Tag det som en mand!

While serious illness is a crisis in the life course of any human being, it harmonizes particularly poorly with traditional notions of masculinity. Statistically, more men than women get cancer, but women seem more likely to communicate about their emotions and experiences of illness in public. In this article, we examine the connection between cancer narratives, war and combat metaphors and hegemonic masculinity based on six recent Danish autobiographies written by men about their experience of having cancer. Based within critical masculinity theories and metaphor theory, we examine how the autobiographies apply and develop traditional combat metaphors and we argue that new narratives and (counter) metaphors are developed and that they influence both the experience of illness and the understanding of masculinity.

Raske drenge og syge piger

This article analyzes how the two figures ‘healthy boy’ and ‘invalid girl’ are negotiated visually at the end of the nineteenth century and how the idea of being healthy or the opposite relates to these two figures. The center of the analysis are illustrations of invalid girls and healthy boys printed in the Scandinavian periodical Nordisk Illustreret Børneblad. The article pays attention to how the two figures are portrayed and examine which images of health and illness, parents and their children were presented to. The argument is that there is a close connection between the visual idea of the invalid girl and the healthy boy and the popular medical literature in the period, and that the idea of the invalid girl was being communicated not only in the paintings of the period but also as reproductions e.g. in children’s periodicals and thereby reached a larger audience.

Apostrofere den levende

Olaug Nilssen’s Tung tids tale (2017) is a novel about speaking to and for the disabled and disarticulate child in the role as mother and caregiver. Olaug, the narrator, tells the story of her son Daniel’s regressive autism and of the challenges she meets as she tries to mediate between him and the outside world, in particular health personnel and other professional caregivers. The narration is directed towards Daniel himself, addressed as ”you”. Because Daniel is unable to use verbal language and reply, the address resembles the figure of the apostrophe. The communication circuit it generates is triangulated, involving both the ”I” that sends the message, the unresponsive ”you” who is unable to respond to it, and a third party intended to overhear it – in this case the implicit or historical readers of the text. In the article the functions of this address is explored in the light of how the novel thematizes caregiving as an act of witnessing. I argue that the apostrophic address produces an alternative to the novel’s narrative through the establishment of an aesthetic and rhetorical event constituted by the communicative situation itself. The address thus provides a formal way of handling the ethical and existential dimensions connected to Olaug’s role as caregiver and narrator in a text that speaks both for and to her son.

Anoreksi og agens

Cultural studies and gender studies hold long-standing traditions for studying people with eating disorders as either passive objects subjected to misogynist discourses or subversive agents that negotiate societal norms. In both cases, agency is primarily investigated as a phenomenon that unfolds between the anorectic individual and the surrounding society. In contrast, this article explores how the question of agency also unfolds within the anorectic her-/himself. It does so by setting up a dialogue between the anorectic testimony of Cecilie Lind’s pathography Scarykost (2016) and philosophical ideas of corporeality in feminist new materialism, affect theory, and phenomenology. Ultimately, the article argues that the anorectic subject is not a homogenous individual that can easily be classified as either passive or active, but comprises an infra-corporeal landscape of social, psychic, and biological forms of agency that struggle to determine the will of the anorectic “I.” In that way, the article pushes back on the tendency in cultural and gender studies to make generalizing claims about the anorectic’s subversive agency – or lack thereof.

Den uhelbredeligt hjemløse kinesiske dagbogsfiktion

This article examines the disease motif in Lu Xun’s “Diary of a Madman” (1918) and in Ding Ling’s “Miss Sophia’s Diary” (1928) in their historical and medical contexts. At its most fundamental, the contemporaneous Chinese conception of health was thermodynamic, vesting the utmost importance in the circulation of energies and substances. This conception had immense social importance because it provided part of the ideological scaffolding for the family structure. Inside the family, established responsibilities and hierarchies purportedly served to guide this circulation in ways supportive of health, and the same considerations charged family members with maintaining strict scrutiny of the family’s barriers against any potentially illness-inducing influences that might penetrate the family fortress. Written at a time when political, social, and scientific verities were crumbling in China, these diaries record the foibles and concerns of two diseased individuals who stand alienated from their families and their immediate surroundings. By focusing on this alienation, as well as on the shared interests of the diarists in boundary crossing flows and anthropophagy, this article suggests that these short stories can profitably be read as explorations of the anxieties facing this generation of young Chinese as they sought to make a world for themselves independently of their families. What these stories dramatize is that leaving the family behind might have medical ramifications in addition to social and financial costs. In the current covid-19 context, we may not need reminding that ideas about disease and health relate in important ways to how we think of the relationship between families, boundaries, and vulnerability.

Human Nature

The research-based Danish therapy garden Nacadia, which opened in 2011, can be viewed as a holistically oriented realization of the World Health Organization’s (WHO) broad definition of health from 1948: health is not just the absence of disease, but a state of both physical, mental and social well-being in which individuals may develop their abilities, deal with everyday challenges and stress, as well as socialize with other people. Nacadia’s raison d’être and relevance are indisputable. But the questions this article addresses are what perception of nature the therapy forest garden promotes and what social diagnosis it springs from and reproduces. Nacadia’s interdisciplinary research team provides no explanation, but these questions inform my analysis. Based on Nacadia’s concept manual and the therapy garden itself, as well as some literary accounts of engaging with nature, I develop two answers: First, that the researchers behind Nacadia operate with both a discourse and a physical-aesthetic presentation of nature as a peaceful and accessible place for both self-immersion and connection with ‘something greater’. Secondly, the implementation of such a sanctuary encourages romantically tinted modes of experience which certainly seem invigorating but may also evoke an element of alienation for people in a modern society.