Nervous Routes: Tracing Unexplained Illness from Accountability to Affirmation

Abstract

What happens when illness is not recognized as illness? Patients whose experiences are not biomedically legitimized and recognized struggle to give an account of their pain, and struggle to be heard. Unexplained illness is not only characterized by pain but also by the discursive gap in which this pain grows louder and yet is hidden. This pain must be acknowledged. Faced with the absence of clear biomarkers for illness, patients are often told a variation of “it is all in your head.” “Explanations” of this type intersect with existing forms of marginalization, along the lines of race, gender, sex and class. Taking the lack of medical explanation for embodied conditions as a place of departure, this work reads a wide range of cultural objects, from film to illness memes, medical texts and diagnostic criteria, to study how unexplained illness is made sense of in the collective imagination.