Engendering stress in Australia: The embodiment of social relationships

This study draws on data from an ethnographic study of health and illness i n a suburb of a regional city of southeastern Australia. "Stress" was a sig nificant emergent theme in one-third of 111 semistructured interviews, as w ell 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. T he paper explores the different ways in which discourses of stress articula ted the experience of structured Sender relations among residents of Oceanp oint within the wider framework of a cultural critique of modernity in rela tion to the embodied self.