ABSTRACT
Chronic illness and disability present circumstances in which people become conscious of their body and reflect upon them in ways that may or may not be on their own terms. Thus, as Kathy Charmaz and Dana Rosenfeld suggest, “Studying people’s experiences with chronic illness and disability teaches us of the fragility of our body and its appearance, and how subject we are and have always been to contingencies that affect it.” Using Cooley’s looking-glass self as a tool to examine relationships between body and self, Charmaz and Rosenfeld magnify how people with illness and disability “see images of this body – and themselves – in how other people respond to them.” Charmaz and Rosenfeld also unite Cooley with Goffman to investigate how illness and disability intensifies tensions between body and self, focusing here on the tension between visibility and information control. In their grounded analysis, Charmaz and Rosenfeld “take the concept of the looking glass self beyond appearances and information control about the body into the experiences of the body and to those emanating from it as they arise during illness and disability.”
