Conference Programme, Abstracts & Papers

Session 13 - Health, Illness and Disease: Private, Public and Social Views
Chair: Andrew Goffey

What's Love got to do with it? The Relational Nature of Depressive Experiences
Leeat Granek
York University, Canada

Clinical depression is a condition that involves depressed mood and intense sadness that lasts for more than a “normal” span of time for a person feeling down. Depression has traditionally been considered a medical disorder and as such has been studied, treated and researched through “objective” positivist empirical methods. Very few in-depth qualitative studies on depression have been undertaken. This study looked at the depressive experience from the subjective perspective and found that depression is a complex process that involves relationships. Using Methodical Hermeneutical approach, (revised version of grounded theory), this study found that depression was largely a relational phenomenon. Under this category, three findings arose; self in relation, self-criticism and self-loathing, and loneliness and disconnection. Further conclusions suggest that the traditional medical “objective” conceptualization of depression is inadequate in understanding the totality of the depressed experience and more emphasis needs to be placed on the “subjective” aspect of the condition.

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Women as Mysterious Machine: Female Sexual Dysfunction and the Impossible Journey into Female Pleasure
Monica Brown
Department of English, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada

This paper, which performs a rhetorical analysis of the relationship of female pleasure to the construction of female sexual dysfunction (FSD) as a medical diagnosis, aims to isolate the metaphors that allow for the conditioning of female pleasure as a medical problem, and how those metaphors produce the value of female sexuality within North American pharmaceutical culture. I argue that the medicalization of FSD exists within a larger narrative of the vice of female sexuality, and of the devaluation of female pleasure within Western culture, but that, as Meika Loe argues in The Rise of Viagra, such narratives persist within a masculine medical model of pleasure dominated by the metaphor of the body as a ‘biochemical machine’ with pleasure faculties that can be easily switched on and off (Segal 221). The alternative to such a conception, as a rhetorical approach will emphasize, has been to persuade of female pleasure as a ‘hidden’, ‘mysterious’, ‘complicated’ and therefore largely misunderstood aspect of a woman’s sexuality – which suggests that another trope that has ‘dysfunctionalized’ female pleasure has been its displacement from the female body through the metaphor of an ‘impossible journey’. Regardless of its outcome, the search for a female Viagra – for a cure to FSD - rhetorically produces the character of female sexuality, constructing, constraining and quite literally confusing her access to pleasure. Research into pleasure and FSD supports this claim by demonstrating that the search itself provides the terms through which one may speak of feminine sexuality, terms that can be seen as not only prohibitive in that they limit attitudes toward female pleasure, but that, through limiting attitudes, also limit access to pleasure.

Suffering: Rediscovering Religion in Medicine
Stephan van Erp
Department for Theology and Medical Sciences, Heyendaal Institute for Interdisciplinary Research, Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands.

Research on the interface of religious studies and medicine mostly approaches spirituality and prayer as ways of coping with illness and disease. The possible consequences of that approach are a functional or instrumental view of religion and a neglect of the diversity of religious ideas at work in medical practice. Functional or not, confronted with illness and disease, medical doctors, nurses, pastoral carers and family members all apply their life views and world views – explicitly or implicitly – to their work and care. In this paper I would like to ask what a theological approach could contribute to urgent cultural matters while dealing with medical decisions and dilemmas. I would like to argue that, in the field of religious studies and theology, medicine is not only a matter for theological ethics or practical theology, but also a source and workplace for systematic theology. To understand the task of systematic theology of articulating, comparing and contrasting life views and world views in a medical context, I shall first clarify the historical connection between religion and medicine (1). Next, I shall describe the modern split between religion and medicine and the current failing attempts to restore the connection (2). Subsequently, I shall sketch a theological agenda for future research on medicine and health, with a focus on the interdisciplinary approach of human suffering (3).