Blood Sugar: Gothic Bodies and Diabetes

Blood Sugar: Gothic Bodies and Diabetes Tracy Fahey Limerick Institute of Technology Abstract The diabetic body can be mapped as a profoundly Gothic landscape, referencing theories of the monstrous, the uncanny and the abject. Diabetes is revealed under what Foucault has termed ‘the medical gaze’, where the body becomes a contested site, its ownership questioned by the repeated invasion of medical procedures. As an invisible chronic illness, diabetic lifestyle is positioned in relation to issues of control, transformation, and the abnormal normal. Translating the Gothic trope of the outsider into medical and social realms, the diabetic body is seen as the ‘Othered’ body ceaselessly striving to attain perfection through blood purification rituals. This essay examines how diabetes is portrayed in film and fine art practice from the filmic approach to diabetes as dramatic trope to fine art techniques that parallel ethnographic and sociological approaches to chronic illness. Keywords: diabetes, gothic, invisible, monstrous, uncanny, medical Two girls sit on sofas facing each other, while a TV plays in the background. Light streams through a large French window to illuminate the apartment. On closer inspection, however, all is not how it seems. One of the photographed subjects has her back turned to the viewer but the face of the other is visible, and her expression is uneasy, watchful. Further details come into focus. Every available surface, the curtains, carpet, wallpaper, sofa upholstery, are all covered with paper prints, prints of endless, neat columns of numbers. This fine art piece is part of Irish printmaker Leggs Lanigan’s haunting photographic series of 2010, Always On My Mind.1 In this series the artist has made prints of his own blood glucose readings, and used them to both externalise the private, internal process of diabetes management and to allude to the Gothic body that it monitors using these systems of control. These repetitive landscapes create an uncanny space, a space in which the abnormal is normalized, and where the Gothic Studies, Volume 17, No. 1 (May 2015), published by Manchester University Press http://dx.doi.org/10.7227/GS.17.1.7 Delivered by Publishing Technology to: mounika indupriyal IP: 202.177.173.189 On: Fri, 29 May 2015 08:59:27 Blood Sugar 93 ‘normal’ person becomes ‘Othered’; this tension is mirrored in the uneasy faces of the photographed subjects. Printmaking itself is a process of repetition, with infinite small variations, and this medium perfectly conveys the weariness of the diabetic, the eternal quest for the perfect reading and the terrible monotony of the repeated ritual of blood sugar checking. Lanigan’s piece lays bare the secret rituals and rites of diabetes, only previously perceptible within the diabetic community of practice. Diabetic lifestyle is aligned with ideas of control and transformation and diabetic communities are constructed on the tacit understanding of a paradox; that of identifying as an Othered body involved in a ceaseless quest to attain perfection. The diabetic body itself is revealed under what Foucault has termed ‘the medical gaze’; it becomes a contested site, its ownership questioned by repeated invasion of medical procedures.2 This essay maps the diabetic body, referencing theories of the Gothic; specifically those of the monstrous, the abject and the uncanny. Translating the Gothic trope of the outsider into medical and social realms, it examines how this Othered body is considered in medical and artistic spheres. Diabetes is not only analysed as a manifestation of otherness in lived practice, but portrayals of diabetes in film and fine art are examined in order to draw interesting distinctions in how these representations form public perceptions, but also in how they differ widely from each other, from the filmic approach to diabetes-as-dramatic-trope to fine art techniques that parallel ethnographic and sociological approaches to chronic illness. We are all familiar with traditional representations of the Monstrous Gothic body – an Othered body, frequently grotesque, freakish, carnivalesque in its physical appearance, commanding a mixture of pity, fear, fascination and revulsion on the part of the viewer. This body is manifest in the form of the archetypal Thing, Shelley’s unnameable Monster, the unspeakable, the abject. Today, the monstrous body manifests before us with increasing frequency, its appearance running the gamut from slasher films to reality TV. As Catherine Spooner puts it, ‘[C]ontemporary Gothic is more