A01=Emily Lim Rogers
activist burnout
Author_Emily Lim Rogers
basic income
Betty Friedan
biomarkers
Carolyn Lazard
Category=JBSF1
Category=JHM
Category=VFJB9
chronic fatigue syndrome
disability
eq_bestseller
eq_health-lifestyle
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Finnegan Shannon
forthcoming
Gaza
Hans Selye
health insurance
HIVAIDS
lesbian health
MECFS
medical debt
medicalization
Michel Foucault
myalgic encephalomyelitis
National Institutes of Health
New York Native
patient activism
prognosis
Robert Gallo
scientific management
social death
Social Security
stress
Susan Sontag
Todd Haynes
Wages Against Housework
Women's Bureau
Product details
- ISBN 9781478039037
- Weight: 445g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 01 Sep 2026
- Publisher: Duke University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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In Sick Work, Emily Lim Rogers shows the unpaid labor it takes to be recognized as sick in the United States. Through a historical and ethnographic account of myalgic encephalomyelitis / chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS)—a disease defined by disproportionate exhaustion after any form of exertion, which has no cure or treatment—she reveals how changing formations of labor decide what counts as disability and what does not. Sickness, she writes, is not work’s opposite. Rather, the frequent dismissal of their disease leaves people with ME/CFS to do their own labor of disease advocacy, or “sick work,” even as their symptoms prevent many from working paid jobs. Rogers presents a history of the discursive construction of chronic fatigue and demonstrates its development alongside capitalism since the dawn of industrial management science in the late nineteenth century. These histories, she argues, echo through to the present day, shaping the denial of me/cfs and the stigma that surrounds it. Examining the everyday lives of people with ME/CFS and their activist movements, Sick Work describes how they swim upstream against strong tides of disbelief and demands a radical transformation of how work is defined and valued.
Emily Lim Rogers is Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University.
