Email this article Staying Positive: Women's illness narratives and the stigmatized vernacular
Abstract
This article uses the stigmatized vernacular (Goldstein & Shuman, 2012) as a conceptual framework for examining the public construction and reception of women’s illness narratives. I begin by making the case that personal illness narratives – a genre that works to translate the subjective illness experience to a public audience – are rich sites for exploring how discourses of veneration and repudiation can become inextricably intertwined. Discussing illustrative examples of the construction and reception of women’s illness narratives shared in contexts of breast cancer and fibromyalgia, I show how popular understandings of emotions, particularly positive emotions like happiness, play a major role in the regimes of value shaping how women’s illness experiences become tellable or untellable, and thereby valued or devalued. Integrating scholarship on illness narratives, stigma, and happiness, I aim to contribute to a richer and more multifaceted view of the illness narrative genre and the discursive contagion of stigma.
Keywords
Full Text:
PDFReferences
Ahmed, S. (2010). The promise of happiness. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.
Åsbring, P., & Närvänen, A. (2002). Women's experiences of stigma in relation to chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia. Qualitative Health Research, 12(2), 148-160.
Barker, K. K. (2005). The fibromyalgia story: Medical authority and women's worlds of pain. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Becker, G. (1998). Disrupted lives: How people create meaning in a chaotic world. Berkeley; Los Angeles; London: University of California Press.
Bode, R. (2010). The sense of an illness and breast cancer culture. Canadian Woman Studies, 28(2/3), 95-98.
Bury, M. (1982). Chronic illness as biographical disruption. Sociology of Health and Illness, 4(2), 167-182.
Couser, G. T. (1997). Recovering bodies: Illness, disability, and life writing. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Dow, C. M., Roche, P. A., & Ziebland, S. (2012). Talk of frustration in the narratives of people with chronic pain. Chronic Illness, 8(3), 176-191.
Edwards, D. (1997). Emotion. Discourse and cognition (pp. 170-202). London: Sage Publications, Ltd.
Ehrenreich, B. (2001). Welcome to Cancerland. Harper’s, November, 43-53.
Ehrenreich, B. (2009). Bright-sided: How the relentless promotion of positive thinking has undermined America. New York: Henry Holt and Company.
Everett, H. (2009). Vernacular health moralities and culinary tourism in Newfoundland and Labrador. Journal of American Folklore, 142(483), 28-52.
Frank, A. W. (1995). The wounded storyteller: Body, illness, and ethics. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Goffman, E. 1963. Stigma: Notes on the management of spoiled identity. Englewood
Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Good, B. J. (1994). Medicine, rationality, and experience: A anthropological perspective. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press.
Goldstein, D. E. (2000). 'When ovaries retire': Contrasting women's experiences with feminist and medical models of menopause. Health: Interdisciplinary Journal of Health, Illness and Medicine, 4(3), 309-323.
Goldstein, D. E. (2004). Once upon a virus: AIDS legends and vernacular risk perception. Logan: Utah State University Press.
Goldstein, D. E., & Shuman, A. (2012). The stigmatized vernacular: Where reflexivity meets untellability. Journal of Folklore Research, 49(2), 113-126.
Hänninen, K. (2007). Perspectives on the narrative construction of emotions. Elore, 14(1), http://www.elore.fi/arkisto/1_07/han1_07.pdf, September 16. 2013.
Hawkins, A. H. (1999). Reconstructing illness: Studies in pathography (2nd ed.). West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press.
Herring, S. C., Scheidt, L. A., Bonus, S., & Wright, E. (2004). Bridging the gap: A genre analysis of weblogs (HICSS-37). Proceedings of the 37th Hawai'i International Conference on System Sciences, http://www.csus.edu/indiv/s/stonerm/genreanalysisofweblogs.pdf, September 16, 2013.
Herring, S. C., Scheidt, L. A., Bonus, S., & Wright, E. (2005). Weblogs as a bridging genre. Information, Technology & People, 18(2), 142-171.
hooks, b. (1992). Black looks: Race and representation. Boston, MA: South End Press.
Hydén, L. (1997). Illness and narrative. Sociology of Health and Illness, 19(1), 48-69.
Killoran, J. B. (2003). The gnome in the front yard and other public figurations: genres of self-presentation on personal home pages. Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly, 26(1), 66-83.
