Gender and Pathography from a Transnational Perspective

The Project

Our research project “Gender and Pathography from a Transnational Perspective" (led by Prof. Isabel Durán) has obtained funding from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation for three years (2021-2024). Reference: PID2020-113330-GBI00.

“Medical Humanities” is an interdisciplinary area of knowledge which explores human health and disease through the methods and materials of the creative arts and humanities. It responds to the imperative of understanding the experience of “being ill” through a wide spectrum of physical and mental maladies, as reflected in literature and other artistic expressions. The research group “Gender Studies in English-Speaking Countries” from U. Complutense de Madrid (UCM) envisions to employ its consolidated expertise in the fields of gender, transnational and literary studies to explore stories of illness as (auto)pathographies, which complement a patient’s medical history, protest against injustices from the medical profession and global health systems and strengthen the healing purpose inherent in the act of writing, as “scriptotherapy”.

This research group’s case studies include but are not limited to examining illness stories of restitution, chaos, quest and patients’ confrontation with death, as well as illness-related myths and metaphors, such as rebirth, battle, the amazon, or medical colonialization. This project’s overarching goal is to scrutinize key questions, themes and narrative strategies from the four axes of four clusters (the physical, the mental, the sexual and the spatial), in order to have diagnostic knowledge of several life episodes: being physically or mentally ill, interacting with healthcare professionals, being treated in hospitals and other health institutions, and being traditionally stigmatized for gendered pathologies. Within the timeframe of the next three years, this group will share its research findings by means of participating in conferences; fostering comparative and transnational studies; and publishing articles, book chapters and edited volumes in prestigious publishers and indexed journals. We also expect to organize a symposium, a film cycle and a summer course on (auto)pathographies, as well as to arrange research stays in international universities for the members of this project and their graduate students. This group has robust experience in supervising PhD dissertations in literary, gender and transnational studies, so this project’s objective is also to train future professionals of Medical Humanities and, thereby, to encourage further research and promote this area of knowledge, which is particularly pressing in today’s “ill” world, due to the COVID-19 contingency.

Research objectives

General Objective:

Our overarching goal is to tackle key questions regarding the thematic content of each of the four clusters (bodily, mental, sexually related conditions, and the spaces in which they are treated) to test gender and transnational commonalities/differences in the appreciation of the experience of “being ill,” as expressed by men and women from various cultures, and narrated in different languages (namely, English and Spanish). The key questions to be applied in our critical analysis for achieving this aim will be grounded on the theoretical framework presented in the main description of the project: How is illness an occasion for stories? What needs do the ill address in their stories and what are the salient themes addressed? What type of illness narrative are we facing? What medical and social aspects are denounced or critiqued in the stories? How is the ill body/mind depicted in the story? What metaphors or myths are used in that depiction? Does the ill narrative present abjection and/or stigmatization? What are the narratological aspects of each type of story? What lessons do general readers/the medical profession learn from reading those stories? What ethical issues are presented in the narrative? What cultural/medical differences/commonalities have we been able to discover in our comparative, transnational readings? The answers to these questions will certainly foster the comparative study of medical narrative according to a series of themes that analyze the interrelations and conversations between different national and social traditions.

Specific Objectives:

As mentioned, aims are divided into four separate but interrelated research clusters (See 1.4. “Methodology and Workplan”). This allows us to establish several specific objectives within our main research goal:

To perform a gendered anatomy of the ill body and to propose a “typology of ill bodies” as depicted in body-centered pathographies, and discern how the bodies-that-write achieve specific biopsychosocial ends not envisioned by a strictly biomedical outlook (Cluster 1).
To revise the history of psychic suffering through narrated expressions of mental illness in order to engage collective responsibility towards the understanding, comforting and relieving of psychic suffering (Cluster 2).
To examine representations of the ill or diseased female, male and transgender bodies in relation to sex, sexuality, and sexual orientation in order to depathologize these categories, which have been traditionally taxonomized as or associated with multifarious body and mental illnesses by scientific and social discourses (Cluster 3).
To revise medical spatialization, as focused on the change from “person” into “patient” in medical spaces with specific processes and treatments associated with them (Cluster 4).
To promote PhD training: Some PhD dissertations are now underway in areas of research related to this team. It is the aim of the project to foster research on illness stories and gender, so that at the end of this project, at least 2 PhD Dissertations will be defended.

Clusters

To facilitate the investigation of (auto) pathographies in conjunction with gender and transnationality, this Research Project and its members are divided into four clusters:

CLUSTER 1: STORIES OF BODILY CONDITIONS

Coordinator: Isabel Durán

Participants: Francisco Cortés, Claudia Alonso, Noelia Hernando, Laura de la Parra; Laura Rodríguez Arnaiz

External advisors: Thomas Cole, Franziska Gygax, Ignacio Lizasoain

Expected Results: by exploring transnational literary works and films under the lens of gender and Medical Humanities, this cluster envisions to propose a “typology of ill bodies” as depicted in body- centered pathographies and discern how the bodies-that-write are a means to achieve specific biopsychosocial ends not envisioned by a strictly biomedical outlook.

CLUSTER 2: STORIES OF PSYCHIC SUFFERING

Coordinator: Rebeca Gualberto

Participants: Laura de la Parra, Carmen Méndez, Claudia Alonso, Isabel Marqués, Laura Rodríguez Arnaiz

External Advisors: Thomas Cole, Franziska Gygax, Ignacio Lizasoain

Expected Results: by critically exploring the selected corpus, this research cluster will reassess the idea of mental illness to engage collective responsibility towards the understanding, comforting and relieving of psychic suffering. A wider understanding of the socio-economic dimension of mental distress may help the development of public policies, hence responding to the integrative approach of the Health Humanities.

CLUSTER 3: STORIES OF SEX- AND SEXUALITY-RELATED OCCURRENCES

Coordinator: Francisco Cortés

Participants: David Yagüe, Noelia Hernando, Isabel Marqués, Laura Rodríguez Arnaiz

External Advisors: Thomas Cole, Franziska Gygax, Ignacio Lizasoain

Expected Results: by exploring transnational literary works and films under the lens of Medical Humanities, this cluster envisions to depathologize the categories of sexuality, sex, gender and sexual orientation, which have been traditionally taxonomized as or associated with multifarous body and mental illnesses by scientific and social discourses.

CLUSTER 4: STORIES OF TREATMENT AND ILLNESS-RELATED SPACES

Coordinator: Carmen Méndez

Participants: Isabel Durán, David Yagüe, Rebeca Gualberto

External Advisors: Thomas Cole, Franziska Gygax

Expected Results: by exploring transnational literary works and films under the lens of Medical Humanities, this cluster envisions to reassess our understanding of traditional medicalized spaces (hospitals, psychiatric institutions, addiction treatment centers, and nursing homes), and of non- traditional spaces of treatment (homes during a global pandemic), emphasizing the paradoxical nature of these spaces, portrayed both as locus of safety, danger, recovery and suffering.