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Feminist Philosophy and Social Theory Seminar: Lara Jost, “The Labours of Chronic Illness”
13th April 2022 @ 4:00 pm - 6:00 pm
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Lara Jost will be giving the following presentation, titled The Labours of Chronic Illness. The seminar will take a hyrbid format. The in-person seminar will take place Castlecliffe G5W – Seminar Room. To attend online please email arche-fem-soc@st-andrews.ac.uk for the attendance link.
The Labours of Chronic Illness
Lara Jost
In this presentation, I aim to explain two types of labour – hermeneutic labour and epistemic labour- that chronically ill people have to engage in to get good care. The goal is to highlight why being chronically ill is often considered by many chronically ill people to be a full-time or part-time job, often without being recognized as such by others. I explain why these two labours are disproportionately higher when it comes to certain chronic illnesses. I discuss how these labours cannot be fully explained by the presence of political structures and the underfunding of healthcare. Contrary to these two commonly accepted explanations, I argue that this higher cost is in part the result of a deep disagreement about how these patients should testify about their illness, caused by a cluster of types of epistemic injustices. To illustrate this dynamic, I attend to the applied case of endometriosis, a gynaecological chronic illness causing pelvic pain and infertility.