The Unknowable Body

In The Unknowable Body, Lisa Jean Moore explores the profound disconnect between how we experience our bodies and how the medical world interprets them. Drawing on her own journey through DCIS diagnosis, mastectomy, and reconstruction – alongside her family's navigation of her ex-partner's brain tumour – Moore investigates various unsettling dimensions of bodily uncertainty that emerge when illness enters our lives. As scans revealed secrets that human perception failed to, and while navigating a queer family system that didn't fit institutional categories, the author found herself in territory few roadmaps could chart. This book weaves candid humour and poetic personal narrative and analytical vision to examine how bodies resist complete knowing – medically, emotionally, in time, and through gender and identity. It offers new ways of thinking about embodiment in an age of increasing medical surveillance, technological intervention, and economically 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 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 shape 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 and evade categories.