The Constitutive Nature of Vital Signs

Abstract

This article is about two interconnected subjects: the politics of acute illness and the representation of such politics in writing. I present three narratives that were provoked by the witnessing of family member’s hospitalization. The narratives focus on the experience of technology and fall within autoethnographic traditions (Denzin, 2003; Ellis & Bochner, 2000; Richardson, 2000), as well as the burgeoning realm of publications that narrate authors’ experiences of the illness of a loved one (Dideon, 2005; Oates, 2011; Want, 2010).

In taking seriously the “emergent nature of critical inquiry” (Denzin, 2010), I intentionally move in and out of the narratives inorder to demonstrate how negotiations with “everyday technology” are taken-for-granted. I concern myself with how technology is the primary mode of care and argue that its prolific use calls for a politicization of medicine such that we can see how patients and medical staff alike are configured as mechanistic.