Stella Bolaki

Works of Illness: Narrative, Picturing and the Social Response to Serious Disease

Authored by Alan Radley. Published by InkerMen Press, Ashby-de-la Zouch, 2009, Paperback, pp 244. ISBN-13: 978-0-9562749-0-8, £ 13.95. Alan Radleys previous work has focused on the relationships between sociology, aesthetics and ethics, with the overall aim of bringing these disciplines together. He has been at the forefront of the recent move within the social sciences towards a consideration of illness representations as anchoring social practices, arguing for the need to draw together the social and the representational, the discursive and the visual, and the aesthetic and the political. Works of Illness continues this interdisciplinary commitment by broadening the scope of the discussion about experiencing illness in contemporary society. Radley does this by ‘assembling a socio-cultural view of health and illness that underlines the semantic and aesthetic potential’ of the wide range of narratives and artworks of living with serious illness that he examines under the term ‘works of illness’. The introductory chapter outlines a series of exchanges by art critics and social scientists debating whether illness representations ‘are art’ or constitute ‘good science’, which attests to the complex and contested space that such representations occupy across disciplines that maintain a sense of rigid boundaries between art and science. The common problem Radley identifies is that both camps approach such representations as transparent windows into a persons experience, which raises the thorny question of truthfulness or …

Illness as Many Narratives: Arts, Medicine and Culture

Illness narratives have become a cultural phenomenon in the Western world but their analysis continues to be framed by the context of biomedicine, the doctor–patient encounter and the demands of medical training. This reductive and instrumental attitude prevents the inclusion of more formally experimental genres, different themes and interdisciplinary methods within the field. It also perpetuates the view of the medical humanities as a narrow area of study largely serving the needs of medicine. Approaching illness and its treatments as a multiplicity and situating them in relation to aesthetics, theory, radical pedagogy, politics and contemporary cultural concerns, Bolaki offers close readings of autobiographical and collaborative works across a wide range of arts and media. Through case studies on photography, artists’ books, performance art, film, theatre, animation and online narratives, Illness as Many Narratives demonstrates how bringing in diverse materials and engaging with multiple perspectives can help the arts, cultural studies and the medical humanities to establish critical conversations and amplify the goals and scope of their respective work. Key Features: •Opens up the category of illness narrative to consider a wide variety of media/artistic forms beyond literature •Intervenes in current debates in medical humanities/medical education by emphasising more critical as opposed to instrumental approaches •Explores different physical and mental illness experiences in both autobiographical and collaborative/relational narratives •Offers new close readings of diverse works by Sam Taylor-Wood, Martha Hall, Guillermo Gomez-Pena, Wim Wenders, Lisa Kron and others

‘New living the old in a new way’: home and queer migrations in Audre Lorde's Zami

This essay looks back to an older queer of colour text, Audre Lordes Zami: A New Spelling of My Name that rethinks narrow formulations of the relation of queer and diasporic subjects to the space of ‘home’ before these debates emerged in queer diasporic criticism. Drawing on critics who have suggested that queer migrations entail remaking rather than leaving home, most notably Anne-Marie Fortier and Gayatri Gopinath, I argue that Zami challenges idealized conceptions of home and belonging without abandoning these concepts altogether. My analysis starts by showing how Lorde, departing from the Anglo-American tradition of the lesbian Bildungsroman, queers the ancestral homeland and the childhood home through a kind of translation that demonstrates the dynamic relationship between ethnicity and sexuality in female queer diasporic narratives. It then turns to the lesbian community as theoretical home and traces the process of ‘making home’ exemplified in Zami. Rather than being a straightforward project, this requires continuously attaching home to, and detaching it from, relationships, communities, and places or, in Lordes words, living in the ‘house of difference’. In reading Lordes biomythography through the theoretical lens of queer diaspora, my essay seeks to keep open the texts capacity to speak beyond its historical moment: Zami which has been typically read as a work that serves the ‘convenient’ function of ‘making vivid a Black lesbians position in the world’ looks forward to theorizations of queer diasporas and offers important insights to questions of home and un/belonging.

Capturing the worlds of multiple sclerosis: Hannah Laycock's photography

This essay explores UK photographer Hannah Laycocks Awakenings and, to a lesser extent, Perceiving Identity that were created in 2015, following her diagnosis with multiple sclerosis (MS) in 2013. It draws on scholarship by people with chronic illness while situating these two MS projects in the context of Laycocks earlier art and portrait photography dealing with fragility, image and desire, and power relations between subject and observer. The analysis illustrates how her evocative photography captures the lived or subjective experience of an invisible and often misunderstood condition by initially focusing on the tension between transparency and opacity in her work. It further shows how her images counter dominant didactic metaphors such as, ‘the body as machine’, that perpetuate the dehumanising and objectifying aspects of medical care. Subsequent sections trace the influence that Oliver Sacks has had on Laycocks practice, and reflect on other metaphors and tropes in Awakenings that illuminate the relationship between body and self in MS. The essay concludes by acknowledging the therapeutic power of art and calling upon health professionals to make more use of such artistic work in clinical practice.