Bodies in Protest: Environmental Illness and the Struggle Over Medical Knowledge

Bodies in Protest does not seek to answer the question of whether or not chemical sensitivity in physiological or psychological, a virtual impossibility in an environment as chemically saturated as ours (there are currently over 55,000 separate chemicals in commercial use in the United States). Rather, the book reveals how ordinary people borrow the expert language of medicine to construct lay accounts of their misery. The environmentally ill are not only explaining their bodies to themselves, however, but also influencing public policies and laws to accommodate the existence of this new body, one that professional medicine refuses to acknowledge and one that is becoming a popular model for rethinking conventional boundaries between the safe and the dangerous. Having interviewed dozens of the environmentally ill, the authors here recount how these people come to acknowledge and define their disease, and themselves, in a suddenly unliveable world that often stigmatizes them as psychologically unstable. Bodies in Protest is the dramatic story of human bodies that no longer behave in a manner modern medicine can predict and control.