On being 'sick': Scholarly treatments of illness and identity in critical illness narrative

This thesis attempts to situate contemporary illness narratives within the relatively recent histories of modern medicine and identity politics in order to explore the ways in which a shift in medical perception in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries contributed to the discursive production of a "pathologized Other." Beginning with Michel Foucault's The Birth of the Clinic (1963) and The History of Sexuality (1978), I suggest that illness and sexuality share a common history following the Enlightenment, a history that influences scholarly treatments of illness, from performativity theory to personal narrative. Using Robert McRuer's concept of the "straight composition" (2006), I analyze four scholarly "autobiographies" of illness that I refer to as "critical illness narratives" in order to determine how queer and postcolonial treatments of illness resist modern(ist) ideologies by attempting to historicize the production of "pathology." I argue that by exercising a kind of "double vision" these treatments locate the "truth" of illness in its ability to expose the fantasy of health that underlies the production of "proper" (sexual and racial) identities.