ABSTRACT
This chapter explores ‘puzzlement’ as a resource for feminist transdisciplinary research into placebos and the placebo effect. As an object of knowledge, placebos dramatize bifurcated logics that are of longstanding interest to feminist scholars—mind/body, self/other, nature/culture, objective/subjective. Placebos (and their ‘evil twin’ nocebos) are demonstrative of the ways in which relations of social power suffuse all of our encounters, especially those in the realm of health and medicine. The chapter turns first to Placebo Studies and its emerging paradigm of placebo research and then examines three exemplary cases of feminist ‘placebo puzzles.’ Each ‘puzzle’ has an attendant transdisciplinary question that queries the limits of generalizable methods, while foregrounding the significance of care, interest, and puzzlement itself for feminist research practices.
