“A razor-sharp, feminist-minded, and much-needed book.””
Why do we as a society ignore many of our biggest problems? Public attention is a limited resource and we’re just not able to address all the things, all the time. What falls through the cracks? And why don’t we notice?
Not Tonight argues that migraine is one of those perennially overlooked problems--an issue routinely dismissed as trivial, despite the fact that it is one of the most common, painful, and disabling diseases in the world. This remains true, even though researchers now understand that migraine is a neurobiological disease with potentially serious outcomes.
Why haven’t we paid attention to data that might alert us to the severity of this disease? Not Tonight combines concepts from sociology, anthropology, literature, history, and science studies to explain how “old” ideas about effete men and hysterical, neurotic women with migraine have been replaced with “new” ideas about people who have a hypersensitive, neurotic migraine brain. I argue that this entrenched stigma can be traced back to migraine’s long-standing association with neurotic women.
In other words, we often let who we assume experiences pain determine how we understand their symptoms and their suffering. I trace these highly feminized ideas about migraine to scientific journals, pharmaceutical advertisements, and even patient advocates’ arguments for why migraine should be taken seriously. Not Tonight casts new light on how cultural beliefs about gender, pain, and the distinction between mind and body influence not only whose pain and suffering we legitimize, but which remedies are marketed, how medicine is practiced, how knowledge about headache is and is not produced, and how we make policies about people in pain.
Winner of the 2016 American Sociological Association’s Medical Sociology Section’s Eliot Freidson Outstanding Publication Award
Best Book Award
“This insightful and eloquent account of our evolving understandings of migraine, from a condition of weak-nerved women, to a “real” neurobiological disease, does far more than document the cultural framing of headache. Kempner illuminates the complex, tangled relationship between medicine, morality, and meaning making in contemporary American society as she demonstrates that despite its biomedicalization and a shift from thinking of migraine as ‘all in the head’ to a genuine brain disease, migraine remains a disorder of personhood—and a particularly gendered one at that. The acuity of her sociological analysis is matched by her compassion for migraine sufferers and their fellow travelers on the quest for legitimacy and a cure.””
Banner art credit: Migraine Action Art Collection: Image 501, Unnamed artist, ‘Untitled’ (1985). http://www.migraineart.org.uk/artwork/untitled-24/
Winner of the 2016 Society for Medical Anthropology’s Eileen Basker Memorial Prize
For Not Tonight’s Contribution to Gender & Health
“An important contribution to our understanding of the multi-dimensional process through which society perceives and construes pain and disability. Her study of headache and especially migraine powerfully demonstrates the way in which gender, stakeholder interests (including those of status-oriented physicians and profit-oriented pharmaceutical manufacturers), and the very elusiveness of pain interact to create that social entity we call migraine—an entity that shapes attitudes, self-perceptions, and access to care. Carefully researched and engagingly written, this study should be of interest to anyone concerned with the social aspects of medicine. And anyone who suffers from the curse of headache pain.””