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Women’S Resistance: Patient Pathographies And Medical Authority, Anna Claire Elliott

Honors Theses

In recent years, illness narratives have risen in popularity. Women’s medical narratives in particular have gained momentum in the literary world, and they often share commonalities including the inherent theme of medical resistance and an emphasis on the power dynamic between patients and physicians. This thesis will examine two pathographies, Susanna Kaysen’s Girl, Interrupted and Porochista Khakpour’s Sick, in the contexts of gender and disability studies, as well as theories of illness narratives. I examine how each text resists medical authority, and I also closely survey the physician-patient relationships within each text. The themes of gender and disability emerge …