Narrative Art and the Politics of Health (Anthem Series on the Politics and Literature of Global Rights and Freedom)

As countless alterations have taken place in medicine in the twenty-first century so too have literary artists addressed new understandings of disease and pathology. Dis/ability studies, fat studies, mad studies, end-of-life studies, and critical race studies among other fields have sought to better understand what social factors lead to pathologizing certain conditions while other variations remain “normalized.” While recognizing that these scholarly approaches often speak to identities with radically different experiences of pathologization, this collection of essays is open to all critical engagements with narratives of health in order to facilitate the messiness of cross-disciplinary collaboration and interdisciplinarity. As scientific advances provide insight into a wide range of well-being issues and help extend life, it is vital that we come to question the very categories of “healthy” and “unhealthy.” This collection brings together analyses of cultural productions which probe those categorizations and suggest new psychological and philosophical understandings which will help better apply and guide the knowledge being rapidly developed within the life sciences. “Right of health” is a widely accepted human right, but in applying a right to healthcare what care and what sort of health are less universally agreed upon. The contributors share an interest in addressing who controls answers to the questions of “how do we define a healthy body and a healthy life?” and “what are the political forces that influence our definitions of health?” As countless alterations have taken place in medicine in the twenty-first century so too have literary artists addressed new understanding of disease and pathology. Dis/ability studies, fat studies, mad studies, end-of-life studies, and critical race studies among other fields have sought to better understand what social factors lead to pathologizing certain conditions while other variations remain “normalized.” While recognizing that these scholarly approaches often speak to identities with radically different experiences of pathologization, this collection of essays is open to all critical engagements with narratives of health in order to facilitate the messiness of cross-disciplinary collaboration and interdisciplinarity. As scientific advances provide insight into a wide range of well-being issues and help extend life, it is vital that we come to question the very categories of healthy and unhealthy. This collection brings together analyses of cultural productions which probe those categorizations and suggest new psychological and philosophical understandings which will help better apply and guide the knowledge being rapidly developed within the life sciences. “Right of health” is a widely accepted human right, but in applying a right to healthcare what care and what sort of health are less universally agreed upon. The contributors share an interest in addressing who controls answers to the questions of “how do we define a healthy body and a healthy life?” and “what are the political forces that influence our definitions of health?” Although not all contributions take a feminist lens, feminist thought has questioned the medical community’s response to women’s bodies, contributed to the de-stigmatization of difference, and challenged gendered binaries. Consequently, many of the essays are informed by the possibilities enabled through the work of feminist scholars. Just as feminist writing positioned storytelling as a way of overcoming the way women’s bodies were defined as unfit and inferior, so too are literary and visual artists exploring how empowering personal and cultural expressions of dis/abled bodies, mad bodies, trans bodies, fat bodies, racialized bodies, and aged bodies among others can overcome pathologizing normative standards. The globalization of healthcare protocols has brought many advances but also challenges to traditional understanding of health within many cultures. This collection includes papers that examine narratives of health from all countries, cultures, and communities and is not limited to a North American or Western locus. Further, just as Edward Said problematized “travelling theory” this book hopes to bring together scholars who look at how literary works also show that medical interventions from a Western perspective need to be challenged when applied to communities whose voices are often not heard or deliberately undermined when those “treatments” are developed. Cover 1 Front Matter 3 Half-title 3 Title page 5 Copyright information 6 Contents 7 List of figures 9 Acknowledgments 11 Notes on Contributors 13 Inro-PartI-III 17 Inroduction 17 Notes 29 Bibliography 30 Part I Institutional Narratives 33 Chapter 1 The Laboring Body and the Slave Trade: An Enduring Narrative of Health and Illness 35 Introduction 35 Two Hundred Leagues from Grenada 36 The Surgeon, the Slaving Vessel, the Body 44 Conclusion 48 Notes 49 Bibliography 51 Chapter 2 Projecting Eugenics and Performing Knowledges 53 Displaying Eugenics Slides 58 Conclusion 71 Notes 73 Bibliography 76 Chapter 3 Grief Supremacy: On Grievability, Whiteness and Not Being #Allinthistogether 79 Introduction 79 Grief and Loss Literature: A Brief Overview 80 White Things 82 Site 1: Grief supremacy and the DSM 84 Site 2: Grief supremacy and bereavement policy/leaves in Ontario‡ 85 Site 3: Grief supremacy, pandemics and #allinthistogether 88 What’s Next? 90 Notes 92 Bibliography 96 Chapter 4 Creating Categories 101 Notes 106 Bibliography 107 Part II Sociocultural Narratives 109 Chapter 5 Mothers Who Know Best: Narratives of Motherhood and Epistemological Anxieties in Vaccine Hesitancy Discourse 111 Introduction 111 Competing Constructions of Vaccine Hesitancy 113 The 2016 Canadian Immunization Conference 116 Narratives of Motherhood and Epistemological Anxieties 118 Celebrity-mothers as vectors of infectious narratives 119 Physician-mothers as trusted narrators 121 Narrative Etiologies, Contested Epistemologies and the Politics of Public Health 124 Notes 126 Bibliography 129 Chapter 6 The Cultural Production of Commodifying Under Resourced Bodies 133 Introduction 133 “Truth” in “Advertising” 136 Foundational Narratives of Resources and Health 138 Sentimentality and (Social) Media 142 Conclusion 146 Notes 146 Bibliography 149 Chapter 7 When Progressivism Goes Mad: Spiritualism and the Euthanization of the Spiritually Unfit 153 Notes 165 References 167 Chapter 8 American and Taiwanese Conceptions of Suicide in Emily X. R. Pan’s the Astonishing Color of After 169 Narratives of Suicide 172 Multicultural Critique of Western Model 179 Notes 185 Bibliography 187 Part III Fictional Narratives 189 Chapter 9 Sadness, Madness and Vigor in Jessie Redmon Fauset’s the Chinaberry Tree 191 Notes 205 Bibliography 207 Chapter 10 Death, Cruelty and Magical Humanism in the Fiction of Terry Pratchett 209 The Value of Lives 211 2. Cruelty and Death 215 3. The Rage of Sir Terry 219 Notes 221 Bibliography 224 Chapter 11 Mental Illness and Radical Caregiving in Sepia Leaves and Em and the Big Hoom 227 Sepia Leaves: Remembering a Fragmented Past through Writing 228 Em and the Big Hoom: Narrative Quests and the Search for Meaning 234 Notes 239 Bibliography 241 Chapter 12 Cast-Off Casts: The Orthopedic Imagination in Dear Evan Hansen and Lady Bird 243 Notes 255 Bibliography 257 End Matter 259 Index 259 This intersectional collection considers how literature, film, and narrative, more broadly, take up the complexities of health, demonstrating the pivotal role of storytelling in health politics