Affective Ecologies of Illness: Medical Humanities, Environment, and Resistance in Boyer’s The Undying and Khakpour’s Sick

Abstract

This paper examines the convergence of medical humanities, affect theory and ecocriticism in Anne Boyer’s The Undying (2019) and Porochista Khakpour’s Sick (2018). Both memoirs disrupt dominant biomedical and neoliberal health narratives by foregrounding the lived experience of illness within broader contexts of environmental toxicity, gendered care work, and structural inequality. Through the lens of affect theory, the study highlights how pain, fatigue, and vulnerability function as politically charged affective states that resist clinical objectification. An ecocritical perspective further reveals how each author portrays the body as a site inscribed by ecological and institutional violence. Boyer’s lyrical critique of breast cancer treatment and Khakpour’s intimate depiction of chronic Lyme disease underscore how illness emerges from entanglements with capitalist, patriarchal, and toxic systems. Situated within the medical humanities, these memoirs utilize experimental narrative forms and emotionally resonant language to reclaim agency, redefine care, and assert the ethical urgency of storytelling amid environmental and bodily precarity.