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Not Tonight: Migraine and the Politics of Gender and Health
Joanna Kempner
€ 36.82
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Description for Not Tonight: Migraine and the Politics of Gender and Health
Paperback. Migraine is a disabling, and painful disorder that affects over 36 million Americans. Nevertheless, it is frequently dismissed, ignored, and delegitimized. The author argues that this general dismissal of migraine can be traced back to the gendered social values embedded in the way we talk about, understand, and make policies for people in pain. Num Pages: 232 pages, 13 halftones, 3 figures, 1 table. BIC Classification: MBS. Category: (G) General (US: Trade). Dimension: 229 x 160 x 18. Weight in Grams: 404.
Pain. Vomiting. Hours and days spent lying in the dark. Migraine is an extraordinarily common, disabling, and painful disorder that affects over 36 million Americans and costs the US economy at least $32 billion per year. Nevertheless, it is frequently dismissed, ignored, and delegitimized. In Not Tonight, Joanna Kempner argues that this general dismissal of migraine can be traced back to the gendered social values embedded in the way we talk about, understand, and make policies for people in pain. Because the symptoms that accompany headache disorders-like head pain, visual auras, and sensitivity to sound-lack an objective marker of distress that can confirm their existence, doctors rely on the perceived moral character of their patients to gauge how serious their complaints are. Kempner shows how this problem plays out in the history of migraine, from nineteenth-century formulations of migraine as a disorder of upper-class intellectual men and hysterical women to the influential concept of "migraine personality" in the 1940s, in which women with migraine were described as uptight neurotics who with-held sex, to contemporary depictions of people with highly sensitive "migraine brains." Not Tonight casts new light on how cultural beliefs about gender, pain, and the distinction between mind and body influence not only whose suffering we legitimate, but which remedies are marketed, how medicine is practiced, and how knowledge about disease is produced.
Product Details
Publisher
University Of Chicago Press
Format
Paperback
Publication date
2014
Condition
New
Number of Pages
232
Place of Publication
, United States
ISBN
9780226179155
SKU
V9780226179155
Shipping Time
Usually ships in 15 to 20 working days
Ref
99-2
About Joanna Kempner
Joanna Kempner is assistant professor of sociology and an affiliate of the Institute for Health, Health Care Policy, and Aging Research at Rutgers University.
Reviews for Not Tonight: Migraine and the Politics of Gender and Health
"Kempner's incisive work analyzes migraine medicine and its gendered subtext as practitioners sought to make sense of the mind/body actions or interactions causing the common, yet devastating pain of sufferers. The book is beautifully written, with a moving preface in which Kempner locates herself as a fellow migraine sufferer as well as ethnographic observer." (Linda Blum, Northeastern University)"