Sick Women, 2023-ongoing

“Well, you don’t look sick. You look great!” It’s a statement frequently heard by women with chronic illness— befuddling in its multilayered nature, at once acknowledging illness and signifying skepticism. Such a response to the articulation of individual experience begs the question, What does it mean to “look” sick? My ongoing project Sick Women interrogates this very question by probing representation of women in film, one of the primary mediums through which the general public encounters depictions of ill people. 

Living with multiple chronic illnesses, I am often too unwell to leave the sofa, and so turn to film as a distraction. Desperate for structure, I set myself a task: watch as many films about sick women as I could find. I began to observe a distinct visual vocabulary emerge across the broad range of films I watched, a kind of aestheticization of illness through common formal strategies and representational tropes. Interested in better understanding how this visual vocabulary operates, I began to collect and combine film stills to create photographic prints. Together, these juxtapositions draw out the problematics and possibilities inherent in the traditional images of these individuals. 

The project works to reveal what makes a culturally “acceptable” sick woman; they are overwhelmingly white, conventionally feminine, and largely upper-middle class. In our culture’s constructions of both health and femininity, looking great is positioned as an achievement to be chased, no matter one’s embodied experience. Sick Women acts as a call for care— for more thorough representation; for a less idealized, more veritable depiction of the illness experience; and an art that actively resists ableism’s reductive image of the sick woman.

See film list here.