Dolphin
Senior Member (Voting Rights)
Abstract
This creative dissertation, a collection of disability poems, opens with an auto-ethnography that theorizes why it took me sixteen years of disabling mystery illness to embrace disability studies.As a patient of myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS), I felt sick in the first place, disabled in the second, and studied the medical humanities for insight into living with chronic illness.
On diagnosis with a genetic disorder of the connective tissue, I learned I had been disabled the whole time by faulty collagen, and I pivoted to disability studies to understand the disabled experience in turn.
A former waltzer forced into early retirement by debility, I survey contemporary disability literature for modes of reclaiming an embodied art in words.
As background, I define disability according to the United Nations and World Health Organization to explain the medical model of disability, which seeks cures for what it deems insufficient bodies, and the social model, which seeks infrastructural remediations for bodies innately sufficient as they are.
I disentangle the historical incompatibility of the sick and disabled identities informed by feminist philosopher Susan Wendell’s notion of the healthy disabled (2013) and weigh the psychic damage done to patients of medically unexplained symptoms who first receive incorrect diagnoses of psychosomatic illness from dismissive physicians.
Next I conduct a Foucauldian analysis of Maud Casey’s City of Incurable Women (2022), a historical novella that gives voice to nineteenth-century women warehoused for hysteria, a now defunct psychosomatic diagnosis of the era.
Philosopher Michel Foucault’s concept of the medical gaze (1963) clarifies the power structures at play in an institution where a captive female population learns to “write” their illness in medical photographs.
Finally I engage poet Jim Ferris’s aesthetic of asymmetry (2004) to enable formal reinvention in “crip” poetry.
My own poems speak obliquely of mobility impairment until the last section on the neurosurgery I had for a spinal defect that restored my ability to walk longer distances.
The third section features erasure poems created from interviews I conducted with ME/CFS patients, whose testimony distills inherent truths about the human condition from their lived experience of chronic illness.
Details
Record ID27399
Record Created
2025-09-23
Title
Unusual Velvet (Back Story)
Author
Guzmán, Genevieve Karlie
Contributor
McKnight, Reginald R Advisor (University of Georgia)
Romero, Channette C Committee Member (University of Georgia)
Menke, Richard R Committee Member (University of Georgia)
Department
Creative writing
English literature
Disability studies
Date
2025-08
Content Type
Dissertation
Pagination
69
File Format
Language
English
Degree Type
Doctor of Philosophy (PHD)
Name of Granting Institution
University of Georgia
Year Degree Granted
2025-08
Keywords
disability studies; history of medicine; medical humanities; medical model of disability; poetry; social model of disability
Record Appears in
Electronic Theses and Dissertations > Doctoral Dissertation
All Resources
Doctoral
System Control Number