Our Bodies, Ourselves

It's taken me about a year but I'm finally on the last chapter of the book Our Bodies, Ourselves and the Work of Writing by Susan Wells. I enjoyed reading how the women of the Boston Women's Health Collective researched, wrote, illustrated and published the book on women's health in 1970. At the time it was a revolutionary act.



Wells' book talks about how the women even wrote collectively, taking care to create a unique voice that would not intimidate readers but instead encourage them to take charge of their own bodies and health.



But I kept stumbling over the word "metaleptic" in the text. I had to look it up every time I ran across it in my reading. I still don't think I understand what it means! Wells writes that

Traditionally, metalepsis was a figure in which a writer refers to something by naming an object only remotely related to it. For example, a lead-footed driver is one whose foot is heavy, or leaden, on the accelerator

. But she uses the term in its rhetorical sense, i.e.

the figure of excess, of breaking frames (p.100).

Wells is saying that by inserting themselves into the text of the book by way of personal stories and drawings, the writers of Our Bodies, Ourselves invite the reader into the book on a personal level as well. The desired result of this frame-breaking is the realization that

every woman [is] a potential writer, and that her body [is] a potential source of both medical knowledge and political enlightenment.