The female body, sexual identity and chronic illness.

Jane's research will focus on the site of the female body, and explore the relationship between chronic illness and sexuality. She will extend the critical dialogue that exists between feminist theory and the medical humanities, and the potential interplay between these two fields of study. The work of feminist theorists such as Simone de Beauvoir, Judith Butler, and Julia Kristeva will be employed to interrogate cultural and social discourses of illness and wellbeing. Poetry will be an investigative mode through which she will explore the tensions which surface as a result of her research, and her creative work will attempt to restore female agency through the destabilisation of this social construct.