Darren Rowse at Problogger.net recently asked what you do with your blog when you go on holidays. I'm wondering what you do with your blog when you are sick which I've been since October. When something had to give it was my blog, but now I'm back and ready to make up for lost time. Darren suggests we invite key people to be guest bloggers for the time we are away - a great idea for another time.

I did do quite a bit of thinking about sickness though. I was especially reflective on how we relate to it as women because in the end, after multiple tests came back clear, I self-diagnosed and began to improve. Due to a whole lot of biological and physiological experiences that characterise our lives - menstruation, pregnancy and birth, lactation and menopause, for example - we are forced to be very in touch with our bodies if we want to live richly and feel in control of our lives. We have the capacity to go into ourselves and connect, intuitively often, with what is happening there.

I remember how exciting it was back in the 1970s and 1980s when women's bodies and their experience of them became valued and recognised. Many women knew nothing about their bodies up until that time. It was the time when the contraceptive pill emerged, abortion laws were challenged, new reproductive technologies were being developed, women were empowered to reclaim control of pregnancy and birthing, women's health centres were established and all this was celebrated in the classic book of the times - Our Bodies Ourselves.

Prior to that time (and unfortunately still today in some cases) the natural, healthy experiences and changes that took place in women's bodies through their normal life-span were very readily brought under medical control. We were made to believe that we, ourselves, could not manage our own bodies because they were so unpredictable and unruly. It's both interesting and worrying that the hormones oestrogen and progesterone are the most widely used drugs in the entire history of medicine. There were some medical "experts" who would have our bodies under the "care" of pharmaceutical hormones from puberty to post-menopause - because we can't care for them ourselves.

I realised when I was sick that I have a lot of knowledge about myself because I have experienced so much of myself through my body, that, as Elizabeth Grosz says, "bodies have all the explanatory powers of minds". This intuitive, embodied knowledge that women have in abundance has not been valued in the past as real knowledge. I just needed to tap into it, to connect with it and through some processes of elimination work out what my body was saying to me, what was making me sick and what I needed to do to be well.

There are some feminists that distance themselves from their female bodies and want to deny that it has any impact on their being and their knowing. I, however, want to celebrate the embodiment of the knowledge within me, of all that is female about me for it has empowered my life over and over, both personally and professionally.

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