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ZHAO Yuxi, ZOU Jing
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DOI:10.17265/1539-8072/2026.04.002
China University of Geosciences, Wuhan, China
Joyce Carol Oates’s novel Butcher draws on real scandals in the history of 19th-century gynecological surgery to expose how a system of power, dressed in the language of medicine, systematically exploits the bodies of lower-class women. By mobilizing Michel Foucault’s critique of clinical power alongside Elaine Showalter’s feminist historiography, this essay first demonstrates how the protagonist Dr. Weir’s diagnostic discourse disguises patriarchal discipline as medical fact. It then investigates the double exploitation inflicted upon lower-class female bodies whose pain is systematically devalued or erased, before drawing on narrative theory to analyze how the oppressed protagonist, Brigit, achieves narrative reclamation. By redrawing, from a contemporary perspective, the suffering that women have historically endured in the name of illness, the novel exposes a mechanism of social oppression disguised as medicine and builds a narrative structure that mirrors this system of power at every turn. In doing so, Oates produces a distinctive work of illness writing whose implications remain deeply relevant today.
Joyce Carol Oates, Butcher, illness writing, medical discourse, bodily pain, narrative reclamation
ZHAO Yuxi & ZOU Jing. Diagnostic Hegemony, Bodily Pain, and Narrative Reclamation: Illness Writing in Joyce Carol Oates’s Butcher. Sino-US English Teaching, July-Aug. 2026, Vol. 23, No. 7-8, 152-160 doi:10.17265/1539-8072/2026.04.002
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