patient: megan ingram: Counterarchiving Medical Records and Resisting Institutional Memory


Megan Ingram, Queen's University

Archival records of disabled bodies are partial, fragmented, and in many ways disabled themselves, constituting a legacy of exclusion within memory spaces. Disabled memory is often archived through the limited scope of medical and institutional records (Brilmeyer 2020). Crucially, medical records have often been isolated from other archival spaces, kept siloed within the bureaucratic confines of the ‘medical archive’, often situated in hospitals or other inaccessible institutional spaces. What medical records exist beyond these spaces are often those of the “exceptional” patient, those bodies deemed abnormal enough to warrant consideration from an outside public or source. While these bodies are often those that are disabled in some way, considered exceptional or “freakish” due to their visual, mobility, or psychological differences, such bodies are also often queer–and sometimes the difference in the clinical or public imaginary is non-existent. To engage with the history of the medical record and disabled bodies through the lens of the queer archive is to explore the ways that many records of our queer ancestors only exist in their medical records: in the bloodwork done as they battled HIV/AIDS, in the strange ways that psychiatrists describe our queerness, and in the diagnoses of ‘transexualism’ or ‘gender identity disorder.’ These records are fraught. On the one hand, they provide concrete evidence of these queer ancestors, the ways that we have continued to persist despite the oppression of the medical industrial complex and rampant homophobia, transphobia, and these system’s underlying basis in white supremacy and ableism. On the other hand, they provide an incredibly narrow understanding of who these people were, with whole, expansive lives often reduced to blood tests, diagnostic labels, and an image or two of disparate body parts. How do we grapple with both the beauty of ongoing memory contained in these records, and their absolute inadequacy in archiving the legacy of human existence? Building from a queer, feminist, and disabled lens, as well as Springgay et al’s (2020) conceptualization of counter-archiving, this body of work therefore seeks to read disability into the queer archives, and read queerness into medical records. This is done through work that critically intervenes on the artist’s own medical records to note how they construct her own queer and disabled body and the limits or failures of these records. This is achieved through an experimental autobiographical documentary work entitled patient: megan ingram, that seeks to create a counterarchive of embodied experience. The work explores how the author’s own queer and disabled body has been archived, and what it means for experiences to remain, in some ways, unarchivable. It opens up medical records and imaging as information and materials not typically engaged with by the public, and encourages reading into these unconventional mediums to engage with deep listening (Rangan 2020) of the bodily archive. The work, while artistic in nature, and foregrounding the author’s lived experience, pulls from scholarship on archive, memory studies, queer theory, and critical disability studies to turn towards histories left unearthed by normative academic scholarship and to pull forward the affective textures of these stories. 

This paper will be presented at the following session: