This paper will examine the experience of and drive for bodily invisibility in women through the theoretical approaches of phenomenology and social constructionism. An examination of the social disruptions of bodily invisibility and the compulsive avoidance of such instances, particularly with respect to the fastidious maintenance of body comportment and appearance within the narrow parameters afforded by social norms, will lead to an exploration of the conflation of biomedicine with the beauty industry.

One of the major tasks of medical educators is to help maintain and increase trainee empathy for patients. Yet research suggests that during the course of medical training, empathy in medical students and residents decreases. Various exercises and more comprehensive paradigms have been introduced to promote empathy and other humanistic values, but with inadequate success. This paper argues that the potential for medical education to promote empathy is not easy for two reasons: a) Medical students and residents have complex and (...) mostly unresolved emotional responses to the universal human vulnerability to illness, disability, decay, and ultimately death that they must confront in the process of rendering patient care b) Modernist assumptions about the capacity to protect, control, and restore run deep in institutional cultures of mainstream biomedicine and can create barriers to empathic relationships. In the absence of appropriate discourses about how to emotionally manage distressing aspects of the human condition, it is likely that trainees will resort to coping mechanisms that result in distance and detachment. This paper suggests the need for an epistemological paradigm that helps trainees develop a tolerance for imperfection in self and others; and acceptance of shared emotional vulnerability and suffering while simultaneously honoring the existence of difference. Reducing the sense of anxiety and threat that are now reinforced by the dominant medical discourse in the presence of illness will enable trainees to learn to emotionally contain the suffering of their patients and themselves, thus providing a psychologically sound foundation for the development of true empathy. (shrink)

This paper explores how organizational members use documents to share their knowledge within and across work settings. I suggest that organizational studies of distributed knowledge sharing and information systems would greatly benefit from the linguistic analysis of communicative practices. Specifically, the paper highlights the notion of indexical centering as formulated by the linguistic anthropologist William Hanks and demonstrates its analytical power in studying documenting as a communicative practice. Drawing on a 15-month, multi-sited ethnographic study in several pediatric healthcare settings, the (...) paper focuses on how two doctors compose and use two medical histories found in two distinct medical information systems. The analysis suggests that the doctors use documents to index the temporal, spatial, and participatory dimensions of their knowledge sharing. They do so by indexing, on the one hand, the participants, times and places for their communicative practices and, on the other hand, the participants, times and places of their general care practices. The indexical analysis allows us to perceive documents, as more than mere vessels for knowledge transfer among organizational members, but as an integrated part of how people structure their work practices and situate their knowledge sharing in complex distributed organizational settings. (shrink)

In this essay, I analyze two memoirs—Rafael Campo's The Poetry of Healing: A Doctor's Education in Empathy, Identity, and Desire and Abraham Verghese's My Own Country: A Doctor's Story of a Town and Its People in the Age of AIDS—which describe the effects of treating HIV/AIDS on each doctor's identity, on his desire for community and belonging, and on his identification and/or disidentification with the medical profession in the United States. My readings of Campo and Verghese revolve around three key (...) terms provided by Campo's subtitle: identity, empathy, and desire. I shift the order of these terms in Campo's subtitle because I want to read identity, empathy, and desire in Campo and Verghese through and along with the theoretical “pragmatics” of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. (shrink)