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Reviewed by:
  • Our Bodies, Ourselves and the Work of Writing
  • Kimberly K. Emmons (bio)
Susan Wells. Our Bodies, Ourselves and the Work of Writing. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010. 280 pp. Hardcover, $65; Paperback, $21.95; Ebook, $21.95;.

When Our Bodies, Ourselves was first published in 1973, it was unique: authored by and for women, it offered frank advice about women’s health and healthcare. Written collectively by a group of women that eventually became the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective (BWHBC), Our Bodies, Ourselves has gone through eight major editions and been translated into twenty-nine languages since its first commercial publication. In the intervening years, health information, particularly women’s health information, has become a commodity— a collection of facts and figures packaged for so-called “empowered consumers” of health services. As this commodification has taken place, health information has been disassociated from the authors and contexts that have produced it and given it textual form. What began for the BWHBC as the radical project of making private, personal understandings [End Page 207] of women’s bodies the subject of collective debate and action has, in the hands of WebMD and other healthcare information sources, become a mere consumer mandate for self-education. Such education no longer requires the personal conversations that engendered Our Bodies, Ourselves; it now assumes a stock of available information and avoids questioning the textual production of health knowledge.

Enter Susan Wells’s Our Bodies, Ourselves and the Work of Writing, a book that rediscovers the revolutionary interventions made by the BWHBC into women’s health and healthcare in the twentieth century. Wells’s project is rhetorical: it investigates the textual work of the BWHBC and its influence on the public discourse surrounding women’s health. Wells’s project is also archival and sociological, drawing on interviews with many members of the BWHBC and on a variety of primary documents to enrich her analysis. Throughout her carefully argued and readable text, Wells emphasizes the historically situated and intertwined work of writing, reading, and healthcare, and her conclusions are significant beyond the fields of rhetoric and writing studies. Wells’s analysis offers insight into why Our Bodies, Ourselves has remained central to feminist interventions into health practices for over four decades, and it describes a model for public discourse that can successfully incorporate both public and private understandings of health and the body.

In Our Bodies, Ourselves and the Work of Writing, Wells recounts the publication history of Our Bodies, Ourselves, describing its authors and their writing practices, often in their own words. Then, she turns to the unique composition of the text itself as a collective and distributed process of drafting, editing, and seeking comments from a large pool of collaborators and from women enrolled in the authors’ health courses. Investigating the construction of the woman’s body within the pages of Our Bodies, Ourselves, Wells finds that it is revolutionary because it is a body co-authored by readers, via their own self-explorations and because it is a personal, whole, and storied body that represents a departure from traditional, atomized, and depersonalized medical depictions. This discussion of the body leads naturally into an analysis of how Our Bodies, Ourselves challenges established medical authority, sometimes by appropriating and translating its knowledge and sometimes by offering counter-narratives based in the personal experiences of the book’s many authors. Wells’s account is both a fascinating history of the production of Our Bodies, Ourselves and an important analysis of the interventions writing and reading can enact in healthcare. [End Page 208]

For medical humanists, four important insights emerge from Wells’s book. Her attention to the shifting contexts of textual production reminds us to interrogate the historical, situated literacy practices surrounding the dissemination of health information rather than to judge texts simply by contemporary rhetorical standards. Secondly, her description and analysis of the distributed authorship of the book suggests the means by which the book has successfully negotiated the shifting ideological contexts of the feminist movement over four decades. Third, her rhetorical analysis of Our Bodies, Ourselves also offers narrative tools for challenging the depersonalized, institutional voice of medicine. Finally, Wells...

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