Bodily Decay Research Articles

Old ‘Women’ on the Stage Actorship and the Aging Body in the Works of Enchi Fumiko

Enchi Fumiko’s literature has frequently faced the topic of ageing, especially focused on the bodily decay from the point of view of disease or loss of beauty and femininity and often in reference to the double standard adopted for female and male bodies. In this paper, focusing mainly on the novel Komachi hensō (1965) and the short story “Futaomote” (1959), I analyse how in Enchi’s works the figure of the actress and the one of the onnagata actor perceive the process of ageing vis-à-vis their gender and sexuality. The onnagata and the actress experience a real loss of identity when facing age, since the success they have lived has almost been based on the charm of their figure on the stage. In this paper I analyse how the protagonists cope with the reality of ageing, comparing their reaction with regard to their gender and sexuality. By looking from a peculiar perspective the idea of the ‘female’ decaying body, I aim at giving a further contribution to the already rich scholarship on the vision of ageing in Enchi’s literature. Moreover, I aim to demonstrate that the foundational elements of Enchi’s series of works, known as rōjomono or ‘works on old women’, typically believed to have originated in the 1970s, were in fact established as early as the late 1950s.

An Unusual Case Report of Cotard’s Syndrome with Depressive Delusions

Cotard’s Syndrome, also known as nihilistic delusion or Cotard’s delusion, is an exceptionally rare psychiatric condition characterized by delusional beliefs ranging from a sense of being dead to the conviction of bodily decay or nonexistence. This case report of a male patient, aged 21 years, with Cotard’s Syndrome highlights the difficulties in diagnosis, the course of therapy, and the clinical ramifications of this illness. The patient exhibited symptoms of severe depression along with nihilistic delusions, expressing the belief that he was deceased and experiencing bodily decay. Nihilistic delusions and depressed symptoms compatible with Cotard’s syndrome in the setting of major depressive disorder were found during the patient’s mental state evaluation, despite the absence of a serious physical disease or drug addiction. Treatment consisted of antidepressant and antipsychotic medication, along with individual psychotherapy sessions focusing on cognitive restructuring. Over time, the patient demonstrated gradual improvement in delusional beliefs and depressive symptoms, highlighting the importance of comprehensive psychiatric evaluation and individualized treatment planning.

Cemetery meditations and Morbid Visions: death metal as a spiritual exercise

ABSTRACT Scholarship on death metal tends to emphasise its grotesque and provocative aspects, and to define it in terms of transgression. Like many other forms of extreme music, death metal playfully infringes the principles of morality and decency by representing topics that usually remain inexpressible. In this paper, I propose to draw on the methodology of Comparative Religion to reframe and complement this approach. I relate death metal to Buddhist meditation techniques that involve bodily decay and sickness, and suggest that underneath its grotesque appearance, death metal reveals a meditative element that likens it to religious practice. In the light of this comparative and religious approach, I draw some conclusions for the future of Metal Studies.

An archaeological evaluation of the Olmec “royal tombs” at La Venta, Mexico

AbstractAt La Venta, Mexico, the Middle Formative Olmec regional center, the existence of individual leaders is interpreted from the evidence of monumental stone portraiture and several tombs believed to house the bodies of a sequence of kings late in La Venta's history. The status of these latter features as graves, however, has been debated since soon after they were excavated in the 1940s, especially because they generally lacked osteological material. What remained was arrangements of costume items as if adorning a body, usually associated with a stone container. Most archaeologists have advanced the reasonable explanation that bones and teeth would not have survived in tropical environments and accepted both the tomb attribution and their function as individual funerary monuments. A detailed review of available information from the La Venta excavations reveals these assumptions are not warranted. Field data indicate the absence of expected taphonomic evidence of bodily decay. Analysis of the stratigraphy of Mound A-2, aided, by computer-enhanced imaging of field drawings, demonstrates its tomb-like features were erected in a single, short construction phase, not over a span of decades as individual kings died. These conclusions call for alternative explanations of these “surrogate burials,” absent bodies materially evoked by ritual officiants.

