Literature and Medicine II

Detailed Table of Contents

Carmen Birkle: Editorial

Abstract: 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.

Bärbel Höttges: Blogging the Pain: Grief in the Time of the Internet

Abstract: During the last few decades, grief narratives have become increasingly popular. Especially women, who traditionally take over the responsibilities of a caretaker, have used this narrative genre to express and deal with their losses and to share their experience of grief with a larger audience. With the advance of the Internet, grief blogs have started to complement printed grief narratives, offering a virtual version of the traditional genre of grief writing. This article compares these two versions of grief writing. Drawing on narrative theory, the essay reveals that virtual grief narratives do not merely offer a screen version of a printed text. Rather, blogs produce a new form of grief writing, which decisively differs from its printed counterpart despite many thematic similarities. A text, the essay suggests, is thus defined as much by the act of writing, editing, and publishing as by traditional narrative categories such as topic, voice, and perspective. A comparison of printed grief narratives and grief blogs consequently not only documents a reinvention of grief writing on the Internet, but it also reveals a web-based redefinition of (auto)biographical writing in general.

Author's Bio: Bärbel Höttges is assistant professor of American Studies at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, Germany. She has done research at the University of California, Irvine, and at Columbia University, New York. Her main areas of research are ethnic fiction, colonial literature, literature and film, grief writing, and life writing. She is currently working on her Habilitation on death and grief in American literature and culture. Her publications include Faith Matters: Religion, Ethnicity, and Survival in Toni Morrison’s and Louise Erdrich’s Fiction (Heidelberg: Winter, 2006).

Katie Ellis: A Quest Through Chaos: My Narrative of Illness and Recovery

Abstract: Stories of people trying to figure out who they are following illness are both popular amongst readers and vital to the author’s recovery. This article is an illness narrative and an exploration of illness, narrative, recovery, and critical disability studies. Using my own experience of having a massive stroke as an 18-year-old, the article considers narrative structures present in a series of journal entries, video diaries, letters, and blogs to reflect on the importance of narrative throughout my recovery. My story has evolved through the dominant narrative structures of the illness narrative as outlined by Frank (1995)—chaos, restitution, and quest. These narrative types display the relationship between narrative and culture, and emphasise the complexity of illness. Telling illness narratives is a valuable means of recovery when the body becomes what the individual never expected it would—damaged. Narrative is vital, as the ill persons work out their changing identity and position in the world of health, continuing when they are no longer ill, but remain marked by their experience. This article connects the (my) autobiographical to the social, political and cultural.

Author's Bio: Katie Ellis is an adjunct researcher at the Centre for Research in Entertainment, Arts, Technology, Education & Communications at Edith Cowan University in Western Australia. She is interested in how media and communications shape the experience and interpretation of disability and illness, and, as such, her research intersects across cultural studies of disability, media, youth and gender. She has taught film and television courses at several Universities in Western Australia and has participated in many feature, documentary and short film productions in various capacities. She is the author of Disabling Diversity: The Social Construction of Disability in 1990s Australian National Cinema (2008, VDM Verlag) and is currently co-writing a manuscript on Disability and Web 2.0 with Dr Mike Kent as part of Routledge’s Studies in New Media and Cyberculture series. Katie also remains committed to helping students with disability achieve their academic goals through her work in disability support at The University of Western Australia (Crawley). For more information about Dr. Ellis visit her website www.katieellis.com.

Elizabeth J. Donaldson: Lauren Slater’s Lying: Metaphorical Memoir and Pathological Pathography

Abstract: As public awareness of antidepressant medication surged in the 1990s, Lauren Slater’s Prozac Diary became the quintessential auto-pathography, documenting her life with major depression and her dramatic “cure” with the wonder-drug Prozac. However, Slater’s pronounced ambivalence about the drug’s side effects and her treatment was largely ignored by a culture swept up by Prozac enthusiasm. Slater’s more recent “metaphorical memoir,” Lying, on the other hand, is not so easily appropriated. A parody of the illness narrative, a pathological pathography, Lying is the dark sister text of Prozac Diary – Slater’s subversion of the autobiographical conventions and imperatives of the genre. Slater, who is both a psychologist and a patient, writes in the antipsychiatric tradition of David Rosenhan’s “On Being Sane in Insane Places,” the infamous 1973 study in which sane “pseudopatients” were incorrectly diagnosed with mental illnesses after feigning symptoms. By becoming a patient himself, Rosenhan called into question the seemingly discrete categories of sane and insane and revealed the structuring power of psychiatric labels. In a similar fashion, Lying, an autobiography about epilepsy, challenges and defies readers’ expectations for truth and transparency in memoir and underscores the central role of the patient’s story and the metaphorical nature of illness itself. Lying is a literary form of hysteria, a conversion evoking the complicated past of women, mental illness, and the authenticity of psychiatric diagnoses.

Author's Bio: Elizabeth J. Donaldson is chair of the Interdisciplinary Studies Program and Associate Professor of English at New York Institute of Technology (edonalds@nyit.edu). She teaches courses in American literature, writing, and medical humanities, and her research interests include disability studies and cultural studies of mental illness and psychiatry. She has published on essays on mental illness in film, physiognomy and madness in Jane Eyre, teaching Melville online, and the poetry of Amy Lowell, among other subjects. She is currently co-editing, with Catherine Prendergast, a special edition on “Disability and Emotion” for the Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies.

