Phenomenologies of Illness and Normality: Critical Engagements with Merleau-Ponty

Dear Colleagues,

The philosophy of 20th century French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty continues to inspire phenomenologists and critical phenomenologists as well as disability studies scholars, feminist philosophers, critical race theorists, and, more recently, cognitive scientists. His insistence on the primacy of embodied perceptual experience and its fundamentally intercorporeal dimensions, as well as his rejection of traditional dualisms (e.g., mind/body, subject/object, self/other, and body/world), has played a transformative role in fields as varied as the health sciences, performance studies, environmental studies, political theory, ethnography, and the arts. This Special Issue, “Phenomenologies of Illness and Normality: Critical Engagements with Merleau-Ponty,” will take up this Merleau-Pontian legacy by focusing a critical lens on the oppressive as well as liberatory ways that normality and illness are experienced, expressed, and inscribed in both theory and practice.

Merleau-Ponty is especially known for adopting and further developing specific concepts from Husserlian phenomenology, Gestalt Psychology, and other traditions that illuminate central aspects of our lived experience. In the process, he questions, and ultimately dismantles, artificial distinctions between normality and illness. This Special Issue is an invitation to critically engage with Merleau-Ponty’s own work and the work it has inspired by addressing topics such as:   

• The role of illness narratives in reinforcing or combating traditional views of normality;
• Intersubjective dimensions of illness and normality;
• Norms of gender, race, class, sexuality, and ability in relation to different types of illness;
• The challenges illness poses to autonomy and conventional perceptual norms;
• The social harms associated with stigmatized vs. nonstigmatized illnesses;
• Embodiment of normality and normal(ized) embodiment;
• The “normal abnormality” of chronic illness experiences;
• The deficiencies of a logic of cure;
• Distinctive temporalities and spatialities of illness experience .

Possible questions to consider include, but are not limited to:

• How has the concept of health traditionally excluded the possibility that illness is normal?
• How are different vulnerabilities manifested in experiences of illness and normality?
• In what ways are both normality and illness intersubjectively and/or intercorporeally constituted?
• How does the experience of illness positively and negatively affect our relations with others?
• In what ways does the recognition that illness is normal force us to reconceive both normality and illness?
• How do first-person illness narratives broaden the field of describable experience and transform phenomenological conceptions of embodiment and subjectivity?
• What unique resources can an ethics of care (or other relational ethics) bring to phenomenological descriptions of illness and normality?

Prof. Dr. Gail Weiss
Dr. Lisa Käll
Guest Editors

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• Merleau-Ponty
• illness and normality