On Inhabiting a Body and Studying Bodies

How illness and embodiment informs scholarly positionality.

Me, in my hospital bed, on my first day of chemotherapy. Credit: Julie Hart.

Before graduate school, and before cancer, I believed that bodies could be overcome. Not indefinitely, of course. I understood mortality abstractly. But before mutated cells began silently wrecking my bone marrow, I lived inside the fantasy most healthy young people are permitted: the body is fundamentally cooperative, ultimately recoverable, and largely incidental to intellectual life. I thought of thinking, and knowledge-making, as something that happened above the neck. The body was simply transportation, or scenery. Occasionally, it was an inconvenience.

I was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia, a rare cancer of the blood and bone marrow, when I was twenty-five years old, and I underwent multiple rounds of chemotherapy to treat it. Cancer changed everything. It altered my body and it shifted my understanding of what it means to “know.” Illness collapsed the distance I once imagined existed between intellectual activity and embodied life. I felt entrapped by my body, which made me realize that I always had been — I only noticed it then because it had stopped working.

Now, when I tell people that I study the rhetoric of health and medicine, embodiment, and illness narratives, there is often an implied assumption that my research interests emerged neatly from my diagnosis, as though cancer handed me a tidy research agenda alongside my treatment plan. But positionality is almost never that linear. My illness destabilized me in ways that still feel ongoing. It complicated my relationship to expertise, to language, to institutions, and to my own body. The scholarship I pursue now emerges from ongoing negotiation with those fractures.

During treatment, my body was mediated through language. There were the diagnostic vocabularies: blast counts, neutropenia, remission status, cytogenetics. There were the scripts physicians used to explain risk, probability, and survival. There were the euphemisms people offered me in grocery stores and Instagram comments: fighter, brave, warrior. I became aware of how thoroughly illness is shaped by rhetoric long before I had the disciplinary language to articulate that awareness.

I noticed, too, how difficult it was to describe what was happening to me outside of medical terminology. Clinical language often felt emotionally abstract, but popular narratives of illness felt dishonest. I did not feel like an inspirational survivor. I did not experience my body as a site of triumph or revelation. Much of my illness was profoundly boring, humiliating, lonely, and strange. My lymph nodes swelled. My hair came out in clumps. My memory faltered. Time changed texture. Days stretched endlessly during hospitalization while entire months vanished into chemo fog.

During this time, it became increasingly clear to me that certain forms of suffering were narratively acceptable, and others were harder to articulate publicly. At times, it felt like people only wanted to hear from me if it was good news, or if I was in a good mood, but I did not want to be good. Nothing I was feeling or experiencing was tidy. People wanted coherence and optimism, and I often resisted providing either.

Even after treatment ended, I found myself suspended in a strange rhetorical position: visibly healthy enough to move through the world “normally,” yet permanently altered in ways I hadn’t completely reckoned with. The category of “cancer survivor” felt unstable. I was alive, yes, but I was also grieving versions of myself that no longer existed — my cognitive sharpness before chemotherapy, my uncomplicated relationship with time, my trust in my body, my peace and ease of mind. This instability profoundly shaped the kinds of research questions I began asking in graduate school, though I don’t think I fully understood that at the time.

Throughout my MA experience, I became interested in how people narrate bodily disruption when available cultural narratives fail to capture the complexity of their experiences. Survivorship discourse especially drew my attention because of the pressure survivors often face to frame illness as transformative or redemptive, and because of my own dissonance with these expectations. These questions led me toward broader concerns with embodiment as something material, unstable, and unevenly lived.

My positionality as a cancer survivor does not grant me automatic authority over illness research, nor does it make my interpretations universally representative. If anything, illness made me more cautious about claims to mastery. One of the most important lessons survivorship continues to teach me is that bodies are extremely variable, and suffering cannot be generalized. My experience with leukemia cannot stand in for all illness experiences, nor even for all cancer experiences, or all leukemia experiences. But my positionality does shape what I notice.

For example, it shapes the moments that catch in my throat while reading medical discourse. It shapes my sensitivity to how institutional language can make patients simultaneously hypervisible and invisible. It shapes my suspicion toward narratives that equate bodily discipline and health with moral worth. These are significant, ongoing shifts. As I wrote in my statement of purpose when I applied to PhD programs: “Because no living being is immune from illness, studying how we understand health is ultimately a study of what it means to be alive.”

Most importantly, my illness complicated my relationship to academic distance. In many scholarly contexts, there seems to be an implicit expectation that intellectual rigor requires emotional detachment. Researchers are often encouraged to “acknowledge” positionality briefly before proceeding toward supposedly objective analysis. But cancer disrupted my ability to believe in clean separations between the personal and the scholarly. My body, with all its complexities and medical trauma, accompanies me into every classroom, every research question, every thought.

I felt this tension when I began researching rhetorics of cancer survivorship and bodily change. Reading patient narratives often produced uncomfortable moments of recognition. Sometimes I encountered fears I shared but had never articulated aloud. Other times I resisted narratives that resembled my own because I did not want to see myself reflected back so clearly. Positionality, for me, often feels like vulnerability.

There is a particular discomfort in studying experiences that remain emotionally unfinished inside you. I do not approach illness rhetorics from a position of completion or retrospective wisdom — I don’t think that’s possible. I still live inside many of the questions I study. My heart races with anxiety before routine bloodwork, and I interpret every random cough or ache as a symptom of relapse. I still negotiate what it means to inhabit survivorship as both a medical category and a personal condition.

This messy unfinishedness has also become methodologically important to me.

Illness taught me to value uncertainty rather than prematurely resolving it. In both my creative and scholarly work, I am drawn toward narratives that resist closure, toward bodily experiences that exceed available vocabularies, and toward forms of testimony that remain fragmented. I distrust narratives that smooth suffering into coherence too quickly because I know all too well how much embodied experience remains narratively intractable. I am nearly three years in remission, and I still do not know quite how to tell my cancer story.

As I write this, I am cautious about overly romanticizing illness within academic spaces. There is sometimes subtle pressure, particularly within personal or scholarly narratives, to frame suffering as productive — as though trauma becomes meaningful primarily through the insights or scholarship it generates. I resist that logic. Cancer took enormous things from me. It altered relationships, interrupted my early adulthood, destabilized my sense of self, and left lingering cognitive and emotional effects that continue to shape my daily life. I do not believe my illness happened “for a reason.” I do not believe suffering inherently produces wisdom. Every day, still, I wish my cells hadn’t randomly mutated. I mourn who I was.

But I can acknowledge that illness changed the conditions under which I ask questions, and it sharpened my attention to embodiment. My cancer experience continues to shape how I move through questions of vulnerability, care, and bodily failure. I remain drawn toward research that takes seriously the emotional, material, and rhetorical complexities of living inside a body that can, and will, fail.

Sometimes, when I am grieving the carefree person I was before, I think about how different my scholarly life might have been had I never become sick. Perhaps I would have studied entirely different questions. Perhaps I would have remained more comfortable with academic distance. Perhaps I would still believe the body could be temporarily bracketed away from intellectual work.

But I find it increasingly difficult to believe scholarship emerges separately from lived experience. Our bodies are who we are, they shape what we know. Positionality is lived, inhabited. I study bodies now from within one that has already betrayed me, survived, and changed, and that has shaped everything.