“Crippling of the Body and Mind”

: contemporary poetry and health capitalism

Abstract

This creative and critical doctoral dissertation aims to develop a mad-crip and Marxist poetics in the context of capital’s unstable economies of health. I turn to the political activism and Marxist theorisation of illness proposed by the Sozialistischen Patientkollektiv (Socialist Patients’ Collective, or, SPK) in their manifesto Turn Illness into a Weapon ([1972] 2013), and develop the concepts of “industrial pathology” and alienation in relation to the productive imperatives and economic power of neoliberal capital (Marx, [1867] 1990). I take Plato’s characterisation of poetry as “harmful [to] the mind” as the tentative basis for a kind of poetic Cripistemology, building on contemporary mad critique and crip and Marxist theory (Plato, 2007). In a chapter on the poetry of Eleanor Perry (2017), I provide a close analysis of their sequence ‘i hope you well & thriving’ in relation to the construction of health by economic power, before looking to the poetry of Juha Virtanen (2019) as mad critique and subversive response to the alienation experienced in a Deleuzian “society of control” (Deleuze, 1992). In my creative portfolio, [Sick Notes,,], I deconstruct the language of health and sanity (in its historical, judicial, economic, privatised, medical, and state-sponsored forms) through textual fragmentation and lyric paranoia, in an attempt to resist and reach beyond a definition of health that is synonymous with the capability to submit to labour exploitation. The SPK, a radical patients’ group that formed in 1970 in Heidelberg, West Germany, present a rallying cry for the complete weaponisation of illness through the class consciousness of the sick-proletariat. It is such a call that I hope to seek out within the site of contemporary poetry in its relation to the political economy of health in the 21st century.

Date of Award	23 Jul 2024
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Roehampton
Sponsors	TECHNE AHRC Doctoral Training Programme
Supervisor	Lisa Sainsbury (Director of Studies), Jeff Hilson (Co-Supervisor) & Peter Jaeger (Co-Supervisor)