- Detailed Table of Contents
- Carmen Birkle: Editorial
- Bärbel Höttges: Blogging the Pain: Grief in the Time of the Internet
- Katie Ellis: A Quest Through Chaos: My Narrative of Illness and Recovery
- Elizabeth J. Donaldson: Lauren Slater’s Lying: Metaphorical Memoir and Pathological Pathography
- Aimee Burke Valeras: A Balancing Act: How Women with a Hidden Disability Perform Femininity
- Stella Bolaki: “What the Book Told”: Illness, Witnessing, and Patient-Doctor Encounters in Martha Hall’s Artists’ Books
- Julia Mason: “Lessons to Learn”: Constructions of Femininity in Popular Magazine Breast Health Narratives
- Cecile Ann Lawrence: The Case of the Missing Areolae: Race and Breast Reduction Surgery
- Review (Review): Judit Gadzi, Andrea Petö and Zsuzsanna Toronyi, (eds.): “Gender, Memory, and Judaism”.
1 This thematic issue of gender forum is part II of a collection of essays focusing on the intersections of medicine, literature, and gender. In contrast to the first issue with its contributions on the representation of women in the medical profession from historical and literary points of view, in this second part personal narratives take center stage. Here, all contributions emphasize the healing power of grief and illness narratives in their various sub-genres, such as written testimonies, diaries, blogs, and artists’ books, thus in a multiplicity of autobiographical or auto-ethnographical writings. Some of the authors interweave theoretical discussions or analyses of other people’s narratives and their own illness narratives. In doing so, they all demonstrate that they share a belief in the illness narrative as a new space of communication between readers and artists and, ultimately, doctors and patients.