Doubling, Decay and Discontinuity: Pathology and the (post)human body in Marie Darrieussecq’s Notre vie dans les forêts

This article focuses on the portrayal of corporeal and textual embodiment in Marie Darrieussecq’s novel Notre vie dans les forêts (2017), a science fiction dystopia in which all bodily diseases have been cured by advancements in cloning technology. In so doing, it explores how the novel’s paradigm of bodily enhancement questions both the physical limits of the human body and the ways in which corporeal changes redefine contemporary notions of subjectivity, life and death. Drawing on posthuman theory and critical theories of the body, the analysis begins with a reading of human doubling and the portrayal of cloning, before considering the text’s depiction of bodily decay and dissection as a decentering of Darrieussecq’s human subjects. The final section concludes with an exploration of textual discontinuity and its significance for the interpretation of this work. As such, this paper demonstrates how Notre vie dans les forêts encourages its readers to contemplate the innate pathologies of the human condition, allowing them to find new life in the forces of decay and disorder that connect all living subjects.

«НО РАЗВЕ МЕРТВЫМ ХОЛОДНА ПОСТЕЛЬ»: ТАНАТОЛОГИЧЕСКИЙ ДИСКУРС В «КОЛЫМСКИХ ТЕТРАДЯХ» ВАРЛАМА ШАЛАМОВА

The article analyzes specificity of the thanatological discourse in Varlam Shalamov's Kolyma Notebooks, which allows to present his work as a single metatext, elaborating different variations of thanatological poetics. The category of death is considered as an integral basis of V. Shalamov's work, which eventually leads to understanding his own attitude to death as an ontological, epistemological and axiological basis of life and creative work. The article examines different modes of death in Kolyma Notebooks: death as an essential component of the lyrical hero's mind, unattainability of rest, death as the embodiment of historical memory, art as victory over death, and the idea of purification and rest of the soul through creative work. Thanatological discourse of Varlam Shalamov's Kolyma Notebooks is seen as an integral artistic world with the image of the lyrical hero-creator at its center, gradually passing through all stages of dying, as a complex of subjects and images, united not only by the theme of physical death, but also by the idea of memory and creativity as a symbol of victory over moral and bodily decay. The article demonstrates how the thanatological character goes along the difficult path from contamination by death to complete spiritual purification, fulfilling the mission of the creator, the poet, called to capture in his work disintegration of personality, inevitably arising under the influence of difficult circumstances of life, and thus he not only relieves himself of deep spiritual distress and finds eternal peace, but also helps to restore historical justice.

Exposed and Concealed Bodies: Exploring the Body as Subject in Metalwork and Text in 7th-Century Anglo-Saxon England

THIS ARTICLE EXPLORES attitudes to and perceptions of the body in 7th-century England. By the late-Saxon period, textual sources indicate a growing fear of the grave and the horrors of bodily decay...

