Elizabeth Ettorre

• BA (Fordham University), PhD (LSE)
• Professor Emeritus at University of Liverpool

This article explores autoethnography, based upon transcribed, narratives, conversations, and research notes, as a useful method of creating social and cultural insights into the lives of women drug users and their particular kinds of problems and to related issues of reflexivity, reliability, and validity. A critical issue is raised by asking the...

This article focuses on my experience of thyrotoxicosis and is rooted in the tradition of medical sociologists reflecting upon their own illnesses. I use the method of autoethnography to contribute to broader academic debates on acute illness as a neglected research area and embed my reflections in feminist work which makes connections between bodi...

This article provides an autoethnographic account of my personal journey through ‘good time’ sociology. Telling my story involves recounting my experience as a Catholic nun and closeted lesbian in 1970s’ USA; providing a picture of what it was like to do the first PhD on lesbians in the UK; explaining the impact of drugs and alcohol research on my...

Commentary to: Do women with complex alcohol and other drug use histories want women-only residential treatment?

Lesbianism can be understood as same‐sex attraction, love, or romantic desire between women. Lesbianism emerged as a visible social phenomenon in the mid‐twentieth century. Since that time, understanding of the concept has developed exponentially from defining the practice of lesbianism on an individual level as a pathology or deviance to seeing le...

This article explores autoethnography as one way of doing feminist research in the drugs field. By telling my story during my 40 years experience as a feminist researcher in the drugs field, I aim to help those practicing critical drug scholarship to become familiar with this methodology as a viable way of employing a gender analysis, an employment...

‘Health, Culture and Society’ has been explored in classic texts by a diverse range of scholars. We want to demonstrate that enduring concepts have consistently been complex and contested. We pose questions about the ways they have been defined, used and applied to health. Our tone is recharging arguments through enduring concepts, and we want to d...

The ‘power’ of the medical profession is introduced alongside sociological concepts of medicalization, professionalization and biomedicalization. How power is constructed in and through these conceptualizations and their consequences is explored and discussed with reference to Parsons, Weber, Bourdieu and Foucault whose ways of seeing power involve...

As a corporeal overlay upon which healthy and unhealthy identities are fashioned, the notion of ‘embodied self’ allows for ‘social interaction’ implying diversity and the need for ‘normativity’ as a powerful paradigm in which health and illness are often shaped as normal and ‘deviant’. How ‘the agentic self’ was formative in developing sociological...

This book traces the history of formative, enduring concepts, foundational in the development of the health disciplines. It explores existing literature, and subsequent contested applications. Feminist legacies are discussed with a clear message that early sociological and anthropological theories and debates remain valuable to scholars today. Chap...

Autoethnography is an ideal method to study the 'feminist I'. Through personal stories, the author reflects on how feminists negotiate agency and the effect this has on one's political sensibilities. Speaking about oneself transforms into stories of political responsibility - a key issue for feminists who function as cultural mediators.

This chapter examines the intersections between biological and social dimensions of gender and health with special reference to reproduction. We explore the notion of reproductive regimes through the consideration of four case studies that exemplify how contemporary women’s reproductive bodies may engage with biomedicine. A major assumption running...

The paper develops key notions needed for a feminist embodiment approach to drugs, their use and users. First, the term embodied deviance is defined in relationship to women drug users. Second, the bodily tasks of gendered drug use are defined to show how “normal” embodiment is foreclosed to women drug users. Third, disease regimes and epistemologi...

The book is introduced by Prefessor Elizabeth Ettorre and edited by Dr. Patsy Staddon, who recovered from alcohol issues in 1988. It includes chapters by Laura Serrant, looking at Black Caribbean women and alcohol (mis)use, Lydia Lewis, on adult community learning responses to women’s alcohol problems, and other chapters on the history of moral reg...

This chapter examines the intersections between biological and social dimensions of gender and health with special reference to reproduction. We explore the notion of reproductive regimes through the consideration of four case studies that exemplify how contemporary women’s reproductive bodies may engage with biomedicine. A major assumption running...

Critiques of gender mainstreaming (GM) as the officially agreed strategy to promote gender equity in health internationally have reached a critical mass. There has been a notable lack of dialogue between gender advocates in the global north and south, from policy and practice, governments and non-governmental organisations (NGOs). This paper contri...

This study, by two leading scholars in the field, draws on feminist theory and science and technology studies to uncover a basic injustice for the human rights of drug-using women: most women who need drug treatment in the US and UK do not get it. Why not?.

This book brings to bear the ideas of feminist sociology of knowledge, situated knowledge and ignorance, and standpoint epistemologies (Figueroa and Harding, 2003; Haraway, 1988; Harding, 1991, 1998, 2006, 2008; Hartsock, 1984; Smith, 1990) upon a basic injustice that has grave consequences for the human rights of drug-using women. Despite concerte...

