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Paper short abstract

Functional disorders produce disabling, fluctuating symptoms without clear pathology, challenging biomedical and semiotic models of causality. Drawing on linguistic anthropology, affect theory, and disability studies, this paper shows how symptoms reconfigure agency, temporality, and credibility.

Paper long abstract

Functional disorders (f.ex., fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome, environmental sensitivities) challenge biomedical and anthropological analysis in producing debilitating, fluctuating symptoms without identifiable pathology but also in defying the semiotic conventions through which medicine links symptoms to causes. Drawing on linguistic anthropology, affect theory, and disability studies, this paper develops animated illness as a framework for understanding how these conditions reconfigure bodily agency and vitality. I argue that functional symptoms enact a form of animacy in which the body becomes a volatile co-agent – reactive, anticipatory, and affectively porous – that destabilizes cultural hierarchies of legibility and agency. This instability is temporal as well as phenomenological, as symptoms shift across hours or days, prompting sufferers to map fluctuations against stress, relational tensions, and everyday sensory exposures. Such temporal attunement informs practices of interpretation and recovery, complicating linear models of illness progression. By approaching symptoms as figurations that emerge from dynamic entanglements of physiology, environment, and semiotic ideology, the paper shows how functional disorders unsettle the boundary between somatic and psychological, reconfigure biomedical semiotics, and expose the political stakes of who is recognized as agentive, credible, and ill.