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Full Description
This book of autobiographical, autoethnographic illness narratives tackles the intersection between cultural and medical illnesses in present-day Lebanon, in relation to topical issues such as queer home, coming of age, dementia, expatriate trauma, and sexual blackmail, among others. The book's essays are developed in the backdrop of Lebano-pathography - a dual, potentially adaptable and reusable, narrative intervention (form/method) that does not depoliticise the traumatic subject. Simultaneously, it is a body of writing (text) that seeks to illuminate the different ways one can be ill, and try to recover, in present-day Lebanon.
While somatic manifestations of illness and their concomitant patient accounts are central to previous research in narrative medicine and illness writing, Lebano-pathography underscores a more versatile interpretation of illness encompassing cultural practice and/or clinical disease, and exploring in critically informed autobiographical text the two illness categories' causal interrelationship. In the backdrop of the cadaverous political grid and economic tensions rending the country since the national tragedy of the August 4, 2020 explosion of Beirut Port, this volume unpacks the following thematic clusters: (1) Rewriting Illness: Pathographies of Gender and Sex; (2) The Alzheimer Spectrum: Cognitive and/or Cultural Memory Failure; (3) Walking the City: Medical Malpractice, Pedestrian Injuries, and Claustophobia; (4) The Bones Within: Immigrant Narratives and Vicarious Trauma; and (5) Surviving Trauma: Coping and Mental Health.
The chapters in this book were originally published in Life Writing and are accompanied by a new conclusion.
Contents
Introduction - Theorising Lebano-Pathography: A Biographical Exploration of Medical-Cultural Pathologies 1. Narrating Sexual Blackmail in Lebanon: A Present-Day Pathography 2. No Cure: Illness through a Lebanese Arab Queer Lens 3. On the Vulnerability of Memory and the Power of Storytelling, or How My Grandmothers Made Me a Historian 4. Writing Pretty: On Self-Cannibalism and Disfigured Tongues 5. The Man in the Mirror: Reflections on Dementia Caregiving in Lebanon 6. Truman in Beirut: Journeying Through Fear and Immobility 7. Drink the Sea: Twenty Years of Walking and Falling in Beirut 8. Ta(l)king Back (to) the City—Fragments of Beirut and/in Me 9. Playing Tennis in Beirut: Sisterhood and Transnational Aches 10. Sickness of Separation: Reflections on Expatriation, Repatriation, and Motherhood 11. Scarred Skin and Wiggling Worms: What I Learned from my Eating Disorder 12. Illnesses of Illusion and Disillusionment: From Euphoria to Aporia Conclusion - Countering Self-Erasure: Lebano-Pathography and Future Studies in Auto/Biography
