Heterotopias of Illness

In Lost Bodies, Laura Tanner writes, ‘Although recent cultural criticism explores the stresses and fissures created when an embodied subject negotiates economic, political, and geographical landscapes, the normative body such criticism posits is most often a body that is healthy, functional and stable’. ¹ This essay explores the relationship between bodies and space as well as between space, power and resistance in the narratives of people who inhabit what could be called ‘heterotopias of illness’. The relationship between space and power, which is central to Foucault’s work, is, as this volume demonstrates, one of the most urgent questions of our time. The ongoing critical conversation as to whether heterotopias are spaces of freedom or normalization, prompted by Foucault’s ambiguous conception of ‘other spaces’, is more alive than ever in our globalized age. This is an era where hyper-mobility and cosmopolitanism find a striking contrast in the restricted movements of refugees, illegal migrants and other people for whom movement is a luxury. Debates about the nature of ‘other spaces’ are also relevant to discussions of medical spaces which, echoing scholars of heterotopias, could be seen as either ‘vulnerable and marginalized spaces’ ² or spaces of ‘Other voices’. ³ This chapter productively adapts some of Foucault’s distinctions in ‘Of Other Spaces’ to explore the heterotopian qualities of illness and of medical spaces such as the tuberculosis sanatorium, the cancer clinic and the dementia ward in first- and third-person illness narratives. Such narratives have garnered more attention in the last few decades and have provided a means for patients to reclaim their bodies and their stories from medical discourse.