Inside us all is a gross girl, in conversation with Ione Gamble
Gamble is the founder of cool girl zine, Polyester. What began as a university project is now thriving in its eighth year; Polyester gives space to new and established writers who comment on digital culture, art, feminism, fashion and whatever else rears its head in the modern zeitgeist.
Her debut essay collection blends those classic Polyester ideas with a much more personal narrative, that of her journey with chronic illness. Gamble was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease before her twentieth birthday, and the essays in part explore coming to terms with sickness and the implications of living as a young, sick woman, in an ableist society.
Far from a pity memoir, Gamble questions both medical institutions and young, sick people themselves in her essay The Tragic and Gorgeous History of a Sick Girl, which traces the lineage of sick women who’ve come before us, and those being immortalised online as we speak. She goes out on a limb to illustrate how some online spaces that congregate over sickness aren’t as helpful as we might think, questioning: who does a hospital selfie really serve?
“Ultimately I think when we post on social media - and this is subconscious in the majority of cases - we're catering to a non-sick and non-disabled gaze. The internet is as patriarchal as the rest of the world. We're using these tools to try and be understood, but it's more often like putting us in a glass house to be gazed at and pointed at. It makes non-sick people believe they understand us without having to interrogate any of their internalised ableism.”
Gamble is nothing if not nuanced. She is able to linger in the grey spaces of the conversations around illness and disability, without fear of offending people. She reflects on the process making some of her medical history public knowledge: “I understand the contradiction as someone who has written a book about being ill, but more often than not I prefer to try and plough my ideas or feelings into a more concrete, longer term project than a social media post which, to me, feels so fleeting and disposable”.
When asked; when is awareness no longer enough? She is certain there is an alternative path: “People can be aware of any marginalisation, yet still actively oppress a group or individual. We aren't going to solve oppression through choices made under the guise of awareness, and instead need to find ways to collectively dismantle the oppression we face. It's about pushing away from individual choice - i.e, things that make us feel good on a personal level, and instead fighting for the things that will liberate us all.”
Awareness falls neatly in sync with respectability politics. Charitable days and special disease months are limited to spreading knowledge only, without calling for radical changes to healthcare research or the treatment of people disabled by illness in everyday settings. Awareness does not ask anything of non disabled people, it assumes knowing is enough. Respectability politics appreciates that, it doesn’t dive into the grotesque, the unwieldy and the unpredictable parts of living with sickness. Instead, it asks every member of a marginalised group to get in line, to become poster people for their cause and thrives on hardline moralistic methods of thinking.
Gamble pushes against these schools of thought when she discusses her own realisations of the realities of Crohn’s: “[it] would find me throwing up outside bus stops in suburban English towns at ten o’clock in the morning. Not because I’d drunk too much, but because my insides were trying to kill me. Witnessing the very real rejection and horror from bystanders who refused to help me cemented the taboo nature of, and reaction to, marginalised people”. She learnt in real time that disabled bodies aren’t considered worth helping, something the global sick community has been forced to reckon with in the past two years.
The essays in Poor Little Sick Girls are not contained by illness alone. Rather, Gamble uses the lens of disability to observe the failures of multiple movements including body positivity, wellness and feminism. There are no neatly parcelled problems and solutions within Gamble’s work, there is instead a tangled set of thoughts within each essay, which communicate with one another, and with the reader, that she is still working out how illness connects to every other facet of living: “I write in the book about how marginalised people are encouraged to hone in on a singular part of their identity in order to capitalise on it, which is something I want to actively resist.”
Embracing what society has made us feel ashamed of: bodily functions, sleeping late and failing to climb the corporate ladder, forms part of Gamble’s arguments in multiple essays including A love letter to bed and It costs a lot to look this cheap. She questions the idea of a model minority in relation to her disabled identity that feels at odds with the way society talks about health, wellness and feminism:
“A lot of commercialised feminism and social politics in general has sanitised the experiences of marginalised people; illness included. I knew that when writing this book, it would be really tempting to gloss over the bad stuff or the symptoms I experience that are considered gross in society, and for good reason, they are! But just ignoring them doesn't make these facts of my existence go away, it just means more and more of us feel unable to speak about them. I know the books that have made me feel most seen are the ones that don't hold back, in which the author reveals everything about themselves or their character, and I wanted to do the same”.
It seems tricky to balance an authorial vulnerability that lets readers know they aren’t alone in the things they feel shame for, and still remaining staunchly of the belief that sharing without action won’t change a thing. However, Gamble has an answer for that too; “Illness is a part of my life, but it should be discussed within the context of all the other things I care about and visa versa. Often I feel like being chronically ill has allowed me to see the farce in things such as self care, wellness, or commercialised fourth wave feminism; but my takeaways from this things are hopefully applicable to a wide scope of people regardless of if they are ill or otherwise.”
This book is not a polemic, yet it demands change. It is not instructional nor prescriptive. Gamble isn’t attempting to inspire a revolution, but she can’t help but know there is something else better instore for us all: “I hope the future will be collaborative, intersectional, and see us working collectively under shared goals. In terms of where we go from here I do think its really important not to reject feminism outright because its current iteration is faulty or cringe, we need to work towards making it work for all of us; not just skinny, cis, able-bodied and upper middle class white women”.
