Feminist Medical Fiction and the Failure of American Censorship
Examines how women writers of medical fiction rewrite cultural narratives of the female body against censorship under the Comstock Laws.
(P)rescription Narratives reveals how the act of narrative creates the subjects of disability, race, and gender during a period of censorship in American history. In a Crip Affect reading of woman-authored medical fiction from the Comstock law era, this book astutely argues that women writers of medical fiction practice storytelling as a form of narrative medicine that prescribes various forms of healing as an antidote to the shame engineered by an American culture of censorship. Woman-authored medical fiction exposes the limitations of social construction and materiality in conversations about the female body since subject formation relies upon multiple force relations that shape and are shaped by one another in ongoing processes that do not stop despite our efforts to interpret cultural artifacts. These multiple failures to censor, to resist, to interpret open up a space for negotiating how we engage the world with greater empathy.