Living Dis/Artfully with and in Illness
- PDF / 360,199 Bytes
- 16 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 91 Downloads / 227 Views
Living Dis/Artfully with and in Illness Patty Douglas 1
2
& Carla Rice & Areej Siddiqui
2
# Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract
This article experiments with multimedia storytelling to re-vision difference outside biomedical and humanistic frames by generating new understandings of living dis/ artfully with illness. We present and analyze seven short videos created by women and trans people living with illness as part of an arts-based research project that aimed to speak back to hegemonic concepts of disability that create barriers to healthcare.1 We call for a welcoming in of disability studies’ disruptive and re-imaginative orientations to bodily difference to unsettle medicine’s humanistic accounts. In turn, we advance medical post-humanistic approaches that call on disability studies to re-embody its theories and approaches. Keywords Multimedia storytelling . Medical (post)humanities . Feminist disabilitystudies . Body becoming theory . Illness narratives
Introduction In October 2016, The Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, Canada, launched a fundraising campaign entitled “VS” (versus). Against the driving soundscape of rap artist Donnie Daydream’s Undeniable, the dizzying two-minute-long ad juxtaposes blue-black images of battleready doctors (surgeons suiting up) and resolute ill children (shaving their heads, strapping on prosthetics, oozing blood) in highly technologized hospital settings alongside combative images of hyper-masculinized, often-racialized adults and children engaged in boxing, wrestling, and other aggressive acts while dressed as knights, superheroes, and soldiers. Over-sized text flashes on the screen: “SICK ISN’T WEAK.” “SICK FIGHTS BACK.” The enemy is a host of diseases and their effects: kidney failure, cystic fibrosis, autism, cancer, worry, time, defeat. The campaign ends in ‘victory’—smashed medical technologies, an exploding clock, a child’s bursting arm cast and soldier-like patients and healthcare providers charging into battle * Patty Douglas [email protected]
1
Faculty of Education, Brandon University, 270 - 18th Street, Brandon, Manitoba R7A 6A9, Canada
2
University of Guelph, 50 Stone Rd E, Guelph, ON N1G 2W1, Canada
Journal of Medical Humanities
(and into technologized medical therapies), including an apocalyptic-like image of a young person in a hospital gown atop a massive pile of mangled wheelchairs, crutches and IV poles. This fundraising campaign (that is ongoing with another ad recently released) stirred controversy in news media and academic circles. “New SickKids campaign puts ‘fierce’ new face on what it means to be sick” (Lee-Shanok 2016) declares a CBC headline; “SickKids campaign forgets that kids aren’t always warriors” (Picard 2016) counters the Globe & Mail. On the bioethics forum Impact Ethics, disability scholars Michael Orsini and Anne McGuire (2016) argue, “The campaign message is very clear: there is no room for weakness in the face of illness or disability.” They remind us many sick children will n
Data Loading...
