From sick role to narrative subject: An analytic memoir. (January 2016)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Frank, Arthur W
• Is Part Of: Health. Volume 20:Number 1(2016:Jan.)
• Page Start: 9
• Page End: 21
• Publication Date: 2016-01
• Subjects: Audre Lorde -- governmentality -- illness experience -- Michel Foucault -- narrative medicine -- narrative subject -- sick role -- Talcott Parsons; Health -- Periodicals; Health -- Social aspects -- Periodicals; 613.05
• DOI: 10.1177/1363459315615395
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1363-4593

Abstract

Questions of illness experience and identity are discussed, based on the analysis of a story told by the breast-cancer activist Audre Lorde. Displacing Parsons' conceptualization of illness as a sick role, I understand the ill person as a narrative subject, defined by discursive possibilities. Three discourses of illness are proposed: the medical institutional discourse, the discourse of illness experience, and the pink-ribbon discourse. Each has its preferred narratives. These discourses overlap and mutually affect each other. Problems with the Foucauldian conceptualization of the subject are considered, and a dialogical imagination of relations of governmentality is proposed.