The Power of Objects in Eighteenth-Century British America by Jennifer Van Horn

Reviewed by: The Power of Objects in Eighteenth-Century British America by Jennifer Van Horn Kate Smith The Power of Objects in Eighteenth-Century British America By Jennifer Van Horn. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017. Through the meanings they hold and the practices they animate, objects are powerful things. By examining a range of objects, from city prospects to portraits, gravestones, dressing tables and prosthetic limbs, Jennifer Van Horn demonstrates how objects were particularly important to eighteenth-century Anglo-American communities as they wrestled with questions of identity and order. Elite White families utilised objects as key means of constructing and asserting themselves as civil people. Focusing on Boston, New York, Philadelphia and Charleston, The Power of Objects convincingly shows how objects were crucial sites in forming specific identities and excluding others, within British America. In crafting these identities, elite White Anglo-Americans responded to aesthetic debates in Britain, but also reacted to what they viewed as "the threatening counterexamples provided by native Americans and African Americans" (21). The assertion of such identities was often fraught, however, because of the contradictory meanings at stake in material things. The Power of Objects provides a compelling account of the complex ways in which elite White communities consistently drew upon material culture to construct their identities and shows the range of cultural references within them. The first half of the book explores how communities of civil people were created and expressed through the production and acquisition of city prospects, portraits and gravestones. The creation of views of cities, such as Philadelphia, provided communities with a means to "assert their civil environs and future prospects" (35). Participation in these projects, which were funded by subscription, allowed civic bonds to be forged and ensured that artists produced a particular view of "their" city. A careful balance was in play then, between including the detail needed to show the development of a city and excluding that which revealed the complexities of city life. Yet, these drawings were engraved and printed in Britain, significantly linking these communities to transatlantic networks. Similarly, artistic transatlantic networks were cultivated through other means, such as in the 1750s, when elite families in Philadelphia commissioned the British portrait painter John Wollaston to create a series of portraits. Wollaston used similar poses, backgrounds and props in each portrait to produce a community of the civil. These portraits were markedly different from others, including those he painted in New York, demonstrating the value patrons placed on creating a visually coherent community. The civilising project embarked on by Anglo-Americans did not end with portraits, however, but rather continued even after death. The gravestone portraits produced for individuals, particularly in Charleston, show a particular response to concerns over rapid bodily decay. These portraits followed the forms of the miniature portrait genre, but, carved in immutable stone by New England carvers, they provided a fixed point of representation to challenge the decay at work beneath the ground. At the same time, the text included on gravestones, and projects to develop graveyards into more ordered, tended spaces, signified a community of the dead that linked to that of the living and contributed to a wider sense of civility. While the civilising project seemed all encompassing, the second half of the book reveals a more subversive and complex set of objects produced for and used by women and men. In Charleston, in the 1760s, it became popular for women of marriageable age to have their portrait painted in a masquerade style. These portraits provided male patrons and viewers with a prompt to consider the mutability of identity and female sitters with a route to empowerment. They were specifically painted at the moment within a woman's lifecycle in which she had power: on the verge of marriage. The portrait underlined her ability to conceal and reveal herself, and to (temporarily) have control. Women's ability to construct a particular identity was also at stake in the dressing tables they used. These items of furniture offered a site in which women could "create" their face, transforming themselves from a private self into a public individual. They contained complex sets of objects which also trained women in...

Thomas W. Laqueur. The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2015. 736 pp.

Previous articleNext article No AccessThe CI ReviewThomas W. Laqueur. The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2015. 736 pp.Eileen SperryEileen Sperry Search for more articles by this author Eileen Sperry is a visiting assistant professor of English at the College of Saint Rose, where her research focuses on early modern English literature and culture with concentrations on lyric poetics and embodiment. She is currently working on a book project exploring the subject of bodily decay in early modern verse. Her work has appeared in Shakespeare Bulletin and is forthcoming from The Sixteenth Century Journal.PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Critical Inquiry Volume 45, Number 1Autumn 2018 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/699593 Views: 195Total views on this site © 2018 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. For permission to reuse, contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Ancient Egyptian Concepts of Bodily Decay in the Old Kingdom Part 1, PT 684

Summary Old Kingdom descriptions of bodily decay are surrounded by assertions of revivification and the maintenance of a proper offering ritual. Thus, the contexts of lines describing bodily decay are first examined, focusing on Pyramid Text (PT) Utterance 684. The problems of preventing the decay of the corpse, and curing conditions of the living body associated with decay were interrelated in ancient Egyptian thought. Already in the Old Kingdom, terminology surrounding wet, drippy decay (r ḏ w, fdt, ḥ wꜢ and ḥ wꜢꜢ.t) was clear and well developed; sometimes incorporated into the offering ritual through association with libations; and paralleled in medical literature. In contrast, terminology which appears to refer to dry decay (jmk, rpw) is rare, and does not have more general uses outside of mortuary literature.

Bodily disintegration and successful ageing in Body Bereft by Antjie Krog

Antjie Krog’s Body Bereft (2006) details both the bodily changes brought about by older age and the ways in which these changes fracture a person’s previously-stable sense of self. This article reads Krog’s depiction of the ageing body in a small selection of poems from this collection in relation to the unavoidable reality of bodily decay and what is referred to in gerontological theory as ‘successful ageing’. This tension dominates large parts of the gerontological field, and can be seen in Krog’s ambivalent representation of older age in Body Bereft. Through close readings of a number of poems, I will investigate the ways in which Krog problematises the relationship between the lived experience of older age with its concomitant sense of deterioration, and the societal impetus to age well and accept ageing with magnanimity. I will demonstrate that this collection foregrounds the poet’s refusal to accept pre-existing discourses that delimit ageing as something either to bemoan or celebrate. I will conclude that this refusal finds particular expression in her poems “dommelfei / crone in the woods” and “how do you say this”.

