BOOK REVIEWS: DES Daughters: Embodied Knowledge and the Transformation of Women's Health Politics by Susan E. Bell.

Susan Bell documents and analyzes the farreaching effects of a significant misstep in obstetric history, the prescribing of Diethylstilbestrol, a synthetic estrogen also known as DES, to millions of pregnant women from the 1940s to the 1970s. Although known to be cancer causing from early animal trials in the 1930s, DES was prescribed for decades as a “wonder drug” effective against miscarriage and for promoting healthy pregnancies. In the late 1960s, a few young women with extremely rare cases of vaginal cancer—clear cell adenocarcinoma— created a cluster in the Boston area that caught the attention of physicians who later confirmed the association between the cancers and prenatal exposures through an epidemiological case control investigation. By 1971, DES had been identified as the first transplacental carcinogen. That same year the FDA issued a drug bulletin advising physicians to stop prescribing DES to pregnant women. Bell centers her investigation on the accounts, experiences, and activism of the women who would come to be identified as “DES daughters,” women whose mothers took DES while pregnant with them. She provides a compelling account of the labyrinth connections between this “wonder drug” and the devastating affects it wrought on women’s bodies and psyches and the subsequent clinical practices and sciences that it engendered. She follows collective and individual journeys of DES daughters, and DES itself, through a Foucauldian lens focusing on “regimes of practices”—the complex interconnections between medical knowledge and authority, women’s health politics and empowerment, and the institutionalization of DES activism and scientific research. The first chapter, which contains a detailed technical history of DES and organizational histories of activists and research enterprises, is weak, but the subsequent narrative analyses are fascinating, not least because Bell provides in-depth examination of multiple factors creating the context of each narrative, whether interview, NIH conference, or documentary. Inspired by Foucault, Bell’s book centers the key concepts of narrative, circulation, webs, mobility, and convergence. She traces the uneven, unstable, and local histories of the public and private discourses operating in an ever-shifting nexus of power and knowledge. She deftly employs narrative analyses of her interviews with DES daughters, a key NIH workshop, and an autobiographical documentary film to show how these concepts, discourses, and practices converge, diverge, and reemerge over time in different forms. Bell argues that women affected by DES employ more than “embodied resistance” as victims of biomedicalization. The creation of influential advocacy organizations, such as DES Action and DES Cancer Network (DCN), drew on empowerment discourses from the nascent women’s health movement, and some activists were able to successfully influence scientific agendas and secure funding for ongoing research. The book can be challenging reading, because of the graphic descriptions of the surgical interventions on DES cancer in women’s bodies and their emotional sequelae, the jargon-laden prose, and because of