Suffering in Cyberspace: Biopolitics, Habitus and ME/CFS (Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome)

This thesis investigates how people with Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (ME/CFS) use digital environments to communicate suffering, build community, and challenge the institutional disbelief that surrounds their illness. Drawing on digital ethnography, illness journals, and qualitative interviews, it explores how online interaction becomes a site of knowledge production, care, and political action. The study introduces the concept of suffering-capital to describe how the emotional and communicative labour of illness generates value and legitimacy within moral and bureaucratic economies. It develops the idea of a political–biosocial habitus, drawing on and reworking Bourdieusian conceptions of habitus and capital, showing how digital illness publics consciously cultivate shared dispositions and forms of expertise that reconfigure the field of health knowledge. Together, these frameworks illuminate how power, visibility, and care are negotiated through digital practice. Empirically, the research traces how people with ME/CFS transform isolation into collective infrastructure through platforms such as MEpedia, online benefits forums, and campaigns like Millions Missing. Within these spaces, participants collaboratively curate and test treatment protocols, translating biomedical research into practical guidance and shared care strategies. The analysis reveals how welfare bureaucracy converts impairment into administrative labour, and how patients counter this through acts of solidarity, creativity, and mutual expertise. The thesis extends disability theory by integrating embodied fluctuation and relational ethics into the social model, culminating in a frailty-informed relational model of care. This model reframes frailty as an inclusive, co-produced framework for chronic illness policy and practice. Overall, the study contributes to disability studies, digital sociology, and medical humanities by demonstrating how suffering, when collectively mediated, becomes a source of resistance, knowledge, and social transformation.