obsessed with bodies than any of its previous phases; bodies become spectacle, provoking disgust, modified, reconstructed and artificially augmented.’3 An important part of this reality TV genre are plastic surgery makeover shows, such The Swan (Fox) and 10 Years Younger (Channel 4) where body anxieties spur the participants through extensive plastic surgery experiences to strive for external perfection. Contemporary pop culture focuses its audience relentlessly on aspiring towards this physical flawlessness; bodies are constantly paraded in the media that fulfil paradigms of beauty and youthfulness, most commonly combined in the public image of the celebrity body. Certain celebrity bodies, such those of actress Halle Berry and singer Nick Jonas, are promoted as embodying these qualities of beauty and desirability. What is interesting is that these bodies of Berry and Jonas are infinitely more Gothic than they initially appear. They are diabetic bodies; Type 1, insulindependent, diabetic bodies. The diabetic body is a Gothic body which is almost Delivered by Publishing Technology to: mounika indupriyal IP: 202.177.173.189 On: Fri, 29 May 2015 08:59:27 94 Gothic studies 17/1 invisibly monstrous; an unusual classification within the taxonomy of teratology, the science of monsters. The markings on the flesh of the diabetic body are subtle signifiers that all is not as it seems, a gentle tracery of pinpricks on the fingers, puncture marks on the stomach and thighs. Reading these manifestations as a code (as the Gothic is traditionally a discourse obsessed with reading mysterious signs) the canvas of the body becomes a physical metaphor for theories of the Gothic, specifically those that relate to concepts of the monstrous, the abject and the uncanny. Diabetes is a medical condition where the pancreas reduces its insulin supply (in the case of Type 2 diabetes), or stops its production of insulin (in the case of Type 1 diabetes), leading to rising levels of glucose in the blood. If not diagnosed, the condition can lead to hyperglycaemia (high blood sugar) a condition characterised by excessive thirst, extreme weight-loss, impaired vision, confusion, respiratory difficulties, vomiting, coma and ultimately, organ shut-down and death. It is monitored by constant blood glucose checking, oral medication and the injection of insulin. While the origins of Type 2 diabetes are generally lifestyle-based, the origins of Type 1 diabetes are mysterious – the onset can be triggered by genetic inheritance, a viral illness or largely undefined ‘other’ factors. Although there are many interesting papers to be written about Type 2 (particularly its prevalence in detective fiction and crime drama, often as a metaphor of a divorce between the detective’s mind and body), Type 1, as the most extreme manifestation of diabetes, is the subject of this essay. The Type 1 diabetic body becomes Othered through this transformation from normal to abnormal body, not just through a simple medical change but through embracing new daily rituals of checking, regulation and injection in a ceaseless aspiration towards the ideal state of medical well-being. The relationship between diabetes and medicine is a somewhat problematic one. Until the discovery that the injection of insulin could regulate blood sugar in 1923, the diagnosis of diabetes was effectively a death sentence. Today, although diabetes is a self-regulated condition, the diabetic body, once diagnosed, continues to be subject to ongoing review by medical professionals. The selfregulation of the diabetic body is critically reviewed, with the patient often facing admonishment for less than perfect scores in three critical areas; blood glucose, cholesterol and blood pressure. The diabetic body becomes a contested site, mapped and audited by the medical profession, its ownership questioned by repeated invasion of medical procedures. The loss of identity in the medical patient is a notion explored by Foucault in The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception (1975). In this work Foucault refers to the spatial nature of disease within ‘the secret volume of the body’.4 In this work he also coined the term ‘medical gaze’ or ‘clinical gaze’ to describe how medical professionals examine disease as separate from the patient’s body. Foucault describes how the Gothic nature of illness itself is challenged by the medical gaze; ‘the presence of disease in the body, with its tensions and its burnings, the silent world of the entrails, the whole dark Delivered by Publishing Technology to: mounika indupriyal IP: 