Fall/Winter 2006 - University of Toronto Press Publishing

G E N E R AS OL CI NI OT EL RO EG SYT
Narrating Social Order
Agoraphobia and the Politics of Classification
Shelley Z. Reuter
Gender, the State, and
Social Reproduction
Household Insecurity in Neo-Liberal Times
Kate Bezanson
Agoraphobia, the fear of open spaces, has received
minimal attention from sociologists. Yet implicit within
psychiatric discussion of this disease is a normative
account of society, social order, social ordering, and
power relations, making agoraphobia an excellent candidate
for sociological interpretation. Narrating Social
Order provides the first critical sociological framework
for understanding agoraphobia, as well as the issue of
psychiatric classification more generally.
Shelley Z. Reuter explores three major themes in
her analysis: agoraphobia in the context of gender,
race, and class; the shift in recent decades from an
emphasis on psychoanalytic explanations for mental
diseases to an emphasis on strictly biogenic explanations;
and, finally, embodiment as a process that occurs
in and through disease categories. Reuter provides
a close reading of reports of agoraphobia beginning
with the first official cases, along with the DSM and
its precursors, illustrating how a “psychiatric narrative”
is contained within this clinical discourse. She argues
that, while the disease embodies very real physiological
and emotional experiences of suffering, implicit in this
fluid and shifting discourse are socio-cultural assumptions.
These assumptions, and especially the question
of what it means, both medically and culturally, to be
‘normal’ and ‘pathological,’ demonstrate the overlap
between the psychiatric narrative of agoraphobia
and socio-cultural narratives of exclusion. Ultimately,
Reuter seeks to confront the gap that exists between
sociological and psychiatric conceptions of mental
disease and to understand the relationship between
biomedical and cultural knowledges.
Shelley Z. Reuter is an assistant professor in the
Department of Sociology and Anthropology at
Concordia University.
Policies implemented in the mid to late 1990s in
Ontario by Mike Harris’s Conservative government
have had undeniable repercussions for the population
of that province. Kate Bezanson’s Gender, the
State, and Social Reproduction is the first study
to consider the implications of those policies for
gender relations – that is, how women and men,
families, and households coped with these changes,
and how division of labour and standards of living
were affected. Bezanson also considers implications
of neo-liberalism more generally, for the lives of
people living under such regimes.
Beginning with an outline of the restructuring
experiment which took place under the Conservative
government between 1995 and 2000, Bezanson
shows how this process dramatically altered the scope
of the welfare state, labour market protections and
conditions, and the capacity for people to manage
and plan their own lives. She combines this detailed
investigation of the changes introduced by Harris
with data collected in in-depth interviews of selected
Ontario households, in order to examine how neoliberalism
affects daily lives, particularly of low
income people, and especially of women. Ultimately,
Bezanson finds that the neo-liberal restructuring of
Ontario in the 1990s consolidated a gender regime
that was highly unsustainable for poor households,
many of which were lead by women. A controversial
and illuminating study, Gender, the State, and Social
Reproduction crosses the disciplines of politics, history,
gender studies, and sociology.
Kate Bezanson is an assistant professor in the
Department of Sociology at Brock University.
Approx. 176 pp / 6 x 9 / December 2006
Cloth ISBN 0-8020-9088-5 / 978-08020-9088-1
£28.00 $45.00 E
Approx. 420 pp / 6 x 9 / November 2006
1 illustration
Cloth ISBN 0-8020-9065-6 / 978-08020-9065-2
£35.00 $55.00 E
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