In The Unknowable Body, Lisa Jean Moore explores the profound disconnect between how we experience our bodies and how the medical world interprets them. Drawing on her own journey through DCIS diagnosis, mastectomy, and reconstruction - alongside her family's navigation of her ex-partner's brain tumour - Moore investigates various unsettling dimensions of bodily uncertainty that emerge when illness enters our lives.

As scans revealed secrets that human perception failed to, and while navigating a queer family system that didn't fit institutional categories, the author found herself in territory few roadmaps could chart. This book weaves candid humour and poetic personal narrative and analytical vision to examine how bodies resist complete knowing - medically, emotionally, in time, and through gender and identity. It offers new ways of thinking about embodiment in an age of increasing medical surveillance, technological intervention, and economically profitable uncertainty.

What began as an investigation into cancer treatment evolved into a deeper exploration of how bodies exceed our frameworks for understanding. Whether through scans that simultaneously reveal and obscure, emotional reverberations that transform family systems, temporal disruptions that fracture our sense of before and after, or gender expectations that shape medical encounters, our bodies remain fundamentally mysterious even as we attempt to make them knowable.

This thought-provoking, enriching book isn't just about illness, but about how all bodies exist in states of becoming and evade categories.

About the Author

Lisa Jean Moore is a SUNY Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Gender Studies at Purchase College and a leading scholar in feminist medical sociology. Over three decades, her work has examined embodiment across human and nonhuman worlds - from the politics of reproduction in Sperm Counts to multispecies entanglements in Buzz: Urban Beekeeping and the Power of the Bee. A qualitative researcher whose methods center lived experience and feminist analysis, Moore brings the same intellectual rigor to this deeply personal investigation of illness, medical surveillance, and bodily mystery. She practices yoga and lives in Brooklyn with her family.

Reviews

"The Unknowable Body argues that the escalation of medical tests, technologies, and risk-reduction strategies has, paradoxically, made our bodies more unknowable. Moore's compelling and beautifully written autoethnography of her own and her family's medical experiences shows that expanding modes of medical surveillance enable new treatments and payment schemes. Yet they also position us as perpetually unknowable, highly stratified subjects of life-long embodied uncertainty."
Rayna Rapp, co-author, Disability Worlds

"Lisa Jean Moore's The Unknowable Body is a searching and resonant account of the persistent tension between medical knowledge and the body's enduring mystery. Drawing on her personal experience, Moore explores what it means to be a 'patient-citizen,' what forms a family can take, and how essential networks of care must expand. Through this analysis, she illuminates the aspects of medical culture that shape what patients feel, know, and fear. Moore investigates the uneasy territory of surveillance medicine; while grateful for scientific advances, she heeds Audre Lorde's call for 'heretical knowledge' - the wisdom of subjective, emotional experience. Ultimately, Moore offers new ways to think about uncertainty, care, and the limits of medicine."
Suzanne Scanlon, author of Committed: On Meaning and Madwomen

Book Information
ISBN 9781509570744
Author Lisa Jean Moore
Format Hardback
Page Count 240
Imprint Polity Press
Publisher John Wiley and Sons Ltd
Weight(grams) 425g
Dimensions(mm) 223mm * 147mm * 27mm