(P)Rescription Narratives: Feminist Medical Fiction and the Failure of American Censorship

(P)rescription Narratives reveals how the act of narrative creates the subjects of disability, race, and gender during a period of censorship in American history. In a Crip Affect reading of woman-authored medical fiction from the Comstock law era, this book astutely argues that women writers of medical fiction practice storytelling as a form of narrative medicine that prescribes various forms of healing as an antidote to the shame engineered by an American culture of censorship. Woman-authored medical fiction exposes the limitations of social construction and materiality in conversations about the female body since subject formation relies upon multiple force relations that shape and are shaped by one another in ongoing processes that do not stop despite our efforts to interpret cultural artifacts. These multiple failures - to censor, to resist, to interpret - open up a space for negotiating how we engage the world with greater empathy.

Stephanie Peebles Tavera is Assistant Professor of English at Texas A&M University, Central Texas. She is author of the critical introduction to Helen Brent, M.D. by Annie Nathan Meyer (Hastings College Press, 2020), a medical novel that she recovered from the archives and for which she won an honorable mention Book Edition Award from the Society for the Study of American Women Writers. Tavera’s research focuses on American women’s literature, medical humanities, disability studies, and crip affect. She has published work in Legacy, Utopian Studies, and Science Fiction Studies academic journals.