Illness (In)action: CFS and #TimeForUnrest, 2021, Diedrich

Illness (In)action: CFS and #TimeForUnrest
Lisa Diedrich
Literature and Medicine
Johns Hopkins University Press
Volume 39, Number 1, Spring 2021
pp. 8-14
10.1353/lm.2021.0001

Free:
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/796703/summary

I offer a snapshot of the multiple temporalities of chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) through the experiences and events Jennifer Brea documents in her film Unrest (2017), where illness and illness politics operate biopsychosocially across different spaces and temporalities. The film presents the historical persistence of hysteria, a diagnostic category replaced by conversion disorder, but nonetheless haunting the phenomenological experience of illnesses, like CFS, without (yet) known biological causes. At the same time, the film captures the experience of embodiment as a kind of endurance, as extreme fatigue and sensitivity to light, sound, and surroundings makes CFS a condition of unrest—a disturbed and uneasy state that is at once physical, social, and political. Early in the film, as Brea films herself with her iPhone struggling to crawl across the floor to her bed (fig. 1), she anticipates a question that might be on the viewer’s mind: “Why would I film it?” Her answers—“Because I think someone should see this” and “I didn’t know what else to do so I just kept filming”—suggest both a politics of visibility and a politics of endurance, or the politics of making endurance visible through practices of documenting illness and illness politics that connects to other historical and contemporary examples of illness and disability in action, including to the emergent illness of Long COVID in the present. The film and the hashtags #TimeForUnrest and #MillionsMissing challenge what activism and the activist look like. By connecting with people with CFS online, Brea documents their experiences with CFS and seeks to politicize the lack of participation in public life of people with CFS, who she describes as missing in action from society and the public sphere. With the film and hashtags, Brea demonstrates illness (in)action as a kind of unrest cure against the denialism of medicine towards chronic conditions that confound easy remedies and against an ableist image of protest. [End Page 8]
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