Join us for a collective reading with the Feminist Duration Reading Group in the historic setting of Barts North Wing at St Bartholomew’s Hospital, one of London’s oldest sites of healthcare. Together we’ll read and listen within a space shaped by the histories of illness, medicine, and the body – a setting that brings together care, dependency, labour, and waiting.
The evening gathers texts that approach sickness, treatment, and care from personal experience. We begin with Derek Jarman’s Why Shutting Bart’s Would Be a Crime (1993), written from his hospital bed at St Bartholomew’s, in which he reflects on the daily life of the wards, the people around him, and the political threat facing the hospital itself. Johanna Hedva’s Letter to a Young Doctor (2021) follows, a missive that speaks across the clinic’s boundaries and the lines between patient and practitioner. Katherine Lord’s The Summer of Her Baldness (2004) continues this thread, offering an intimate and often wry account of undergoing breast cancer treatment and the shifting sense of self that comes with it. We close with Dodie Bellamy’s When the Sick Rule the World (2015), a sharp, humorous meditation on illness, vulnerability, and the messy, resistant lives of the unwell.
Reading aloud in this historical space, we’ll reflect on illness, mortality, and the fragility of the body as sites of artistic and linguistic production. Through these voices, we’ll consider how medical language often fails to account for the complexities of lived experience, and how creative work can hold what is frequently excluded: feeling, duration, transition, and the unknown.
This session is open to all, including Bart’s Hospital staff
There is no need to prepare or read in advance for this session; readings will be printed and circulated on email after RSVP
About the Feminist Duration Reading Group
The Feminist Duration Reading Group (FDRG) has developed a practice of reading out loud together, one paragraph at a time, to create a sense of connection and intimacy. We focus on under-recognised feminist texts, often from outside the Anglo-American canon, and nurture a form of reading that resists speed and extractivism. Often, we collaborate with artists and writers to host gatherings in experimental ways. No prior preparation is necessary, as xcerpts will be provided.
Find out more
https://www.feministduration.com/
Organised by Mariana Lemos and Katie Lock