Main description:

Drawing upon insights from feminist new materialism the book traces the complex material-discursive processes through which women's 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.

Contents:

1. Introduction: Towards a Vital Feminist Politics2. RRhizomatic Movements and Gendered Knots of 'Bad Feelings'3. Reconfiguring Recovery Beyond Linearity.4. Motherhood, Hauntings and the Affective Arrangement of Care5. Moving-Transforming Bodyminds6.Creative Enactments in More-Than-Human Worlds7. Reimagining Feminist Futures: Vital Politics, Disruptive Pedagogies