Fever Dream: Writing through ill-being and medical fictioning

This paper connects strands of critical theory and medical narrativising within which lived experience accompanies a form of 'medical fictioning’. The fiction I am referring to is not a story written from within illness - which is an established form of practice from Helen Keller to Audre Lorde to Ann Boyer - but a new space I am opening up to claim that ill-being is already fictive, made so through bio-power, medical encounters and cultural interpretations of the crip body.

I am writing this paper to create space for this new terminology and to attach illness in the cultural imagination to potential clinical insights. Contentiously, I am interested in critiquing assumptions of bio-agency that have emerged from autotheory’s spotlighting of vulnerability, and pointing to a viable fictive self that is, instead, constructed via the public imagination, misdiagnoses, medical power structures and patient/physician dynamics.

I am interested in disability as method (coined by Rebecca Sanchez in ‘Crip Authorship’) and contemporising Susan Sontag’s work on illness as metaphor. I am flagging how we inhabit and live with embodied cultural fictions, literary selves, the spectacularising of disorder/illness and appropriations of disease. These can be seen to parallel or co-exist with the clinical - so for patients or users of healthcare systems there may be an encounter with a version of themselves produced by culture - a medical fictioning that walks alongside ill-being and affects treatment. My paper asks whether inhabiting these fictions becomes an embodied and embedded part of illness/disability itself, and then asks, how can we write from within this, powerfully?

This paper will code-switch between visual and fictive methodologies and suggest how autotheory can be engaged as a literary tool. I ask whether moving away from self-examination as a form of agency towards a critical methodology from within the disabled body allows us to consciously inhabit fictive selves, formed by the architectures, power structures and appropriations of medicine/culture and thus requiring a critical détournement.