Expressing the IH Lived Experience through Images

Flash Presentation

Kelly Moes
Borderline Bodies, Health and Medical Humanities Symposium, Australian National University, 2024 Jun

Cite

APA Click to copy
Moes, K. (2024). Expressing the IH Lived Experience through Images. Australian National University: Borderline Bodies, Health and Medical Humanities Symposium.

Chicago/Turabian Click to copy
Moes, Kelly. “Expressing the IH Lived Experience through Images.” Australian National University: Borderline Bodies, Health and Medical Humanities Symposium, 2024.

MLA Click to copy
Moes, Kelly. Expressing the IH Lived Experience through Images. Borderline Bodies, Health and Medical Humanities Symposium, 2024.

BibTeX Click to copy

@conference{kelly2024a,
  title = {Expressing the IH Lived Experience through Images},
  year = {2024},
  month = jun,
  address = {Australian National University},
  institution = {Borderline Bodies, Health and Medical Humanities Symposium},
  author = {Moes, Kelly},
  month_numeric = {6}
}

A radiograph image of a skull. A medical device, a cerebral ventricular shunt, is prominant in the image and shows two circular components well as several thin tubes running from the centre of the head, behing the ear and down the neck

Image 1: VP Shunt [radiograph]

Image 1:
Radiographs medicalise the chronic illness – situating it as something that can be fixed. For an otherwise un-apparent disability, this image makes visible something otherwise intangible. It legitimises the embodied experience, and is shared by people with lived experience in a process of 'uncovering'.

Side-by-side selfies of a young woman. On the left, she wears a black face mask over her nose and mouth. Her eyes are red and full of tears. On the right, she has a small smile. Her cheeks are rosy red and her large pupils are fully dilated.

Image 2: "Good Day, Bad Day" [photograph].

Image 2:
This participant-shared imagery represents the good day/bad day duality of a dynamic, fluctuating disability. The presence of a mask in the first image might also express the way we 'hide' our bad days, with one participant noting, “people generally only see me on a good day”. This reflects the performativity of chronic illness, including the ability to ‘pass’ for normal or well.