Session 4a: Art and the Representation of Health, Illness and Disease
Chair: Peter Schulz

Body and Pain: David Wojnarowicz’s Avant-Garde Remaking of the World
Bill Albertini
English Department, Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, OH, USA

In calling for a “new realism of the body,” disability theorist Tobin Siebers has argued that body theory too rarely grapples directly with the immense problem of physical suffering. His is a challenging critique to much body theory and disability studies that desires to recuperate the suffering body as a site of healing, pleasure, or politics. However, Siebers leaves the description of what that “realism” might entail somewhat vague—it entails active politics, but not the utopian politics of some body theory. Siebers finds his example of this politically active but non-utopian bodily realism in a first-hand account that confronts the need for aid, the fact that many bodies do not function without assistance.
A host of works from the first decades of the HIV/AIDS crisis promises another means of thinking about bodies, and one that demonstrates the political and textual possibilities in texts and works of art that actively resist formal realism. David Wojnarowicz, an avant-garde writer and artist working in multiple media, focused most of his work in the 1980s on the AIDS crisis and, especially in the late 1980s, on his own ill health. Drawing on Siebers call for attention to pain, I argue for a reading of Wojnarowicz works such as Seven Miles a Second that carefully negotiates multiple experiences of illness, including suffering, pain, anger—that is, including the negative affect that is so hard to critically recuperate. These works utilize that negative affect—expressed in the intersections of gritty realism, magical realism, the grotesque, and the fantastic—in order to refuse the pressure toward what Erving Goffman calls the “good adjustment” and to make space for new ways of imagining the body and pain.

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Re-thinking the ‘Clinical Gaze’: Art, Surgery and Tactility
Suzannah Biernoff
School of Arts and Education, Middlesex University, London, United Kingdom

Medical archives are remarkable and unsettling because, quite apart from the historiographical questions they raise, they also confront us with phenomenological and ethical questions that draw all of us into the frame.  In effect, they ask questions of us.  How does one, might one, should one, look at images of the maimed, disfigured or dead body?  To what extent are our responses to these states of embodiment universal – or culturally determined and regulated? When those archives document the horrors of war they can be even more confronting because they connect us to events and experiences that can seem, to quote the British painter Paul Nash, ‘utterly indescribable’.  At the very least we find ourselves in the company of images whose ‘meanings’ exceed the traditional narratives of medical or military history.
The empirical starting point for my proposed paper is series of 75 pastel drawings by Henry Tonks, of wounded First World War servicemen who had been referred to Harold Gillies’ pioneering centre for facial surgery at Queen Mary’s Hospital in Sidcup.  What can Tonks’ collaboration with Gillies tell us about the relationship between art and surgery, both in the context of wartime Britain, and in relation to the broader histories of medical illustration and aesthetics? Tonks, who trained as a surgeon before becoming an artist and Slade Professor, produced drawings that disrupt the conventional categories of medical illustration and portraiture.  Using Tonks and Gillies as a point of departure, I would like to pursue the hypothesis that the history of surgery – and the history of medical illustration – is a history of touch as much as a product of visual practices and conventions.  In art, and in surgery, touch (or hapticity, the visual approximation of touch) can be diagnostic, interrogative, analytical, instrumental or creative.  A better understanding of these processes would serve to complicate current assumptions about the ‘clinical gaze’.

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The Semantics of Physical Pain in Science Fiction
Barbara Korte
University of Freiburg, Germany

A world without suffering is a universal dream of mankind. It has been expressed in some classics of utopian fiction (including the prototypical Utopia by Sir Thomas More), and it is also a prime goal and motor of medical research. And yet illness and pain remains a stock element and sometimes even a major theme in much other fiction about the future. Science fiction in particular abounds with depictions of pain, even though precisely this genre is preoccupied with the possibilities of science to interfere with – and allegedly 'improve' – human biology up to the point where this biology becomes post-human.
This paper asks why the depiction of physical pain is such a persistent element in science fiction. It will argue that the genre's basic narrative of progress challenges the familiar understanding of humanity and, in this context, employs pain as a marker of humanity: Pain becomes an anthropological index of what it means to be human, and it indicates where the limits of humanity are finally transgressed. Characters in science fiction tend to experience pain where they are confronted with the non-human or where they themselves reach the limits of 'natural' human life; post-human creatures like cyborgs are typically marked by an inability to  experience pain. Science fiction can thus be regarded as a genre that suggests a very basic meaning of suffering: To (be able to) experience pain and to deal with this pain is part of what defines the human being in its physical and metaphysical dimensions.
The paper will illustrate its thesis with examples that range from the late 19th century, when medicine began to be perceived as a progressive scientific discipline, to the late 20th century and its speculations about post-human existence. Examples from film and television will be referred to, but the discussion will focus on literary work from H.G. Wells's The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896) to 'new wave' science fiction by J.G. Ballard, Philip K. Dick, William Gibson and others.

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