Abjectly Boundless

Within a variety of practice environments, health professionals often experience feelings of disgust and repulsion towards the presence of an abject object. Cadaverous, sick, disabled bodies, troubled minds, wounds, vomit and so forth are all part of health and care work and threaten the clean and proper bodies of those who undertake it, yet this 'unclean' side of health work is rarely accounted for in academic literature. This volume employs the work of Julia Kristeva through a range of case studies drawn from care and nursing settings around the world. It brings together work from researchers and practitioners within the social and health sciences, the caring professions and psychotherapy, to expose and highlight the important impact of the concept of abjection, which historically has been silenced in the health sciences.

Trudy Rudge is a professor in the Faculty of Nursing and Midwifery at the University of Sydney, Australia. Dave Holmes is a professor in the Faculty of Health Sciences and University Research Chair in Forensic Nursing at the University of Ottawa, Canada

Contents: Foreword, Jeanne Randolph; Introduction - abjectly boundless: boundaries, bodies and health work, Trudy Rudge and Dave Holmes; Part I Fluids and Transgression of Boundaries: Blurring the boundaries: breastfeeding and maternal subjectivity, Virginia Schmied and Deborah Lupton; Menstruation and dene physical practices, Audrey Giles; 'What it means to see': reading gender in medical examinations of suicide, Katrina Jaworski; Fearing sex: toxic bodies, paranoia and the rise of technophilia, Dave Holmes and Cary Federman; Eroticizing the abject: understanding the role of skeeting in sexual practices, Patrick O'Byrne. Part II Abject Positioning: Spoiled identities: women's experiences after mastectomy, Roanne Thomas-MacLean; 'Betwixt and between nothingness': abjection and blood stem cell transplantation, Beverleigh Quested; Managing the 'other' within the self: bodily experiences of HIV/AIDS, Marilou Gagnon; 'She exists within me': subjectivity, embodiment and the world's first facial transplant, Marc Lafrance; The abject body in requests for assisted death: symptomatic, dependent, shameful and temporal, Annette Street and David Kissane; Losing Private Kovko: when military masculinity goes SNAFU, Jackie Cook. Part III Containment of Bodies: Strange yet compelling: anxiety and abjection in hospital nursing, Alicia Evans; Subjectivity and embodiment: acknowledging abjection in nursing, Janet McCabe; Encountering the other: nursing, dementia care and the self, Dave Holmes, Sylvie Lauzon and Marilou Gagnon; Dirty nursing: containing defilement and infection control practices, Allison Roderick; Regaining skin: wounds, dressings and the containment of abjection, Trudy Rudge; Conclusion - defacing horror, realigning nurses, Joanna Latimer; Index.