Ethics, Representation, and Positionality

My approach to this research is informed by Wahab’s overview of the strata of social power: institutional, cultural, disciplinary, and discursive. Wahab’s reflections on the

positionality of the researcher in the context of anti-racist research illustrate the challenges in reconciling the irreducible difference between researcher and subject, self and other. His focus is on race, but the principle or irreducible difference holds true in other contexts.

Deconstructing the ‘neutral’ position of whiteness and naturalized discursive authority exposes how power and authority are manifested in medical discourse and in culturally situated debates about dignity and autonomy at the end of life. Following Wahab, the researcher “is not only called upon to be reflexive, but critical of his/her own positioning, politics, interests, and desires, and therefore to deconstruct racialized currents in the process of textual

negotiation/entanglements.”43 _{For this project, in which the texts I analyse rarely address issues} of race directly, I am therefore responsible to negotiate with an unwritten and unspoken other who is not present in the texts. In the context of studying media discourse, this means asking whose account is missing from the feature article, lobby action, or report? Wahab argues that “discourse affords multiple sites to contest and question the embodied (white researcher) and historical (colonial/liberal) constructedness of authority.”44 _{Drawing on this challenge to the} normalization of authority, I ask how matters of race, ability and privilege structure the presence and coverage of whose lives, and in turn whose deaths matter in Canada.

43 _{Wahab, “Questioning Authority,” 47.} 44 _{Wahab, 47.}

While the matter of MAID is rife with ethical challenges and dilemmas, I do not locate this project in the field of biomedical ethics. Rather the forms of medical knowledge and discursive framing that I explore in this research serve as a means of reflecting on the

structuring logics of society. In this project, I work to position myself as a researcher between the legal, civil and medical interlocutors among whom the conversations about assisted dying have taken place. While on the one hand medicine has long offered a familiar and fruitful locus for theorizing the disciplining of the body,45 _{I rely on the recent critical interrogations of health} and medicine detailed here for guidance in articulating the complex intersecting relationships between the forces of late capitalist global capital, the development of drug technologies and other tools of medicine, the legacy of liberal regimes of governmentality and their effect in reshaping the rites and rituals of the medicalized subject.

Since this research is concerned with the role of medicine in society, I take a critical perspective on scientific knowledge production and the positioning of medical science as an authority that governs our practices and standards of good living. Throughout this research, the question of the medicalization of everyday life looms large. As a researcher, I am concerned with challenging this process, and also with attempting to trace the cultural processes that made such a process possible. Taking a critical look at the position of the researcher, as Haraway argues, is not only a question of ethics, but also, in reorienting us to the object of study, a question of epistemology. As Haraway is well-positioned to remind us, social studies of science can and should do more than point out the flaws and blind spots of scientific reasoning but can take up the work of remaking the goals of scientific practice in its own right. “We need

the power of modern critical theories of how meanings and bodies get made, not in order to deny meanings and bodies, but in order to build meanings and bodies that have a chance for life.”46 _{For my approach to research this contention from Haraway means taking stock of the} ways that medical reason intersects with social practice and public discourse, and making sense of how they work in concert to reshape bodies and the meanings ascribed to them.

This research is feminist because it has stakes in identifying the structures of power that shape social practice, with the goal of promoting equality. Where the functions of science and medicine are concerned, there is no guarantee that the procedures, technologies, policies and practices involved will benefit everyone equally. Good research takes into consideration those subjects who are conventionally left out of the discussion in question. Critical engagement with science, argues Haraway, works toward offering a more thorough account of who is affected and how. “Feminists have stakes in a successor science project that offers a more adequate, richer, better account of a world, in order to live in it well and in critical, reflexive relation to our own as well as others’ practices of domination and the unequal parts of privilege and oppression that make up all positions.”47 _{My aim with Chapter 4 in particular is to attend to} those who have argued that they are excluded from the dominant discourse. While there are many more perspectives that I might have considered with this study, I believe it is done in such a way as to amplify and incorporate the perspectives of those who have those most to lose when the social institutions that govern MAiD are restructured.

46 _{Haraway, “Situated Knowledges,” 580.} 47 _{Haraway, 579.}