We warmly invite you to the next in our series of Affiliates’ Lunches on Thursday, 23rd April from 12-2pm at St Chad’s College. Professor Lucille Cairns and Dr Jac Saorsa will each present talks on the theme “Women, Illness and the Arts”.
Abstracts:
- Professor Lucille Cairns
‘Bodily Dis-Ease in Contemporary French Women’s Writing: Two Case Studies’
This article examines two twenty-first-century autobiographical accounts of the intense, and ultimately life-threatening, mental and bodily dis-ease endured by two young French women, from adolescence into early adulthood. Annick Loupias’s La Tortue sur le dos (2001) and Emilie Durand’s Ma folie ordinaire: allers et retours à l’hôpital Sainte-Anne (2006) are phenomenologically rich and visceral testimonies to their author’s experiences of anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, other forms of self-harm (inter alia, self-cutting, self-burning), and even suicide attempts. I argue that, in common with the texts of many other French female writers who have approached these subjects in the last two decades, their value is not so much “literary” (in the sense of “high-brow literature”) as more broadly cultural, allowing important socio-politico-, gendered, and medical insights about markedly gendered illnesses that have seen an inexorable rise in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, but are still often misunderstood even by educated readers, and even by the health-care professionals who attempt to treat their sufferers. The article sets these texts in a material, extra-diegetic context, ascertains the aetiologies of the pathologies they inscribe, draws out some of the key insights they afford about those pathologies, and identifies some of the stylistic/ rhetorical means by which these insights are conveyed.
- Dr Jac Saorsa
‘The Abject Artist: exploring the multidimensional capacity of art to express and communicate the experience of illness’
Art and science have ‘romanced’ each other throughout history. As a visual artist and researcher my practice continues this liaison through interdisciplinary exploration of the capacity of visual art, in symbiotic relation with polyvocal narrative, to coincide with medical science beyond socio-historical, cultural and philosophical limitations to express and profoundly communicate the lived experience of illness. The creative act, for me, goes beyond illustration or representation, becoming in the medical setting an act of empathic witness. As such I adopt an autoethnographic approach, focusing on the idea of the abject as a key factor in the formation of individual subjectivity, and this ensures a theoretically sensitive, self-critical analysis of my role as artist/researcher/human being.
This talk will focus on an ongoing project, Drawing Women’s Cancer. Gynaecological cancer is often subject to ignorance and lack of understanding due to the taboo nature of the condition, and moreover, the suffering engendered by both the disease itself, and by the attendant psycho-sexual, and socio-cultural issues, is compounded by a general scarcity of accurate information. Drawing Women’s Cancer aims to address these issues through the capacity of visual art to create a metalanguage’, a complementary experiential dialogue that transcends explanation, not to determine or prescribe but rather to increase subjective awareness, both professional and public, of the physical and psychological implications of living with the ultimate in ‘women’s problems’.
These talks will be followed by discussion and a buffet lunch. Abstracts for both talks can be found below. If you would like to attend, please confirm your place at the lunch by contacting our administrator, Jane Abel.
Please mark your diaries for our final Affiliates’ event for this year, ‘Visual Culture in Medical Humanities’, an extended workshop on June 18th at Van Mildert College. This will be a day-long event, jointly organised with Professors Ludmilla Jordanova and Janet Stewart from the Centre for Visual Arts and Culture. Further details and registration can be found on the CMH website.