Issue Details: First known date: 2022... 2022 Writing Disability in Australia : Transmedial Potentials for Illness/Recovery Narratives
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'In this paper I argue that extending the illness/recovery narrative through the transmedial mode allows for more diverse representation from patients and survivors, leading to greater understanding of varied stories and an enhanced version of Narrative Medicine. Using two transmedial case studies – Dakoda Barker’s threesixfive (2015) and my own interactive memoir How to Knit a Human – I frame my discussion through the lenses of Disability Studies, Mad Studies and Narrative Medicine. Threesixfive evokes Barker’s experience of living with a chronic health condition and the daily struggles and choices one must make throughout each hour. How to Knit a Human utilises choice-based digital storytelling to represent inconsistencies in memory and alternative pathways caused by memory-loss from psychosis and electroconvulsive therapy. I explore these transmedial potentials and encourage survivors to take power and agency in their own valuable lived experiences in order to transform the Narrative Medicine field, which usually only draws on traditional forms of storytelling. I assert that transmedial modes grant greater diversity and flexibility when wielded by survivors. Moreover, once these stories are experienced by others, stigma surrounding disability and/or madness will reduce not only in wider society, but in medicine, education and institutions.'(Publication abstract)

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    y separately published work icon Australian Literary Studies Special Issue : Writing Disability in Australia vol. 37 no. 1 May 2022 24546239 2022 periodical issue

    'Poet Andy Jackson begins his collection Human Looking with a poem titled ‘Opening.’ This signals not only the opening of his book but an ‘incision’ which begins ‘below the back of the neck / and ends just above the coccyx’ (3). Jackson, who has Marfan syndrome, is referring to one of numerous surgeries conducted on his body which leave ‘a thick scar – a blurred, insistent line. / As each layer of skin dies, it whispers to the next / the form and story of the wound. / This is how I continue, intact.’ The word ‘intact’ suggests that the wound’s ‘form and story’ are sealed. They are stitched up and closed over by medical professionals who deem disabled people broken and in need of fixing. As Jackson ‘strain[s] to lift this too-heavy object, / the long suture ruptures / in my head’ (3). The burdensome narrative of his condition – one which has been imposed upon him – has sprung apart. He then addresses the reader, ‘You might think this visceral confession / only an image of mine. But you are becoming / this unstitching, this sudden opening’ (3). The transition in Jackson’s address from first person to second person, and the shift from a noun (‘image’) to a verb (‘becoming’), directs the attention away from his appearance to the reader, who now has a role to play not in staring at Jackson’s image, but in participating in the construction of what his story can be. It is an invitation to be open to all that disability engenders: not stereotypical stories of deficit, but creativity, ingenuity and possibility.' (Amanda Tink, Jessica White : Introduction : Writing Disability in Australia : introduction)

    2022
Last amended 24 May 2022 12:03:40
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