Abstract
While much recent theorizing into affect has challenged the primacy of discourse in understanding social life, this paper is premised on the intertwining of affective experience with discursive meaning. Furthermore, appreciating the entwining of affect and discourse facilitates broader understanding into the illness experience, medical decision-making and experiences of healing. Today, the biomedical discourse carries particular affective weight that can saturate experiences of affliction. Cultural understandings of disease similarly shape affect that may emerge in affliction. Social meaning, more specifically stereotypes pertaining to identities, interweave with emotion also in the context of medical practice. The doctor-patient relationship is an affect-laden encounter where the entwining of affect with social assumptions carries important, yet poorly understood, repercussions for treatment decisions and for the furthering of health inequalities. Both the elusiveness and the power of affect that unfolds in relation to discursive meaning rest on the way in which affect dwells in and resounds through the body.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 312-328 |
| Number of pages | 17 |
| Journal | The Sociological Review |
| Volume | 64 |
| Issue number | 2 |
| Early online date | 15 Sept 2015 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 1 May 2016 |
Bibliographical note
© 2015 The Author. This is an author-produced version of the published paper. Uploaded in accordance with the publisher’s self-archiving policy. Further copying may not be permitted; contact the publisher for detailsKeywords
- Affect
- Discourse
- Doctor-patient relationship
- Healing
- Illness experience