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Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2024

Surveilling bodies in crisis, escaping surveillance: Some of Us Just Fall: On Nature and Not Getting Better (Polly Atkin 2023)

Résumé

Some of Us Just Fall, a memoir by British poet Polly Atkin and published in 2023, opens in the Lake District, and more specifically in Grasmere. The text alternates between accounts of the author’s medical journey, discovering the genetic disease she suffers from, and accounts of her experience of nature. As she explores her own body, she reclaims her own medical data: “The problem is the computer systems don’t talk to each other. The problem is I do not control my data.” (Atkin 248). She confronts medical discourse and her own experience as she obtains more and more information about her condition, all the while providing a new experience of nature, from the Lake District to details about cyanobacteria. Atkin’s vulnerable body becomes the locus of the expression of contemporary surveillance of the material, especially in the medical domain; for instance, as she is measured by a doctor to be diagnosed, she wonders: “In deviating from this canon of proportions, do we deviate from what is human?” (64) This literary enterprise is then multiple: the constant medical crisis with which Atkin lives is connected to the crises plaguing the natural world, and she attempts to regain agency over her own body, and nature, by turning surveillance on its head. This paper will then contend, along with D. Haraway, that nature writing currently attempts to “stay with the trouble” (Haraway 2016), in particular as memoirs become increasingly popular, and express vulnerability (Ganteau 2015) by using multimodal surveillance tools to reclaim agency. Then, surveillance in contemporary nature writing exists, as we will develop, as something which should be both evaded and re-invested.

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hal-04646318 , version 1 (12-07-2024)

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  • HAL Id : hal-04646318 , version 1

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Cécile Beaufils. Surveilling bodies in crisis, escaping surveillance: Some of Us Just Fall: On Nature and Not Getting Better (Polly Atkin 2023). The 10th Biennial Surveillance Studies Network / Surveillance & Society Conference, David Murakami Wood, May 2024, Ljubljana, Slovenia. ⟨hal-04646318⟩
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