Functional neurological disorder (FND) is a common and debilitating disorder that is beset with multifaceted stigma. A critical sociolinguistic approach illuminates the powerful and unexpected ways that language maintains this marginalisation. Previously known as hysteria and conversion disorder, FND’s history is intricately connected to ideologies of gender and mental illness that are further complicated by the historical separation between diseases of the mind and body (medical dualism). Today, people affected by the disorder face this medical legacy in discourses of blame, suspicion, and dismissal, leading to the question: Is it real or is it all in my head?

This presentation explores how ‘the FND patient’ has been constructed as illegitimate over time. Through the lens of art and literature, I examine tropes of the malingerer, the dangerous hysteric, and the effeminate man as sites of ideological and epistemological embodiment and show how, far from being relics of the past, these understandings continue to pervade and naturalise stigmatising FND discourses. I conclude by discussing implications for revalorising subjectivity, and what this might mean for undoing the epistemic injustice that suffuses the FND experience.

Dr. Shelley Dawson is a critical sociolinguist whose research examines how language is used to reproduce and contest social inequalities. Working across interdisciplinary boundaries, and with a specialisation in gender, she uses qualitative ethnographic and discourse analytic methods to address questions of identity, marginalisation, and belonging in diverse research contexts. Her current research project investigates functional neurological disorder from a discourse perspective, with a view towards challenging the taken-for-granted ‘truths’ about the disorder and the people affected by it. She works at Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, in the School of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies.