ABSTRACT
Coming at the end of a rich array of widely diverse essays and approaches, this chapter reiterates the mission of the book to avoid a “fatal unclutteredness” in theorizing, conceptualizing, and acting for and on women, health, and healing (Mukherjee 1994:6). Reaching for “fatal unclutteredness” here would hold out the tempting possibility of creating an interpretation for understanding and action that would unite or at least link these diverse essays into a new grand agenda for women, health, and healing. Such an approach would be fatally flawed. Aside from glossing the multiple complexities of substance, concepts, theories, and women’s individual and communal lives which have been explored in these pages, and ossifying an unfortunate and inappropriate “othering,” such an exercise in closure would stunt or even foreclose the potential for these essays to open out into each other and into new territories.
