Violence, Care, Cure: Self/perceptions within the Medical Encounter

This book explores the notions of violence, care, and cure within the medical encounter and seeks to foreground the ways in which, whether individually or as a triad, they are prone to ambiguous interpretations. The chapters of this book attend to the complex interlacing of these three key terms and what to make of their entanglement by offering historical, practical, philosophical, personal, and aesthetic analyses of different medical scenes, objects, and concepts.

Besides the three main concepts that give the collection its title, the volume deals with bodily experience, medical neglect or scepticism, pain and suffering, diagnosis and recovery, and epistemic injustice, through the lens of, among others, biopolitics, ethics, gender medicine, and critical medical humanities. Altogether, the chapters pay particular attention to the role of images and other narratives, including social media platforms. The case studies in this collection invite the reader to observe medical encounters that take place in and are shaped by a variety of both material and ‘immaterial’ spaces, from the consulting room to the antechamber of medical bureaucracy, and from artistic venues to biopolitical discourses. Taken together, this book argues that a hermeneutic of violence, care, and cure is inseparable from individual and collective perceptions of the medical encounter; that is, it is inextricable from an understanding of the tensions and consensus that surge among perceptions orchestrated by both internal (subjective) and external (social, cultural, political) ‘gazes’. Moreover, the volume aims to provide, both directly and indirectly, a meta‑eflection on the disciplines that fall under the umbrella of ‘medical and health humanities’, interrogating the field’s potential to unearth systemic bias, to open different possibilities of existence, and to make visible the complexity of its research objects, as well as to caution against their possible pitfalls.

By bringing together different methodological approaches, this volume provides its readers with conceptual resources for thinking about the intersections of violence, care, and cure. By providing a space where the voices of both emerging and established scholars mingle and respond to one another, this book will be essential reading for anyone across the social sciences and humanities interested in the sociology of health and medicine, the medical humanities, and gender studies.

The Introduction and Chapters 1 and 5 of this book are freely available as downloadable Open Access PDFs at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons [Attribution (CC-BY)] 4.0 license.

Marta‑Laura Cenedese is UKRI (MSCA Horizon Guarantee) Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Medical Humanities at Durham University. Marta is a literary scholar specialising in postcolonial literatures, memory studies, critical medical humanities, queer death studies, and decolonial feminism. She is the author of Irène Némirovsky’s Russian Influences: Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Chekhov (2021) and editor of Written on the Body: Narrative (Re)constructions of Violence(s) (2023). Her research has been published in Comparative Literature, Storyworlds, Journal of Medical Humanities, Modern and Contemporary France, and elsewhere. Marta was an associated researcher at the Centre Marc Bloch Berlin (2020–2024) and has been a visiting fellow at the Dahlem Humanities Center, Humboldt University Berlin (2020) and at the Centre d’Histoire, Sciences‑o Paris (2023).

Clio Nicastro is a researcher in Philosophy, Cultural Studies, and Film Studies affiliated with Bard College Berlin. She studied philosophy at the University of Palermo, where she completed her PhD in Aesthetics and Theory of Arts. She was DAAD postdoctoral fellow as well as fellow at the ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry, where she held an additional one‑year postdoctoral position research thanks to a VolkswagenStiftung grant. She is the author of La Dialettica del Denkraum in Aby Warburg (2022) as well as the co‑editor with Cristina Baldacci and Arianna Sforzini of the volume Over and Over and Over again. Reenactment Strategies in Contemporary Arts and Theory (2022). She is a member of the board of directors of the Harun Farocki Institut.