Narrating Social Order by Shelley Z. Reuter

Narrating Social Order: Agoraphobia and the Politics of Classification

Shelley Z. Reuter

Agoraphobia, the fear of open spaces, has received minimal attention from sociologists. Yet implicit within the psychiatric discussion of this disease is a normative account of society, social order, social ordering, and power relations, making agoraphobia an excellent candidate for sociological interpretation. Narrating Social Order provides the first critical sociological framework for understanding agoraphobia, as well as the issue of psychiatric classification more generally. Shelley Z. Reuter explores three major themes in her analysis: agoraphobia in the context of gender, race, and class; the shift in recent decades from an emphasis on psychoanalytic explanations for mental diseases to an emphasis on strictly biogenic explanations; and, finally, embodiment as a process that occurs in and through disease categories. Reuter provides a close reading of reports of agoraphobia beginning with the first official cases along with the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders and its precursors, illustrating how a 'psychiatric narrative' is contained within this clinical discourse. She argues that, while the disease embodies very real physiological and emotional experiences of suffering, implicit in these fluid and shifting discussions are socio-cultural assumptions. These assumptions, and especially the question of what it means, both medically and culturally, to be 'normal' versus 'pathological', demonstrate the overlap between the psychiatric narrative of agoraphobia and socio-cultural narratives of exclusion. Ultimately, Reuter seeks to confront the gap that exists between sociological and psychiatric conceptions of mental disease and to understand the relationship between biomedical and cultural knowledges.

Hardback edition with dust jacket, in good condition. Some damage along edge of first page; some white marks on (black) back pages; front cover marked and slightly warped; dust jacket has staining on inside and wear & tear at corners.

Published by University of Toronto Press, 2007

ix, 237 pages.

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