Embodying Health Identities

How do we know we are ill? Are health, illness and disability universal categories? How Important is the body in our understanding of health? These crucial questions are just some of the issues tackled in this comprehensive and insightful new book.

ALLISON JAMES is Professor of Sociology at the University of Sheffield. She is also Director of the Centre for the Social Study of Childhood and has helped pioneer the theoretical and methodological approaches to research with children which are central to the new childhood studies. She is an experienced and well-respected author who has published extensively in the field of Childhood Studies, as well as in medical anthropology and the life course.

JENNY HOCKEY is Professor of Sociology at the University of Sheffield, UK. Her current teaching includes the following areas: death and dying; sociology of health, illness and identity; the life course; qualitative research methods.

Problematising Health, Illness and Identity	p. 1
In Sickness and in Health	p. 1
Who Says I am Ill? Illness as a Social Construction	p. 3
Health Identities and Illness Experiences	p. 7
Being and Bodies	p. 10
The Negotiated and Embodied Body	p. 13
Towards Embodiment: The Body, Health and Identity	p. 17
Theorising Health and Illness	p. 21
The Individual and Society	p. 22
The Individual in Society	p. 24
Theorising the Medical Encounter	p. 29
The Social Construction of Health and Illness	p. 31
The Social Construction of Health and Illness: The Feminist Contribution	p. 32
The Social Construction of Health and Illness: The Contribution of Foucault	p. 33
Agency, Health and Illness	p. 36
Structure, Agency and the Body	p. 37
Conclusion	p. 39
Towards Embodiment	p. 40
Models of the Body	p. 40
Why Embodiment?	p. 44
Social Constructionism, Medical Sociology and the Body	p. 46
Experiencing the Body	p. 48
The Lived Reality of the Body	p. 49
Real Lived Bodies?	p. 52
Towards a Theory of Embodiment	p. 54
The Phenomenon of the Lived Body	p. 56
Embodiment and Society	p. 58
Bodies and Risk	p. 60
Conclusion	p. 62
The Problem of Illness	p. 64
Defining Illness	p. 64
Who is Ill?	p. 67
Why Me?	p. 71
Staying Healthy?	p. 75
Illness as a Problem of Identity	p. 78
The Problem of Illness and the Problem of Identification	p. 80
Conclusion: The Problem of Embodiment in the Problem of Illness	p. 83
Representing the Body's Health and Identity	p. 85
Re-presenting Representations	p. 87
Representing the Hegemony of Bio-medicine	p. 91
Health 'Information'	p. 94
Encountering Representations of Health and Illness	p. 96
Authoritative Representations	p. 100
Self Presentation and Re-presentation	p. 105
Conclusion	p. 109
The Ritual Drama of Illness	p. 110
Illness as a Rite of Passage	p. 111
Illness as a Drama	p. 115
Embodiment within the Ritual Drama of Illness	p. 117
Health Transitions and Transformations	p. 121
The Drama Unfolds	p. 125
Illness Narratives	p. 127
Strategies of Narration	p. 129
Experiencing the Ritual Drama of Illness	p. 130
Conclusion	p. 132
A Medicalised Life Course?	p. 134
What is the Life Course?	p. 135
Constructing the Object Body across the Life Course	p. 137
Determining the Health of 'the Child' through the Body	p. 139
Old Bodies, Young Bodies	p. 141
The Medicalisation of the Child's Body	p. 144
Health and Ageing across the Life Course?	p. 146
Health Experiences across the Life Course	p. 148
Feeling and Being Old	p. 150
Being Sick as a Child	p. 152
Conclusion	p. 155
Negotiating the Body's Limits	p. 156
Technology in Practice	p. 157
The Medical Encounter Resituated	p. 159
Indeterminacy and Interpretation	p. 162
Bodies and Technology as Embodied Practice	p. 165
Individual Bodies, Commodified Bodies and Relational Bodies	p. 167
Health, Identity and New Reproductive Technologies	p. 169
The Global Politics of Technology	p. 172
Conclusion	p. 174
Conclusion	p. 175
Bibliography	p. 180
Index	p. 192
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

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Embodying Health Identities

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Author Biography

Table of Contents

Supplemental Materials