202.177.173.189 On: Fri, 29 May 2015 08:59:27 Blood Sugar 95 underside of the body lined with endless unseeing dreams, are challenged as to their objectivity by the reductive discourse of the doctor.’5 This ‘reductive discourse’ in turn leads to an uneasy separation between the patient’s body and social identity – ‘at this level the individual was merely a negative element, the accident of the disease, which, for it and in it, is most alien to its essence.’6 This alienation of the patient from the disease causes a dislocation in patient identity. The critical medical gaze that reveals the diabetic body as damaged influences the patient’s self-perception, and leads them to regard their own bodies as flawed, abject, uncanny, both uncontrollable and unknowable. So how is the diabetic body construed as a Gothic body? First of all, the diabetic body is an Othered body. It defines itself in relation to what it is not – a fully functional body. It is a monstrous body in the sense that it represents an altered, abnormal state of being, albeit an internalised one. Creed (1993) cites Kristeva’s seminal essay The Powers of Horror (1982) in describing the monstrous as including ‘corporeal alteration, decay and death’.7 The diabetic body can also be construed as unhemlich – ‘unhomely’ or ‘uncanny’. Freud’s 1919 essay on the uncanny associates these unheimlich feelings with the automaton, the doppelgänger, and the invisibly ill.8 Type 1 diabetes can often appear suddenly through the manifestation of a near or full comatose state. From this coma, this slumber, the newly diagnosed diabetic emerges, a doppelgänger of their former self. Freud explicitly relates the doppelgänger to a form of repression - the coexistence of an earlier self with the current self: ‘The quality of uncanniness can only come from the circumstance of the “double” being a creation dating back to a very early mental stage, long since left behind, and one, no doubt, in which it wore a more friendly aspect.’9 This interpretation is relevant to the onset of chronic illness and its implications for identity. During this process the transformation of the known body into uncanny territory is mercilessly swift. The newly diagnosed patient becomes, on awakening, a different person, with a different lifestyle that must be immediately embraced, a strict code of checks and counter-checks, and a new ritual of preparation and injection that must be followed to sustain life. The ‘new’ diabetic must learn to map their new body and reinterpret its reactions – immediately. There is no period of apprenticeship. This idea of the doppelgänger also relates to the notion of trauma. In Studies on Hysteria (1895) Freud and Brauer discuss the memory of trauma, in this case, illness and diagnosis, which ‘acts like a foreign body which, long after its entry, must continue to be regarded as an agent that is still at work’.10 Although all bodies move inexorably towards death, signifiers of disease disturb the viewer; they cause a disease in the beholder. For the diabetic body, these processes manifest themselves mainly through understated signifiers such as dietary restrictions, or more overtly through the necessity of blood glucose checking or insulin correction rituals. However, the diabetic body is often revealed in a startling manner through episodes of hypoglycaemia (low blood sugar), indicators of which may include paleness, trembling, tingling lips, Delivered by Publishing Technology to: mounika indupriyal IP: 202.177.173.189 On: Fri, 29 May 2015 08:59:27 96 Gothic studies 17/1 dizziness, sweating, confusion, irritability. The range of symptoms is wide, and may vary considerably from person to person. Usually the diabetic body presents as outwardly normal, so if a medical episode presents itself in the public arena, it can be mistaken for drunkenness, aggression or drug abuse. This sudden manifestation of illness corresponds to Freud’s notion of the uncanny body revealed through spectacle. Freud (1919) cites Rank who in 1914 described the uncanny effect produced by signs of chronic illness – ‘these arouse in the onlooker’, he writes, ‘vague notions of automatic – mechanical processes that may lie behind the familiar image of a living person these excite in the spectator the feeling that automatic, mechanical processes are at work, concealed beneath the ordinary appearance of animation’.11 Similarly, the sudden onset of hypoglycaemia’s various physical symptoms cause confusion in the beholder, as a previously normal body becomes transfigured and suddenly presents as uncanny or monstrous. These dramatic