King, S. (2006). Pink ribbons, Inc. breast cancer culture and the politics of philanthropy. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Labov, W. (1972). Language in the inner city. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Langellier, K. M. (1989). Personal narratives: Perspectives on theory and research. Text and Performance Quarterly, 9(4), 243-276.
Langellier, K. M., & Peterson, E. E. (2004). Storytelling in daily life: Performing narrative. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Lavie-Ajayi, M., Almong, N., & Krumer-Nevo, M. (2012). Chronic pain as a narratological distress: A phenomenological study. Chronic Illness, 8(3), 192-200.
Linde, C. (1993). Life stories: The creation of coherence. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lorde, A. (1980). The cancer journals. San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute.
Lutz, C. A. (1990). Engendered emotion: Gender, power, and the rhetoric of emotional control in american discourse. In C. A. Lutz, & L. Abu-Lughod (Eds.), Language and the politics of emotion (pp. 69-91). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Mason, J. (2009). 'Lessons to learn’: Constructions of femininity in popular magazine breast health narratives. Gender Forum, 26, 1.
Mattingly, C., & Garro, L. C. (2000). Narrative and the cultural construction of illness and healing. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press.
McNamara, K. R. (2007). Blogging breast cancer: Language and subjectivity in Women’s online illness narratives. (Unpublished M.A.). Georgetown University.
Mcneill, L. (2003). Teaching an old genre new tricks: The diary on the internet. Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly, 26(1), 24-47.
Miller, C. R., & Shepherd, D. (2004). Blogging as social action: A genre analysis of the weblog. In S. Antonijevic, L. Johnson, C. Ratcliff & J. Reyman (Eds.), Into the blogosphere: Rhetoric, community and culture of weblogs, http://blog.lib.umn.edu/blogosphere/blogging_as_social_action.html, September 16, 2013.
Page, R. (2008). Gender and genre revisited: Narratives of illness on personal blogs. Genre, 41(3/4), 149-175.
Page, R. (2011). Blogging on the body: Gender and narrative. In R. Page, & B. Thomas (Eds.), New narratives: Stories and storytelling in the digital age (pp. 220-238). Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Parker-Pope, Tara. 2010. The voices of fibromyalgia. The New York Times,
http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/03/the-voices-of-fibromyalgia/.
Pitts, V. (2004). Illness and internet empowerment: Writing and reading breast cancer in cyberspace. Health: Interdisciplinary Journal of Health, Illness and Medicine, 8(1), 33-59.
Primiano, L. N. (1995). Vernacular religion and the search for method in religious folklife. Western Folklore, 54(1), 37-56.
Richardson, J. C. (2005). Establishing the (extra)ordinary in chronic widespread pain. . Health: Interdisciplinary Journal of Health, Illness and Medicine, 9(1), 31-48.
Ryan, S., & Räisänen, U. (2012). “The brain is such a delicate thing”: An exploration of fear and seizures among young people with epilepsy. Chronic Illness, 8(3), 214-224.
Sacks, H. 1992. Lectures on conversation, vols. 1 and 2. Edited by Gail Jefferson. Oxford: Blackwell.
Segal, J. Z. (2005). Health and the rhetoric of medicine. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
Segal, J. Z. (2007). Breast cancer narratives as public rhetoric: Genre itself and the maintenance of ignorance. Linguistics and the Human Sciences, 3(1), 3-23.
Shuman, A., & Bohmer, C. (2012). The stigmatized vernacular: Political asylum and the politics of visibility/recognition. Journal of Folklore Research, 49(2), 199-226.
Sorapure, M. (2003). Screening moments, scrolling lives: Diary writing on the web. Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly, 26(1), 1-23.
Ware, N. C. (1992). Suffering and the social construction of illness: The delegitimation of illness experience in chronic fatigue syndrome. Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 6(4), 347-361.
White, G. M. (1993). Emotions inside out: The anthropology of affect. In M. Lewis, & J. M. Haviland-Jones (Eds.), Handbook of emotions (pp. 29-39). New York: The Guilford Press.
White, G. M. (2000). Representing emotional meaning: Category, metaphor, schema, discourse. In M. Lewis, & J. Haviland (Eds.), Handbook of emotions (2nd ed., pp. 30-44). New York: Guilford.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5195/hcs.2013.125
Refbacks
- There are currently no refbacks.
New articles in this journal are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
This site is published by the University Library System, University of Pittsburgh as part of its D-Scribe Digital Publishing Program and is cosponsored by the University of Pittsburgh Press.