You are on page 1of 11

Book Forum:

Sameena Mullas The Violence of Care: Rape Victims, Forensic


Nurses, and Sexual Assault Intervention
Christine Labuski
Virginia Tech

Julie Livingston
New York University

Gethin Rees

University of Southampton

Sameena Mulla

Marquette University
Edited by

Todd Meyers

Wayne State University

From rape as a tool of terror in situations of war and armed-conflict, to the largely unchecked
epidemic of sexual assault on and off college campuses, "rape" finds its way into our collective
political and social (and popular and legal and cultural and aesthetic) consciousness. In a study
that is exhaustive, intimate, and exacting, Sameena Mulla's The Violence of Care: Rape Victims,
Forensic Nurses, and Sexual Assault Intervention (New York University Press, 2014) takes up
the narrative and embodied dimensions of sexual assault and its afterlife in Baltimore. Mulla tells
a story of "fragile relationships" across multiple domains and crafts a highly original account of
the affective, representational, and abstracting elements which form the forensic inventory of
sexual assault. We are happy to present a lively and critical exchange, and look forward the
discussions generated by this second Book Forum.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Available online at: http://somatosphere.net/2014/10/violence-of-care.html

Book forum: Sameena Mullas The Violence of Care

An Awkward Relationship: The Case of Feminism and Nursing


Christine Labuski
Virginia Tech

In the late 1990s, when I was both a new anthropology graduate student and an experienced
gynecological nurse practitioner, I underwent a week of intensive training to become a Sexual
Assault Nurse Examiner, or SANE. On our first day, we were asked to share our reasons for
being there and, though the details of the other participants stories have since escaped me, I
recall being the only one in the room to connect my interest in being a SANE with my
commitment to feminist health care, i.e., care rooted in the recognition of a patriarchal social
order that registers its bodily impacts along gendered lines.


Though surprising at the time, the ill-fit between (my) feminism and the discipline of
forensic nursing resonates all too well with the situation described by Sameena Mulla in her
important new book The Violence of Care. Indeed, the absence of feminism from these nurses
respective worldviews, though not explicitly noted by Mulla, is evident throughout the text,
depicted across a variety of verbal and behavioral exchanges through which rape victims are
rendered other by the nurses charged with their care. One of the more glaring examples involves
the behavioral insistence, on the part of some nurses, on keeping sexual assault victims formally
draped, even when victims themselves attempt to shift their drape sheet and gaze back at the
nurse conducting the exam. Having performed pelvic exams on thousands of women, I found this
to be both disturbing and strange, as my practice was to always adjust the drape sheet in a way
that allowed my patient and I to look at one another.


My manipulation of the drape sheet, rather than an idiosyncratic innovation, was attached
to a host of practices and patient orientations derived from the 1960s-70s era womens health
movement (WHM) in the United States. Many of the practices associated with the WHM, e.g.,
clinicians asking permission from, or narrating their exams to, patients (Im touching your leg
now, Okay if we go ahead with the speculum?), are so commonsensical in contemporary
gynecology that it was surprising to read about nurses dispensing with one so central to feminist
health care. This made me curious about how the nurses themselves understood this act, one that
Mulla rightly describes as distancing.


One clue can be found in Mullas astute analysis of the feminized nature of nursing, and
of forensics as a mode via which some nurses have pursued greater institutional authority.
Though made up almost entirely of women, the profession has largely avoided examining itself
with the tools of feminist analysis. It is also true that the WHMs reach did not fully extend to
nurses; physicians, and the unquestioned power they wielded over womens bodies, were the
targets of activists initial interventions. This awkward relationshipbetween nursing, feminism,
and feminized labormakes the authority with which forensic nurses are currently invested
situational rather than durable. It also indexes how nurses have adapted to shifting gender roles,
both in and outside of health care settings.
Somatosphere | November 6, 2014

Book forum: Sameena Mullas The Violence of Care



Indeed, and as Mulla demonstrates throughout the book, forensic nurses hover between a
myriad of binarized spaces, including gender roles (masculine vs. feminine), the type of care
they deliver (medical vs. nursing), its location (emergency room vs. bedside) and aims (legal vs.
therapeutic), and their relationship to physicians (autonomous vs. subservient). Moreover, their
propensity to identify with victims as nurses rather than women (p. 79) suggests an inability to
relate to victims via a mode of solidarity rather than hierarchical authority or medical distance. In
sum, The Violence of Care raises a novel and intriguing set of questions about the relationship
between forensic nursing and the feminist movement(s) responsible for putting sexual assault on
the institutional map.