episodes run counter to the mainstream diabetic experience; unless diabetes is uncontrolled, these tend to be abnormal episodes. However, their potential for drama, to incite anxiety and to create fear and tension, makes this part of the diabetic experience the facet of the illness that is most often presented on TV and film. Possibly the most extreme example of the sinister manifestation of diabetes through the uncanny or monstrous body can be seen in schlock-horror BMovie Scarecrow Gone Wild (2004).12 This movie plays with the trope of the ‘hidden’ diabetes becoming visible; Sam, a diabetic student conceals his condition via urine-swopping shenanigans to make the team; however, during Spring Break, his hypoglycaemic episode is misinterpreted as aggression, and leads to his being hazed by his fellow jocks. He is abandoned in a haunted cornfield, lashed to a scarecrow and left to fall into a coma. Sam then becomes transformed into the Scarecrow, and wreaks a terrible revenge on his teammates. The protagonist appears as possessed, the Scarecrow becoming a metaphor for his invisible illness, adhering to Mike Kelley’s (1993) contention that one of the main sources of the uncanny is ‘the body itself as a puppet, seemingly under the control of an outside force’.13 However, even when the teenager emerges from his diabetic coma, like the Scarecrow’s malevolent spirit, his diabetes has been publicly revealed in all its monstrous abnormality. He has had to publicly acknowledge his inner monstrosity, his difference. For the diabetic body also embraces notions of the abject as defined by Kristeva. The physical state of diabetes involves the acceptance of a non-functioning pancreas within a living human being, which works endlessly to simulate a reanimation of this organ. The abject is defined as ‘the inbetween, the ambiguous, the composite’, the abject ‘disturbs identity, order systems’ and ‘does not respect borders, positions, rules’.14 Although in her seminal essay, The Powers of Horror, Kristeva memorably evokes the idea of the abject as something cast from the body (‘I spit myself out, I abject myself’), like the metaphor of the malevolent Scarecrow, the diabetic can never separate the abject from the self – it is in the blood.15 Delivered by Publishing Technology to: mounika indupriyal IP: 202.177.173.189 On: Fri, 29 May 2015 08:59:27 Blood Sugar 97 Diabetes as an abject disorder or monstrous flaw also appears as a theme in the 1995 sci-fi movie Species.16 In Species, Sil, the alien played by Natasha Henstridge, is on a mission to acquire mates and propagate her alien species. She leaves her hunting ground, Club ID, with her first choice, but later realises he has diabetes. As such, his body is deemed genetically unacceptable for mating, and the alien kills him with a well-aimed tentacle through the skull, possibly the most spectacular example of the Othering of the diabetic body in movie lore. The monster rejects the monstrous. However Scarecrow Gone Wild and Species constitute exceptions to the rule; monstrosity of the diabetic body within the medium of film is largely invisible, generally internalised and only externalised through the motif of the body as a site of crisis. Its potential for inbuilt monstrosity is usually activated by an external predicament – a home invasion (Panic Room, 2002), a hi-jacking (Con Air, 1997) or a bank hold-up (Dog Day Afternoon, 1975).17 In this context, diabetes is presented as a sort of hamartia or Aristotelian fatal flaw; once its presence is indicated, in fact as soon as you see someone inject themselves with insulin early on in a film, a medical disaster will surely follow. In the real world, diabetes is self-managed and self-monitored. But in the arena of film, the diabetic condition is played out as a dramatic device that is deliberately used to prolong a sense of suspense, or increase a sense of anxiety. The diabetic lifestyle is generally mistranslated, with scriptwriters and directors selecting to highlight only the most spectacular and negative aspects of the condition. These negative aspects relate mostly to those manifestations of the uncanny body previously discussed. These include episodes of hypoglycaemia, or low blood sugar when the sufferer needs to ingest sugar to raise glucose levels, or hyperglycaemia, where the blood sugar is very high due to ingestion of too many sugars and insulin is needed to bring it down. Film blithely conflates these situations; the diabetic prisoner in Con Air collapses into a coma, as he has not eaten anything and is suffering from low blood sugar, but