body is good to think and talk; indeed, its peculiar somatic changes insist on thinking and talking. People with MCS are forced to think about why their bodies change in the presence of common consumer products and ordinary environments; and they are often forced to explain these peculiar somatic changes to skeptical others.
Two Ways of Talking and Thinking, and the Reappearance of the Subject
We can think about our bodies because we both are bodies and have bodies (Berger and Luckmann 1966). The question, “How do we have bodies?” is routinely answered in sociology with some variant of the word symbol. We “have” bodies because we talk about them. Indeed, bodies are fabricated in talk; they are, literally, figures of speech, tropes, embodied conversations, social constructions. Many conversations about the body are occurring simultaneously, however, some more privileged than others. The power of physicians and medical researchers is embedded in their use of biomedical talk to promote a culturally preferred account of the body and disqualify other accounts. To the profession of medicine society has given the right to author the body: to pronounce it legally alive, to name its systems and diseases, to control its capacity to labor by defining when it is sick and when it is well, and, finally, to pronounce it legally dead. From the birth certificate to the death certificate and everything in between, biomedicine is charged by the state with writing the somatic text.1
Consider, for example, a proud father who looks at his newborn daughter and observes, “She has my eyes and nose,” and thus locates her body in his lineage. Important as this moment is in the life of the father and daughter, of equal or greater importance is the issuance of a state birth certificate signed by a physician that officially recognizes the infant body as living and legally belonging to the father who gave her the eyes and nose and the mother who birthed her. In the absence of state certification of the live body of the infant, the date of birth, and her legal father and mother, recognizing a similarity between her nose and that of an adult would not be sufficient to establish paternity.
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