Disorder - both in narrative and of narrative - is omni-present today, and trauma and syndromes proliferate: Disorders and their names are more familiar to us than ever before, and the terminology of trauma and symptomology no longer belongs to a narrow professional (medical or therapeutic) register. We are disorder-, syndrome- and trauma-aware like never before. This greater awareness and label dissemination indicates that a popularisation of trauma terminology has taken place, and that these labels have entered a wider cultural field. The reason for this could be that we now like to mirror ourselves in the various offerings of available trauma images, trying on trauma for size. This is also reflected in the increasing number of popular culture treatments in various media of psychological disabilities, whether in books, TV or films.

[Click here to view a collection of popular culture references to Tourette]

The late 1990s and early 2000s have especially brought us numerous portraits of Tourette’s sufferers. A search on Amazon.com reveals hundreds of references to books with the word Tourette in them, many of them offering personal testimonies about living and coping with the syndrome. This number alone seems to suggest, not only that the syndrome is widely known and discussed in the general public, but also that a certain voyeuristic interest has developed, since it is hardly possible that all these books are only read by relatives of Tourette’s patients or the patients themselves.
What interests us particularly here, though, is the growing number of American fictional treatments of Tourette’s. At least 5 recent titles exist, and I list the titles and years of publication as evidence of the period in which the dissemination of Tourette-awareness has reached the field of popular fiction: Peter Lefcourt The Woody (1998), Daniel Hecht Skull Session (1998), Gwyn Hyman Rubio Icy Sparks (1998), Jonathan Lethem Motherless Brooklyn (1999), Marcia Byalick Quit It  (2002). Of the five titles I have mentioned here, one is a detective novel, one a thriller, one a political satire, and the two female-authored books are tales of girls growing up in rural America. Tourette’s syndrome thus seems to have wandered effortlessly into the pop cultural realm, and to be particularly effective for light entertainment purposes. The question this paper hopes to address in depth remains: why Tourette's, and why now?

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