Work and chronic illness in contemporary feminist illness writing 2015-2022

Groenvold, Lise Villemoes (2024) Work and chronic illness in contemporary feminist illness writing 2015-2022. PhD thesis, Birkbeck, University of London.

Abstract

This thesis looks at engagement with the concept of work in UK and US life-writing about chronic illness between 2015 and 2022. In texts by writers including Anne Boyer, Johanna Hedva, Carolyn Lazard, Sonya Huber, Alice Hattrick, Dodie Bellamy, and Porochista Khakpour, the experience of living with chronic illness is shaped by and against neoliberal capitalism and contemporary work culture. I call this grouping contemporary feminist illness writing. These writers do not show illness as the antithesis to work but instead render visible the ways in which illness and work compound each other. With a rise in ‘patient work’ and an increasingly active sick role, illness entails administrative, reproductive, and investigative labour. I demonstrate how contemporary writers draw on intersectional feminist and leftist political thought in their textual experiments to represent how incapacity and pain intersect with effort and skill in the experience of chronic illness. I argue that work is not just a central theme in this grouping but that it actively informs its textual strategies. Writers play with intensifying and withdrawing labour and with appropriating and subverting medical and work genres like the list, the case history, the e-mail, and various forms of accessibility documents. I argue that engagement with the concept of work marks a departure from earlier generations of illness writing and the teleological narratives of self-development described by critics including Anne Hunsaker Hawkins and Arthur Frank. Building on recent critical accounts of the neoliberal aspects of teleological narratives, I contend that contemporary feminist illness writers use alternative, non-teleological narrative forms. Their poetics of impairment emphasizes imperfection, collective thinking, and subjects in a variety of differently-capacitated states. Drawing lines back to the history of illness writing, I argue that writing on the ill bodymind continues to be a resource for imagining alternatives to the ‘good’ worker-citizen.

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