Bodies in a Broken World: Women Novelists of Color and the Politics of Medicine (review)

Bodies, whether ill or healthy, are inextricably tied to the world they inhabit, a world that is often hostile, indifferent, and unjust to individuals from nondominant cultures. Drawing on the work of eleven women novelists of color, Anne Folwell Stanford illustrates how physical and emotional states of health and illness are linked directly to social justice, even though medicine spends little energy beyond the clinic or hospital doors. Her reading of these authors is informed by feminist ethics, particularly the work of Susan Sherwin, along with physician-sociologist Howard Waitzkin, who both focus on the failure of medicine to address the sources of suffering and injustice in the social contexts of patients' lives. Stanford has carefully selected novelists who confront medicine's participation in racist, sexist, classist, and other unjust practices, and "if medicine is to heed the words of these writers . . . to become more engaged in the community, to become more involved in the struggle for social justice, it cannot possibly continue in the same models" (10).

The book is divided into two parts. The first five chapters deal with individual characters, their illnesses, and sometimes their healing: Toni Cade Bambara's The Salt Eaters, Paule Marshall's Praisesong for the Widow, Gloria Naylor's The Women of Brewster Place, Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony, Toni Morrison's Beloved and The Bluest Eye, Louise Erdrich's Tracks, and Sapphire's Push are among the works Stanford uses to examine women who have become ill because of broken ties to their histories and communities, because of racial hatred, or because of domestic and sexual violence. Political and social factors are always at work influencing how each woman experiences her illness in physical, mental, and/or spiritual ways.

The second part of the book finds novels examining medicine itself. Stanford uses Ana Castillo's So Far from God, Gloria Naylor's Mama Day, Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead, and Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents again to raise connections between patients and social conditions, as well as to ask questions about bioethics and uncertainty, medicine and epistemology, and how medicine might resist dehumanizing trends through the "myriad possibilities of communitas" (218).

Bodies in a Broken World is an important theoretical reconceptualization of many of these well-known writers' works. Stanford's selection of texts is superb given the two threads she uses to link them together: a call for medicine to attend to social justice as well as it attends to the body, and for medicine and society to reconsider health and illness and their relationship to the community. The bulk of each chapter is devoted to literary analysis as Stanford focuses on representations of illnesses arising from social factors, or on the corruption and greed contributing to an "infecting world" that includes medical institutions and practices. Stanford's readings are critical, thoughtful, and wonderfully articulated as she connects sick bodies to a sick world and calls for medicine to work against the social factors that are major determinants of health throughout the world.

Throughout the text, her arguments are solidly connected to many currents in feminist bioethics, particularly the objection to how the concept of autonomy is privileged in much of the bioethics discourse, where individuals are seen as "being fundamentally independent and self-directed . . . as somehow prior to and independent of their social circumstances" (Sherwin 1996, 52). For that reason, as well as how the texts illuminate Stanford's argument, Bodies in a Broken World would work well in a variety of contexts that includes bioethics, Women's Studies, women's literature, and medical sociology. In fact, it would be an excellent companion to feminist bioethics texts such as Embodying Bioethics: Recent Feminist Advances (Donchin and Purdy 1999) or Feminism and Bioethics: Beyond Reproduction (Wolf 1996); it would also work well with Howard Waitzkin...