Bodily disintegration and successful ageing in Body Bereft by Antjie Krog

Antjie Krog’s Body Bereft (2006) details both the bodily changes brought about by older age and the ways in which these changes fracture a person’s previously-stable sense of self. This article reads Krog’s depiction of the ageing body in a small selection of poems from this collection in relation to the unavoidable reality of bodily decay and what is referred to in gerontological theory as ‘successful ageing’. This tension dominates large parts of the gerontological field, and can be seen in Krog’s ambivalent representation of older age in Body Bereft. Through close readings of a number of poems, I will investigate the ways in which Krog problematises the relationship between the lived experience of older age with its concomitant sense of deterioration, and the societal impetus to age well and accept ageing with magnanimity. I will demonstrate that this collection foregrounds the poet’s refusal to accept pre-existing discourses that delimit ageing as something either to bemoan or celebrate. I will conclude that this refusal finds particular expression in her poems “dommelfei / crone in the woods” and “how do you say this”

Psalm 16:10 and the Resurrection of Jesus “on the Third Day” (1 Corinthians 15:4)

In 1 Cor 15:4, Paul apparently views the timing of the resurrection “on the third day” as a fulfillment of Scripture, but nowhere in the Old Testament is the resurrection of an individual associated with a third day. The reigning explanations for Paul's reference include a creative reading of Hos 6:2, a suggestion that Paul refers to a pattern of third-day deliverances within Scripture, and a denial that Paul's fulfillment formula was intended to include the reference to “on the third day.” These explanations all have their weaknesses, and it is worth reconsidering a solution offered by Douglas Hill in 1967. Hill argued that Paul refers to Ps 16:10, with its reference (in the septuagintal wording) to a “holy one” being preserved from (bodily) “corruption.” Although such a reference might seem cryptic to modern readers, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that Paul's contemporaries associated the onset of bodily decay with the third day after the spirit leaves the body. Thus, Paul's original readers would have understood a promise that someone would “not see decay” as a promise to be raised within three days.

Psalm 16:10 and the Resurrection of Jesus “on the Third Day” (1 Corinthians 15:4)

In 1 Cor 15:4, Paul apparently views the timing of the resurrection “on the third day” as a fulfillment of Scripture, but nowhere in the Old Testament is the resurrection of an individual associated with a third day. The reigning explanations for Paul's reference include a creative reading of Hos 6:2, a suggestion that Paul refers to a pattern of third-day deliverances within Scripture, and a denial that Paul's fulfillment formula was intended to include the reference to “on the third day.” These explanations all have their weaknesses, and it is worth reconsidering a solution offered by Douglas Hill in 1967. Hill argued that Paul refers to Ps 16:10, with its reference (in the septuagintal wording) to a “holy one” being preserved from (bodily) “corruption.” Although such a reference might seem cryptic to modern readers, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that Paul's contemporaries associated the onset of bodily decay with the third day after the spirit leaves the body. Thus, Paul's original readers would have understood a promise that someone would “not see decay” as a promise to be raised within three days.

Odpoczynek Boga (Rdz 2,1-3) w interpretacji Ojców Kościoła

The theme of this paper is the exegesis of Gen 2:1-3 in selected writings of the Church Fathers and early Christian writers. The Early Church authors pon­dered over the passage in question, seeking to find the meaning of God’s resting on the seventh day from all his work of creation of the world and man. In their statements, early Christian writers clearly stated that the Biblical text should be read spiritually while treated as a metaphor. For God does not need rest, but man. It is for man that the Creator made the Sabbath day, and made it holy, and since the Resurrection of Christ, Sunday has been a holy day designated for rest and celebration. Concurrently, it was the announcement of the eighth day, or eternity, in which a man, free from all the trouble and bodily decay, will forever rest in God and live a true union with Him.