Mulla expresses concern that forensic nurses relinquish their role as care providers in
their quest to secure evidence-based rape convictions and that, in doing so, they lose out on an
important opportunity to reframe sexual violence as a gendered health-related issue (p. 226).
And though I too worry about the relative lack of gender analysis within and around the forensic
encounters she describes, Mulla and I may disagree regarding nurses relative capacities to
generate this institutional shift. The standard curricula for two- and four-year degree programs
leave little room for nursing students to learn about feminist thought or gender analysis, a set of
skills that require their own cultivation. Trained to work in a system through which care is
distributed in profoundly uneven ways, nurses often survive as professionals by adapting to
rather than challenging this order. But even these realities do not fix nursing as any one kind of
institutional actornurses heterogeneous backgrounds predispose them to any number of social
projects, including those of healing and justice that Mulla invokes. The complicated care
administered via contemporary modes of sexual assault intervention may rely on nursings
complicity with state projects that cast gendered violence as exception rather than rule. But it
may also depend on the still undeveloped relationship between nursing and feminism, a project
around which more gender theorists and medical anthropologists may wish to converge.


Moreover, Mulla worries that forensic nurses exchange the kindness (p. 214) with
which patients associate them for a cool affect (p. 227) and techno-scientific expertise, a
formulation that may limit our definitions of both nurse and care. In feminist-informed abortion
clinics in the US, for example, counselors act as patient advocates, physicians expertly perform a
procedure, and nurses attend to the entire process, being both kind and technically proficient. I
wonder if there is room in Mullas analysis for a more distributed model of care, one that can
include the specialized and technical skills of a clinician, working in tandem with other affective
laborers to remedy, or at least ameliorate, an urgent (medical) situation. Mullas book makes it
eminently clear that warm and fuzzy (p. 212) care has a place in sexual assault interventions.
I suggest that we use this insight to carefully delineate what we mean by, and whose job it is to
administer, such care.
Christine Labuski is an anthropologist and an assistant professor of Women's and Gender
Studies at Virginia Tech, where she also directs the Gender, Bodies & Technology initiative. Her
book, It Hurts Down There: The Bodily Imaginaries of Female Genital Pain, is forthcoming from
SUNY Press.
Read this piece online at: http://somatosphere.net/forumpost/an-awkward-relationship
Somatosphere | November 6, 2014

Book forum: Sameena Mullas The Violence of Care

Critical Care
Julie Livingston
New York University

Sameena Mullas remarkable new book about rape victims and forensic nursing is tightly woven,
compelling in its ethnography, and so carefully thought and cumulative in its analytic structure
(resituating in turns questions of time, body, care, gender, photography, kinship, home, self and
state) that for me reading it felt like one extended epiphany. It also left me with a profound
respect for Mullas work as a rape crisis counselor and an anthropologist. Rarely do we see
participant observation on this order of participation, rarely do we see a writer strike such a
perfect tone when addressing such deeply fraught material.


Talk of sexual assault is everywhere right now. From public outrage in the aftermath of a
brutal gang rape in Delhi in 2012 that drew the worlds attention, to the ongoing scandal of
sexual assaults in the US military, to the politicized sexual assaults in Tahrir Square, to the
revelation that some 400,000 rape kits remain unprocessed in the US, to the highly publicized
failure of US colleges and universities to adequately respond to the problem of rape on their
campuses, such talk turns quickly to the law. If the law is meant to protect the population and to
bring justice to the victim, then it is against these ends that its shortcomings of practice are
judged. But in Mullas careful hands we are led to ask what other effects does it bear? The
Violence of Care, set in a Baltimore hospital, focuses close attention on the micropractices of the
law on narrative and the body and the attendant regimes of evidence that structure forensic
nursing. It shows how powerfully perceived imperatives of the law violate possibilities for care
of the individual, even within a space geared towards critical care. Such a dynamic is only
intensified by the structural violence of poverty, gender, age, and race that animate the dynamics
of sexual assault in Baltimore and elsewhere. Is the rape kit here the equivalent of public healths
magic bullet? The narrow technological solution to the complex political, economic, and social
problem of sexual violence?


