Book reviews meaningless. It is not simply that the result is unmappable but that its focus, purpose, and thus its grounding seems wholly unclear. The result would not have served in the sociology of disability literature of the 1980s but is offered here as a ‘new wave’ of social geography. The misfortune is that issues requiring urgent attention are ignored as a result. Principle among them is what do we mean by a ‘disability’? How do we distinguish naturally occurring cognitive, physical, and sensory differences from social attitudes toward them? How are those attitudes translated into spatial realities, and perhaps barriers? Are the elderly indeed somehow ‘disabled’ as a result of their age or is it that some over the age of sixty-five years have cognitive physical, or sensory limits that affect their engagement in the shared world? More generally, perhaps, how do social attitudes translate into impediments that restrict those with specific cognitive, sensory or physical deficits? If they are real, can they be demonstrated: mapped, perhaps? If demonstrable, in what conception of social justice does one argue their unfairness? None of these questions are raised or treated in this volume, which thus is neither particularly enabling nor geographic in its parts. Tom Koch University of British Columbia, Canada
Reference Koch, T., Torchinsky, R., Denike, K. 2010. Accessibility and access: A new approach to transit barriers. American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting. Washington, DC, April 15.
Casper, M. J. and Moore, L.J. Missing Bodies: The Politics of Visibility. New York: New York University Press 2009 x + 221 pages. $21.00 (pbk) ISBN 9780814716786 If seeing is believing, then how can we understand the things that remain unseen? Are they not real in important ways as well, despite their invisibility? Sociologists and other social scientists have a long history of revealing the obscured, the disenfranchised, and the silent. Whether or not we
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engage in critical reflection of these groups or prefer to direct our gaze to the more visible elements of the world and ourselves, their presence is all around us. The human body, particularly, as a physical entity and a social construction, is curiously both an object of intense public scrutiny, and, in certain cases, an entity rendered imperceptible. The systemic and systematic invisibility of some bodies is widespread in the developed and developing world, but the ways in which meanings are and are not socially constructed about these missing bodies are rarely the subject of scholarly inquiry. In Missing Bodies: The Politics of Visibility, medical sociologists Casper and Moore interrogate the stark absence of particular bodies in the modern world. Drawing extensively on feminist theory and the work of Michel Foucault, they present an ethnographic exploration of bodies that have been marginalised, co-opted, or otherwise denied legitimacy in contemporary society. Organised as paired case studies, the chapters explore three themes of embodiment that have received scant attention in previous literature: the bodies of children and infants (‘Innocents’), the vulnerability of the human body to disease and environmental toxins (‘Exposed’), and bodies of the masculine and feminine hero (‘Heroes’). The tendency to dissect the body, literally and figuratively, and regard embodiment as a static, quantifiable condition are critiqued throughout the book. Caspar and Moore, rather pointedly at times, argue against the affinity of contemporary policy makers and other authorities to rely solely on statistical snapshots of societal trends in an effort to inform their decision making. Aggregated quantitative data, while useful in many instances, masks the effects of the structural inequalities that are often the genesis of these trends. The level of abstraction that defines statistical analyses is something that the authors actively resist as they present an alternative discourse of bodies grounded in an examination of data that is primarily qualitative and embraces lived experiences. Drawing extensively from a variety of sources – including media reports, academic literature, national and international statistics, interviews, children’s books, and autobiographies – Missing Bodies is an appropriate companion to the extensive demographic work found in public health and other medically oriented disciplines. The paired case studies that comprise the main chapters of Casper and Moore’s book reveal
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Book reviews
missing bodies and bring their existence into discussion with the visible bodies that obfuscate their representation. The chapter addressing the invisibility of children’s own narratives regarding their embodied experiences and sexuality also highlights the ever-present voice of parents, who serve as stewards of their children’s innocence and are often asked to speak on their behalf. The chapters discussing heroes, specifically soldier Jessica Lynch and cancer survivor ⁄ cyclist Lance Armstrong, provide an excellent commentary on the visibility of idealised masculine and feminine bodies and their corresponding selves, while juxtaposing these idealised representations with the less visible missing bodies that fail to conform to these romanticised standards. Importantly, Missing Bodies is not only an informative text; it is also a readable work relevant to the fundamental concerns of a variety of scholarly audiences. Between each of the three paired case studies, the authors include a brief introduction to the corresponding chapters. This introduction serves to guide the reader’s interpretation of the chapters that follow and connects the subtheme to broader historical trends thereby accentuating its relevance and justifying inclusion in the text. Overall, the organisation of Casper and Moore’s book is accessible, and while the case studies serve as evidence for broader theoretical arguments about power, masculinity, and modernity, they are also informative and persuasive when read independently of the rest of the book. As a commentary on the consequences of neoliberalism, a critique of contemporary Western culture, and a recovery effort of the unseen, Missing Bodies is a provocative and thought provoking work that situates our understandings of the bodies that are seen and obscured in a new light. Though their case studies tend to focus on how marginalisation and visibility of bodies occur in the United States, analyses of these events are couched in broader theoretical and political contexts that make them accessible for an international audience. For any scholar interested in the sociology of the body, this book provides a brief review of the past literature regarding the sociology of the body, while dialoguing with this knowledge in a novel and often ironic manner. Casper and Moore present a vital perspective that will have resonance with medical sociologists as well as those interested in inequality, politics, social theory, or the media.
Erin L. Pullen University of Kentucky USA
[email protected] Beach, W.A. A Natural History of Family Cancer: Interactional Resources for Managing Illness. New Jersey: Hampton Press Inc., 2009 $89.50 (hbk) 388 pp ISBN 978-1-57273690-0 (hbk). Over the last 30 or so years we have witnessed a significant rise in empirically driven research, drawing on the method of Conversation Analysis (CA), concerned to explicate and understand how a variety of health related interactions are socially patterned and organised. During a similar period, the literature on the psycho-social needs of people affected by cancer and the centrality of communication has also grown. This largely empirical volume contributes to both of these fields, by drawing on a corpus entitled ‘The Malignancy Series’. The corpus comprises 60 audio-recorded conversations involving family members of the author who have been informed that their mother’s tumour has been diagnosed as malignant. The calls were recorded over a 13 month period and commence with a call between Dad and Son in which the Dad ‘delivers the news’. The cancer journey is revealed and (in part) constituted in and through ongoing conversations with other family members (including ‘Mom’) and friends. The journey ends with the last calls as Son arranges travel home to await Mom’s death. The volume is organised into six parts comprising a full 15 chapters. Part I provides an extremely useful review of the literature on the importance of communication for cancer care and the various limitations of much of that literature, including the common (over)-reliance on self report data in the field of psycho-social oncology, and the need to open up the black box of communication to look at how communicative endeavours are realised in order to begin to verify this ‘theoretically rich and empirically underdeveloped’ field. Beach also highlights how, on the one hand, many acknowledge that a cancer diagnosis alters social relationships, while on the other hand research on families and how they interact is in its infancy. Part I also provides a useful index, timeline and chronology of the corpus (p.28-9). Transcription notation (following Gail Jefferson’s orthography) (p.30) is explained,
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