Shame, silence and resistance: How my narratives of academia and kidney disease entwine

Abstract

As an academic with a chronic illness, it has taken me a while to understand shame’s impact on my academic identity and choices. In this article, through a process of narrative recuperation, I consider the challenges and contradictions of living as an academic with chronic kidney disease, an incurable and often debilitating illness that, for the most part, is invisible to others. By means of evocative autoethnography, I trace the trajectory of silencing shame I experienced around my condition in academia and I show how and why this changed over a number of years. My aim in doing this is to uncover subjugated knowledge of what it takes to live as a chronically ill academic and to be an advocate for other academics living with chronic illness. I theorise my study using Garland-Thomson, Shildrick and Leder, all of whom have worked with the othering effect of shame on the nonconforming body. These theorists have described ways of resisting shame and, partly thanks to them, I was able to find ways of fighting back and recovering. My intention in sharing these illness narratives is to speak back to a dominant discourse that favours invulnerability and a masculinised, disembodied way of being academic.