Ann Miles

Of butterflies and wolves: enacting lupus transformations on the Internet.

This article explores how women with lupus use the Internet to construct discourses about illness and transformation. The textual and symbolic content of Internet websites and message boards offers unique perspectives on the relationship between embodied experience and textual construction, and demonstrates the ways in which women use their participation on the Internet to communicate about themselves. Using common search engines, an array of lupus websites were identified, including message boards and personal pages, and the textual and symbolic content was analysed for reoccurring themes. Three distinct types of transformational discourses were identified: adjustment narratives; expert narratives; and transformations of personhood. These transformations are achieved and given renewed value through online participation. The article suggests that online communication provides a unique opportunity to understand embodiment but also that transformational discourses may ultimately be limiting.

Radio and the commodification of natural medicine in Ecuador

This paper explores the discourse that is being created around medical commodities in one Ecuadorian city in an effort to understand how desire for new medical products is generated and sustained. Commercial natural medicine, which includes vitamins, herbal remedies and tonics is a relatively new addition to the medical marketplace in Ecuador, yet the popularity of these products seems to be growing rapidly. Much of the success of natural medicines is due to promotional campaigns, most notably radio programs, that emphasize and manipulate, important cultural themes about the body, identity, morality and social success. Although on the surface natural medicine seems to be creating a radically new discourse about the body and illness causation, that discourse ultimately serves only to reinforce the unequal social relations associated with capitalist marketplaces.

Emerging Chronic Illness: Women and Lupus in Ecuador

This article reports on an ethnographic investigation of the experiences of urban Ecuadorian women suffering from the chronic illness, lupus. Chronic illness is “emerging” in Ecuador, and cultural models and the health care delivery system are struggling to adapt to the increasing burdens brought by life-long illness. Based on extensive qualitative interviewing of lupus patients and doctors and participant observation, we identify three areas of concern including a weak health infrastructure and unequal access to care, gender models that increase the emotional burdens, and cultural understandings about illness and morality that add to social stress.