4th Global Conference
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Monday 4th July - Thursday 7th July 2005
Mansfield College, Oxford
Conference Programme, Abstracts & Papers
Session 12: Writing the Experience of Illness (2)
Chair: Charlotte Baker
"Beyond Description"- Seventeenth-Century
Representations of Breast Cancer
Thérèse Taylor
School of Humanities, Charles
Sturt University, New South Wales, Australia
Breast cancer has a long history,
and a status as a ‘hidden disease’,
which usually caused the sufferers to retreat to the female world of
domestic space.
In 1666, breast cancer claimed a high profile victim. Anne
of Austria, queen of France, died in the Louvre after a lengthy and public
illness. She endured the disease, and also attempts to cure it,
which included surgery. Anne’s status as a queen caused her
death to be an event in which many people participated, and had the opportunity
to record their impressions. In her case, the barriers which kept
women’s cancers hidden did not apply. The documents generated
by her illness give an opportunity to understand something of the history
of this disease.
In this paper, I explain how Anne’s illness affected
those around her, and the ways that breast cancer had physical and symbolic
meanings. My
argument is that her death had an unusual degree of impact. Her
sufferings were difficult to represent or explain, although the culture
of the time was habituated to the sight of death and disease. Anne’s
death was a trauma which her household recovered from only slowly.
Metaphors of Injury: Making Sense of Visceral Pelvic
Pain
Victoria M. Grace and Sara
MacBride-Stewart
Social Sciences, College of Arts, University of Canterbury, Christchurch,
New Zealand
Generating an understanding of chronic visceral pain
in the pelvis is the single most important aspect for women in the ir
experience of ‘chronic
pelvic pain’. Not-withstanding the long history of hysteria which
attributed the origin of women’s apparently unspecifiable yet
numerous ailments, pains, paralyses and fatigues to disturbances in
this symbolic site, biomedical knowledge is lauded for having replaced
cultural ‘mythologies’ with
the explanatory discourse of biological ‘science’. Chronic
pelvic pain, however, frequently resists or frustrates the attempts
of a biomedical paradigm to provide satisfactory explanations. Given
the ‘unexplained’ character
of chronic pelvic pain for many women, how do the y generate understandings
of the ir pain? What discursive patterns feature in the ir narratives
specifically in relation to making sense of the interior of the pelvis?
Why is an ‘understanding’ important, and what does this
mean? How is gender ‘read’ into meanings of the pelvis-in-pain?
This
paper analyses the narratives of forty New Zealand women of European
descent who have or have had chronic pelvic pain that is not associated
with menstruation or sexual activity. Many also have pain with periods,
and/or pain with penetrative sexual activity. Open-ended interviews
aimed to generate narratives conveying the meanings of pain through a
conversational exploratory method. The specific focus for this analysis
is on talk about meanings associated with the physicality of the pelvis-in-pain.
The binary ontology of the post-Enlightenment West that constitutes the
body simultaneously as the object of an empirical (biomedical) science
and as the lived experience of a subject, dislocates embodiment, and
splits explanation from experience. This paper explores how women make
sense of the ir pain both within and against this subject/object binary;
how imaginary (and digital) visualisation of the ‘workings’ of
the pelvic interior are crucial for many women as a sort of boundary-marking
that possibly confines the pain; and how metaphors of injury create an
intelligibility of painful processes that helps to anchor women-in-pain
within a meaningful world of o the rs.
Perceptions of Pain in Contemporary Zimbawean
literature - Personal and Public Narratives in Yvonne Vera's The
Stone Virgins
Zoe Norridge
SOAS, London, United Kingdom
Human suffering has long been a dominant representative
theme of African literature. Consequently, bearing witness to the disabling
violence of the colonial project and giving voices to the powerless in
pain is a key feature of both nationalist and feminist literary theoretical
approaches. Rather than focussing solely on witnessing the infliction
of bodily pain, contemporary writers are also exploring the possibilities
of living with unforgettable pain. Zimbabwean novelist Yvonne Vera is
one such writer.
Vera’s acclaimed 2002 novel, The Stone Virgins tells
the story of two sisters who are attacked by a dissident in the early
years of independence. The attacker beheads one of the sisters and cuts
the lips off the other. The narrative surrounding this incident is an
exploration of the social currency of the body and strategies for survival
in a physically uncertain world.
This paper investigates how such extreme
experiences are described through innovative use of both language and
temporal structures. Bodies, in health and in sickness, are figured throughout
the text, and the recurring motif of exposed bones works to dissolve
the barriers between the internal organs and social surface of the body.
These bodies also interact with the historical contexts of colonialism,
guerrilla war and continued violence post-independence. Yet Vera’s
text remains morally ambiguous towards this politicisation of the personal.
As a Zimbabwean woman from Bulawayo, Vera the writer is located within
a similar geographical and temporal framework to her heroine. So finally
I will ask whether the writer of such pain is also implicated in her project.
Are the traumatic elements of the text a deliberate narrative strategy
or is the storyteller also sick? And if the writer of pain is indeed also
in pain, then what are the implications for the work’s readership
and literary theory? Understanding these questions will help us begin to
make sense of pain narratives in contemporary African fiction.
