Susan E. Bell

Changing ideas: the medicalization of menopause.

This paper examines the intellectual roots of the medicalization of menopause in the 1930s and 1940s. An analysis of published papers written by prominent American medical specialists reveals three models that were developed to understand menopause--biological, psychological and environmental--and shows how each contributed to its medicalization. This transformation was made possible by the paradigm of sex endocrinology and the availability of a new drug (DES), which was produced in 1938. Exploring the medicalization of menopause illuminates some of the special and complicated ways that womens experiences are vulnerable to medical control.

Photo Images: Jo Spence’s Narratives of Living with Illness

Sociological approaches to understanding narratives of illness usually begin with oral or textual discourse. This article extends the study of illness narratives beyond oral and textual accounts to photographs. It takes the position that attempts to distinguish clearly images and words, or verbal and visual narratives, are utopian projects. It examines three photographs taken by British feminist Jo Spence (1934–92) to document her experiences of breast cancer from the time of her diagnosis in 1982 until the time of her death in 1992. After defining ‘narrative’ and ‘photography’ and explaining how some photographs are narratives, the article considers how Spence’s photographs are narratives of living with cancer that incorporate visual and textual elements. It concludes by suggesting how and why extending the study of illness narratives beyond oral and textual accounts can enlarge and enrich social science understandings of people’s experiences of illness.

Intensive Performances of Mothering: a Sociological Perspective

This article explores multiple identities and meanings of mothering by interpreting two narrative performances of mothering in the early 1970s. One performance is from a work of art by feminist Mary Kelly, Post-Partum Document (1983), the other from a research interview conducted in the early 1980s with a DES daughter. Both women perform versions of intensive mothering. The essay shows that moving between narratives produced in a research interview and a work of art enlarges the field of narrative analysis and fills in details about how intensive mothering is a historically specific and embodied practice.

Translating science to the people: Updating the new our bodies, ourselves

Abstract This paper asks how to recognize and benefit from “situated knowledges.” How can some of the split, contradictory, and unequal knowledge positions become coordinated and mutually beneficial? To do this, I consider how to provide women with the ability to evaluate and adopt birth control technology without at the same time adopting and reproducing the cultural messages and social arrangements embedded in it. I draw examples from the birth control chapter of the 1984 and 1992 editions of The New Our Bodies, Ourselves . First, I consider feminist critiques of the language of sex and reproduction. Their critiques underlie the transformed images about the menstrual cycle and contraception in the update of “Birth Control.” Second, I review how medical scientists have redefined “efficacy” and explore the meaning of these changes for a handbook written for women who are making decisions about birth control. Finally, I use these two examples to consider the wider implications of translating science to the people and of coordinating and benefiting from situated knowledges.

Premenstrual Syndrome and the Medicalization of Menopause: A Sociological Perspective

More than 50 years ago. Robert T. Frank (1931: 1053–1054). an eminent medical scientist, gave the name of Premenstrual Tension to the “minor disturbances,” including “increased fatigability, irritability, lack of concentration and attacks of pain,” as well as to the “indescribable tension” experienced by some women premenstrually. These physical disturbances, he believed, led to disruptions in the social fabric; he cited instances of patients’ complaints of interference in their family lives and in their employment. Implicit in this formulation of the problem was a belief that relief of women’s physical distress would lead to social order, and that the proper role of medicine was to intervene. These assumptions about the connection between physical and social disorder and about the role of medicine in treating these disorders are mirrored by many others in medical publications since the 1950’s (Morton, 1953a; Reid & Yen, 1981).

Another way of knowing: Art, disease and illness experience

Representations of illness stand at the intersection of art, medicine and social action. As stories and as pictures, artworks give shape and form to illness experience, thereby bringing it into existence by performing it. Artworks also tell about illness experience and are used as claims to social justice. Ill people have been open in their acknowledgement that such images are made not only as strategies for making meaning and reaching out to others similarly situated, but also in anger and indignation. In that sense, these representations can be considered as ideological, and therefore as legitimate objects for sociological as well as aesthetic study. This view sees artworks as producing social life and shaping cultural movements as well as reflecting individual motives and desires. This Special Issue of health brings together a selection of articles that examines the place of artworks in shaping the social meaning of illness. Among the questions these articles address are: Who makes art about illness and for whom? What are the different media and genres of works and how do these provide understandings of illness and its treatment? How can works of art explore connections between illness and health, life and death? What might these works tell us about the changing relationship of medicine to society and about images of care? How might such works mediate the relationship of patients to medical professionals? And finally, in relation to the research context, how do artworks open a discursive space in which scholars can address questions from their various disciplinary perspectives? The work published in this issue arose out of our joint interest in the place of art in health, more specifically in relation to the expression and communication of serious disease (Bell, 2002, 2009, 2010; Radley, 1999, 2002, 2009; Radley and Bell, 2007). This interest gave rise to an AHRC funded series of workshops held at Loughborough University, UK in the summer and fall of 2008, attended by artists, social scientists and medical practitioners, some of whom contribute to this journal issue. The articles that follow adopt a variety of styles and cover a range of content, as might be expected from the different perspectives from which the authors write. Linking the articles are a number of specific issues concerning the place of art in living with illness; the relationship of patients to medicine, its spaces and practices; to questions of narrative and the relationship of images to text; to questions of spectacle and what might be made properly visible.

Looking at bodies: Insights and inquiries about DES-related cancer

This paper considers the symbolic and material meanings about gender and sexuality surrounding womens bodies. To do so, it interprets three vignettes from an ongoing study of the experiences of women who have had vaginal and cervical cancer, as a result of their prenatal exposure to DES (diethylstilbestrol), a synthetic estrogen prescribed to pregnant women to prevent miscarriage. Each vignette represents a different social and political context. The paper demonstrates how the different contexts construct meaning, and explores the implications of this for understanding the ambivalent, complicated, shifting, and contested meanings of womens bodies.

Letters of recommendation in academe: Do women and men write in different languages?

The present study analyzes seventy-eight letters of recommendation sent to a department of sociology and anthropology for six replacement and two tenure-track positions. The sample consists of fifteen pairs of letters written for women and twenty-four pairs written for men. Each pair of letters includes one written by a woman and one written by a man for the same candidate. Men and women wrote letters differently, but their letters also varied by the gender of the applicant. The concept of tokenism, Gilligan’s theory about moral reasoning, and Acker’s discussion of gendered organizations are used to interpret these differences.

What to Do with All this “Stuff”? Memory, Family, and Material Objects

This article explores the meaning of objects in making families and memories from the perspective of two sisters, now in our 50s. We show and tell a story of sorting through “stuff” collected by our mothers and fathers families in the United States from the nineteenth century to the present. We tell the story using seven objects we selected during the sorting process. Photographs of the objects are included in the text. In written dialogue with each other about each object, we reflect on the process of sorting, how our different experiences in the family shaped the sorting process, and how it gave new meanings to our relationship as daughters and sisters.

Claiming Justice: Knowing Mental Illness in the Public Art of Anna Schuleit’s ‘Habeas Corpus’ and ‘Bloom’

This study investigates two public art performances by artist Anna Schuleit in the early 2000s commemorating the life and history of two state hospitals (‘asylums’) in Massachusetts and the people who built, worked, and were patients in them. Public art is made for and sited in the public domain, outside, freely accessible, frequently collaborative, and often ephemeral. This study addresses a series of questions: What can public art ‘do’ for understanding mental illness? What use is a public art project for those living with (and caring for those who live with) mental illness? How can a public work of art sustain and portray meaning in an expressive way, open up a shared discursive space, and demand witness through embodiment?