Abstract
This chapter investigates the capacity of the health humanities to give space to narratives of experiential knowledge as a means of repair of the self through a re-presentation and articulation of the self on the self’s own terms. Using my nine-image series Painscapes, a series of scanner photographs that imagine what my pain might look like in an x-ray, this chapter exercises an embodied self-articulation that centres my experiential knowledge of pain rather than imposing a traditional medical lens of pain experience. I argue that self-articulation and experiential knowledge allows for connection with the self and community, and offers a way to challenge and begin to heal from the ableism present in social and medical spaces.
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Notes
- 1.
To access Painscapes: https://teagerbeza.com/projects/painscapes. Image descriptions are provided within the chapter with the exception of “Scar” and “Bending Over”—these image descriptions are provided in the end notes. I chose to add these two images as Figures in the chapter because “Scar” begins Painscapes and “Bending Over” uses most, if not all, of the quilled shapes in one image. The rest of the images are viewable on the website.
- 2.
Image ID: “Scar” is a scanograph of a large tightly wound paper-quilled circle centred at the top with only a quarter of the circle showing. Trailing behind the circle are parts of a paper strip—some iterations are longer than others. The strip that starts right after the circle is glitched from movement. There are cut-off words on the strips—these words are from old drafts of my poems. The series uses strips cut from old drafts of my current in-progress long poem. All of this is rests overtop a deep black background that is present in all the scanographs.
- 3.
Image ID: The scanograph “Bending Over” is composed of various types of paper-quilled circles: tightly wound small circles, tightly wound medium circles, wide centre circles, closed coil circles, and open coiled circles. The circles are clustered in left middle of the image and are positioned to replicate a “bending.”
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Gerbeza, T. (2023). Narratives of Repair and the Re-articulation of the Pained Self: A Study in Painscapes. In: Riegel, C., Robinson, K.M. (eds) Health Humanities in Application. Sustainable Development Goals Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-08360-0_5
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