Overview

Intervening in the gnarled lineage of gender, genre and medicine, Writing Contested Illness investigates how uncertainty, doubt and dismissal, the key features of medical contestation, are mediated and transformed in women's experimental illness narratives. It discusses how a range of autobiographical experimentation in emerging and increasingly common subgenres like autofiction, autotheory, experimental memoir and the lyric essay, are creating productive new avenues for contested illnesses to be represented. These illnesses, which range in this book across hysteria, eating disorders, chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia and chronic Lyme disease, have been subject to constrictive medical practices, rendering the conditions illegitimate, under-studied and under-diagnosed. In observing how such narratives identify the rifts caused by medicalised contestation and identify key sites of repair within this sphere, this book argues that experimental life writing can be its own first-hand, affective and embodied source of medical knowledge.

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9781399534406

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Reviews

How do women give voice to experiences of chronic illness which trouble or elide diagnosis, confound biomedical certainties and are the subject of enduring controversy? In this brilliant first book, Chloe R. Green shows how the formal features of experimental literary life writing play a critical role in the generation of new knowledge about contested illness. As compassionate as it is razor-sharp, Writing Contested Illness will reshape our understanding of what illness narratives can be and achieve.--Angela Woods, Durham University

Author Information

Chloe R. Green is a Lecturer in English at the Australian National University. She has published widely on the medical humanities, life writing, autofiction and affect theory, and was previously an Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow at University College Dublin.

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