Violence, Care, Cure

Marta‑Laura Cenedese is UKRI (MSCA Horizon Guarantee) Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Medical Humanities at Durham University. Marta is a literary scholar specialising in postcolonial literatures, memory studies, critical medical humanities, queer death studies, and decolonial feminism. She is the author of Irène Némirovsky’s Russian Influences: Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Chekhov (2021) and editor of Written on the Body: Narrative (Re)constructions of Violence(s) (2023). Her research has been published in Comparative Literature, Storyworlds, Journal of Medical Humanities, Modern and Contemporary France, and elsewhere. Marta was an associated researcher at the Centre Marc Bloch Berlin (2020–2024) and has been a visiting fellow at the Dahlem Humanities Center, Humboldt University Berlin (2020) and at the Centre d’Histoire, Sciences‑o Paris (2023).Clio Nicastro is a researcher in Philosophy, Cultural Studies, and Film Studies affiliated with Bard College Berlin. She studied philosophy at the University of Palermo, where she completed her PhD in Aesthetics and Theory of Arts. She was DAAD postdoctoral fellow as well as fellow at the ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry, where she held an additional one‑year postdoctoral position research thanks to a VolkswagenStiftung grant. She is the author of La Dialettica del Denkraum in Aby Warburg (2022) as well as the co‑editor with Cristina Baldacci and Arianna Sforzini of the volume Over and Over and Over again. Reenactment Strategies in Contemporary Arts and Theory (2022). She is a member of the board of directors of the Harun Farocki Institut.

“This thought-provoking and rich edited volume explores the concepts of violence, care and cure as part of the growing interdisciplinary scholarship on the medical encounter. Contributions by leading and emerging scholars from an impressive range of disciplines engage the reader in historical, practical, philosophical and creative reflections that open up new dimensions of research across the fields of medicine and humanities. An eye-opening read for scholars and professionals interested in new and self-reflective approaches to the study and practice of medicine through the humanities and vice versa.”Heike Bartel, Professor of German Studies and Health Humanities, The University of Nottingham, UK"In healthcare and medicine, efforts to care and cure are entangled with violence in complex ways. The contributions in this book highlight the potential of medical humanities to uncover systemic biases and broaden our understanding of medical encounters. The volume is an essential contribution to scholarship, opening new avenues for research and reflection."Anna Ovaska, Research Fellow in Narrative Studies, Tampere University, Finland

• 1. Introduction: Violence, Care, Cure: (Self-)Perceptions Within the Medical Encounter Musing 1: Narrative Medicine, Racial Justice and The Black Maternal Mortality Crisis Part 1: Medical Histories and Biopolitics 2. Touching Matters of Care: A Visual Approach to Care and Violence in Dr Marie Stopes’ Birth Control Campaign 3. Politics In the Time of Cholera: COVID, Table Manners, and Bio-Politics 4. Bio-Story: Michel Foucault and The History of Social Medicine Musing 2: Counteracting Psychiatric Violence Through Critical Heritage Studies and Cooperation Part 2: Unsettling and Working Through Practices and Languages of Cure 5. The ‘Interpretation Workshop’ As Artistic Research: A Methodological Approach to Original Biographical National Socialist Writings 6. ‘The Way Out Is Via the Door’: R.D. Laing and the Cure from The Family 7. ‘Io Sono Matta’: Psychiatric Violence, Militant Madness, and Sexual Difference in Alberto Grifi’s ‘Anthropology of Disobedience’ 8. The Denied Poetics of Global Psychiatry and Frantz Fanon’s Poetisation of Science Musing 3: Fanon, Epistemic Injustice, and the Colonial Medical Encounter Part 3: Agency in Illness and Ethics of Suffering 9. Narrative Autonomy to The Test of Illness 10. Plumbing The Perpetual Loss of Paradise: Susan Taubes and Sacred Suffering 11. Almodóvar’s Anatomies Musing 4: On Care and Violence in Medical Humanities Research Collaborations Part 4: Anatomy of a Transformation 12. T For Trans: An Outraged Investigation of Non-Binary Medical Transition in Germany 13. I Am Not My MRI 14. Surprised By the Night: On the Traversal of a Dysphoric Phantasy 15. Afterword: Moral Value in Medicine: Violence, Cure, and Care