Reported by Soumya Lahoti, Class of 2025
October 7, 2022, 12:30-14:00
This lecture was part of the 2022 Humanities Fall Conference: Ciencia y Caridad.
Isabel Durán Giménez-Rico is a Professor of English Philology at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. She based her keynote lecture on revisiting medical conditions through a gendered lens. She focused on an intriguing gender swap in translating literature to visual or medical media. She spoke about the male gaze and the female gaze in medical media and the subtle differences in which they’re dealt with in a way that speaks to both genders. She spoke at length about Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen (1993), which was adapted into the 1999 film of the same name by James Mangold, and The Dying Animal by Philip Roth (2001) was adopted by Spanish filmmaker Isabel Coixet into Elegy (2008).
Medical Humanities (MH) explores human health and disease through the methods and materials of the creative arts and humanities. Edmund Pellegrino, one of the founding figures in modern medical ethics said, “Medicine is the most humane of sciences, the most scientific of the humanities.” Under the theme of MH, Dr. Durán conducted a critical analysis of the two narratives written by American authors, one male and one female. We then viewed their film adaptations, interestingly with the female piece (Kaysen) being adapted to the big screen by a male filmmaker, Mangold and Roth’s work was adapted by Coixet. She intertwined the readings followed by a viewing of the film adaptations.
She spoke about the male and the female gaze in medical media and the subtle differences by which they are dealt with in a way that speaks to both genders.
Dr. Durán also brought attention to the fact that women usually treat diseases somberly. They do not sensationalize the pain and the suffering. We fully feel the horrors and can appreciate the illness and its consequences, which is the female gaze. The male gaze tends to focus more on sex (Roth) or the film business (Mangold). Nudity plays a large role; it is sexy when the female character must strip down for examination. It is sensual and almost erotic. The basest message we get is that vulnerability is hot to the male gaze, which often skims over the sadness and the illness, while the female gaze does not shy away from the graphic depiction of a woman losing her breasts, portrayed as something intensely sad, and the horror of her losing her femininity is not lost on the viewer. At that moment, she is not beautiful anymore.
She caps off her speech by talking about how illness narratives are useful in understanding different psyches and medical practices and ethics in places like America or Europe. Literature also contributes as a laboratory to test social issues. She discussed these topics further in her student seminar later that day.
Read the report on Dr. Durán’s Student Seminar here >>
