American Chinese Medicine (original) (raw)

This thesis explores the power structures which shape Chinese medicine in the United States. Chinese medicine had two incarnations: migrant Chinese practice and its professionalized form. From the 1880s to the 1940s, Chinese medicine was practiced by the Chinese diaspora to serve their communities and non-Chinese settler populations. From the 1970s onward, Chinese medicine professionalized under the agency of acupuncture. Through the regulation of acupuncture, groups of predominately white Americans began to create standards of practice based on the enactment of what I have referred to as “orientalized biopower.” Orientalized biopower is the process where America’s predominately white counterculture began to encompass an orientalism which romanticized a form of Chinese medicine constructed in the 1950s by the People’s Republic of China called Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM). With the adoption of TCM in the United States, they also formulated measures which marginalized Asian Amer...