mysteriously, needs insulin to correct this balance. Sarah in Panic Room, suffering from low blood sugar is urged by her frantic mother to drink water, something which in real life would lower it further. This flawed portrayal of diabetes in film can have serious consequences in terms of public perception of how diabetes should be treated in the case of a medical emergency. The diabetic body as insulin-dependent is also an addicted body; an important trope in the canon of Gothic representation. The public diabetic use of paraphernalia such as needles has sometimes led to misunderstandings and the conflation of illness and addiction, especially if this use occurs, as sometimes it must, in a public space. In Victorian Gothic, the addict commonly represented the ‘other’ side of a person e.g. Wilde’s The Portrait of Dorian Gray. Carol Margaret Davison has commented, ‘As such, the addict/alcoholic was popularly represented in relation to the divided self – an ‘Other’ within the self – a prevalent Gothic motif.’18 In Momento (2000) the uneasy relationship between addiction and fatality is mirrored in the cautionary tale of Sammy Jankis’ wife, Delivered by Publishing Technology to: mounika indupriyal IP: 202.177.173.189 On: Fri, 29 May 2015 08:59:27 98 Gothic studies 17/1 who tries to trigger her husband’s short-term memory by asking him to repeatedly inject her with insulin, leading to predictably fatal consequences. For the diabetic body is also the invaded body, the diabetic patient deliberately and repeatedly injects or is injected with the foreign substance of insulin.19 In the canon of film and TV, the otherness of the diabetic body is generally presented in a negative light. Diabetes remains resolutely embedded in the preinsulin period, a virtual death sentence. In Steel Magnolias (1989) the diabetic main character Shelby has a baby – and then dies.20 In Chocolat (2000) diabetic landlady Armande enjoys life and chocolate – and then dies.21 However TV can sometimes present a more interesting counterpoint to this prevailing gloom. The Uncanny Valley, an episode from the fifth series of Criminal Minds, subverts this recurrent paradigm of the helpless diabetic person.22 In this episode a mentally ill woman abducts other women, sedating them and grooming them as life-size simulacra of the missing dolls of her childhood. One of the women she abducts, Bethany Wallace, is diabetic, leading initially to a familiar crisis voiced by her husband Karl – ‘You have to find her in the next twenty-four hours! Bethany is a diabetic!’ However, the episode then moves to a more considered positive outcome. As Dr Reid of the BAU unit remarks ‘[D]iabetics metabolize everything they take differently’; paradoxically because of her abnormal metabolism, Bethany absorbs the sedative more quickly, allowing her to break free and save the other women. This is a neat overturning of the usual lazy use of the diabetic condition as tragic motif, showing how a modicum of medical research can offer interesting insights into the implications of the condition. The shock of diagnosis of Type 1 diabetes has already been outlined, and the consequent identity crisis it causes after the emergence of the patient from a coma-like state into a new mode of life. This abrupt commencement of a new life can bring with it ancillary problems of diminished body-confidence, depression, sexual dysfunction, fatigue, and feelings of being overwhelmed, outlined in a report by Koch et al (2003).23 These problems have provoked a medical response. As a reaction to this perceived loss of identity or negation of patient identity, a sociological approach to chronic illness has featured in graduate medical programmes. This cooperative approach is also characteristic of several interesting participatory action research projects based in diabetic communities, such as the nursing research project carried out by Koch and Kralik (2001) which looked at patient experience of living with chronic illness, including diabetes, and implications of this research for medical practitioners.24 Today, however, even with the advent of sociological approaches to medicine and patient co-operation projects, there is still a significant lack of diabetes counselling or access to other modes of identity-counselling such as psychotherapeutic applications of music, art or play. Encouragingly, with the development of archives, especially digital archives, ethnographic data relating to the diabetic community has become more accessible. This anthropological approach to chronicling the diabetic lifestyle is realised through interviews, testimonies