Post-Identity Patienthood in the cancer narratives of Jo Spence and Anne Boyer

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My project emerged from the Wellcome Collection's 2019 exhibition 'Misbehaving Bodies', which exhibited Jo Spence's photography from 1982-92 alongside contemporary work by interdisciplinary artist Oreet Ashery. There is a gap in the cultural narratives around Spence's 'The Final Project' (1991-2), made while the artist was dying from leukaemia, a disease with which I have firsthand experience. Where Spence's earlier documentative photography (1982-90) has been praised for its political usefulness in reimagining narratives of breast cancer patienthood, her leukaemic works are oversimplified. In the only prominent narrative used to interpret 'The Final Project', Anne Boyer suggests that Spence is teaching herself a language to die within by showing herself fading into landscapes or as a skeleton. Boyer goes on to contradict this narrative by proposing that a "new ground" for illness politics is "exposed" as identity, previously expressed through Spence's body, begins to fall away (2016). However, this "new ground" remains entirely unexplored and the former narrative has taken precedence.Both Samantha King (2006) and Barbara Ehrenreich (2001) have identified failures in the feminized and infantilized patient narratives pedalled by breast cancer charity campaigning. To remedy the restrictiveness of these narratives, I will revisit Boyer's proposed "new ground" for illness politics. In doing so, I will argue that the removal of the patient's body from illness narratives (for reasons of exhaustion etc.) paves the way for more inclusive expressions of cancer patienthood, less reliant on gender or prognosis. Boyer's illness memoir, The Undying (2019), provides further evidence for the effectiveness of expressing critical illness beyond the body, for Boyer explores herself as a ghost. I will therefore analyse 'The Final Project' and The Undying as pioneering case studies that explore narratives of patienthood emerging outside the typical constraints of representation. My term 'post-identity patienthood' will refer to the reimagination/removal of the gendered body in illness narratives; I argue that Spence's art conceptualises this and Boyer reinscribes its practice. I will test the efficacy of post-identity patienthood by answering the following research questions:How do Spence and Boyer conceptualise their illnesses beyond identity? What does this conceptualisation offer to dominant representations of critical/terminal illness? How can post-identity patienthood offer a more inclusive space for LGBTQ+ communities?How can the reimagination/removal of the unwell body more effectively represent people with critical/terminal cancers in illness discourses?I will adopt a creative methodology to approach these questions, inspired by Spence's intermedial practice and Boyer's employment of comparative literature. This will consist of literary auto-theory and aesthetic criticism, enabled by Georges Bataille's philosophical notion of dust as a tool for conceiving the obliteration of bodily form and the destruction of identity. My research will take the form of an auto-theoretical comparative study of Spence's autobiographical writing and artwork in Putting Myself in the Picture (1986)/Cultural Sniping (1995) and 'The Final Project' alongside Boyer's The Undying. I will remain in close dialogue with several prominent queer/feminist accounts of lived cancer experience throughout (Sedgwick 1999; Lorde 2020; Jain 2013). This method will avoid what Spence criticises as the representation of bodies without theorists "in any way seeming to inhabit their own" (1995).This project dismantles the universalistic paradigms controlling cancer's representation, offering unique contributions to feminist theory and the medical humanities. In developing a model of patienthood inclusive of transgender & gender non-binary communities, this study is important for emerging queer/transgender theory, as well as sociological reflections on illness.