The past decade has witnessed important changes in, and vigorous debates about, the ways in which people in the industrialized West understand and experience illness. These changes include a significant increase in the number of people diagnosed with chronic illness, the development of policies promoting fuller patient participation in the management of their own health, widespread support for treatment protocols that depart from accepted norms, and the emergence of new health activist movements. Contesting Illness presents a critically informed analysis of these emerging trends and of the multiple ways in which they are affecting, and being shaped by, conventional framings of illness and its treatment.

The volume brings together a diverse group of scholars, working within a variety of theoretical frameworks and methodological approaches, who share a thematic focus on contestation as a conceptual tool with which to analyse the relation between power and illness. Some authors focus on a particular contested illness, that is, illness that is dismissed as illegitimate – framed as ‘difficult,’ psychosomatic, or even non-existent – by researchers, health practitioners, and policy-makers operating within conventional paradigms of knowledge (for example, chronic fatigue syndrome, environmental illness). Others identify processes and practices of critical engagement – by researchers, by activist communities, and by those who have been diagnosed with illness or experience themselves as ill – with established understandings of the etiology, diagnosis, symptomatology, and treatment of illness. A fascinating and innovative contribution to current debates on health care and social and political relationships of power, Contesting Illness offers valuable insights into the assumptions, practices, and interactions that shape our understandings of – and responses to – illness in the twenty-first century.

List of Contributors

In this innovative reader, Pamela Moss and Karen Falconer Al-Hindi present a unique, reflective approach to what feminist geography is and who feminist geographers are. Their carefully crafted textbook invigorates feminist debates about space, place, and knowledges with a fine balance among teaching chapters, reprints, and original essays. Offering an anthology that actually questions the very purpose of an anthology, the editors create and then negotiate a tension between reinforcing and destabilizing scholarly authority. They challenge the idea that there is one set of works that acts as the vision, interpretation, voice, and feel of feminist geography while both reproducing key previously published works and including fresh essays from a number of feminist geographers in a single volume.

The first chapter frames feminism, geography, and knowledge as a mélange of ideas, principles, and practices. Each of the three major sections of the volume begins with an introductory essay that places individual contributions into the overarching argument about the construction of feminist geography. Each introduction is then followed by a combination of reprints and original essays that contribute both to understanding how feminist geographical knowledge is constructed differently in different places and to showing what feminist geographers do wherever they are. The final chapter extends the anti-anthology arguments and raises questions that feminisms in geographies have yet to address. Students and scholars will find both the approach and the discussion essential for a full and nuanced understanding of feminist geography.

List of Contributors

"Hooked: Drug War Films in Britain, Canada and U.S.," examines the ideological assumptions embedded in the narrative and imagery of drug films. Drawing on a sample of over one hundred films produced in Britain, Canada, and the U.S. from 1916 to 2006 whose focus is primarily on illegal drugs, trafficking, and their consequences, Boyd highlights specific films that represent past and contemporary illegal drug discourse about users, traffickers, criminal justice, and drug treatment.

Contents:
Introduction 1. Moral Regulation, Film Censorship, and Law 2. Illegal Drug Users and Addiction Narratives: The Early Film Years 3. The 60s On: Counterculture, Addiction-as-Disease, and Mandatory Treatment Narratives 4. Ruptures in Addiction Narratives: Pleasure, Harm REduction, Consumer Culture, and Regulation 5. Drug Dealers: A nation Under Sige 6. Vilified Women and Maternal Myths 7. Challenges to the Drug War: 1980 to 2006. Conclusion