ABSTRACT
Writing illness for me has been a way to thread my interests in bodies, power and space with feminism and feminist methodology. I find that bodies are a particularly rich site for understanding how a relational notion of power (after Foucault, 1990) generates the self and the subject over and over again in various contexts that are just a little bit different each and every time depending on the context within which the bodies live. The specificity of each moment, where a self materializes and a subject takes form, fascinates me. I organize my research to figure out how this happens. Writing illness is one way to put into words the curious, thought-provoking, and noteworthy aspects of the tracings of this process that I have observed in my research. I draw on feminist understandings and interpretations of the content of the tracings to see the effects of these materializations so that I can place illness in relation to wider systems and structures in hopes of effecting social change.