Scholars of medicine have long been interested in the law as a particular dimension of
state power. Important work has pursued the intersection of the medical and the legal through
questions of intellectual property (drug patents and pricing), the tension between personal
liberties and public health (compulsory vaccination, quarantine, immigration, sterilization etc),
tort law (malpractice, injury), and questions of legal protection for patients as human subjects
(informed consent, patient autonomy etc). But Mullas subject is not the legal as a constitutive
domain of medicine. She is concerned here with medical relationships and technologies used for
legal ends in the immediate aftermath of traumatic injury. As she so carefully and methodically
Somatosphere | November 6, 2014

Book forum: Sameena Mullas The Violence of Care

uncovers when the medical profession is recruited to the legal, something disturbing happens to
medicine, its promise of care, and its imperative of psychic and bodily healing. I was left
wondering if a person can be a crime victim and a patient at the same time? What kind of
healing, if any, could or should the law offer?


Some piece of the answer lies in the sexually assaulted body as simultaneous site of
injury (and therefore potential care) and source of truth. Mulla shows how forensics renders the
victims body a crime scene, with rape perverting the social dimension of the body, such that in
its aftermath there is a mingling of two bodies (perpetrator and victim) on and inside of one
(victim). Such a doubled body is ripe with rapidly deteriorating evidence of interest to the state.
In this way the violence of care resonated with other clinical contexts in which the wellbeing or
care of the patient is subsumed under the name of a larger collective the population (for
research or biopolitical purposes). The violence of care here works alongside what Lisa
Stevenson has recently called the anonymity of care, and Miriam Ticktins mapping of the
casualties of care to situate the vulnerable body in relationship to the state. Sameena Mullas
powerfully intelligent book reminds us that for individuals caught up in these relationships, care
as healing is elusive, even as care as institutional practice is formidable.
Julie Livingston is Visiting Professor in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis and the
Department of History at NYU. Her most recent book is Improvising Medicine: An African
Oncology Ward in an Emerging Cancer Epidemic (Duke University Press, 2012).

References
Margaret Lisa Stevenson, Life Beside Itself: Imagining Care in the Canadian Arctic (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2014)
Miriam Ticktin, Casualties of Care: Immigration and the Politics of Humanitarianism in France
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011).
Read this piece online at: http://somatosphere.net/forumpost/critical-care

Somatosphere | November 6, 2014

Book forum: Sameena Mullas The Violence of Care

The Violence of Reductionism


Gethin Rees

University of Southampton
Sameena Mullas The Violence of Care: Rape victims, forensic nurses and sexual assault
intervention highlights the consequences of reductionism in the medico-legal world. She focuses
on the ways that legal requirements shape the interactions between victim, Forensic Nurse
Examiner (FNE) and Victim Advocate, and in particular the temporal aspect of these interactions
(e.g. the requirement to collect trace material within a particular timeframe post-assault in order
to increase the potential for recovering DNA evidence, or the collection of information related
only to the events of the assault), and also the ways in which they serve to separate the attack
from the rest of the victims biography. The assault becomes a zero-hour from which all future
decisions evolve along a designated timeline. Of course, some of this separation is performed
with the best interests of the victim and her case in mind, and there is a belief that the less
information recorded about the complainants behaviour, dress etc., the better; however,
potentially problematic information re-enters the recording for supposedly scientifically
important reasons (e.g. recent sexual partners in order to distinguish between different semen
found in the body, any intoxicants recently consumed), resulting in the medical recording of
potentially harmful information.


Mulla draws the readers attention to a couple of major points: first, that this presumed
separation not only fails to fit with the complainants sense of self (for instance, one of the case
studies emphasised the fact that the assault was the third horrible thing to have happened
recently), and secondly, the important, far-reaching and problematic repercussions of treating the
victim in a way that emphasises the importance of the rupture. For instance, Mullas
ethnographic data problematizes the presumed belief (held by many FNEs) in the home as a
place of safety and recuperation; proper consideration of the biography of the incest victim
would construct the home as a place of harm rather than safety. Likewise, other cases
demonstrated the ways FNEs vilified some victims as repeat customers or as demonstrating
drug-seeking behaviour; in these cases, the FNEs focused upon the fact that the victim had
been revictimised, which they understood as a result of risk-taking behaviours rather than the
complex biographies that resulted in their revictimisation. Examples such as these draw attention
to the extent to which the reduction to the rupture also serves to reinforce particular
understandings of the victim of rape and rape itself. Mulla identifies the ways that documentary
technologies reinforce normative expectations of whether someone counts as a victim/offender,
and the examples further demonstrate the extent to which the legitimate victim is one who does
not put themselves at unnecessary risk. In attempting to improve the potential for convictions,
Somatosphere | November 6, 2014

Book forum: Sameena Mullas The Violence of Care

the forensic technologies necessarily reproduce ideologies that make it harder for women and
men to achieve justice.


