ILLNESS AS METAPHOR AND THE CRISIS OF GENDER: THE LIVED LEGACIES OF SUSAN SONTAG IN A WORLD OF CONTAGION AND COLLAPSE
ILLNESS AS METAPHOR AND THE CRISIS OF GENDER: THE LIVED LEGACIES OF SUSAN SONTAG IN A WORLD OF CONTAGION AND COLLAPSE

Summary/Abstract: This paper revisits Susan Sontag’s work, “Illness as Metaphor; and, AIDS and Its Metaphors” (1990), to examine how disease metaphors intersect with gendered narratives in the context of the increasing global climate crisis and health crises. Sontag’s criticism of disease as a socially constructed metaphor serves to ground an inquiry into how framings around pandemics often reproduce gendered and racialised inequity. It is essential to clarify precisely how women are constituted as the primary caregivers, healers, and victims within these crises, thereby further solidifying existing power structures. Based on Sontag’s work, this analysis will examine the feminisation of care labour, the symbolic contagion of marginalised bodies, and the erasure of women’s experiences within dominant crisis narratives.The paper goes deeper into this analysis using Albert Camus’s “The Plague”, Katherine Anne Porter’s “Pale Horse, Pale Rider”, and Orhan Pamuk’s “Nights of Plague”. Camus provides an allegorical description of a quarantined town, facilitating a deeper understanding of the universality of suffering and the ethical dilemmas that arise in such collective crises. Nevertheless, the male-dominated narrative gaze diminishes the roles of women, reinforcing social patterns. Porter’s novella, set during the 1918 influenza pandemic, poignantly details illness’s personal and social costs, putting at its core the experiences of a female protagonist struggling with love, loss, and survival in the most devastating epidemic ever. Pamuk’s “Nights of Plague” further expands on this, as sociopolitical and cultural dimensions converge with a fictional plague outbreak, paying special attention to the crises women face when confronted with patriarchy in crisis.These literary examples highlight feminist interventions that disrupt dominant crisis imaginaries by reframing care and interdependence as radical acts of resistance. It challenges the language of extra-activism, scarcity, and survivalism embedded in the structures and mindsets formed within capitalist modes of subsistence, yet traces ways in which feminist literature creates new paradigms of coexistence and resilience. This article draws on theoretical insights from Susan Sontag to put these texts to work, highlighting the transformative possibilities of feminist storytelling in tearing apart crisis-ridden rhetorics and evoking new visions of equal futures in the face of ecological and social collapse.

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