Paper short abstract:

This paper contemplates post-humanist frameworks in theorizing the environmental illness Electro Hyper-Sensitivity (EHS). EHS is explored as an embodied phenomenological encounter with the more-than human-world, where non-human agencies present both source of illness and informal practices of care.

Paper long abstract:

This paper revolves around the contested environmental illness Electro Hyper-Sensitivity (EHS), a condition where sufferer's wellbeing become intricately tied to invisible networks of electromagnetic fields. Interdependence with the more-than-human world is an essential thematic in theorizing EHS as porous bodies entangle with the more-than-human environment. Fieldwork undertaken in the Marvão region of Portugal surrounding four people with EHS - one of them the author's mother - leads to reflection on how the natural environment emerges as a vital source of care for EHS sufferers in the absence of more institutionalized medical treatment.

The legitimization of the illness experience (and any potential political mobilization) of EHS sufferers hinges on recognizing the more-than-human environment as an affective and moral realm in new and critical ways. EHS can thereby be positioned as a provocation to ideologies of self-containment and objectivist distrust of embodied, phenomenological knowledge which suffuse medicine and modernist notions of environment. I find that EHS must be approached as a phenomenological embodied experience, where embodiment is a paradigm of knowing that unsettles ontologies of bounded bodies. This approach suggests that environmental illness experiences urge ontological scopes where multiple non-human agencies are at play, and collectivity is instrumental in care. The invocation of non-human agencies in practices of care used by EHS sufferers urges contemplation on ties between medical anthropology and post-human frameworks, and speculative imaginings of the intersections of medicine, care ethics, and environmental politics.