Shame and Medicine in Literature Seminar: Shame, Femininity, and the ‘Sick Woman’ скачать в хорошем качестве

Shame and Medicine in Literature Seminar: Shame, Femininity, and the ‘Sick Woman’

The Shame and Medicine Project presents the Shame and Medicine in Literature Seminar Series, hosted by the Centre for the Cultures and Environments of Health. Shame, Elspeth Probyn tells us, ‘is a painful thing to write about’ (‘Writing Shame’, 2010). This Seminar Series interrogates the connections between the experience of shame and its literary representation, extending discussions initiated by the ‘Shame and Medicine’ thematic issue of Literature and Medicine, edited by Dr Arthur Rose and Professor Luna Dolezal. Dr Kaye Mitchell, (University of Manchester), 4th June 2025, 13.00 – 14.00 GMT (online). TITLE: Shame, Femininity, and the ‘Sick Woman’ ABSTRACT: As I outline in the introduction to Writing Shame (EUP, 2020), the association between shame and femininity is found in classical literature (in the notion of aidōs), in Freudian psychoanalysis (where, as Malcolm Pines explains, ‘female morality’ is felt to be ‘deficient in guilt and over-compensated by shame’), in post-Freudian psychoanalysis (for example in Helen Block’s writing on ‘shame-proneness in women’), and is explored, to rather different ends, in the work of feminist theorists, philosophers and literary critics. I argued in Writing Shame that ‘shame has an originary role in the production and shaping of femininity and female subjectivity’ and possesses ‘a vital revelatory function […]: if the feeling of shame “discloses” to women “who they are and how they are faring”’, as Sandra Bartky claims in Femininity and Domination, ‘then it is an ontological matter, properly speaking, that reveals what “woman” is and means in the Western cultures’ that were the main focus of my enquiry. In this seminar, after outlining the above points, I will discuss a contemporary sub-genre of innovative lifewriting by women and non-binary writers, with a focus on chronic and/or (apparently) undiagnosable illness. Such works, I suggest, bring to light the disparities of language and care afforded to bodies identified as female, and experiment with genre, structure and narrative form as they consider the gender politics of being a ‘sick woman’. Works in this category-in-formation include, but are not limited to, Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely (2004), Leslie Jamison’s The Empathy Exams (2014), Dodie Bellamy’s When the Sick Rule the World (2015), Amy Berkowitz’s Tender Points (2015), Johanna Hedva’s ‘Sick Woman Theory’ (2016), Porochista Khakpour’s Sick (2018), Jenn Ashworth’s Notes Made While Falling (2019), Anne Boyer’s The Undying (2019), Sinead Gleeson’s Constellations (2019), Lucia Osborne-Crowley’s I Choose Elena (2019), and Alice Hattrick’s Ill Feelings (2021). In this paper, I focus on Berkowitz, Hedva and Hattrick and consider the intersection of the shame of femininity, of ‘confessional’ writing (particularly a writing focused on the body), and of chronic illness (stigmatised as ‘malingering’, laziness, and/or non-productivity). BIO: Dr. Kaye Mitchell is Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Literature and Director of the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester. She has published three monographs, most recently Writing Shame (EUP, 2020). Her editorial publications include a collection of essays on Sarah Waters (Bloomsbury, 2013), a special issue of Contemporary Women’s Writing (OUP, 2015) on experimental women’s writing, and a co-edited collection of essays (with Nonia Williams), British Avant-Garde Fiction of the 1960s (EUP, 2019). Kaye was the UK editor of the OUP journal Contemporary Women’s Writing from 2017-23 and is on the editorial board of Open Gender Journal in Germany. She held a Humboldt Experienced Researcher Fellowship in Berlin from 2014-2015 and this has recently been renewed for a shorter return visit in 2025.