Forging Continuing Bonds from the Dead to the Living: Gothic Commemorative Practices along Australia’s Leichhardt Highway

Forging Continuing Bonds from the Dead to the Living: Gothic Commemorative Practices along Australia’s Leichhardt Highway

Elegy, Effigy: Alchemy and the Displacement of Lament in As I Lay Dying

.Libby Catchings Faulkner Journal Elegy, Effigy: Alchemy and the Displacement of Lament in As I Lay Dying Somebody in the house begins to cry. It sounds like her eyes and her voice were turned back inside her, listening; we move, shifting to the other leg, meeting one another’s eye and making like they hadn’t touched. Whitfield stops at last. The women sing again. In the thick air it’s like their voices come out of the air, flowing together and on in the sad, comforting tunes. When they cease it’s like they hadn’t gone away. —As I Lay Dying (91) T hese are the sounds of the women mourning the death of Addie Bundren . Warwick Wadlington frames this moment as a meditation on the relationship between the voice and death, in which the women’s singing enacts a “ritual crossing of mortal boundaries” that refuses physical dissolution in favor of a shared social recognition of human mortality (109-11). However, I would suggest that there is another ritual in Faulkner’s novel that prepares for death even as it refuses communal recognition—one that might be understood via Jonathan Sterne’s notion of sound reproduction technology as an embalming of the human voice. The primary agent of this ritual is Cash, who both mitigates bodily decay though careful construction of Addie’s coffin and seeks preservation of the voice through pursuit of Suratt ’s “talking machine” (AILD 190). Taken together, these two gestures con­ stitute an alchemy that supplants grief with effigy, endeavoring to immortalize Addie’s voice rather than transition to a life without her. By the novel’s end, Cash’s alchemy is complete; for, though her body is in the ground, the imprint of Addie’s maternal voice lingers in the records Cash now plays on the family graphophone. In this sense, Cash reverses the introjective process by which Addie has brought him into the speaking world, ultimately retreating into a domestic space where the maternal voice yields to the consumable object: bananas, false teeth, and mail-order records (260-61). So positioned, the “effiguration ” of Addie Bundren—her being made into an effigy—might also be understood as an auxiliary to the erosion of communal life Julian Murphet sees as Faulkner’s indictment of the modern media ecology (6). At the same time, the mirrored becoming and unbecoming of this modification resonates with Theodor Adorno’s conception of the graphophone as transmitting, in the 25 26 Libby Catchings Displacement ofLament in As I Lay Dying way that other sonic technologies of modernity do, a radiative, umbilical qual­ ity towards a “cosmic death drive” (Adorno qtd. in Zeitlin 122)1 —a distinctly (Freudian) maternal relation2 made all the more poignant by an Alexander Graham Bell recording from 1881: “I am a graphophone, and my mother was a phonograph” (qtd. in ‘“Hear My Voice”’).3 1. Technologies of Sonic Consolation According to John T. Matthews, the novel’s graphophone is a commodity ob­ ject that recalls the “illusorily prosthetic qualities of novels themselves” by “simulatjing] life and speech” to gratify the listener as he or she experiences life’s losses and disappointments (“Machine Age” 90). However, Sterne’s fram­ ing of phonography as “a modification of the relations between life and death” (293) urges us to consider the graphophone’s significance in the novel beyond the function of consolation, to where it might constitute an alteration of the characters’ engagement with the living, speaking world. Such an alteration serves to reinforce Matthews’s thinking that Faulkner was interested in “the way modern technology might create new structures of human feeling, new relations to one’s own body and place, and new possibilities for human imagi­ nation” (Seeing Through the South 62). It should be noted that the graphophone in Faulkner’s novel is a sound recording technology situated in a particular historical moment and identi­ fied by a distinct technique, whereas Sterne’s use of phonography is meant as an umbrella term for all sound reproduction.4 The phonograph, an inscription technology developed by Edison, featured a stylus which made indentations of sound on metal foil; due to the pliability of the material, however...

<em>William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones: Interlacings</em>, by Caroline Arscot

