ABSTRACT
My discussion of rehabilitation to this point has drawn from Foucault’s middleperiod writings on discipline to highlight the processes through which individuals, as cardiac cases, are disciplined and normalized through risk discourse in rehabilitation. In this chapter I examine how clients make sense out of and respond to rehabilitation regimens and the demands of cardiac reskilling more generally. My analysis draws on Foucault’s later-period writings on the care of the self to emphasize the way people remake their bodies and cultivate and care for, themselves. My discussion calls attention to performative features of illness (cf. Dingwall, 2001; Frankenberg, 1986), and identifies different styles of reskilling that are evident in how clients negotiate clinic directives, interpret expert claims, and fashion a way of living with heart disease. My analysis explicates distinctive styles of reskilling that demonstrate differing degrees of trust in and doubt of, expert claims about risk, and ranging measures of investment in, and divestment from, risk reduction imperatives.
