regard to maintaining a job or securing financial
support (Moss and Dyck, 2001). The women
actively negotiated the dissonance between pre-
vious able identities and/or current instability of
corporeal capacities in particularsettings with
gendered performance expectations, whether
home or workplace (Dyck, 1999). Strategies the
women used varied widely but most included
ways of navigating physical environments that
had become ‘hostile’, in the sense of being diffi-
cult to traverse, use or exist within, and ways of
concealing corporeal limitations in workplaces
where there was fear of reprisal – such as dis-
missal or stigmatization – if a woman’s illness
happened to be revealed. In each case, class was
an important dimension of experience and one
would expect that ‘race’ and other devalued dif-
ferences would also intersect in women’s
embodied experience and knowledge of being
chronically ill, although most of the women in
our studies were heterosexual and white.
Our studies show that it is through the body –
which had become a problem for these women
through unsettling constancies, capacities and
materialities – that the women think through and
talk about their lives in perhaps a more explicit
way than those with an able and non-chronically
ill body which has not been reconstructed as
‘deviant’. The transitionbetween states of bodily
being heightens the perception of change and
intensifies the bodily experiences of that change
so that when recounting, women were readily
forthcoming with details about how they deal
with their illness in a number of venues (Moss
and Dyck, 1999b). In a sense, they had yet to nat-
uralize or internalize their ‘deviance’, resulting in
richly, and sometimes garishly, textured descrip-
tions of their bodies. This ‘being in transition’
highlights the fluidityof bodies and associated
inscriptions, through specifying particular spaces
encoded with performance expectations and par-
ticular strategies developed to manage discrepan-
cies between performance and appearance.
‘Being in transition’ also brings into focus bodily
boundaries in identity formation or transforma-
tion – ones that differentiate specific bodily
aspects of identity as well as differentiate bodies
from each other. Like most boundaries, these
bodily boundaries, too, are created, reproduced,
resisted and transgressed (see Moss, 1999).CONTRIBUTIONS AND
CONTESTATIONSThe sum of work in social and cultural geography
concerned with theorizing body and embodiment
in various ways enables us to begin thinkingabout knowledge, ‘being’ and identities beyond
the confines of binaries in two main ways. First,
methodological approaches that focus on narra-
tive accounts and other qualitative methods pro-
vide ways of producing knowledge that creates
space for embodied knowledgeto emerge from
bodily being, experiences and activities from a
plurality of voices andplaces. This in itself chal-
lenges an understanding of the world based on
power-laden categories that cast frameworks of
knowledge in relation to normative depictions of
who and which groups constitute the centre and
margin, the self and other. Taking up difference
entails a reworking of boundaries and borders
and a destabilizing of unitary taken-for-granted
categories through the performance of multiple
ways of beinggendered, classed, ‘raced’, sexed,
sexualized and abled. Because identities are
embodied, audiences respond to transgressive
and conforming performances in the specificities
of the spaces where these performances are
enacted and observed.
Second, theorizing body as material and dis-
cursive with each constituting the other, and
grounded in the particular space/time organiza-
tion of quotidian life, is useful in thinking
through challenges to binary categorization.
Examining this grounding empirically, geogra-
phers are building a mass of studies where con-
testations, resistances and/or transgressions of
dominant and normative depictions of gender,
class, ‘race’, sex, sexuality and ability are unset-
tled. In grounding the abstract subject/body in
the materiality of everyday life such unsettling,
and the success or otherwise of its myriad impli-
cations, provides room for multiple and wide-
ranging audiences, places and cultural contexts.
Feminism and queer theory have been insightful
in suggesting ways of thinking beyond binaries
and incorporating corporeality without falling
into the perils of biological reductionism or
essentialism, while theorizing body and embodi-
ment in ways that demonstrate the non-viability
of understanding social relations based on
simplistic associations of biology, behaviour and
capacities for action and thinking.
Throughout this chapter we have pointed out
the difference between a geography of the body
and an embodied geography while holding in
tension theorizing body and working with
embodied knowledge. Although creating geogra-
phies of bodies is useful in counting, accounting
for and recounting people’s lives, they are
somewhat limited in explaining and understand-
ing how multiple sets of power relations mutu-
ally constitute individual persons and groups of
people or how the mutability of bodies and
fluidity of subject/body is integral to (re)constitut-
ing embodied subjectivities (see the exchange onEMBODYING SOCIAL GEOGRAPHY 693029-ch02.qxd 03-10-02 11:39 AM Page 69