Navigating the “rabbit hole”: An embodied and affective account of patienthood and chronic illness

Feminist scholars studying chronic illness have drawn on the notion of personhood to develop the concept of patienthood, highlighting the socially and culturally constructed nature of this subjectivity. To further conceptualizations of patienthood, I conducted arts-based qualitative research, asking: how do young women and gender-diverse adults living with chronic illnesses understand and experience patienthood? Multimedia collage workshops with 10 women and nonbinary people living with chronic illnesses invited participants to create “portraits of patienthood.” My analysis of the artwork continues the interdisciplinary work of conceptualizing patienthood by reading the art through critical disability scholar Margaret Price's notion of “crip spacetime.” Together, Price's theory and participant accounts illuminate the deeply relational, embodied, and affective dimensions of patienthood as shaped by the entanglement of social, material, cultural, and psychological factors. This study identifies the metaphor of the “rabbit hole” as an apt description of the complexities inherent in navigating the fluctuating nature of chronic illness amid a lack of systemic support.