Towards a feminist politics of desire: Caring, resisting, and becoming. Review of the book Feminism and vital politics of depression and recovery (Simone Fullagar, Wendy O'Brien & Adele Pavlidis, 2019)

Abstract

Biomedical imaginaries on mental disorders are generally based on linear structures of causal connections focused on the individual agency of recovery. Those usually don't include the critical contributions by feminist researchers that have largely proposed different connections between women's social and emotional lives, mental health diagnosis and forms of gender discrimination, inequality, violence and abuse suffered by women in both public and private spheres (Appignanesi, 2011; Chandler, 2016; McDermott & Roen, 2016; Stone & Kokanovic, 2016; Stoppard, 2000; Ussher, 1991; Wiener, 2005 in Fullagar, O'Brien & Pavlidis, 2019). Feminism and vital politics of depression and recovery by Simone Fullagar, Wendy O'Brien and Adele Pavlidis (2019) 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. The authors invite readers "to engage with this book as a co-constituted process of reading-writing through visceral connections guts, brains, hearts, skin, words, images, surfaces to explore how gender matters" (Fullagar, O'Brien & Pavlidis, 2019, p. 1).