'"Recovery is Possible"—Reporting Narratives, Exploring Experiences'—with Dr Sarah Cefai

Yeah, I hear that, and it really raises loads of interesting points for me, because I think it's very paradoxical, because on the one hand, you're right, one of the violences that neoliberalism does is it individualises structural and collective conditions.

I mean, the very fact, for example, that we can reasonably say that this affects more women than men, shows that there are structural, cultural, gendered, somatic dimensions to these patterns in our culture that are more than individual.

I find it really difficult the way in which illness gets individualized.

As you said, it's framed as a failure of responsibility.

But on the flip side, of course, there's the paradox that the recovery narrative arc reinstalls the responsible individual, doesn't necessarily look at, oh, my recovery is materially part of an assemblage in which my husband's words and the operation of that alternative medicine and the operation of that YouTube algorithm all played into the collective emergence of this tipping point for me, which I'm narrating as a subject, but is nevertheless more than simply an individualized account.

So there's a paradox built in.

And the reason I point to that is that some of the more pernicious applications of recovery programs will actually say, if you don't get it better, it's because you're not doing it right,

which

to me is tantamount to the extrapolation of the same neoliberal logic that leads to the individualization of why people get ill in the first place.

I imagine, Sarah, that you'll be diving into that in future projects because I recognize that it's not part of this project, And I can imagine that for you, it must have been a complex walk to try and allow the narratology that these people are bringing to emerge, while at the same time not being naive about thinking.

the fact that we all swim in cultural waters in which we are thoroughly individualized in relation to ourselves.

Even the language of, you know, my body speaks to me is culturally conditioned language coming from Cartesian presuppositions that are being somehow remediated

And

it's quite interesting because that responsabilizes people in a way that a more distributed view doesn't.

Because if, for example, my recovery is as a complex assemblage that pulses and moves and is nonlinear, and suddenly there's a tipping point, predictable or unpredictable tipping point in which I start to experience a kind of more homeostatic functioning, there's less room in that narrative for blaming me if I'm not getting well, because there's a wider range of factors in play.

It's not just me, Anna, making my choices, narrating myself to myself.

Do you see what I'm saying? So I'm curious as to, because you spoke at one point about the The body multiple mole, was it? Yeah.

Was it tricking as an academic? What was it like as a theorist, a cultural theorist, to have to negotiate some of these assumptions that were coming from lived experience conditioned by definition by Western, you know, liberal conceptions, broadly speaking, and to come to that as a gender critical theorist, as a cultural theorist, how did you negotiate that? Because I think that's really intriguing.

Well, I think that I didn't, actually.

Right,

okay.

I just didn't because I think that would stop me from saying what I've been able to say.

And I think that some colleagues might find that difficult to understand because they won't agree with the premise of the work because they'll think that that's... not to open myself up to criticism, but they'll think that's not what I'm qualified to do.

But I think that what the analysis has shown is that to go to the body multiple, this idea from Anna-Marie Moll, is that, in fact, you can use... like your gender and cultural studies training or your broad kind of humanity, you know, your ability to do hermeneutics or think like a social scientist, like that is much more capacious than perhaps you realize, you know, because we're very goal oriented once we're in the job, right? Like there's this, you know, and it's all, it's all disgustingly competitive and it's, It's also incredibly depressingly mediocre in many respects as well.

But it's actually not something that I've...