Engendering Stress in Australia: The Embodiment of Social Relationships

SUMMARY

This study draws on data from an ethnographic study of health and illness in a suburb of a regional city of southeastern Australia. “Stress” was a significant emergent theme in one-third of 111 semi-structured interviews, as well as focus groups and informal conversation. The researchers were able to construct a “lay epidemiology” in which stress was important in residents' understandings of the causes and symptoms of a range of health problems. The paper explores the different ways in which discourses of stress articulated the experience of structured gender relations among residents of Oceanpoint within the wider framework of a cultural critique of modernity in relation to the embodied self.