Rutgers SC&I invited me to give a talk about what the process of composing my dissertation was like, to show students currently in the program what I did and how I did it, to demonstrate how the boundaries of the genre might be pushed.
I felt a little torn about this request: for one thing, the program did not make it easy for me to do this work; I relied on my advisor and committee for that. For another, I experienced some nasty microaggressions by a couple of faculty members who never acknowledged or apologized for it: one prone to ableist microaggressions because of my anomalously embodied thinking and learning processes and absences due to fibro flare-ups; another who sent belittling emails after an error I made in an online PR statement about her, even though I only wrote the first draft, no one more established in the field caught the error, and the department chair (who reviewed it last) owned up to it being his error, not mine. Even knowing all that, she still lashed out at me when I apologized via email. It had been years since I’d self-injured, but I was traveling and in a great deal of pain. I seriously considered it. I suppose she never thought of the incident again. Additionally, I’d warned students who entered after me about who they could trust and who they should approach with caution. After a couple of people attacked me for it, I stopped that, too.
Still, I did want to share how I managed to pull off what I did, because it was the first digital dissertation defended at SC&I, and I didn’t want anyone else to go through that. In the end, I’m glad I did it—the other people on the colloquium panel and I meshed in interesting ways, and unexpectedly, someone who came at me while I was still in the program emailed me to take accountability and apologize. I didn’t feel obligated to reply, but I did appreciate the gesture.
Access copy of my talk below.
ஐயோ ஏலாது (aiyo, eylaathu): Composing with chronic pain & fatigue when you just #$%ing can’t
Vyshali Manivannan, Pace University – Pleasantville
Ph.D. Colloquium, Rutgers University School of Communication & Information, New Brunswick, NJ
March 6, 2024
This talk, “ஐயோ ஏலாது (aiyo, eylaathu): Composing with chronic pain and fatigue when you just #$%ing can’t,” contains descriptions and depictions of academic ableism; cognitive impairment; genocide; medical procedures; pain; profanity; racism; sexism; and capitalist, colonialist, material, and symbolic violence. Please engage as you are able.
When you just fucking can’t, the only way to begin writing is to accept that what wants to emerge, should.
To the tune of Tim Carleton’s “Opus No. 1,” Cisco’s default hold music, this interactive patient intake form with form fields asks: “How has the above impacted your ability to: Read? Think? Write? Participate in intellectual dialogue? Belong? Pass as optimally healthy?”
This visual novel screenshot portrays a gray-haired woman in a buttoned-up cream cardigan and tan blouse with a bored, stern expression, in an office with a blue velvet armchair and a vase of dried pampas grass behind her. A yellow text box at the bottom reads: “Dr. Hunt interlaces her fingers together and steeples them under her chin. The gesture feels vaguely ominous.”
The text translation game pictured here reads, “Intake. Date of Service: 9/18/2014, 5:05pm. Filed: 5:30pm. Signed: MTJ, PA. Triage Chief Complaint: Patient presents with: Abdominal pain x 3 weeks, PID confirmed by CT scan today, sent to ER for treatment”; using a word-on-word mechanic, the “Translate” command transforms into “Really?” when highlighting the word “confirmed,” which is replaced with “questionable given that nothing conclusive could be seen.”
“The Defense Rests,” a 16-bit game I updated after depositing my dissertation, depicts a room lined with books and speech bubbles, with five people at a rectangular table in the center of the room and a cat in the upper right corner. The exit is blocked by a book. String and woodwind instruments crescendo sharply into four descending violin notes that alternate between major and minor key. The player picks up a cup, and the following message appears: “You sit down with the hot cup of black tea you carried from your office to this conference room. Despite the smart whiteboard, computer podium, mounted flatscreen monitor, and mahogany conference table, its brick walls and fireplace remind you of an outdoor lodge. You attended classes in this room while titrating to an effective dose of Lyrica. You couldn’t keep anything down. You’d bring a cup of tea, like this one, to help you stay awake and put something in your stomach. In this room today, you face a cross-examination disguised as a degree requirement: the defense of your qualifying exams, or proposal, or dissertation. You’re never fully prepared for anything because of the contingencies of fibromyalgia. You’re as ready as you’ll ever be.”
Frankly, I’m barely ready to give this talk.
Hello, I’m Vyshali Manivannan, and I’m an Eelam Tamil American creative-critical scholar with multiple chronic illnesses—starring fibromyalgia and myalgic encephalomyelitis, or chronic pain and fatigue. I was diagnosed well before I joined the program to study trolling in 2011, but I didn’t anticipate how chronic illness would complicate my doctoral work. When I became disabled during my Fiction M.F.A. program, I was unquestioningly accommodated—even without disability documentation. Multiple absences. Last-minute extensions. Half-finished, code-meshed, cross-genre drafts that deviated from my degree program, the only writing I could make myself produce between pain, fatigue, clinics, commutes, teaching. These submissions were not just tolerated but accepted as legitimate evidence of progress towards my M.F.A.
