ABSTRACT

Reflecting on 30 years of living with Crohn’s Disease, I engage Managed Meaning of Embodied Experience (MMEE) theory, considering whether and how it can help me articulate new possibilities for working as an academic with chronic illness. I come to see that MMEE does enable restorying of possibility, but the stories that can be told are constricted by the assumption that illness is undesirable and in need of a fix. That is, MMEE rests on existing discourses founded on a hierarchical binary between illness and health. Applying Simone de Beauvoir’s analysis of the political and practical binds arising when we accept binaries as natural, I call for a leveling of the ill/healthy hierarchy. This move facilitates chronically ill people existing as whole subjects rather than as lacking and in need of a fix to repair them to the healthy ideal. Using Beauvoir’s idea of reciprocity, which calls for an intersubjective, situational construction of subjectivity, I offer a path toward wholeness for all people.

摘要

回顾与克罗恩病共处 30 年的经历，我采用了具身经验的管理意义 (MMEE) 理论，考虑它是否以及如何帮助我阐明作为慢性病学者工作的新可能性。我开始看到 MMEE 确实能够恢复可能性，但可以讲述的故事受到疾病是不受欢迎的并且需要修复的假设的限制。也就是说，MMEE 依赖于现有的建立在疾病与健康之间的二元等级制度之上的话语。应用西蒙娜·德·波伏瓦 (Simone de Beauvoir) 对当我们接受二进制是自然的时出现的政治和实践约束的分析，我呼吁平衡病态/健康的等级制度。此举有助于慢性病患者作为完整的受试者存在，而不是缺乏和需要修复来修复他们的健康理想。