Leveling Health Hierarchies: Finding My Way as A Chronically Ill Academic

Reflecting on 30 years of living with Crohn's Disease, I engage Managed Meaning of Embodied Experience (MMEE) theory, considering whether and how it can help me articulate new possibilities for working as an academic with chronic illness. I come to see that MMEE does enable restorying of possibility, but the stories that can be told are constricted by the assumption that illness is undesirable and in need of a fix. That is, MMEE rests on existing discourses founded on a hierarchical binary between illness and health. Applying Simone de Beauvoir's analysis of the political and practical binds arising when we accept binaries as natural, I call for a leveling of the ill/healthy hierarchy. This move facilitates chronically ill people existing as whole subjects rather than as lacking and in need of a fix to repair them to the healthy ideal. Using Beauvoir's idea of reciprocity, which calls for an intersubjective, situational construction of subjectivity, I offer a path toward wholeness for all people.