Re: Berkenkotter & Ravotas article

Susan Leigh Star (s-star1 who-is-at uiuc.edu)
Mon, 9 Feb 1998 11:45:34 -0800 (PST)

Hi Francoise, and Carol and others,

This is a really good question that I have pondered a lot in writing about
classifications and standards. Often there is no escape, at least in the
disciplining Foucaldian sense. But I do see (or have seen) three different
avenues out:

-- Almost no single system, standard or category really is universal.
There is thus leverage for change or escape through plurality. Sometimes
that takes the form of pitting one system against another, to show how
claims of universality are really based on parochialism. The sources of the
pluralism are many, from historical and cultural circumstances to changes
in technology and scientific disagreement. While this may not directly
impact pathologizing, indirectly it may. For instance, Anne Figert's book,
Women and the Ownership of PMS, shows feminist activists using the
uncertainty and pluralism in the diagnostic realm to challenge claims about
PMS (pre-menstrual syndrome) and the DSM (diagnostic and statistical
manual, the psychiatric classification system).

-- Sometimes a single category or group of categories attracts a
constituency for activism and reform (or occupational subgroup reform).
Kirk and Kutchin's book, The Selling of DSM, shows how the demedicalization
of homosexuality worked in just this way, at a time when much of
psychiatric theory was tending in the opposite (reductionist biomedial)
direction.

-- Making ambiguity a resource (very hard to do, but possible). Systems
of classifying always have struggles with residual categories, fuzzy
categories, and what to do with people-diseases-situations-things that do
not fit the categories put forth. Where groups of people can organize and
address this struggle head on, and link it to their own power and
discretion, sometimes spaces open up in the web of control.

Really good discussion, it has been helpful to me. Thanks to you all, and
Carol, I've been loving reading your stuff on this.

Leigh

>Hi Carol, Hi Doris, I had the opportunity to read your MCA article
>"Genre as tool in the transmission of Practice over time and
>across professional boundaries" which I really enjoyed and at the
>same time left me depressed. In line with Leigh's work on
>classificatory systems, but in terms of how these shape
>experience, and in the case study that you report people's
>indentity and lives, I have one question for you ( perhaps
>especially for Doris). How do you espcape the bind of
>intertextuality, the web of institutional pressures to
>"pathologize"? It is great to see it, to analyze it, to unveil
>the "dirty" secrets. but what are the alternatives? How do you
>escape being locked into a status quo of "pathology" and its
>reproduction? The therapist as researcher is a lousy one that only
>uses "etic" means of approaching the culture of his or her client.
>Where and how did you begin to change that?
>
>Francoise Francoise Herrmann fherrmann who-is-at igc.apc.org
>http://www.wenet.net/~herrmann

***************************************
Susan Leigh Star
Graduate School of Library and Information Science
University of Illinois 123 LIS Building
501 East Daniel St.
Champaign, IL 61820 Phone: (217) 244-3280
FAX: (217) 244-3302 email: s-star1 who-is-at uiuc.edu
____________________________________________________

"The point of a pencil is its raison d'etre; all else is infrastructure."
--Henry Petroski, The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance, p. 196