The reduction of the victims biography to the temporality of the assault is certainly one
of the violences of care towards which Mulla draws attention; however, while she explicitly
focuses on the temporal aspect, I felt the work spent as much time emphasising the spatial.
Clearly, there is much discussion of the inter-relationship between the medical space of the
Emergency Room and the juridical space of the police station, courthouse etc. and the ways that
both interact in order to construct the Forensic modality, but there is also much within the text
and the case studies that represents the spatial construction of Baltimore. For instance, in the
introductory chapter, Mulla recognises that her own sense of the city has altered as a response to
an awareness of the hotspots for violent activity. This is later emphasised by a discussion of
crime-mapping data and websites; as the author states, such medico-legal constructions of the
city impact on the ways that FNEs interact with their victims. Given that much of the book
engaged so richly with the spatial aspects of FNE work, it left me wondering why the temporal
was given so much prominence in the introduction. I was also intrigued by her decision to use
the term victim and eventually victim-patient rather than the more regularly used survivor to
denote the harmed party. However, as Mulla very cogently argues, the term survivor connotes the
same biographical rupture that she is attacking, emphasising the extent to which a person has
moved on from a particularly troublesome point in time, while the term victim-patient instead
highlights the importance of both the medical and the legal registers in forensic examination
work.


Mullas identification of the reductionism of the victims biography, implicit in the
forensic medical examination, as well as the implications of that reduction, is fascinating and
wholly troubling; through her ethnographic observations as a victims advocate she is able to
identify a deeply entrenched problem, well-disguised within the more traditional debates in this
area over the primacy of the medical or the legal or the importance of professionalism and
evidence-based practice. Using an ethnographically-rich approach, focusing upon the temporal
and indeed the spatial, Mulla sophisticatedly expresses the violence of reductionism.
Gethin Rees is a Lecturer in Criminology at the University of Southampton. He is interested in
the use of medical evidence in the criminal justice system, especially in rape and sexual assault
cases, and the treatment of victims. Previously he has been funded by the United Kingdom's
Economic and Social Research Council and his current work on the medico-legal and popular
narratives of the sexsomnia defence is being funded by the Socio-Legal Studies Association.
Read this piece online at: http://somatosphere.net/forumpost/the-violence-of-reductionism

Somatosphere | November 6, 2014

Book forum: Sameena Mullas The Violence of Care

Care confounded: the ethnography of intervention into violence


Sameena Mulla

Marquette University
My thanks to Christine Labuski, Julie Livingston and Gethin Rees, who have brought their sharp
insights to their reading of my recently published book, The Violence of Care: Rape Victims,
Forensic Nurses, and Sexual Assault Intervention. I began this project many years ago as a
prelude to research, planning to gain experience as a rape crisis advocate in Baltimore, Maryland
and then to depart for the field. Baltimore was the site of my graduate training, and
anthropologists, as we all know, must leave home to travel to the field. Over time, my prelude
resulted in my deep imbrication in the flawed institutional fabric of intervention. I began to
absorb the complex choreography of care as it intersected with Baltimores historical, legal, and
demographic genealogies, and my original plan of spending time training and practicing as a
patient advocate in Baltimore and then going on to other things began to seem less like a method
and more a form of abandonment. The layers of the technologies, professional orientations,
routines, personalities and genealogies that characterized the approach to sexual assault
intervention I witnessed were too compelling to turn away from, so I stayed and laid the
groundwork for a study which chose depth over breadth, longitude over sample, while generally
adopting an ethic of patience. The clinical location of sexual assault intervention proved a rich
and challenging site to interrogate, as many ethnographers and historians have demonstrated in
their work and it was the implementation of historically informed ethnography that seemed the
only way forward (see, for example, Livingston 2012; Meyers 2013; Saunders 2008).


