Phenomenologies of Illness and Normality: Critical Engagements with Merleau-Ponty

Dear Colleagues,

The growing interdisciplinary field of critical phenomenology takes as a point of departure the social and political implications of embodied perceptual experience. It pays special attention to marginalized subjects whose gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, class, age, and/or disabilities have not been done justice to in (allegedly) universal phenomenological descriptions of human existence. Critical phenomenology is increasingly playing a transformative role across multiple areas of study such as disability studies, medical humanities, queer theory, critical race studies, cultural anthropology, environmental studies, and performance studies. In addition to challenging traditional dualisms such as mind/body, subject/object, self/other, and body/world, critical phenomenologists address other powerful dualisms that have failed to capture the full range of human experience, including that between normality and illness, which is the subject of this Special Issue. Highlighting how such dualisms emerge from and reflect quasi-transcendental structures of power and privilege, rather than being inherent features of human existence, critical phenomenology validates various ways of being in the world that have historically been neglected, pathologized, and devalued.

This Special Issue, “Phenomenologies of Illness and Normality: Critical Engagements with Merleau-Ponty”, focuses on the oppressive as well as liberatory ways that normality and illness are experienced, expressed, and inscribed in both theory and practice. Possible topics include the following:

• The role of illness narratives in reinforcing or combating traditional views of normality;
• Intersubjective dimensions of illness and normality;
• Norms of gender, race, class, sexuality, and ability in relation to different types of illness;
• The challenges illness poses to autonomy and conventional perceptual norms;
• The social harms associated with stigmatized vs. nonstigmatized illnesses;
• The embodiment of normality and normal(ized) embodiment;
• The “normal abnormality” of chronic illness experiences;
• The deficiencies of a logic of cure;
• Distinctive temporalities and spatialities of illness experience.

Possible questions to consider are the following:

• How has the concept of health traditionally excluded the possibility that illness is normal?
• How are different vulnerabilities manifested in experiences of illness and normality?
• In what ways are both normality and illness intersubjectively and/or intercorporeally
• constituted?
• How does the experience of illness positively and negatively affect our relations with
• others?
• In what ways does the recognition that illness is normal force us to reconceive both
• normality and illness?
• How do first-person illness narratives broaden the field of describable experience and transform phenomenological conceptions of embodiment and subjectivity?
• What unique resources can an ethics of care (or other relational ethics) bring to phenomenological descriptions of illness and normality?

Prof. Dr. Gail Weiss
Dr. Lisa Käll
Guest Editors

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• critical phenomenology
• embodiment
• illness
• normality
• disability
• pathologization
• vulnerability