Falling Out of Performance: Pragmatic Breakdown in Veterans’ Storytelling

Unfortunately, coming to terms with disability and trauma are all too familiar foes for American combat veterans, many of whom receive inadequate, delayed, or nonexistent treatment options upon returning home. We conclude this volume with chapter 10, “Falling Out of Performance: Pragmatic Breakdown in Veterans’ Storytelling,” in which Kristiana Willsey provides new insights into the ways in which U.S. military veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan make meaning and process trauma through the sharing of narratives. She argues that naturalizing the labor of narrative—by assuming stories are inherently transformative, redemptive, or unifying—obscures the responsibilities of the audience as co-authors, putting the burden on veterans to both share their experiences of war, and simultaneously scaffold those experiences for an American public that (with the ongoing privatization of the military and the ever-shifting fronts of global warfare) is increasingly alienated from its military. Importantly, Willsey asserts that the public exhortations in which veterans tell their stories in an effort to cultivate a kind of cultural catharsis can put them in an impossible position: urged to tell their war stories; necessitating the careful management of those stories for audiences uniquely historically disassociated from their wars; and then conflating the visible management of those stories with the “spoiled identity” of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Tales from the Operating Theater: Medical Fetishism and the Taboo Performative Power of Erotic Medical Play

In chapter 9, “Tales from the Operating Theater: Medical Fetishism and the Taboo Performative Power of Erotic Medical Play,” London Brickley invites readers into a fetishist community revolving around medical practices and disability where participating individuals are acutely aware of the stigmas, boundaries, and taboos of the physically disabled and mentally ill. With special consideration placed upon the relationship between the subset of individuals who have experienced disability (and/or those that yearn to), with the nuances of their physical and erotic conditions, Brickley demonstrates that fetishes are not simply deviated sexual practices, but complex constructs of identity and chosen experience. By drawing attention to perceptions of what is sexually attractive, she also points out the bias that the disabled body is unattractive, demonstrating that this ability to either see beyond the disability or find it arousing is the primary reason for the label of deviant sexual behavior.

Deranged Psychopaths and Victims Who Go Insane: Visibility and Invisibility in the Depiction of Mental Health and Illness in Contemporary Legend

In chapter 7, “Deranged Psychopaths and Victims Who Go Insane: Visibility and Invisibility in the Depiction of Mental Health and Illness in Contemporary Legend,” Diane E. Goldstein analyzes the portrayal of mental illness in contemporary legends, focusing on the values inherent in depictions of demented killers, quietly “mad” neighbors, and psychologically damaged victims. Taken as a group and read as parallel texts, Goldstein argues that these narratives construct and present a complex of images of mental health and illness set in changing historical and cultural contexts. Together, she asserts, the narratives create explanatory categories for mental illness and convey popular understandings of “madness”; they equate insanity with visibility of difference; they explore the gendered associations of male aggression and female passivity, and they pinpoint areas of socially tolerable and intolerable deviance.

“Heal Thyself”: Holistic Women Healers in Middle America

In chapter 6, “‘Heal Thyself’: Holistic Women Healers in Middle America,” Elaine J. Lawless profiles a local “healing community” of women in or near Columbia, Missouri, who regularly meet and share knowledge about and practice together various healing modalities. In addition to learning from each other, she notes, the women in the group also learn new healing practices offered by healers who were visiting from other areas, so mouth to mouth and hand to hand learning take place all the time. They all claim a holistic approach, which guides their daily lives as well as their healing practices, and includes attention to complex understandings of how mind, body, and spirit work in conjunction within the human body. Through the stories of these women, Lawless offers a unique glimpse into their shared corpus of knowledge and the traditional healing beliefs and practices they espouse, as well as her own place within the healing community.

Broadcasting the Stigmatized Self: Positioning Functions of YouTube Vlogs on Bipolar Disorder1

YouTube, the free Internet video-sharing platform, is home to an active community of people who performatively share personal experience narratives about mental illness. Many individuals in this group heed YouTube’s early call to “Broadcast Yourself” in order to publicly “put a face” to mental illness, particularly in the form of vlogs that document and share their experience. In chapter 8, “Broadcasting the Stigmatized Self: Positioning Functions of YouTube Vlogs on Bipolar Disorder,” Darcy Holtgrave engages this phenomenon through a selection of vloggers who discuss bipolar disorder and the folk groups surrounding them. The parameters of YouTube inherently define and influence users’ exchanges, which are mediated by digital devices and take the form of videos, video responses, text responses, the prefabricated categories of likes and views, and/or interaction with other forms of social media. Using narrative theory, Holtgrave analyzes the strategies that speakers use to negotiate their place in relation to their audience as well as their mental illness.

