"Kroll-Smith and Floyd have, with both clarity and sensitivity,
provided considerable insight into an important arena of
contemporary experience."
--"American Journal of Sociology"
"Elegantly written. . . . the book is built around the
narratives of multiple chemical sensitivity (MCS) sufferers
themselves. . . . Due to its relevant subject matter, its
interdisciplinary approach, its readability, and its interesting
theoretical arguments, "Bodies in Protest" should be appealing to a
wide audience."
--"Organization and Environment"
"This engagingly written and thought-provoking book provides one
of the first sustained sociological analyses of a baffling,
controversial, and spectacular medical condition."
--"Social Forces"
Gulf War Syndrome: Is It a Real Disease? asks a recent headline
in the "New York Times," This question--are certain diseases
real?--lies at the heart of a simmering controversy in the United
States, a debate that has raged, in different contexts, for
centuries. In the early nineteenth century, the air of European
cities, polluted by open sewers and industrial waste, was generally
thought to be the source of infection and disease. Thus the term
miasma--literally deathlike air--came into popular use, only to be
later dismissed as medically unsound by Louis Pasteur.
While controversy has long swirled in the United States around
such illnesses as chronic fatigue syndrome and Epstein-Barr virus,
no disorder has been more aggressively contested than environmental
illness, a disease whose symptoms are distinguished by an extreme,
debilitating reaction to a seemingly ordinary environment. The
environmentally ill range from those who have adverse reactionsto
strong perfumes or colognes to others who are so sensitive to
chemicals of any kind that they must retreat entirely from the
modern world.
"Bodies in Protest" does not seek to answer the question of
whether or not chemical sensitivity is physiological or
psychological, rather, it reveals how ordinary people borrow the
expert language of medicine to construct lay accounts of their
misery. The environmentally ill are not only explaining their
bodies to themselves, however, they are also influencing public
policies and laws to accommodate the existence of these mysterious
illnesses. They have created literally a new body that professional
medicine refuses to acknowledge and one that is becoming a popular
model for rethinking conventional boundaries between the safe and
the dangerous.
Having interviewed dozens of the environmentally ill, the
authors here recount how these people come to acknowledge and
define their disease, and themselves, in a suddenly unlivable world
that often stigmatizes them as psychologically unstable. "Bodies in
Protest" is the dramatic story of human bodies that no longer
behave in a manner modern medicine can predict and control.
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