The Space That Difference Makes: On Marginality, Social Justice and the Future of the Health Humanities

To be at the margin is to be part of the whole but outside the main body.

-- bell hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center

Abstract

Feminist theorist and educator, bell hooks, asserts that to seek true liberation one must choose marginality. One must choose to occupy the space outside the binary between colonizer-colonized, hegemonic center-periphery, and us-them in order to create a location of possibility. This essay will reveal the practice of social justice as the navigation of the space that difference makes and argue that choosing marginality provides a framework for health humanities work towards social justice in health care. The space of the launderette that is depicted in Hanif Kureishi’s 1986 film, My Beautiful Laundrette, provides an example of choosing marginality and illustrates how difference structures both real and imagined spaces, which influences how individuals ultimately perceive one another. We will draw from the work of bell hooks; political geographer, Edward Soja; and Marxist philosopher, Henri Lefebvre, to demonstrate the importance of the health humanities’ position at the margin to traditional health care education.