Illness of the Gendered Body, Freud’s The Uncanny, and “Being-in-the-World”

Abstract

The study of illness narratives, or pathography, is an emerging discursive scholarship within the field of medical humanities. Centering the connection between narrativity and identity, illness narratives stand as a meaningful response to perceived medical subjugation. This paper turns to a particular case study of hyperandrogenism, a medical condition characterized by “excessive” levels of male hormones (androgens) such as testosterone. When identified in the female body, the increased androgens are associated with “masculinizing” symptoms including excess body and facial hair, male-pattern baldness, infertility, elevated sex drive, increased muscle mass, and absence of menstrual bleeding. For the purposes of imaging new ways to situate the phenomenological experience of hyperandrogenism and illness of the gendered body, a linkage can be made between such an illness and Sigmund Freud’s conception of the uncanny. In line with Martin Heidegger’s conception of phenomenology, I will turn to the lived experience of women with hyperandrogenism through their digital illness narratives (writings of their experience of illness in online blogs), and outline how the experience of hyperandrogenism distorts temporal reality by making “alien” both the past and future. I will show how the gendered body, and therefore self-identity and selfhood, become abnormal in the sense of Freud’s uncanny. Finally, I will discuss how the experience of hyperandrogenism and illness of the gendered body work to trouble the notion of the “everyday.”