Shame and Medicine in Literature Seminar with Dr Katharine Cheston

The Shame and Medicine Project presents the Shame and Medicine in Literature Seminar Series, hosted by the Centre for the Cultures and Environments of Health.
Shame, Elspeth Probyn tells us, ‘is a painful thing to write about’ (‘Writing Shame’, 2010). This Seminar Series interrogates the connections between the experience of shame and its literary representation, extending discussions initiated by the ‘Shame and Medicine’ thematic issue of Literature and Medicine, edited by Dr Arthur Rose and Professor Luna Dolezal.
TITLE: ‘Shame, (in)visibility and Ill Feelings’
ABSTRACT: Alice Hattrick’s Ill Feelings (2021) is a ‘genre-bending’ long-form essay; its title’s dual meaning underlines the entanglement of symptoms and shame that occur when illness is seen as having no explanation. In this presentation, I bring Ill Feelings into dialogue with a spoken account gathered through semi-structured interview, in order to elucidate the particular affective texture of this shame and to illuminate the distinct ways in which it shapes lives and texts. I argue that the shame that occurs for those living with ‘ill feelings’ is characterised by a sense of (in)visibility: by feeling simultaneously seen and unseen. I investigate how diagnostic labels employed in these contexts render suffering and sufferers (in)visible, considering the implications of this analysis for our broader understanding of shame and for our approach to literary life writing.