The Unknowable Body

In The Unknowable Body, leading medical sociologist Lisa Jean Moore explores the profound disconnect between how we experience our bodies and how medical science interprets them. Drawing from her own journey through DCIS diagnosis, mastectomy, and reconstruction—alongside her family's simultaneous navigation of her ex-partner's brain tumor—Moore investigates four dimensions of bodily uncertainty that emerge when illness enters our lives. As medical imaging revealed secrets that human perception failed to, and while navigating a queer family system that defied institutional categories, Moore found herself in territory few roadmaps could chart. This book weaves transparent and poetic personal narrative with sociological analysis to examine how bodies resist complete knowing—medically, emotionally, temporally, and through gender and identity. It offers new ways of thinking about embodiment in an age of increasing medical surveillance, technological intervention, and profitable uncertainty. What began as an investigation into cancer treatment evolved into a deeper exploration of how bodies exceed our frameworks for understanding. Whether through technological scans that simultaneously reveal and obscure, emotional reverberations that transform family systems, temporal disruptions that fracture our sense of before and after, or gender expectations that both shape and complicate medical encounters, our bodies remain fundamentally mysterious even as we attempt to make them knowable. This thought-provoking, enriching book isn't just about illness, but about how all bodies exist in states of becoming that resist final categorization.