CHHS Seminar: Andrew Blades

Andrew Blades is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Bristol. His work sits broadly within the medical humanities; he has worked extensively on the literature and culture of the HIV/AIDS pandemic and more recently has been researching thecultural implications of hoarding. He is the author of Twentieth-century American Literature (Longman, 2011) and co-editor of Poetry and the Dictionary (LUP, 2020). He also sits on the advisory group for Bristol's Centre for Health, Humanities and Science.

What Shall We Do with the Onion Baker?: Thoughts on Hoarding

Hoarding has often been a subject of voyeuristic curiosity, even as it resists or repels the public eye. Through the twenty-first century, it has been increasingly medicalised; from 2013 onwards, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders has listed it as a syndrome in its own right, as psychiatrists have sought to distinguish it from obsessive-compulsive disorder. Cultural representations of hoarding, however, suggest a complicated network of factors influencing a person's compulsion to amass and retain material possessions in excess of their capacity to store them. Through a loosely autoethnographic approach, this talk offers some thoughts on what hoarding might tell us about consumption and waste, grief and loss. What shall we do with hoarding? What might it in turn do to our understanding of what constitutes an expected or legitimate relationship between a person and their immediate environment?