Content area
Full Text
Acurious contradiction arises when Dr. Miranda Bailey, the fictional surgeon who works at Seattle's Grey-Sloan Memorial Hospital on the ABC-TV medical drama Grey's Anatomy, develops obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) in the show's ninth season. Not only does OCD cause Dr. Bailey, a black woman, to perform extra work in the operating room, checking and rechecking to ensure that her patients are healthy, it simultaneously prevents her from working efficiently enough to meet the hospital's needs. Once her colleagues discover her OCD, they quickly ban her from surgery, fearing her compulsive checking will compromise her ability to operate effectively. Dr. Bailey (played by Chandra Wilson) must "overcome" her mental illness to return to work,1 but when she withdraws from surgery to treat her OCD, Grey-Sloan flounders, unable to keep up with its many sick patients. Dr. Bailey's OCD constitutes a puzzle that she must solve immediately, lest a disastrous death toll mount as she "convalesces." By laboring too much, she puts herself in a position to labor insufficiently.
Because Grey's Anatomy narrates Dr. Bailey's OCD by tracking how the disorder moves her into and out of the work force, Bailey's story seems less an exploration of disability experience or a call for disability rights than it does an investigation of black disabled women's ability to contribute to American capitalism. The paradox that OCD makes of Bailey's working life is deeply informed by two long-standing cultural myths about black women's work. Specifically, Grey's Anatomy positions Miranda Bailey as both a "superwoman," an image of a hardworking, hypercapable black woman who uses her strength to emasculate black men, and a "mule," a black woman whose exploited labor is crucial to capitalism's continued prosperity and who therefore must be constantly prodded back to work. Dr. Bailey, by laboring more than is considered normal because of her OCD, is "tireless, deeply caring, and seemingly invulnerable" (Beauboeuf-Lafontant 43). She is exceptionally industrious, "more capable than all men and less incapable than [the] white women" with whom she works (25). Although the show's producers initially cast a white actress to play Dr. Bailey, their ultimate decision to give Chandra Wilson the role locates the character squarely within the orbit of dominant discourses about black women's work. For example, when her...