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.