Cripping 'unexplained' chronic illness in 21st century British women's writing

This thesis focusses on literary depictions of ‘unexplained’ chronic illness by contemporary British women. I theorise a culturally situated model of ‘unexplained’ chronic illnesses which are undiagnosed, undocumented or otherwise ‘unexplained’. I argue that ‘medically unexplained symptoms’ (MUS), as a medical and psychiatric category, is an epistemological framing of embodied experiences which subjects chronically ill bodyminds to processes of epistemic ignorance, domination and injustice. My work takes up a crip reframing of chronicity and cripistemological ways of knowing, using theories of crip spacetime to develop an account of chronicity as an embodied experience profoundly informed by structural oppression. I present readings of Ali Smith’s Hotel World (2001), Hilary Mantel’s Giving Up the Ghost (2003), Helen Oyeyemi’s White Is for Witching (2009) and Kate Murray-Browne’s The Upstairs Room (2017), to show how illness, as a central component in literary writing and everyday life, is often already present in canonical and familiar texts but is rarely recognised or explicitly read as such. Through hermeneutical suspicion and paranoid reading practices, I theorise how and why disability is routinely ignored by cultural critique and literary study. Focussing on gendered representations of illness and associated medical histories like hysteria, I track how contemporary experiences of ‘undiagnosis’ are conceptualised and expressed in literary writing beyond the normative ideological and narrative privileging of coherence, chronology and articulacy. My readings traverse illness spacetimes of spectral haunting and Gothic houses, where precarious crip-queer subjects encounter continuing histories of suspicion, paranoia and hysteria. Using hospitality theory, I conceptualise the deeply conditional statuses of crip subjects living in epistemological uncertainty and material precarity. This cripistemological project theorises literary illness writing (and reading practices) as complexly enmeshed within and resistant to broader power structures and cultural norms of representation and knowledge which make medical and psychiatric ‘explanation’ compulsory requirements of contemporary life.