"It's not all nice and fun": Narrating contested illness on YouTube and Instagram

Living with Sjögren's Syndrome: An Analysis of YouTube Vlogs on the Autoimmune Disease

People who experience symptoms of autoimmune diseases often have to struggle for illness recognition. Women experiencing such symptoms face additional challenges as their accounts of pain are frequently treated with skepticism. This study examines experiences of people living with Sjögren's Syndrome, an autoimmune disease which is primarily diagnosed in women, by conducting an analysis of individual vlogs posted on YouTube using the themes of gender, chronic illness and neoliberal governmentality. Sjögren's Syndrome is the second most common rheumatic disease after rheumatoid arthritis and affects nearly 4 million people in the United States alone. An analysis of 70 vlogs posted by people living with the disease revealed the challenges faced by them including diagnostic delays and perceived attitudinal biases amongst medical professionals, especially in the context of the gender of the patients. Apart from highlighting the impact of the disease on their gendered roles, the vloggers urged viewers to conduct their own research on the disease and advocate for themselves during interactions with physicians. The study illuminates how dissatisfaction with healthcare services reinforces neoliberal rationalities such as individual advocacy, resilience and self-labor. The findings of the study delineate the role of neoliberal governmentality in making self-management of chronic illnesses such as Sjögren's Syndrome an internalized ideal for women living with the disease. Additionally, the study provides empirical evidence of the need for addressing the medical and socio-cultural factors that contribute to delays in the diagnosis and management of Sjögren's Syndrome.

Contesting misrecognition online: Experiences of epistemic in/justice by vloggers with contested illnesses

Contested illnesses, such as fibromyalgia, myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS), and chronic Lyme disease (CLD), are surrounded by polemic debates regarding their etiology, symptomology, treatment, and even their existence. People who suffer from these contested illnesses arguably also suffer from "epistemic injustice." This concept, coined by the philosopher Miranda Fricker, captures how people's knowledge may be discredited because of identity prejudices. In our paper, this concept is used to understand how seven Dutch women with contested illnesses experience the emancipatory potential of their vlogging practices. Our findings show how these women understood their vlogging as a means to break with epistemic smothering, understood as the propensity to cater ones testimony to one's audience (Dotson, 2011), and as a means to attain and enhance epistemic justice. However, our findings also show how vlogging about contested illnesses did not seem to allow these women to fully break with their epistemic smothering practices, and that the ableist design and gendered norms of YouTube were experienced as obstacles to attaining epistemic justice. We conclude that, even though social media do seem to hold emancipatory potential for these women, the experiences of individual users are diverse and ambiguous.

Chronicling the chronic: narrating the meaninglessness of chronic pain

This article proposes a way of narrating chronic pain: the telling of a chronicle Recent work in the medical humanities has been critical of traditional approaches to illness narratives. In line with this criticism, we argue that the experience of chronic pain resists internally coherent, plot-driven-in other words, Aristotelian-narrative. Drawing on phenomenological studies, we state that chronic pain is an utterly meaningless experience due to its relentless continuation over time. It therefore defies any narrative search for a higher meaning or purpose as well as the search for a coherent and progressive 'plot'. However, we reject the idea that chronic pain could therefore only be captured in the form of a meaningless, unshareable and chaotic anti-narrative. Instead, we propose that chronic pain could be borne witness to through the speech act of chronicling-an ongoing telling about ongoing suffering. Building on work of contemporary philosophers Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, we examine what the chronicle entails by touching on three themes: time, meaning, and the body. First, we argue that chronicling allows people to bear witness to chronic pain's purposeless continuation over time, thereby affirming the utter meaninglessness of the experience. Second, we argue that it is precisely in the affirmation of this meaninglessness that a different kind of meaning can be experienced: a meaning which cannot be detached from the sensory experience of telling and listening itself. Third, we examine how chronicling chronic pain could allow the muted and painful body to once again meaningfully express itself to others.