Ph.D. programs don’t typically make allowances for drafts like this, but for my fibromyalgic bodymind, it’s easier to write affectively and evocatively through embodied, multisensory, multimodal composition—to “stage” my arguments—than it is to expend energy I don’t have to “translate” my work into an academic register, sanitizing it of corporeal presence, culture, and capacity. Still, leaning hard on my model minority status, I initially managed to produce conventional academic scholarship with minimal self-harm and wore the resulting surfeit of pain and fatigue like a badge of honor. I spent countless hours at physical therapy, on massage tables like the one pictured here. I wasn’t happy. Then in 2014, my appendix ruptured, bled unchecked for roughly nine months, and culminated in an emergency appendectomy that initially no one wanted to give me. A queer South Asian fibromyalgic woman, I wasn’t legible in the clinic as a patient approaching sepsis. After that, academic writing became prohibitively difficult. I felt exposed as a South Asian chronically ill scholar, and my coursework hadn’t exposed me to the kinds of solutions I needed to feel legible and legitimate as such in academia, either.
I implicitly learned, and was explicitly taught, that “good” graduate students memorized conference papers instead of reading them, could write “theoretically rigorous” articles while commuting and working and caregiving and living off ramen and coffee and four hours of sleep. Fake it ’til you make it, as the saying goes, but because traditional academic composition took me days to do and laid me out for weeks, I sought ways to tactically exploit the system, sticking to professors whose courses or attitudes hinted at a nonjudgmental openness to unconventional approaches to writing.
Thus, a first step: When I saw my Media Criticism reading list included science fiction, I got permission to incorporate and emulate one of our assigned readings, Cybertext, in my final paper. I pretended this textually destabilizing composition mode was a way of enacting the theory instead of disclosing its connection to how disabled I really am (which this professor had already witnessed when I rolled into class one day with slow thoughts and speech and a floppy head after an opiate injection at the ER.) The subheadings and a few footnotes quoted Julio Cortazar’s Hopscotch, a cybertext that influenced my M.F.A. writing, was referenced in Cybertext, and informed the structure and navigational pathways in my dissertation. This subheading, “In that crazy hopscotch…I recognized myself, and called myself by name,” footnotes to a citation, and just below, “Who are we? What is our purpose? Where do our boundaries begin and end? What did we emerge from; what do we want to become?” It found a home that year in enculturation, and I realized writing like this was legitimate outside the doctoral program.
As a genre and artifact, the dissertation is meant to communicate a professional identity to the field and to potential employers, and this is part of what is needed to push a dissertation project through. Riffing on a Diane Williams title, This is About the Body, the Mind, the Clinic, the Academy, Time, and Pain was the born-digital cybertext I ultimately proposed, composed, defended, and deposited between 2015 and 2022.
Practically speaking, I could only do this because I was 1) able to assemble a committee receptive to dissertations that depart from the conventions of a single-authored scholarly monograph, and sympathetic to the time and labor it takes to complete one; and 2) attend to writing as the optimal method of and for my research and rationalize my mediums and modes of writing as rigorous for my study.
For my committee, I chose the professors who were most responsive to, compassionate, and understanding of my chronic illness and modes of writing, who preemptively accommodated me, and who had faith in my seemingly scattered approaches. For my outside member, I strategically chose someone who had also written a creative-critical dissertation. To make sure these composition modes would be approved, I piloted early pieces for my advisor at conferences geared to “interstitial” or “innovative” work, like this creative-critical performance that used augmented reality to reveal a photograph of the body diagram tattoo on my back with the psoas painted in my blood, and this non-replicable performance, where I wore a shawl stitched of notecards and randomly selected, cut, and read each fragment.
Given that my dissertation’s subject was the embodied experience of Eelam Tamil American chronic pain and fatigue— of intermittently “passing” as nondisabled, of being denied expertise and authority as a patient, of struggling with the inherently abusive nature of doctoral programs—I had a ready justification for a medium and mode of writing that emulated the experience of a vicariously traumatized, anomalous bodymind and emphasized its biocultural dimensions. I found theoretical justification in my positionality, cultural studies, and classical South Asian aesthetics. Given I was in media studies, using the affordances of digital media to enact my arguments seemed appropriate, obviously unified my mode of writing with my mode of research, and eased the friction I usually experienced around academic writing. Finally, being disabled meant I could frame this writing method and medium—and the extra time I needed—as accommodation.
