Feminism and a Vital Politics of Depression and Recovery [Hardcover]

Drawing upon insights from feminist new materialism the book traces the complex material-discursive processes through which womens recovery from depression is enacted within a gendered biopolitics. Within the biomedical assemblage that connects mental health policy, service provision, research and everyday life, the gendered context of recovery remains little understood despite the recurrence and pervasiveness of depression. Rather than reducing experience to discrete biological, psychological or sociological categories, feminist thinking moves with the biopsychosocialities implicated in both distress and lively modes of becoming well. Using a post-qualitative approach, the book creatively re-presents how women do recovery within and beyond the normalising imperatives of biomedical and psychotherapeutic practices. By pursuing the affective movement of self through depression this inquiry goes beyond individualised models to explore the enactment of multiple self-world relations. Reconfiguring depression and recovery as bodymind matters opens up a relational ontology concerned with the entanglement of gender inequities and mental (ill) health.1. Introduction: Towards a Vital Feminist Politics.- 2. RRhizomatic Movements and Gendered Knots of Bad Feelings.- 3. Reconfiguring Recovery Beyond Linearity.- 4. Motherhood, Hauntings and the Affective Arrangement of Care.- 5. Moving-Transforming Bodyminds.- 6. Creative Enactments in More-Than-Human Worlds.- 7. Reimagining Feminist Futures: Vital Politics, Disruptive Pedagogies.Feminism and a Vital Politics of depression and recovery by Simone Fullagar, Wendy OBrien and Adele Pavlidis & is an invitation to reconfigure discourses, imaginaries and narratives on mental health from a new materialist approach, by moving beyond individual problems to collective experiences that shape a feminist ethos. (Marina Riera-Retamero, Matter, Journal of New Materialist Research, Vol. 1 (2), lÃV