Queer pathography: A comparison of illness narratives by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Bill T. Jones

The contemporary pathography, as defined by Anne Hunsaker Hawkins, recounts the progress of sickness chronologically from diagnosis to recovery in order to achieve closure over the chaotic experience of illness. This dissertation contributes to the scholarly attempt to expand our understanding of pathographical form and purpose in a sustained comparison of two queer pathographers, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Bill T. Jones. Unlike the search for closure described by Hawkins, Sedgwick's approach to metastatic breast cancer and Jones' treatment of seroconversion and HIV-related loss open avenues for reconceptualizing disease in terms of multiplicity.;The study of Sedgwick explores the theories from her work on the Gothic (for example, conceptions of love in Proust, ellipsis in James, and affinity in Nietzsche) and on nondualistic thought for how they come to fruition in what she calls her "texture book," A Dialogue on Love. Comparing the structure of this pathography to her textile art enables us to see how her theories of nonlinear time, hybrid form, and intersubjective relation function as distinct threads layered together within a 17th-century mode of Japanese linked verse called haibun. Close engagement with these historical, formal, and theoretical matrices demonstrate that Sedgwick's interventions in queer theory achieve their most radical expression in her pathographical work. My examination of Jones investigates how his choreographic strategies structure his pathography, Last Night on Earth. We find a conceptual choreography where discoveries are repeated, recontextualized, and (multiply) reversed until their original formulation reappears in a new light. This cognitive process illumines the literary analyses performed in Jones' pathographical dances of texts as diverse as The Book of Job, Amiri Baraka's Dutchman, and Flannery O'Connor's "Artificial Nigger." His unorthodox interpretations, virtually unexplored in dance scholarship, use these texts to convey principles of de-individuation, contingency, and continual flexibility---all central to Sedgwick's work.;My conclusion expands Hawkins' taxonomy of mythic structures for pathography, which frequently borrow from Christian archetypes, to include these looser paradigms, which draw from more "Eastern" experiential frames. The ethic of expansion in the pathographical work of Jones and Sedgwick allows them to widen the dimensions of illness enough to move in it.