and recordings. The web-site http://www.diabetes-stories.com is an excellent example of this type of Delivered by Publishing Technology to: mounika indupriyal IP: 202.177.173.189 On: Fri, 29 May 2015 08:59:27 Blood Sugar 99 accessible archive as it offers an collection of one hundred recorded interviews with diabetic people from the 1920s to the present day.25 This offers the visitor an insight into the diversity of the diabetic community, and an opportunity to engage with this community and explore communal and individual anxieties, triumphs and cautionary tales. This method of ethnographic engagement has also characterised a striking development in contemporary art practice, which in its portrayal of diabetes has focused on allowing access to the diabetic community through insight and understanding of difference. This socially engaged approach often arises from what Kuppers terms ‘the results of cultural chafing: of being uncomfortable, in skin, language, medical system’, and working that provides an alternative view of the diabetic community.26 The emphasis on subcultural or community identity also offers an empowering alternative to the monstrous identity reflected by the medical gaze. The concept of the individual voice or voices is one which has had a powerful effect on the work of Shimon Attie. Attie uses the device of the interview to add authenticity to his landmark work White Nights, Sugar Dreams (2000), a project carried out in collaboration with a diabetic community of practice in Rhode Island.27 This is a video installation that consists of excerpts from taped interviews with eight diabetic subjects, set to a fantastical landscape of sugar dissolving into red liquid; a signifier of the crucial relationship between blood and sugar, that eternal, internal sea-saw that the diabetic works daily to calibrate. This close-up view of a simulation of diabetic blood, as Petra Kuppers (2003) has remarked, ‘mimics and subverts the medical stare that ill and disabled people often experience vis-à-vis the visualization machine of modern medicine. These people regularly find themselves paraded before doctors, their difference made visible in a myriad of ways.’28 Socially engaged artist Irish artist Aoife Cox, in her video piece Blood Sugar (2011), also focuses on blood glucose, but relocates the site of observation to a religious setting, a deconsecrated church (see Figure 1).29 To a backdrop of voices of interviewed diabetic subjects, Cox reclines in a bath of sugar, hands extended to mimic those of a statue of the Madonna. This piece works to translate the Gothic trope of the diabetic outsider into the realm of social and the visible. It questions the paradox of the Othered body involved in a ceaseless quest to attain perfection through blood purification rituals. It aligns diabetic lifestyle with ideas of control, transformation and the concept of the abnormal normal. Here, in this seven-hour durational piece, (the blood glucose number of seven being the diabetic ‘perfect reading’) she returns the viewer’s gaze, in a brave attempt to subvert the medical gaze and reassert and reclaim body ownership. Cox presents herself candidly, as a diabetic artist, in a situation where her medical Otherness is on display, and her private rituals of regulation and checking become public. The sacramental setting offers a proud and almost defiant attempt to reclaim these rituals as the diabetic sacred rites. American artist Jen Jacobs uses black humour in Every Time I Eat 101, a series of elaborate calculations on a whiteboard relating her insulin dose for one Delivered by Publishing Technology to: mounika indupriyal IP: 202.177.173.189 On: Fri, 29 May 2015 08:59:27 100 Gothic studies 17/1 Figure 1 Aoife Cox, Blood Sugar (2011), performative and video piece. Photography by Deirdre Power. meal to exercise taken and carbohydrates consumed.30 Just as with Lanigan’s Always On My Mind series, these complex calculations communicate the inner monologue of the diabetic person. Every Time I Eat 101 is what Jacobs calls ‘a picture-essay about this exasperating, mysterious, unpredictable, motivating, fascinating, relentless nuisance’31 – a piece which eloquently maps her struggles and frustrations with the endless calculations necessary in order to regulate her condition and eat a ‘normal’ meal. The implications of these fine art practices are far-reaching. These pieces provide a template of how fine art can investigate and explore medical difference using variety of sympathetic and socially engaged methods. What’s also interesting is that all of