Performing Medical Diagnosis in Contemporary Artistic Representation

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My project will explore how different mediums of artistic practice can disrupt the medical framing of diagnosis. I will look at the impact of diagnosis beyond the doctor's office and examine artistic representations that focus on lived experiences of diagnosis. Located at the emerging arts and medicine interface, diagnosis and its relationship to performance has thus far been neglected. This project, in addressing an overlooked area, will bring much needed insight and prove to be of great significance to the fields of performance, medical education and health.In researching artistic representations that are concerned with diagnosis, I will examine the role of spectatorship and how it straddles both life, medicine and performance. Drawing on Michel Foucault, I will explore how diagnosis evokes a type of spectatorship that assesses the body. His coinage of the clinical gaze acts as a critique on how modern medicine, starting at diagnosis, discards personal experiences of illness, objectifies the body, and only sees or examines through scientific fact. Conversely, these medical observational strategies can be juxtaposed with Maaike Bleeker who situates theatrical spectatorship as a vision machine of political subjectivity. Here, I will critically add to theatrical and diagnostic research by teasing out the nuances separating medical and artistic spectatorship. Adding further knowledge to the intersection between medicine and art, I will explore how diagnosis can be read as a performative mode. Through leaning on the works of J.L. Austin and Judith Butler, I will explore how diagnosis and its declarative delivery performs and constitutes the initial and founding construction of illness identity.