In a new publication, Órla Murray, IMH Honorary Fellow, reflects on her diagnosis of ulcerative colitis in the context of a feminist queer crip approach.
Dr Órla Meadhbh Murray is an Assistant Professor of Criminology and Sociology at Northumbria University, a co-founder of the Institutional Ethnography Network and an Honorary Fellow of the Institute for Medical Humanities.
The Gut Feelings pilot research at the Recovery College Collective (ReCoCo) was supported by the Discovery Research Platform and funded in whole by the Wellcome Trust. This provided a space to begin thinking about the gut and ideas underpinning this article. The open-access article ‘Crip guts, stomas, and the violence of ‘returning to normal’: a feminist queer crip approach to the gut‘ was published in the journal Humanities and Social Sciences Communications.
Abstract
What is a feminist queer crip approach to the gut? How might we use feminist queer crip theory to make sense of non-normative guts? And how might crip guts help us make sense of the world? This paper is an autoethnographic reflection on my crip guts, specifically being diagnosed with ulcerative colitis (UC), a form of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), and having a colectomy (surgery to remove my colon) to create an ileostomy (a type of stoma). I consider the epistemic complexities of being both patient and researcher and the importance of acknowledging multiple forms of expertise, putting my autoethnographic reflections into conversation with a variety of texts. I argue that my crip guts provide an embodied, if stigmatised, form of knowledge that complicates academic/lived experience and body/mind divisions, alongside necessitating more holistic responses to crip guts beyond individualising biomedical models. I examine the violence of discourses of normality around bodily difference and the complex temporalities of the gut through a focus three key moments in my crip gut experience – late diagnosis and (not) being believed; stoma representation and stigmatised imagined futures; and, the gut remembering colonial pasts – before arguing for queer stoma pride as a destigmatised collective refusal of normative gut discourse and valuation of crip gut knowing.
