Feminist Phenomenology and Medicine ed. by Kristin Zeiler and Lisa Folkmarson Käll (review)

Sometimes (especially in academic circles), we operate as though we live in the center of our brains at the top of the tower that is our bodies. We are aware of our bodies as instrumental to accomplishing various pragmatic tasks, but we are unaware or forgetful about how the body constitutes our conscious experience of self and world. The deeper nature and significance of our lived bodily experience is hidden, and it is challenging to discover and describe adequately. Nonetheless, during periods of sickness and injury, we are forced into dramatic confrontations with our bodies and must address our lived bodily experience in often vivid and visceral detail. Fortunately, we are not without resources in the effort to discover and describe better the features of our lived bodily experience.

In Feminist Phenomenology and Medicine, Kristin Zeiler and Lisa Folkmarson Käll have edited a thought provoking collection of essays that draws together work in feminist phenomenology along with the phenomenology of medicine to offer innovative, hybrid analyses of the lived experience of the human body that is variously ailing, afflicted, and subject to medical interventions. This collection of essays does not sit easily in any single philosophical tradition, but instead intentionally strives to integrate insights and methodologies from feminist phenomenology, more traditional phenomenology (e.g., Edmund Husserl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty), and the phenomenology of medicine. While there are numerous articles and books in each of these veins of phenomenology, this collection admirably strives to generate a more comprehensive analysis through the synthesis of the divergent strains. As Zeiler and Käll observe, both phenomenology and feminist philosophy are natural partners in unveiling and scrutinizing the taken for granted and the hidden: for example, the nature and significance of our lived bodily experience (1). And the ability to unveil the taken for granted is especially important in the context of medicine, which has increasingly become an authority on normal bodily experience (10).

In addition to integrating several areas of philosophical study, the essays in this collection display a positive eclecticism of source material. Variously, the authors reference qualitative empirical interviews, individual case studies/narratives, poetry, and film. Ellen Feder provides a fascinating account of Jim, who struggles with the effects of childhood sex reassignment surgery. Cressida Heyes studies the narrative of Lolo Ferrari and her desire for frequent cosmetic surgeries. Käll dissects the 2001 film Wit, while Abby Wilkerson iteratively explores Delmore Schwartz’s poem “The Heavy Bear Who Goes with Me.” Meanwhile, Margrit Schildrick draws extensively on her own phenomenologically informed empirical research project interviewing heart transplant recipients. Throughout, authors are conversant with both philosophical literature and medical research. Fredrik Svenaeus, for example, interweaves aspects of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders fourth edition (DSM-IV) entry on anorexia nervosa with a thought provoking phenomenological analysis of anorexia.

The eclecticism of this source material is important because it provides multiple vantage points from which to understand better the elusive qualities of our lived bodily experience. Insisting on only one type of source material (e.g., empirical laboratory studies or personal narratives) distorts and sometimes obscures the complex and extensive nature of bodily experience. Diverse source materials, though, keep us alive to our multifaceted lived experience.

Less positively, the organization of the fifteen essays in this collection did not clearly demonstrate the thematic connections between essays or otherwise develop a larger argument/set of insights. Reading through the collection—front to back—felt disjointed. Nonetheless, reflecting back on the essays afterwards, there are several interesting themes woven through the various essays, which I discuss below.

In phenomenology, there can sometimes be a tendency to talk about “the body” as a unified thing. While the body certainly does (typically) afford a unified perspective on the world and ourselves, it is also the case that our embodied perspectives are sometimes affected by the imposition of particular organs and body parts during sickness, injuries, afflictions, ailments...