Building on the legitimacy of those papers and creative-critical performance pieces, my proposal tentatively outlined a text-only experimental literature project, describing textual destabilization and paper-based gamification in an Artist Statement, here reading, “I have to learn alone / to turn my body without force / in the deep element” from Adrienne Rich’s “Diving into the Wreck” and under Methodology: “Let me deconstruct.”
This proposal included first drafts of many of the pieces and formats that were realized digitally in the dissertation I defended, including this Artist Statement, shown here as a webpage with a dead link and tabbed sections in a yellow container set against an image of my optic nerve.
I passed my defense, but I wasn’t brave enough to fully commit to a born-digital project until it became a matter of necessity, when I just couldn’t do it anymore. I wrestled with composing in a text-only mode until the pain reached a tipping point, and then I understood: The only way I was going to finish was if I stopped allowing the form and content of my dissertation to be dictated by what the institution wanted me to do, and instead did what I was able to do, in whatever form it emerged.
So I did. I made something hyperlinked, nonlinear, perseverative, forgetful, corporeal, pattern matching, subtle and playful in contrast to the “state then elaborate” nature of academic writing. I used photographs, audio, video, comic sketches, drawings, and games in a code-meshed, interactive, multimodal, process-focused dissertation that—by being something other than the typical proto-book manuscript—offered a theatrical experience of my research while illuminating the hardships faced by disabled “model minority” doctoral students who suppress traumas and ways of knowledge-making to “pass.”
Like Hopscotch, the project can be read sequentially, omitting creative and dynamic content; non-sequentially; or in a randomized order. Each piece of the project can also stand alone. None of it was composed outside of a code editor. I used Bootstrap 5 and Javascript to create the modified patient intake form, as well as interruptive popup alerts, loading spinners that timeout to the title page, active and disabled links, image galleries. I used platforms like Scalar to create a photo essay with a non-hierarchical visual archive, like these thumbnail images of clothing compiled into different wardrobe categories, including “Pain Wardrobe,” “Interview Closet,” and “Patient Closet”; as well as Timeline.js to create narrative timelines.
For manageable game design, I used platforms like Texture Writer, as seen here, for that word-on-word text-translation game; Bitsy HD for 16-bit games that served as 404 pages; and Ren’Py and Mannequin for a prototype of that visual novel. I was already familiar with many of these tools from my own creative work, teaching, and the digital rhetoric community, so I was comfortable composing in, testing, and debugging these modes. Since my files were so large, I uploaded drafts for review via a cloud storage drive shared with my advisor. I finished my dissertation in 2022, and to graduate, I had to submit two copies: the authentic born-digital version that I defended in front of my committee and described in my public presentation; and a “shadow” copy, a PDF formatted according to university specifications. It took me a June full of 10-hour workdays to adapt as much as I could to a text-only format, organize it into linear chapters, and format footnotes, images, captions, line spacing, and fonts used for code-meshing. Then I spent until October—when I officially deposited—revising my digital dissertation, so that I had a version I could submit for awards and showcase in talks, which is the version I’m showing you today.
My digital dissertation was 255,146 words and included an estimated five-and-a-half hours of audio, video, and gameplay. I spent two years thinking, reading, planning, and another three coding, composing, debugging, beta-testing, implementing feedback, and editing. I took a much more time-intensive and laborious route, but it was work that was spiritually revitalizing to me.
Importantly, I got impossibly lucky. With my advisor, who worked with me through treatment changes, medication titration and withdrawal, two surgeries, and the uncharted territory of each draft. With my committee members, who signed off on extensions and let me write and design what I needed to at my own pace. With the fact that I had intuitively begun to lay this groundwork for myself as early as my first year of coursework. With the fact that I knew rhetoricians and digital humanities scholars who had crafted digital scholarship and alternative dissertations.
In retrospect, I was recruited for my interdisciplinary potential before there were real programmatic and institutional pathways to interdisciplinarity. If you want to do this work, ask yourself: Who supports me? Who believes in my vision? Who will be flexible with deadlines, word counts, formats (or lack thereof) of each submission? Who will read and respond to my work like a reader instead of a critic or Reviewer #2? What about my research and myself makes a creative-critical disposition essential? Why am I writing this particular creative-critical dissertation in the first place?
I purposely began this talk without a fully identifiable through-line to emulate the circuitous creature I ended up making, and this creature is so dear to me, I’m developing it further into the non-traditional monograph shown here. If the process isn’t revitalizing to you, it isn’t worth doing. But if you too are one of the ghosts harmed by academia’s wards, then you may find this work is worth doing, too.
Thank you.
