Narratives, Communicative Monopolies, and Acute Health Inequities

This chapter challenges common views of narrative as externalizing interior states or representing events by demonstrating how narratives are coproduced with acts of care. It uses Walter Benjamin’s work to suggest that the labor of care and of health/communicative labor are coproduced, creating complex layers of embeddedness as bodies and narratives circulate. Received medical modes of eliciting patient stories and transforming them into medical narratives thus erase or pathologize the webs of care and health/communicative labor that patients and relatives bring to the clinic. Analyzing how narratives both situate acts of care and communication and render them mobile, the discussion draws on psychoanalytic notions of displacement, condensation, and projection in exploring why the circulation of narratives between parents, clinicians, healers, epidemiologists, journalists, and health officials did not lead to a diagnosis. The parents' narratives constituted both demands to participate in knowledge production and assertions of health/communicative rights.