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Book review of Women, Body, Illness: Space and Identity in the Everyday Lives of Women with Chronic Illness

For most women, juggling the demands of family, work and home is a difficult task. For the women whose accounts form the basis of this book, the stresses of everyday life are further complicated by chronic illness. Using material from 49 in-depth interviews with Canadian women diagnosed with Myalgic Encephalo myelitis or Rheumatoid Arthritis, Moss and Dyck set out a framework for a ‘radical body politics’ (p. 9) in which the discursive, material and spatial aspects of living with chronic illness are explored and dualisms such as discourse/materiality are challenged. Throughout the book they seek to destabilize hegemonic dualisms such as health/illness, normal/deviant, and to ‘trouble’ the experience of living with chronic illness, prompting new perceptions of the chronically ill body. Moss and Dyck’s ‘radical body politics’ focuses on the body, or bodies, as ‘discursive formations and material entities’ (p. 10), which experience both social and physical space, within the context of power and identity’ (p. 10). As feminist geographers space, is a crucial concept in their understanding of the body and chronic illness, and plays a significant part in their theoretical exposition (Chapter 3). The prologue introduces the aptly named Patience, a fictional character, through whose ‘voice’ the embodied experience of living with chronic illness is revealed. Patience continues to inform throughout the book, and her ‘words’ are used at the beginning of the four empirical chapters. Although Patience’s experiences are based on fact, I wonder why she was created, as the extracts used from the interviews throughout the book are detailed and rich, and I would have preferred to hear the voices of the women themselves. In Chapter 1, Moss and Dyck set out their theory for a ‘radical body politics’. In Chapter 2 they critique ‘theories of the body’. They focus mainly on the work of Shilling, Grosz, and Williams and Bendelow, and their reading of this material leads them to ‘conceive the relationship between illness and health for women with chronic illness as an ‘in between’ identity’ (p. 34). This ‘in between’ or liminal status of women with chronic illness is well conveyed throughout the book, as is the way in which the women’s lives expand and contract with the vagaries of their bodies. Chapter 3 explores the relationship between chronic illness and space, and in Chapter 4 the conceptual framework through which they interpret women’s experiences is further delineated. Here also, preceding their methodological discussion in Chapter 5, they provide a critique ofHowson’s chapter inThe body and everyday life (1998) on women’s experiences of cervical screening in which the term embodied obligation is developed to explore cervical screening as a state-sponsored