ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I mobilise an ‘erotics of talk’. I appropriate this expression, and a good deal of the underlying analysis, from Carla Kaplan.1 She uses it to challenge feminist literary criticism to revisit cherished texts, unpacking the cosy consensus which represents finding voice as the sine qua non of liberation, and forcing new readings of resistance, silence and conversation in women’s writing: I use it to map out a health care schema that is less preoccupied with the politics of voice and more open to the possibility of meaningful communication. More generally, I use it to revive inquiry into the intimate, and to maximise the dialogic potential of Habermasian theories of communicative ethics.2
