The Embodied Female Subject: The Hand-Brain, Multiple Identities, and the Beast in Her: “The Girl at the Mental Stop I, II”

Author : LAURA TORRES CARO

Abstract : This case study examines the embodied female subject through a phenomenological approach to illness, based on a critical analysis of two narratives by a female author-patient, The Girl at the mental stop I, II (Torres- Caro, 2025, 2026). It explores how women's neurological illness is often socially misunderstood and reduced to psychological explanations. In response, these narratives show how storytelling enables the reconstruction of an embodied identity. Through She-Storytelling Identity, literature becomes a space where the fragmented self is reconfigured beyond medical and social misrecognition. Building on this framework, it is used a qualitative literature comparative methodology to examine “the hand” as a narrative and phenomenological marker of neurological illness. In both narratives compared with Brain on Fire, (Cahalan, 2012), the first neurological sensations are described through embodied metaphors—bedbugs in Cahalan's account and ants in Torres-Caro, which first occurred in 2018—before being recognised. This narrative pattern exposes the gendered dynamics of diagnostic naming. The analysis is structured around the concept of the "other her": the first rupture, represented by the protagonist's coma in 2006, self- consciousness; the second, epilepsy, 2023, repeatedly destabilizes bodily agency through behavioural, emotional and absence seizures changes in self-perception. These experiences generate a process of She-Storytelling Identity, through which fragmented feminine selves are reconstructed across multiple subject positions, including patient, victim, and the perceived "Beast in her". This further highlights how the female body becomes a contested site where medical discourse, and epistemic recognition converge, revealing the complexity of women´ lived experience of illness.

Keywords : She- storytelling, identity, hand- brain, embodied female body, illness narratives.

Conference Name : International Conference on Narrative, Storytelling, and Discourse (ICNSTD - 26)

Conference Place : New York, USA

Conference Date : 28th Sep 2026