This panel includes four speakers who explore illness experiences in women's poetry. Each panelist will speak for fifteen minutes, which leaves the remaining fifteen minutes for discussion with the audience. We seek to investigate how poetry can be used to express illness and pain for women whom patriarchal institutions have marginalized. Each panelist offers a unique perspective on the challenges women's perspective on illness brings to poetry.

Ilana Larkin will explore how Bettina Judd’s "patient.," through the voices of Betsey, Anarcha, and Lucy, articulates how racist, capitalist systems of oppression produce illness. Larkin's work argues that Judd mobilizes the figure of the research subject to think about the overlaps between research and spectacle, which meditates on how research is both a necessary form of information gathering and an exploitative endeavor.

Jane Huffman analyzes her experience with chronic respiratory illness in a poetic framework based on cyclicality and forms of repetition. Within this framework, the asthmatic cough is a semantic unit of meaning. The cough is a “chiasmus” in that it is an embodied linguistic effect. Repetition within poetic work also captures the banality of sickness, the languid ritual and rhythm of bedriddenness, and how the “burden” of the poem is its refrain.

Ronnie Stephens states that chronically ill women are turning to poetry as a site of resistance, using the genre to insist on the recognition of women’s illness and the validation of their pain and further critique how patriarchal/capitalist societies imbue women with a natural distrust of traditional medical treatment, analyzing the works of Willa Schneberg, Katie Farris, and Jeannie Hall Gailey.

Maria Rovito argues that Sylvia Plath's references to illness and pain in her work Ariel serve multiple functions: as a form of rebellion against patriarchal norms, a reclaiming of the female body, and a commentary on the cyclical nature of creativity and destruction that mirrors the poet's own life. Rovito's analysis of Plath contributes to the destigmatization of women's pain and positions it as a source of power and insight within the feminist movement.

Scholars of all literary texts, periods, and genres will have an interest in attending a panel on women's illness, pain, and poetry. Ranging from the literature in Medieval Studies on the "wandering womb" as the cause for women's illness to the modernist impetus to find the meaning of pain through language in life-writing to the portrayal of state-sponsored violence against women of color in contemporary fiction, scholars of all backgrounds will be interested in attending a panel on illness in women's poetry.

This panel will fill an overlooked gap in literary studies and respond to the MLA's Presidential Theme of Visibility. Women's pain, expressions of that pain, and research exploring women's pain have been particularly stigmatized in literature, academia, and larger patriarchal institutions. Women are still often told that they are "faking" their pain, they are being "hysterical," or they are told that pain is a consequence of womanhood. This panel, finally, makes women's pain visible to students, faculty, writers, and the public. We are asking the audience to not only listen to women who are ill but also to feel and experience the pain emanating from these works.

We hope the audience will leave this panel with a new understanding of the importance of sharing women's illness experiences and explore why poetry is the preferred medium by these authors to investigate the body's relationship to the lived experience of illness. We anticipate that the audience will engage with our discussions about illness and pain and the profound visibility of using poetry to explore women's unique illness perspectives. We hope the audience leaves with a newfound appreciation for "sick women" and how poetry can be used to express the much-needed visibility of these perspectives.