Appropriating Space for Practices of Self-Care

• In Event: Feminist Technoscience by Other Means: Reconfiguring Research Practices for World-Making Beyond the Academy - I

Abstract

This paper examines inter-relationships between self-care practices and the production of social space in everyday life. I use ethnographic data from new clinic-based “extended services” provided by mid-level medical practitioners (nurses and pharmacists), to people living with type-2 diabetes. Henri Lefebvre’s work on social space is used to think with data (Jackson and Mazzei 2012) and understand diabetes self-care in terms of the increasing dominance of abstracted space over spaces of lived and embodied experience. Lefebvre’s work shows the importance of form to cultural production; abstracted space both fragments and homogenizes the social realities of everyday life.
I also situate rearrangements of clinical practice, disease management and self-care within broader discussions of what Latour describes as extensions of scientific knowledge claims, which shape how people take responsibility for self-care and create relationships between body and self. Analysis of how both clinicians and patients grapple with and learn to use abstracted space reveals how space and spatiality are integral to knowledge claims. As the prevalence of type-2 diabetes increases globally, space (and time) within the home is also re-arranged; abstracted space dominates as self-care is transformed into measurements and math-skills. However, the production of abstract space does not affect people evenly. For many working-poor women living with type-2 diabetes, self-measurement and quantification further alienate already tenuous relationships between body and self. Lastly, I discuss the intersections of spatial forms and subjectivity formation as an exploratory avenue for STS studies to be engaged beyond academia and normative medical goals of improving compliance.

Author

• Jenny Epstein