Literature and Medicine II

26 Blogs are interactive online reverse chronological journals that allow authors to reflect on life and the events they experience. Unlike typical diaries or journals, blogs are characterised by community, and allow others to contribute to your experiences via comments. For Michael Keren, illness narrative blogs are one of the most important functions of this new form of communication because they allow sick people to share their day by day, hour by hour feelings while gaining and sharing information and emotional support (119). Although the experience of stroke shapes my daily perceptions, my blog is not an illness narrative blog in the strictest sense of the definition. It does however allow me an outlet to express experiences that are usually silenced by both my culture which does not wish to be reminded of body instability, and my research area which discourages any association with the body. The blog format likewise generates chaos, restitution and quest narrative structures in the recording of my continuing experiences.

27 Bogs enable people an outlet, and illness narrative blogs which focus on the articulation of the experience of illness in order to understand it better and/ or provide support to others, have emerged as an important subgroup in the blogosphere. These online spaces hold significance for life writing as they allow suffers (or recovers) a way to recover a sense of agency while transforming the private into public (McCosker). Power imbalances and social constructions are de- and reconstructed within these narratives. Patients become the experts online in a massive power shift and people who never recover from their illness or who eventually die as a result receive as much agency as those fully realising the restitution narrative. Although blogging was not an option available to me in 1997, based on my short and sometimes, several times a day journal entries, I imagine I would have used it if it were. I use blogs now as a way to navigate my life and experiences within and outside my research and writing in critical disability studies.

28 For Rosemary Garland-Thompson conventional narrative genres usually conform to an image of bodily stability and perpetuate cultural fantasies of loss and relentless cure seeking rather than present stories “possible because of rather than in spite of disability” (114). She argues that by presenting disability within the context of community in particular, disability can structure a positive story. Illness narrative blogs as they are firmly embedded within community achieve Garland-Thompson’s vision while also allowing for the narrative structures examined earlier in this article. The potential for each of the three narrative structures to be present at any one time within a blog generates different narrative models within illness narrative.

29 The cultural implications of the intersection between the social model of disability and disability and illness blogging can be seen in the way they “move beyond the medical versus social divide of disability” (Goggin and Noonan 165). My blog from 2006 compared to my musings about the social model of disability in 2004 demonstrate that while I ascribe to the social model of disability, my illness narrative is continually unfolding, impacting on my personal identity.

30 Through a focus on the individual, illness narratives have been accused of medicalising the experience of disability by perpetuating damaging stereotypes (Barnes 23). The social model must also respond to the stereotypical aspects of life, disability and illness (Waine; Ellis, “Aww Factor”). Tom Shakespeare draws on these critiques to argue that the social model must engage with impairment because it is a “central and structuring part of the experience [of disability].” Impairment is not neutral and while it does lead to disadvantage it also “lead[s] to opportunities: for example, to experience the world in a different way” (43):

I went back to University the year after my stroke to study film and media and in my final unit two years later I stood up at the beginning of the semester and pitched a film about my having had a stroke a few years before. Most of my class mates had no idea, I had successfully passed. My class voted to make this film and I began my process of “coming out” by talking about what I had experienced rather than silencing myself. My passing had deprived people of experiencing the diversity of society although it took me a while to embrace my illness and to realize illness autobiography and honour in disease are possible because of other marginalized groups taking pride in their stigmatized identities. (Ellis, “I Premiered My First Film in an Inaccessible Cinema” 9 August 2009)