A01=Joanna Kempner
Author_Joanna Kempner
brain
Category=MBS
chronic illness
class
disability
disease
disorder
distress
doctors
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_nobargain
femininity
gender
head
health
healthcare
hysteria
intellectualism
invisible
masculinity
medicine
migraine
mind and body
nonfiction
pain
sensitivity to sound
sexuality
sociology
suffering
symptoms
treatment
visual auras
wealth
women
Product details
- ISBN 9780226179018
- Weight: 539g
- Dimensions: 16 x 24mm
- Publication Date: 09 Oct 2014
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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Pain. Vomiting. Hours and days spent lying in the dark. Migraine is an extraordinarily common, disabling, and painful disorder that affects over 36 million Americans and costs the US economy at least $32 billion per year. Nevertheless, it is frequently dismissed, ignored, and delegitimized. In Not Tonight, Joanna Kempner argues that this general dismissal of migraine can be traced back to the gendered social values embedded in the way we talk about, understand, and make policies for people in pain. Because the symptoms that accompany headache disorders-like head pain, visual auras, and sensitivity to sound-lack an objective marker of distress that can confirm their existence, doctors rely on the perceived moral character of their patients to gauge how serious their complaints are.
Kempner shows how this problem plays out in the history of migraine, from nineteenth-century formulations of migraine as a disorder of upper-class intellectual men and hysterical women to the influential concept of "migraine personality" in the 1940s, in which women with migraine were described as uptight neurotics who with-held sex, to contemporary depictions of people with highly sensitive "migraine brains." Not Tonight casts new light on how cultural beliefs about gender, pain, and the distinction between mind and body influence not only whose suffering we legitimate, but which remedies are marketed, how medicine is practiced, and how knowledge about disease is produced.
Joanna Kempner is assistant professor of sociology and an affiliate of the Institute for Health, Health Care Policy, and Aging Research at Rutgers University.