these artists discussed – Attie, Lanigan, Cox and Jacobs – have diabetes, and that they relate to and explore their own identity as diabetic persons through their art work, and to formulate a community of practice through fine art methodologies. As Attie remarks of his piece White Nights, Sugar Dreams, ‘it was also a way to meet other diabetics and to know their experiences’.32 Given the emotional and psychological trauma experienced by newly diagnosed diabetic patients and the prevalence of depression among the Delivered by Publishing Technology to: mounika indupriyal IP: 202.177.173.189 On: Fri, 29 May 2015 08:59:27 Blood Sugar 101 diabetic community, it would be interesting to apply some of these fine art methods to therapeutic approaches that use art as a central methodology of engagement. An interesting study by Furler et al (2008) emphasises the social and emotional implications of living with diabetes and of the need for the medical profession to acknowledge and work with these patient needs.33 Smith et al (2005) conducted a fascinating exercise to use computer visualisations of blood glucose data, and the participants’ photography to facilitate conversations about diabetes, a research experiment that generated open and revealing patient narratives about food, control, and interactions with the medical profession.34 This reclaiming of agency is key to both fine art practice and, it would seem, to therapeutic, patient-centred medicine. It would be interesting to see further facilitation for the diabetic community to use art in visualising notions of body, self and community, and to articulate their positive and negative experiences of illness. From B-movies to TV series, from crisis-led depictions to the merged voice and the blank implacability of numbers, depictions of the invisible monstrosity of diabetes vary widely. But while film depictions of diabetes centre on loss of agency and the diabetic body as a site of crisis, the fine art pieces examined have revealed a desire to reclaim this sense of agency and control by celebrating shared rituals and a sense of community. These pieces carry a sense of authenticity, a desire to normalize diabetic experience, to make the invisible visible. These artists work at externalising the closed rituals of the illness and illustrating the diabetic body, externally and internally. In doing so, they start to dissipate the mystique of the diabetic body ‘making the other visible and experiential’ as Kuppers (2003) says, but ‘without making this other fully knowable’.35 Kupper’s statement reflects the importance of viewing the diabetic experience as complex and individual, in line with ethnographic explorations, instead of reading it as a uniform experience. This sensitive and considered response to chronic illness is most directly presented through socially engaged work, which involves diabetic subjects and may even pose interesting avenues for art therapy with the diabetic community. These projects effectively remap the diabetic body outside the stern lens of the medical gaze which renders the body monstrous. Within this fine art illumination of diabetic lifestyles, finally a different kind of diabetic body can be seen. Its circumstances may be Gothic, its medical condition may be challenging, but in its explained existence it is no longer monstrous: it is simply Other. Notes 1 L. Lanigan, Always On My Mind (photographic series of prints, 2010). 2 M. Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception (Oxford, Vintage Books, 1975) p.2. All subsequent quotations are taken from this edition. Page numbers will follow in brackets. 3 C. Spooner, Contemporary Gothic (London, Reaktion, 2006), p.63. 4 Foucault, p. 2. Delivered by Publishing Technology to: mounika indupriyal IP: 202.177.173.189 On: Fri, 29 May 2015 08:59:27 102 Gothic studies 17/1 5 Foucault, p. 11. 6 Foucault, p. 16. 7 B. Creed, The Monstrous Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (London, Routledge, 1993), p 9. Citing J. Kristeva, The Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York, Columbia University Press, 1982). 8 S. Freud, ‘The ‘Uncanny’, (1919), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey, with Anna Freud, Alix Strachey, and Alan Tyson, vol. 17 (1917–19), An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works. (London, Hogarth Press and the Institute for Psycho-Analysis, 1955; reprint, 1986), pp. 217–56. All subsequent quotations are taken from this edition. Page numbers will follow in brackets. 9 S. Freud, p. 237. 10 S. Freud and J. Breuer, Studies in Hysteria (1895), transl. A. A. Brill (New York, Nervous and Mental Disease Publishing, 1937). 