We argue that gender and gendered social norms actively define the reproducing body, as well as female bodies with or without reproductive potential, and the pregnant body.1 This chapter demonstrates how the larger political climate and policy environment shapes responses to illicit drug use by women from diverse backgrounds, limiting the likelihoo...

The first generation of women’s treatment programmes in the 1970s and early 1980s were well-intentioned, often isolated from one another, and often maternalist and ‘pro-natalist’ at base.1 They were often undertaken by physicians interested in helping drug and or alcohol-dependent women patients towards greater conformity with dominant social norms...

In Britain the policy framework within which treatment responses to women drug users and alcoholics developed can be situated within political changes reflecting distinct phases or periods. For Susanne MacGregor and Lynne Smith (1998: 70) these phases are characterized by treatment and care as well as control and punishment — all shaped within a pr...

Drug and alcohol treatment have long challenged the public health infrastructures designed to deliver them. This chapter unfolds a proto-feminist history of treatment and research programmes focused on women that evolved in the mid-twentieth century. The chapter covers the history of how the treatment of women’s drug and alcohol use were spoken abo...

This chapter maps out the history of feminist attempts to carve out the space in which to create and sustain feminist and gender-sensitive treatment programmes during the 1980s and 1990s. We examine those factors that made for sustainable programmes and those that led to non-sustainability and ultimate dissolution or demise. We trace the history of...

We start with the question: Does gender still matter in an age of neurochemical thinking about self and other? We argue that gender does still matter because one of the most significant effects of understanding ourselves as ‘neurochemical selves’ has been a shift in the site of the deviance of ‘others’ from bodies to brains. The gendered body has l...

Culture, Bodies and the Sociology of Health explores the boundaries between bodies and society with special reference to uncovering the cultural components of health and the ways in which bodies are categorized according to a form of culturally embedded 'health orthodoxy'. Illustrating the importance of contextualizing the body as a cultural entity...

Le but de cette étude ect d'éclairer sous un autre jour la position des femmes en sociologie urbaine. Cette discussion va illustrer les directions dont on a tiré les analyses précédentes et l'effet qui s'ensuit sur la sociologie urbaine vis-à-vis des femmes. Tout d'abord, la présentation s'attache principalement à l'articulation de la politique des...

This article provides a review of literature of articles and texts on prenatal genetic technologies and is limited specifically to research that focuses on the intersection between the dynamics of prenatal screening; the regulation of family life and reproduction; the issues of disabilities, risk, and shame; embodied affect; and contemporary molecu...

Focusing on the impact of prenatal screening on women's bodies, the paper sets the scene for an understanding of the social complexities of this type of screening. After looking briefly at the various types of procedures used during the prenatal period, I demonstrate how the mix of prenatal politics, reproductive genetics and gender creates threats...

The paper explores the effect of group participation on depressed women's ‘doing depression’ and ‘doing pleasure’ in Finland over three time periods. Quantitative data and qualitative data are analysed. To assess statistically the differences between the time periods, the Wilcoxon matched-pairs signed-ranks z-test is applied to the quantitative dat...

[No abstract]

Through diaries, depressed women are able to chart their passage through depression side-by-side with their involvement in the therapeutic process. Writing in diaries provides meaning for their own experience of depression and enhances the therapeutic process. As diarists, by retelling and reclaiming the events in one's life, they are able to becom...

This ‘landmark’ text by one of the most respected researchers in drug use considers the issues surrounding the gendering of drug use, and within this looks critically at two approaches - the classical and postmodern. Ettorre examines the idea of a drug-using society and the implications this holds for social inequality and exclusion.

Hopefully, readers will have a developing sense that over the past decades, indeed centuries, scientific and biomedical discourses on the body have become rooted in contemporary culture. As social scientists begin to position bodies centrally in their approaches to society and culture (E. Martin, 1992; Turner, 1996; Frank, 1995; Shilling, 2005; Fea...

This introduction is all about providing the ‘back story’ for how Revisioning women and drug use emerged. It’s almost as if this book has its own life and personal history. Revisioning women and drug use has been a long time coming and represents for me an overwhelming research journey from despair to hope as my body moved from being ill to healthy...

As noted in Chapter 1, I ask in this and the following two chapters the question, ‘How can we develop a feminist embodiment approach to drug use?’ and look at some of the different types of embodiments that are on offer to drug-using women. Already in the previous chapter I used the notion of the consuming body to demonstrate women drug users’ bodi...

In the previous chapter, we became familiar with the ‘back story’ for the development of this book. I suggested that gender may be viewed as a fanciful quirk in our analyses of the lives of drug users or as a crucial notion in our understanding of drug cultures. Additionally, I presented two co-existing paradigms, the ‘classical and the ‘postmodern...