Reviewed by: William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones: Interlacings Kathleen O’Neill Sims (bio) William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones: Interlacings, by Caroline Arscott; pp. 260. New Haven and London: Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2008, $75.00, £40.00. Caroline Arscott, Senior Lecturer at the Courtauld Institute, offers students of William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones an engaging, if eccentrically speculative, study of the aesthetic relationship between the two artists. Arscott opens her introductory chapter by articulating a dialectic between the artists’ timeless “lyrical” images and the time-bound textual “narratives” in which those images have their contexts. She posits Morris’s and Burne-Jones’s fascination with imaginary body morphologies, psychic and [End Page 152] physical spaces, and their troubled utopian desires as crucial to a full understanding of the expressive urgencies coursing through the fine arts, literature, and decorative arts of the second half of the nineteenth century. This study alternates between chapters devoted to works or clusters of works by each artist. Arscott’s first chapter, “Morris: The Gymnasium,” seeks to illuminate the convergences between Morris’s early wallpaper design and fitness theory, harkening back to his and Burne-Jones’s Oxford days when both would frequent the gym of Archibald MacLaren, who was to give Burne-Jones his first commission designing illustrations for a book of fairy ballads. Arscott argues that as Morris grew older, his designs relied increasingly on two-dimensional motifs evacuated largely of negative space. Arscott compares Morris’s practice of beefing up the patterns of his designs at the expense of the background to the tearing down and building up of soft tissue to create lean muscle mass in order to escape bodily decay and death, linking both to experiments in Aesthetic art. In this same vein, chapter 3 examines Burne-Jones’s unfinished Perseus series (1875–88), undertaken in response to Morris’s robust designs. Arscott deploys the under-appreciated Didier Anzieu’s psychoanalytic theory of the “skin ego,” which, in both pre- and post-Oedipal dispensation, experiences the overwhelming external world of reality effects across its fragile and permeable surface. Whereas the alarmingly stout Morris creates strapping acanthus vines and loud chrysanthemums, the painfully thin Burne-Jones paints a vulnerable, thin-skinned hero who appears to have forgotten his shoes. The armor he creates for Perseus provides a much-needed exoskeleton for his mythological protagonist. Arscott’s elaborations on this seeming half-man-half-machine says a lot about Burne-Jones’s forlorn and feeble construction of masculinity. But then she overshoots her lovely insight that Perseus is a time traveler (psychic or art-historical, she does not say). Her comparison of Perseus to the Terminator is modestly entertaining, but only just—while her illustrations do intrigue, correlation is not causation. Arscott also fails to provide any convincing evidence that Burne-Jones drew his inspiration for armature from Victorian weapons manufacture. Perseus’s metallic skin owes far more to the Hermes of Andrea Mantegna’s Parnassus (1497) than to a proto-cyborgian vision. Moreover, much of his armor features avian elements, as if the magic of Hermes’s slippers had enchanted even his most obsidian of garments. Designed for Arthur Balfour’s dining room, this series was to have included, like The Legend of Briar Rose series (1870–95), in situ panels encased in wooden frames with gilded gesso ornamentation and set off by text. Chapters 4 and 5 continue to explore the dialogue between the two artists by analyzing Morris’s wallpaper designs from the 1870s onwards alongside Burne-Jones’s Briar Rose series. Here Arscott explores how and why these artists (Morris more than Burne-Jones) chose to erase the boundary between foreground and background, as well as between fine and decorative arts, in seeming anticipation of modern concerns with space, image, and function. She also examines dead space in Morris’s textiles and wallpaper designs, describing how their interlocking patterns, color blocking, and strong vertical repetitions convey the harmonies of the natural world and promote a green vision of a human community, while simultaneously reminding the spectator of his mortality and subjection to the cycles of life and...

Rethinking the "Corse in clot": Cleanness, Filth, and Bodily Decay in Pearl

Rethinking the "Corse in clot": Cleanness, Filth, and Bodily Decay in Pearl

The social consequences of living with and dealing with incontinence—A carers perspective

Incontinence is a discrediting and stigmatising condition for those who experience it, as it signifies a person who is lacking in self-control. For their carers, the very nature of undertaking ‘dirty work’ signifies a low status and low paid job. Those health care professionals higher in status and financial reward put distance between themselves and bodywork, especially bodywork that deals with bodily decay. However, little is known or has been highlighted about the social consequences that living with and dealing with incontinence can have on informal carers. In this paper we examine the notion of dirty work and ‘unbounded’ bodies in the role of informal carers. Through qualitative interviews with carers of stroke survivors the negative social consequences of dealing with incontinence for both the survivor and the carer are explored. We also examine the strategies employed by carers and stroke survivors in order to manage the symptom in an attempt to prove the adult status of the survivor and to protect both the identity of the survivor and the carer. The embarrassment of leakage and the moral danger of odour can lead some carers and survivors to make decisions that can isolate both within the confines of their home. In this sense the very meaning of home is transformed into an isolated and marginalised space.