Towards a feminist politics of desire: Caring, resisting, and becoming. Review of the book Feminism and vital politics of depression and recovery (Simone Fullagar, Wendy O’Brien &amp; Adele Pavlidis, 2019)

Marina Riera-Retamero

doi:10.1344/jnmr.v1i2.31841

Abstract

Highlights

Biomedical imaginaries on mental disorders are generally based on linear structures of causal connections focused on the individual agency of recovery
The 80 in-depth interviews presented in this research are not analysed by the authors from an interpretative perspective, by producing unequal relations between expert knowledge/situated knowledges, researchers/researched. Their analysis produces creative, generative and relational dialogues with the women interviewed, by disclosing the subjectivity of the researchers and entangling it in intra-active and dialogical ways with other voices. This gesture responds to the challenges of extending poststructuralist critiques of discursive formats towards a new materialist
In the first part of the book the authors provide an epistemological framework that takes up a combination of poststructuralist and new materialist conceptual configurations in order to reconsider depression and recovery as a non-linear process, but an entanglement of rhizomatic movements powered by the agency of human and non-human elements

Summary

Introduction

Biomedical imaginaries on mental disorders are generally based on linear structures of causal connections focused on the individual agency of recovery. Fullagar et al.’s generative analysis moves beyond the representationalist perspectives that prefigure static humanist subjects and objective meanings to a new materialist direction; by exploring how social practices, affective relations, infrastructures of care, power and non-human elements lively produce and constitute processes, meanings and subjects.

Results

Conclusion