In the discussions in the previous chapters I have focused more on women than on men. This is not because I see women as passive victims, because I want to create a separate or ‘essentialist’ women’s space or because I define a seamless theoretical category, women, in opposition to men. No. I want to uncover the sometimes obscure gendering processe...

Thus far in this book we have built up a feminist embodiment approach to drugs and looked at some of the different types of embodiment that are on offer to drug-using women. Wanting to revision, we let go of how we have traditionally seen women and drug use and attempted to construct new perceptions of women’s drug-using bodies. I have maintained t...

The Women and Depression Project began in 1994 within a Finnish national research programme. We developed professionally guided self-help groups as a therapeutic intervention in mental health clinics. Through a gender lens, we explored the effect of group participation on depressed women's ‘individual’ and ‘social’ feelings over three time periods....

xx

This chapter examines, through three case studies, how new health technologies are changing the material and social conditions of critical moments of life’s transition: birth, childhood development and the end of life. New and emerging health technologies are surrounded by ambivalence and risk: they promise a greater degree of ‘human’ agency over t...

The concept of the ‘risk society’ has focused on growing uncertainties about the benefits of scientific innovation and the reliability of professional judgement. Paradoxically, this has gone hand in hand with reductions in the actual risk associated with many activities and is often accompanied by demands for a technological fix. These contradictor...

The purpose of this paper is ‘to revision’ our approach to women's use of drugs – which means to let go of how we have seen in order to construct new perceptions. Women use a variety of substances for a range of reasons, including pleasure. Yet, women who experience problems are left feeling stigmatised, marginalised and demoralised. The paper incl...

Depression is a multidimensional, multicultural phenomenon. To understand fully the material, embodied and subjective discursive aspects of experiences labeled as depression demands drawing upon knowledge that is interdisciplinary and sensitive to cultural diversity. We use a cultural ethnographic approach to depression and link it to a gender sens...

Shaped by an understanding of the impact of biotechnology on medical practice, this paper highlights some of the key issues that become visible in a critical analysis of the relationship between reproduction and genetics. The term 'reproductive genetics' is used sociologically and defined as the utilization of DNA-based technologies in the medical...

The paper reports findings from a European study on experts’ perceptions of reproductive genetics, and explores the notion of experts as ‘genetic story tellers’ and producers of genetic ideology. The first part provides experts’ accounts of families who are perceived as being in need of prenatal genetic screening. Here, I reflect on the types of cl...

This article examines long-term users of psychotropic drugs (43 men and 57 women) and their views on women's and men's reasons for using these drugs. The data came from written statements (N= 56) given on open-ended questions from a survey of users and from taped interviews with 10 respondents. Men's accounts expressed a notion of men as experienci...

Although the term 'genetic screening' has been used for decades, this paper discusses how, in its most precise meaning, genetic screening has not yet been widely introduced. 'Prenatal screening' is often confused with 'genetic screening'. As we show, these terms have different meanings, and we examine definitions of the relevant concepts in order t...

Although the term ‘genetic screening’ has been used for decades, this paper discusses how, in its most precise meaning, genetic screening has not yet been widely introduced. 'Prenatal screening’ is often confused with ‘genetic screening’. As we show, these terms have different meanings, and we examine definitions of the relevant concepts in order t...

Prenatal comes from the Latin words ‘prae’ and ‘natalis’ meaning ‘before’ and ‘to be born’, respectively (Concise Oxford Dictionary, 1995). This word is semiotically loaded because ‘prenatal’ connotes the time before being born. The word itself signifies the foetus (who is ‘before being born’) not the pregnant body within whom the foetus grows. If...

The myth that most if not all senior researchers who have national prominence can ‘successfully’ manage international research is alive and well in the academy today. Many researchers believe that research management and consultancy is acquired through a process of trial and error and demands little contemplation or training. The purpose of this pa...

This paper's purpose is to highlight key sociological issues, that come to light when 'the body' becomes a theoretical site in reproductive genetics. By positioning the body as a central feature in this analysis, the paper: (1) describes how a mechanistic view of the body continues to be privileged in this discourse and the effects of this view; (2...

SUMMARY The purpose of this paper is to analyze a series of feminist archetypes and expand this analysis to concentrate on lesbian interpretations of these archetypes. The related notions, spiritualities and myths are defined in order to contextualize feminist archtypes. It is contended that there is a difference between traditional, female archety...

Sarah Nettleton and Jonathan Watson (eds.), The Body in Everyday Life, London: Routledge, 1998, £50.00 (£15.99 pbk), xii+308 pp. (ISBN 0-415-16201-7). - - Volume 33 Issue 4 - Elizabeth Ettorre

The article examines men's and women's views on their reasons for mental distress and on their coping styles, respectively. The data were taken from written statements given on two open-ended questions from a survey questionnaire returned by 43 men and 57 women who were self-reported, long-term users of these drugs, and from taped interviews with 1...