Interpreting and Treating Autism in Javanese Indonesia: Listening to Folk Perspectives on Developmental Difference and Inclusion

In chapter 5, “Interpreting and Treating Autism in Javanese Indonesia: Listening to Folk Perspectives on Developmental Difference and Inclusion,” Annie Tucker shifts our discussion focus from diabetes to autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Following a year and a half of ethnographic fieldwork in Yogyakarta and Jakarta, Indonesia, Tucker observes that while the concept of “autism” remains comparatively new to the region, there are, in fact, operant models of developmental difference in Javanese Indonesia, and a robust repertory of available responses to ASD. While weighing the benefits and challenges of adopting and mobilizing a globalized paradigm of developmental difference, Tucker illustrates how looking at meaningful embodied folk practices of inclusion might identify potentially powerful local interventions that could be disseminated, specifically describing the work of a Yogyakarta gamelan group that uses traditional music towards individually and socially therapeutic ends.

Latina/o Local Knowledge about Diabetes: Emotional Triggers, Plant Treatments, and Food Symbolism

Local knowledge and folk customs, in particular, play a significant role in shaping communal dietary practices and approaches to treating ailments and disease, sometimes in defiance of “official” medical knowledge and direction. In chapter 4, “Latino/a Local Knowledge About Diabetes: Emotional Triggers, Plant Treatments, and Food Symbolism,” Michael Owen Jones explores several areas of Latino/a local knowledge and belief about diabetes collected around Los Angeles, California. Here again, informant narratives powerfully reflect the critical intersection of folk culture and institutional authority. Charting explanatory models regarding causes and the course of illness or disease, the folk use of plants and botanicals to lower blood glucose levels, awareness of non-nutritional meanings and uses of food—rituals, symbols, and sources of identity—regularly ignored by dieticians, self-reported “barriers” to maintaining a recommended dietary regimen, and perceptions of the social and psychological dimensions of illness that all too rarely are considered by medical personnel, Jones sheds light into how clinical and public health officials must develop culturally sensitive treatment plans that more accurately recognize and respond to local exigencies and the preponderance of emotional and environmental stress in treating diabetes within Latino/a communities.

Exploring Esoteric and Exoteric Definitions of Disability: Inclusion, Segregation, and Kinship in a Special Olympics Group

Folklorist William Hugh Jansen’s (1959) classic work on esoteric and exoteric folklore has frequently been used to understand how groups identify themselves and others, but this classification becomes complicated when working with individuals with intellectual disabilities who may or may not self-identify as “disabled” or understand disability as something that applies to them because it hinges on relational conceptions of normalcy. In chapter 2, “Exploring Esoteric and Exoteric Definitions of Disability: Inclusion, Segregation, and Kinship in a Special Olympics Group,” Olivia Caldeira revisits Jansen’s concept of esoteric/emic and exoteric/etic and expands on Shuman’s preceding discussion of stigma and individuals with intellectual disabilities. Drawing from fieldwork with a group of Special Olympics athletes, Caldeira applies Richard Bauman’s (1971) concept of differential identity to emphasize how disability is commonly used to describe others but not oneself. In doing so, she investigates new ways of understanding the concept of disability as a fluid term that is more about understanding deviance rather than static notions of normalcy.

Invoking The Relative: A New Perspective on Family Lore in Stigmatized Communities

In chapter 3, “Invoking the Relative: A New Perspective on Family Lore in Stigmatized Communities,” Sheila Bock and Kate Parker Horigan further extend this volume’s section on disability, ethnography, and the stigmatized vernacular into the narrative and familial realms. While family stories always signify the values and identities of particular groups, they also open up opportunities for individuals to contest articulations of morality and blame in contexts of stigma. Accordingly, Bock and Horigan approach the concept of “family” not only as a classification of a particular folk group or a descriptor of narratives’ thematic content, but as a rhetorical strategy employed by narrators in contexts wherein their reputations and identities are threatened. Bringing together fieldwork materials from two independent studies—one examining accounts of personal and community experiences with Type 2 diabetes and another examining personal narratives of Hurricane Katrina survivors—the authors highlight how the concept of “family” serves as a rich rhetorical resource in individual accounts of community trauma by indexing material and symbolic relationships across both time and space.

Disability, Narrative Normativity, and the Stigmatized Vernacular of Communicative (in)Competence

Amy Shuman starts us off with chapter 1, “Disability, Narrative Normativity, and the Stigmatized Vernacular of Communicative (in)Competence,” which builds on her previous work with Diane E. Goldstein and their shared contention that folklorists can make an important contribution to the study of stigma by devoting particular attention to the process of managing how value is assigned, claimed, and denied in social interactions, rather than focusing on categories of stigmatization. Placing ethnographic practice and folkloristic theories of communicative competence in conversation with the works of disability studies, anthropology, and sociolinguistics, Shuman endeavors to demonstrate how normativity stigmatizes individuals, especially those with intellectual disabilities (ID), and underscores the need for multiple normalcies.