Writing Contested Illness: Experimentation in Contemporary Women’s Life Writing

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.