(P)rescription Narratives: Feminist Medical Fiction and the Failure of American Censorship

Description

Examines how women writers of medical fiction rewrite cultural narratives of the female body against censorship under the Comstock Laws Offers an original contribution to the study of nineteenth-century American literature that recovers and examines lesser-known texts by canonical nineteenth-century women writersContributes to the emerging fields of medical fiction, medicine and literature, and medical humanities by examining how one group of women writers intervenes in discourses of reproductive health during a period of censorshipBrings disability theory and affect theory into productive conversations that explore the limitations of social construction and materiality, and offers empathy as a discursive method of resolving tensions in each fieldOffers a new theory of (p)rescription that accounts for the role of narrative as an apparatus in ongoing identity formations linked to disability, race, and gender (P)rescription Narratives reveals how the act of narrative creates the subjects of disability, race, and gender during a period of censorship in American history. In a Crip Affect reading of woman-authored medical fiction from the Comstock law era, this book astutely argues that women writers of medical fiction practice storytelling as a form of narrative medicine that prescribes various forms of healing as an antidote to the shame engineered by an American culture of censorship. Woman-authored medical fiction exposes the limitations of social construction and materiality in conversations about the female body since subject formation relies upon multiple force relations that shape and are shaped by one another in ongoing processes that do not stop despite our efforts to interpret cultural artifacts. These multiple failures – to censor, to resist, to interpret – open up a space for negotiating how we engage the world with greater empathy.