11 O. Rank, Der Doppelgänger (1914), The Double, ed. and transl. by H. Tucker, Jr. (London, Karnac, 1989). 12 Brian Katkin, dir., Scarecrow Gone Wild (Urban Girl Productions, 2004). 13 M. Kelley, ‘Playing With Dead Things’, (1993) in G. Williams (ed.), The Gothic; Documents of Contemporary Art (London, Whitechapel Press, 2007), pp. 174–82. 14 J. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York, Columbia University Press, 1982), p. 4. 15 Kristeva, p. 3. 16 Roger Donaldson, dir., Species (MGM Pictures, 1995). 17 David Fincher, dir., Panic Room (Columbia Pictures, 2002). Simon West dir., Con Air (Touchstone Pictures, 1997). Sidney Lumet dir., Dog Day Afternoon (Warner Bros, 1975). 18 C. M. Davidson, ‘The Gothic and Addiction: A Mad Tango’, Gothic Studies, 11:2 (2009), 2–8. 19 Christopher Nolan, dir., Memento (Newmarket Films, 2000). 20 Herbert Ross, dir., Steel Magnolias (Tristar Pictures, 1989). 21 Lasse Hallström, dir., Chocolat (Miramax Films, 2000). 22 Anna Foerster, dir., ‘The Uncanny Valley’, Episode 12 Series 5, Criminal Minds (CBS, 13 January 2010). 23 T. Koch, D. Kralik, K. Price and N. Howard, ‘Chronic Illness Self-Management: Taking Action to Create Order’, Journal for Clinical Nursing, 13 (2003), 259–67. 24 T. Koch and D. Kralik, ‘Chronic Illness: Reflection on a Community-Based Action Research Project’, Journal of Advanced Nursing, 36:1 (2001), 23–31. 25 Oxford Centre for Diabetes, Endocrinology and Metabolism, ‘Diabetes Stories: Personal Tales of Diabetes through the Decades’ (1999) http://www.diabetes-stories.com accessed 20 March 2014. 26 P. Kuppers, Disability and Contemporary Performance: Bodies on the Edge (London, Routledge, 2003), p. 31. 27 S. Attie, White Nights, Sugar Dreams (installation and video piece, 2008). 28 Kuppers, p. 38. 29 Cox, Blood Sugar (performance and video piece, 2011) http://www.aoifecoxart.com/ #!performance/c21zx accessed 25 June 2014. Delivered by Publishing Technology to: mounika indupriyal IP: 202.177.173.189 On: Fri, 29 May 2015 08:59:27 Blood Sugar 103 30 J. Jacobs, Every Time I Eat 101 (white charcoal on blackboard, 36 × 24 inches, 2011) http://www.type1diabetesart.com/Type1/diabetes_math/DM.html accessed 25 June 2014. 31 J. Jacobs, ‘Type 1 Diabetes Revealed’, 1999, http://www.type1diabetesart.com/Type1/ type1-about.html accessed 21 March 2014. 32 Cited by P. Kuppers, The Scar of Visibility: Medical Performances and Contemporary Art (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2007), p. 48. All subsequent quotations are taken from this edition. Page numbers will follow in brackets. 33 J. Furler, C. Walker, I. Blackberry, T. Dunning, N. Sulaiman, J. Dunbar, J. Best, and D. Young, ‘The Emotional Context of Self-Management in Chronic Illness: A Qualitative Study of the Role of Health Professional Support in the Self-Management of Type 2 Diabetes’, BMC Heath Services Research, 8 (2008), pp. 205–14. 34 B. K. Smith, J. Frost, M. Albayrak and R. Sudhakar, ‘Facilitating Narrative Medical Discussion of Type 1 Diabetes with Computer Visualizations and Photography’, Patient Education and Counselling, 64 (2005), 313–21. 35 Kuppers, p. 2. Notes on contributor Tracy Fahey is Head of the Department of Fine Art and Head of the Centre for Postgraduate Studies at Limerick School of Art and Design, LIT. She has previously worked as Head of the Department of Humanities, IT Carlow, and Head of the Faculty of Design, Griffith College Dublin. Her main area of research is Irish Gothic and the Gothic nature of domestic space. She has forthcoming chapters on this subject in Living Gothic: Histories, Practices and Legacies (Palgrave) and The Gothic Compass: New Directions in Scholarship and Inquiry (Routledge). Tracy has delivered papers on the Gothic at conferences in Ireland, the UK, Denmark, New Zealand and the US. She is a founder-member of the Gothic Association of New Zealand and Australia (2013) and the Irish Network for Gothic Scholars (2013). In 2010 she founded the collaborative fine art practice, Gothicise, which works on site-specific projects related to ideas of site, traces and narrative. Address for correspondence Tracy Fahey, Head of Department of Fine Art and Centre for Postgraduate Studies, Limerick School of Art and Design, LIT Clare Street Campus, Limerick, Ireland. Email: [email protected] Delivered by Publishing Technology to: mounika indupriyal IP: 202.177.173.189 On: Fri, 29 May 2015 08:59:27 Copyright of Gothic Studies is the property of Manchester University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.