My orientation to ethnography is to capture excess, and leave some things unexplained
rather than imposing an analysis that, while dazzling in its tidiness, leaves no loose ends. Studies
of violence challenge ethnographers to cultivate a voice that resists the gravity of sensationalism.
A creative approach to analytical categories, drawing broadly on the agencies that structure
sexual assault intervention, be they human or non-human, drew me along. I considered the role
of DNA, time, emotion, reproduction, visual and documentary techniques, domesticity,
compliance, and care. Caring for victims of sexual assault is a process replete with loose ends,
unreconciled moments of ethical success and failure, unused or misunderstood data, underpaid
and underresourced personnel, and passionate, sustained dedication and successes. These
systems, like many other health systems, are curious in their systematicity. They rely on broad
diagnostic categories, such as sexual assault, that capture and fix heterogeneous events, plotting
them in familiar and actionable rubrics (Mattingly 1994, 1998). Medical anthropologists have
successfully traced the narrative features of clinical stories, but my aim was to go beyond this to
Somatosphere | November 6, 2014

Book forum: Sameena Mullas The Violence of Care

track patient narratives of sexual assault complaints, and to think of the clinic as a cutting room
floor. What patient narratives were rejected by practitioners within the space of the clinic? What
futures were deferred? Gethin Rees locates these impulses in a focus on legal requirements as
they serve to separate the attack from the rest of the victims biography. I found this mode of
therapeutic emplotment particularly puzzling in its manifestation as part of nursing care precisely
because U.S. nursing assessment practice incorporates patient advocacy within a holistic
framework.


Rees also notes that my emphasis on the text is often on time, although he notes that the
text, spent as much time emphasizing the spatial. Thus, he notes he was left wondering, why
the temporal was given so much prominence in the introduction. In many ways, the clinical
interactions that informed the research were not prefaced by battles over spatial loci. Rather,
space seemed thoroughly colonized by medical practice, by the courtroom, and by criminal
justice and epidemiological renderings of the cityscape. Resistance to spatial colonization was
present, but the contest over turf was more or less determined before anyone arrived in the clinic.
The ways I attended to space were therefore descriptive and, again, by placing spatial rendering
within its context. Time, on the other hand, was at issue in the encounter between forensic nurse,
patient, and police officer. All these actors, and the institutional structures in which they were
located, participated in the struggle to seize, shape, reject and renew time: this struggle was at the
heart of the forensic modality as I described it.


Julie Livingstons discerning comments place the forensic intervention as care in
conversation with a broader literature on care. Livingston specifically cites Miriam Ticktin and
Lisa Stevenson as she characterizes forensic intervention as critical care. I welcome this
connection, particularly as Livingston points out the multitudinous ways in which the legal can
be thought in relation to the medical. In some ways, we are all haunted by the specter of
Foucault, and a most welcome haunting it often is, but I read neither my own project nor
Ticktins or Stevensons as a simple Foucauldian project in which the biopolitical subject is
constituted by institutions of care. Rather, while Livingston writes that my work highlights
clinical contexts in which the wellbeing or care of the patient is subsumed under the name of a
larger collective the population (for research or biopolitical purposes), its subject is not the
legal as a constitutive domain of medicine, but rather, medical relationships and technologies
used for legal ends in the immediate aftermath of traumatic injury.


Like Ticktin, I attempt to think about the relationship of sexual violence to poverty.
Where Ticktin describes humanitarian intervention and a mode of sexual suffering that supplants
poverty and therefore other forms of structural violence, the forensic intervention is perhaps
unlike humanitarian aid in that it excludes poverty as the basis for suffering, even as poverty
exacerbates sexual violence. Or perhaps this is, in fact, Ticktins point in her descriptions of the
casualties of care. In both her work and mine, institutions cultivate a care with blind spots, and
certain forms of suffering can never be seen, nor given a home. As I thought through the
complexities of an un-homed suffering, I found myself turning to the well-trod anthropological
ground of domesticity and kinship, domains in which the legal and the medical shape and are
shaped by modes of care.


My thanks to Livingston for suggesting, in her gentle way, that I include Lisa Stevensons
Life Beside Itself: Imagining Care in the Canadian Arctic as a productive and challenging
Somatosphere | November 6, 2014

Book forum: Sameena Mullas The Violence of Care

10

interlocutor to my work. Stevenson describes an anonymous care that alienates Inuit patients and
their supporters, sustaining a form of life that is unrecognizable as life. This anonymity is not
what drives the violence within the forensic interventions I describe. Rather, where my work
intersects with Stevensons is in the consideration of care as not simply a therapeutic project, but
a truthmaking process. The truths rendered through the regimes of care that Stevenson and I
described are often imperceptible to the subjects of the caregiving regimes themselves. The
incommensurability of truth with care and the work of care may sustain an enduring violence.
Care, even located within the most well-meaning practices and delivered by caring
practitioners, results in the unmaking of the subject, her recasting in a form that she barely sees
as herself and the positing of a world that resembles only itself and not the world she previously
inhabited.


