| This dissertation explores how disordered bodies are organized. 'Disordered' refers predominantly to addictions and/or self-mutilating practices that are delineated as mental disorders within the current Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). In addition it covers related practices popularized as 'disorders' by the North American recovery movement. Through an exploration of some historical, socio-cultural, and economic contexts to the recovery movement and the DSM, and through close readings of textual examples of disordered bodies, this dissertation argues that the disordered body is co-produced by economic, social, and political factors. Folded into this theoretical inquiry on the tools and forces that are at play are 'ethnographic fictions,' emphasizing how ethnography can function to re-present and reify, or possibly resist, disordering bodies. Synthesizing concepts from medical anthropology, queer/feminist/anti-racist theorists, critical ethnography, and/or educational and literary theorists, this dissertation works to be inter- or counter-disciplinary.; This dissertation is divided into three overlapping parts. (1) Re/covering Bodies, addresses some ideological and economic factors at work behind the DSM that organize the narration of bodies in pain or, bodies that do not fit within a prescribed social order. Offering a post-fordist analysis, a framework useful to understand the impacts of economic forces in configuring social orders, this section also emphasizes the necessity of examining discourse. (2) Putting Out in the Field, represents an ethnography as it unravels the work of an ethnographer. While exploring aspects of an organization that seeks to do support work with disordered bodies, it questions practices of ethnography, specifically highlighting the role of participant observation in ethnography, the writing of fieldnotes, the construction(s) of data, and the (re)constructions of whiteness and other identity markers (in the field). (3) Fleshwork contradicts and complements the preceding work. Emphasizing interpretation and translation, issues already exposed as partial, situated, and fragmented within ethnographic research, this section places texts and/or fiction as a site for ethnographic fieldwork to examine how desire(s) might travel and be expressed in disordered bodies. This section also shifts to look at trauma studies, a subtext throughout this dissertation, to highlight issues of communication and representation possibly relevant for ethnographers. |