Aimee Burke Valeras: A Balancing Act: How Women with a Hidden Disability Perform Femininity

Abstract: The word “disability” carries strong cultural and social symbolic meaning. The impact of these meanings is entrenched in the storied experiences of either embracing or repelling “disability” as a self-characteristic. Persons with a “hidden disability,” one that is unapparent to the unknowing observer, make daily decisions about when, where, why, and how to disclose and adopt the disability identity or to “pass” and give society the impression of able-bodiedness. These decisions are heavily influenced by the bodily and social performance expectations of a given gender. Such gender expectations have reverberating effects on self-concept, relationships, and the way one interacts with the world. This study used a narrative research methodology to understand the identity processes of four women ranging in age from 21 to 46 years who have a hidden disability. Victoria has Juvenile Rheumatoid Arthritis; Angela has Epilepsy, Mary has Mitochondrial Myopathy, and Rosalina has Celiac Disease. In this essay, I also reflect on my own experiences as a woman with a hidden disability, Muscular Dystrophy. Through these personal, emotional, and insightful self-narratives, each woman relays the complexity of self-disclosure and disability identity.

Author's Bio: Aimee Burke Valeras attended Boston College for her undergraduate and MSW degrees and Arizona State University for her doctorate in social work. She has presented nationally and internationally on the topic of disability and qualitative research methodology. She currently lives in Concord, NH, working in an educational and clinical medical social work role with the New Hampshire Dartmouth Family Medicine Residency at a community health clinic for uninsured and underinsured people.

Stella Bolaki: “What the Book Told”: Illness, Witnessing, and Patient-Doctor Encounters in Martha Hall’s Artists’ Books

Abstract: The essay explores the specific insights artists’ books offer to contemporary feminist understandings of breast cancer, questions of representation and embodiment, discourses of ‘witnessing,’ and to doctor-patient relationships, using the work of American book artist Martha A. Hall as a case study. Hall’s artists’ books, created in response to her initial diagnosis of breast cancer in 1989 and the effects of later recurrences until her death in 2004, consist of poems, prose passages, ironic quotations by health practitioners, and images such as x-rays, bone scans, and pictures of prescription bottles. Artists’ books create a different kind of ‘reading experience’ compared to most ordinary books. While this is often described in terms of a powerful ‘aesthetic’ experience, in the essay I am more concerned with illustrating how artists’ books engage and complicate discourses of witnessing, which have recently become foregrounded in the fields of trauma, disability, and illness studies. I also discuss the potential the artist’s book holds as a medium for sharing experiences of critical illness and for effecting change in the ways medical professionals interact with their patients, thus commenting on both its personal and political value. The essay concludes with a series of reflections triggered by my own particular encounter with Hall’s work.

Author's Bio: Stella Bolaki holds a PhD from the University of Edinburgh, where she teaches courses in English and American literature. Her research interests lie mainly in the fields of contemporary American literature, with a focus on multiethnic fiction and gender. She has published on topics as diverse as cultural translation, queer diasporas, narratives of community, loss and mourning, and on writers such as Jamaica Kincaid, Sandra Cisneros, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Audre Lorde. She is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH) at the University of Edinburgh, working on a cross-media interdisciplinary project ‘Poetics, Identity, and Witnessing in Contemporary Narratives of Illness and Disability.’ She is also Co-Director of the Scottish Universities’ International Summer School, based in Edinburgh.

Julia Mason: “Lessons to Learn”: Constructions of Femininity in Popular Magazine Breast Health Narratives

Abstract: Personal narratives associated with breast health are prominent in women’s magazines. Within the personal stories are themes and frames that reinforce traditional femininity, support narrow beauty ideals, and emphasize women’s roles as mothers. This article analyzes personal narratives about breast health published in the October issues of forty women’s magazines from 2005 through 2008. Feminist theorizing about breast cancer grew out of the women’s health movement which recognized that paternalistic thinking and scientific discourse have worked to disassociate women from knowledge about our bodies as a form of control. Breasts have social and cultural significance related to motherhood and sexuality, which additionally complicates the discourses surrounding breast health. Magazine content related to breast health is created and produced within a cultural context that devalues women. Building on a critical analysis of personal narratives about breast health this article argues for a more nuanced understanding that recognizes the potential for empowerment that the inclusion of women’s lived experience provides while being critical of narrow gender constructions supported by mainstream breast health narratives.

Author's Bio: Julia Mason is an assistant professor of Women and Gender Studies at Grand Valley State University, Allendale, Michigan, USA. She earned her doctorate in American Culture Studies, with graduate certificates in Women’s Studies and Ethnic Studies, from Bowling Green State University and a Master of Arts in American Indian Studies from The University of Arizona.

Cecile Ann Lawrence: The Case of the Missing Areolae: Race and Breast Reduction Surgery

Abstract: Writings about female breast reduction surgery have primarily focused on the size, location on the chest, and the techniques for such surgical reduction. Few have looked at how the areola is handled, nor whether there is an underlying racial context in decisions about this part of the female body. This multi-disciplinary, multi-technique, part analysis, part auto-ethnography seeks to open up and broaden the discussion, asking the question whether subliminal racial preferences play a role in surgeons’ decisions.

Review (Review): Judit Gadzi, Andrea Petö and Zsuzsanna Toronyi, (eds.): “Gender, Memory, and Judaism”.

Abstract: Like Jewish feminism itself, Gender, Memory, and Judaism relies on a combination of images, stories, biographies, and art to make its arguments. Despite the liabilities of the volume’s uncompromising commitment to diversity and its theoretical language, the editors have created a highly provocative and challenging work. Its diverse authorship and media offer a model for all contemporary scholarship that seeks an element of activism.