Right now I am in a class called Illness & Health in Literature that focuses on the "sick role" - how society views people who are ill and how ill people base their thoughts and actions on themselves and their illness from other social influences. I think people who are ill would be a perfect "othered" community to analyze because, as I've learned and am continuing to learn from my other class, illness can be a highly constructed social theme.
I already have a lot of information and texts, including Audre Lorde's "The Cancer Journals," Barbara Ehrenreich's "Welcome to Cancerland," Susan Sontag's "Illness as Metaphor" and "AIDS and It's Metaphors," and an analysis of illness from the early nineteenth century, "Complaints & Disorders." Having already read all of these I do not think I will be stressed to find information, but I think I will still reach out to find other texts once I find the specific approach I am going to take. I also will have plenty of different subcategories to go along with; analyzing separate diseases and illnesses such as cancer, mental illness, AIDS/other sexual illnesses, and others.
What I'm thinking about doing right now is just to explain & analyze how society shapes how we perceive illness, how patients/physicians "should" act, how we view different illnesses based on gender or age, and how society responds to those that do not conform to the "sick role." I will most likely take examples from texts from the patient's perspective and use that as a basis of exploration for the societal views.
Carson,
ReplyDeleteI think this sounds like a great and creative idea and I'm glad you can connect it to your other class! The texts you gave as examples are good ones, but as each of those are long and very complex texts, I would recommend picking no more than one of those as one of your texts for analysis for this project. Instead, you might want to pick a few other texts that are more "pop-culture-y."
I'm also wondering if you'll want to narrow your focus a little. Illness is a pretty broad category so I'm wondering if you might want to look at people with a specific category of illness, like cancer, AIDS, degenerative disorders, etc. You have the right idea with your questions: Carson,
I think this sounds like a great and creative idea and I'm glad you can connect it to your other class! The texts you gave as examples are good ones, but as each of those are long and very complex texts, I would recommend picking no more than one of those as one of your texts for analysis for this project. Instead, you might want to pick a few other texts that are more "pop-culture-y."
I'm also wondering if you'll want to narrow your focus a little. Illness is a pretty broad category so I'm wondering if you might want to look at people with a specific category of illness, like cancer, AIDS, degenerative disorders, etc. You have the right idea with your questions:Carson,
I think this sounds like a great and creative idea and I'm glad you can connect it to your other class! The texts you gave as examples are good ones, but as each of those are long and very complex texts, I would recommend picking no more than one of those as one of your texts for analysis for this project. Instead, you might want to pick a few other texts that are more "pop-culture-y."
I'm also wondering if you'll want to narrow your focus a little. Illness is a pretty broad category so I'm wondering if you might want to look at people with a specific category of illness, like cancer, AIDS, degenerative disorders, etc. You have the right idea with your questions: "just to explain & analyze how society shapes how we perceive illness, how patients/physicians "should" act, how we view different illnesses based on gender or age, and how society." But these are pretty big questions. I think you might be better off to just pick one of these as your centralizing research question for the project.
Sorry for the strange repetition. Copying error!
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