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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Choroba, ciało, grzech: kulturowe studia maladyczne

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The main objective of the presented dissertations, which integrate knowledge from cultural sciences, sociology, history of medicine, sexology and psychiatry, is the values and meanings attributed to illnesses. We are talking here mainly about specific metaphors and symbols, which – usually entirely independently of the medical context – have organised and still organise the specific maladic iconosphere. I am primarily interested in the cultural mechanisms of disease management: generating a specific climate of fear and anxiety, and finally, the numerous strategies of its neutralisation. An essential part of the presented studies is a detailed comparative study of infectious diseases. Although I assume that each epidemic has its own usage and world of values, it does not change the fact that they are very often borrowed and mixed in the social circulation. I devote most attention to the HIV/AIDS epidemic; its mythology invariably fascinates with a wealth of meanings. The multiplicity of contexts and the diversity of analysed materials determine the transdisciplinary character of the thesis. Sociocultural, multifaceted reflection on the disease has forced the appreciation of methodological eclecticism. In this paper, I confront documents of various provenance: from contemporary (pop)cultural texts, diaries and testimonies from the times of the plague to old prisons and the first textbooks on psychiatry and sexology. I devote a separate place to the explanation of selected books of the Bible, which had a decisive influence on the formation of Western morality; an effect that, despite the passage of years, still organises the specific mode of reading many diseases and alternative (i.e. unrelated to the Christian vision of the world) lifestyles. Maladic discourse organises statements about illness; it is the sum of social contexts and meanings built around it. It, therefore, includes journalistic, artistic and scientific accounts and a colloquial understanding of the illness. It constitutes an excellent register of emotions, impressions, moods, fears and concerns related to the illness and its experience. Due to the richness of medical nosology, it is reasonable to single out a specific disease and articulate its particular language and mythology. Undoubtedly, every illness and epidemic has its language and story. At the same time, it is worth adding that not all are equally media-savvy; not all are equally easily culturally processed. This is related, on the one hand, to the different narrative/myth-creating potential of specific diseases, and on the other, to the still present conspiracy of silence that accompanies many diseases. Illness is nowadays understood as a biocultural phenomenon, clearly linking the level of physiology with a less apparent social context. The maladic discourse also emphasises individual, subjective emotions connected with experiencing impotence. They concern both the bodily sphere, so strongly manifested in the disease and psychosocial problems. An example of such a situation may be entering the role of the sick person, requiring new social functions to be played. The maladic discourse is polyphonic; at its source lies anxiety and a state of tension related to the frailty and fragility of the human body. The scale of emotions accompanying the illness, both one’s own and those of loved ones, can be surprisingly rich and dynamic. The topicality of the issues raised in the presented book seems indisputable. The analysed materials unequivocally indicate an extremely functional, often completely arbitrary property of what is understood as “sick” and “morbid” – let us repeat: at a particular time, in a specific cultural circle. Ultimately, one cannot be sure whether certain conditions currently considered “healthy” do not owe their “non-medical” status solely to the lack of specific diagnostic methods. The question of medical ontology is closely linked to the issue of the ontology of diseases: do they exist independently of human cognition, or do they await to be recognised and named – and therefore, in some sense, created? The pathologising/normalising strategies presented in the book point to the enormous role of culture in creating the idea of illness and the process of “managing” it. Health (somatic and/or mental) is not, in my view, an “ontological” category; it remains, in the vast majority of cases, an effect of valuation. Similarly, illness does not have to be exclusively detected in so-called objective phenomena. Its presence may be determined not so much by factual premises as by a specific attitude of the assessor. There is no doubt – this is what the presented book is about – that the notions of “health” and “disease” are also categories that organise the non-medical world. Their functionality seems unquestionable. The whole book has been divided into three correlating parts: disease, plague, body and sin. This arrangement not only points to the multifaceted nature of the maladic discourse but – which is equally essential – reveals its most important components. Illness is a multidimensional reality: biological, psychological, social and cultural. All these levels are intertwined and complementary. It is not uncommon for an illness to be considered incompatible with the dominant – in a given culture, at a given time – social expectations. This issue appears throughout the work; it is related to the medicalisation and pathologisation of the so-called normal states. In the book’s last, most extensive part, I cite numerous examples of “illnesses” and “diseases” that, almost without exception, have lost their former deviant/abnormal status. The ongoing depathologisation of many conditions and behaviours is, in my view, a response to the strenuous (obsessive) attempt to medicalise them in previous decades. I refer to this phenomenon as the “normalisation frenzy”. As I show, this process is concerned primarily with female sexuality and male homoeroticism. Here I point to the highly functional and equally arbitrary categories of “deviance”, “deviation” and “unnaturalness” that have organised the Western world of values/science for centuries. The materials presented here point to a radical change in the social reception of homoeroticism in the last decades of the twentieth century. These changes, to which I devote detailed studies, are most easily put in a simple scheme: from the criminalisation and medicalisation of homosexuality to the medicalisation of homophobia.