I note here that my response grows long, and I have yet to address the comments of
Christine Labuski, who offers me what few readers can, a reaction to my work as both an
anthropologist and a former Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner. She begins her response by
highlighting the notable absence of a feminist health orientation to the forensic practices I
describe, which she accurately reads as reflecting the alignments of the community of nurses
with whom I worked. Feminism, or what I call the F word, was rarely mentioned by the
forensic nurses with whom I worked, either by individual nurses, or specifically in the articulated
views of local leadership. When it was mentioned, or strategically omitted, feminism was clearly
received as a form of advocacy rather than as a way of informing the knowledge practices of
nursing. In short, nurses felt their work as truthtellers was compromised rather than enhanced by
feminism. The rejection of patient oriented practices, such as a clinicians communication during
pelvic examinations, gave way to silence or distractive talk, restricting knowledge flows within
the clinical encounter. In effect, it was not for the victim to know what the nurse perceived, and
her requests to share in this knowledge were frequently greeted by silence.


Labuski asserts that resolving the uneasy relationship between nursing care and feminism
is not straightforward. Educational resources by way of time and expertise are limited, giving
nurses little space to cultivate a feminist sensibility. Meanwhile, the institutional structures that
guide forensic nursing interventions are both binary and prescriptive, giving nurses few chances
to overcome these structures. To be sure, I try to make the point at several junctures that even a
nurse with a very well-defined feminist orientation could find herself on the wrong-side of things
so to speak because of the ways in which forensic intervention plays out. If, at times, this seems
to over-emphasize the role of structure above and beyond agency, this is deliberate. This might
be an over correction on my part as I take this approach as a part of a feminist project that
critiques the neo-liberal emphasis in sexual assault interventions themselves, an approach that
atomizes and privatizes sexual assault response, depoliticizing the policy debates that inform
intervention (Beres, Crow and Gottell 2009). I found the violence of the forensic intervention
foundational in its shaping of racialized and gendered subjects (foundational in the sense of
Walter Benjamins founding), as well as confounding, as the state which was founded by the
intervention produced subjects who inconsistently recognized the nurses ministrations as care,
sometimes branding it as cruelty.


While Rees, Livingston and Labuski have raised many questions and drawn attention to
several themes, I have not responded to all of their queries in this short space. I will let their
Somatosphere | November 6, 2014

Book forum: Sameena Mullas The Violence of Care

11

questions and their analyses stand, or rather, I will let other readings of The Violence of the Care
supply answers to these questions. It is my hope that encounters with The Violence of Care will
generate new questions and critiques of the way that law, violence, care and the state exist in
relation to one another.
Sameena Mulla is Assistant Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Social and Cultural
Sciences at Marquette University in Milwaukee, WI. Her current project, a collaboration with
Heather Hlavka, is an interdisciplinary ethnographic study of the sexual assault trial as it
engages and produces expert knowledge about evidence, victimization, sex offenders, and
carcerality.

References
Melanie Beres, Barbara Crow and Lise Gottell. 2009. The Perils of Institutionalization in
Neoliberal Times:Results of a National Survey of Canadian Sexual Assault and Rape Crisis
Centres. Canadian Journal of Sociology. 34(1): 135-63.
Julie Livingston. 2012. Improvising Medicine: An African Oncology Ward in an Emerging
Cancer Epidemic. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Cheryl Mattingly. 1994. The Concept of Therapeutic Emplotment. Social Science and
Medicine. 38(6): 811-22.
--. 1998. In Search of the Good: Narrative Reasoning in Clinical Practice. Medical
Anthropology Quarterly. 12(3): 273-97.
Todd Meyers. 2013. The Clinic and Elsewhere: Addiction, Adolescents, and the Afterlife of
Therapy, Seattle: University of Washington Press
Barry Saunders. 2008. CT Suite: The Work of Diagnosis in the Age of Non-Invasive Cutting.
Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Margaret Lisa Stevenson. 2014. Life Beside Itself: Imagining Care in the Canadian Arctic.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Miriam Ticktin. 2011. Casualties of Care: Immigration and the Politics of Humanitarianism in
France. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Read this piece online at: http://somatosphere.net/forumpost/care-confounded

Somatosphere | November 6, 2014

You might also like