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Chronic illnesses often go unnoticed mainly due to their invisibility and lack of understanding both at home and in the workplace. In this chapter, I use an autoethnographic approach to engage with my “emotionally charged” lived experiences of living and working with a stigmatized chronic illness – irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) – in a highly patriarchal Pashtun society where women are expected to perform various social roles despite of illness and are often silenced to male domination. IBS is a functional gastrointestinal disorder characterized by abdominal pain, abnormal bowel function, and bloating, in the absence of any structural abnormalities, and has a significant impact on one’s life. As I navigate through my experiences of suffering from a chronic illness and the emotional labor involved therein, I shed light on the challenges I face as a woman in managing work and life and as I silence my pain and emotions to fit into the roles of a “professional” academic, a “good” wife, a “good” daughter, a “good” sister-in-law, a “good” daughter-in-law, and so forth. I have used both the lens of stigma to reflect my sufferings and normalization to demonstrate my resilience and (re)adjustment to the new life. In doing so, pain and emotions do leak out during intense situations but silencing chronic illness is mostly strategic as it protects us from being excluded, marginalized, and stigmatzed both at work and home.

Gender and disability are intimately connected as embodied experiences that young people navigate interactionally. Disabilities scholars have theorized that men and women with chronic health conditions face uniquely gendered challenges. Theories of gender and disability centered on youth continue to gain prominence as the population of children and young adults with chronic health conditions grows. This study draws on data from 22 in-depth interviews with young adults diagnosed with chronic health conditions in childhood in the United States. Women, men, and gender nonbinary individuals report that doing disability in interactions in childhood meant doing gender in expected feminine ways. Specifically, interviewees described increased empathy, a deep understanding of their own emotions, and the ability to use adversity to connect with and benefit others as expectations. Interviewees employed or resisted doing gender in ways that reflected individuals' gender locations. Women and nonbinary individuals saw feminine performance as a sign of weakness, often resisting demonstrating it in interactions. On the other hand, feminine performance reportedly impacted men in the sample in positive ways. This study takes a life course approach to illuminate how the ableist expectations expressed to disabled children are gendered and impact how disabled young adults negotiate an ableist world.

Witchcraft in Honduras is an unprotected marginalized woman’s efforts to gain social, economic, and political power through an informal economy by utilizing the cultural belief in the witches’ supernatural power. The Honduran post-colonial Latin American culture allows for a persistent informal economy, in part, based on the commoditization of witchcraft and exorcism. The case study provides a specific example through ethnographic interviews of this under-researched informal economy driven by fear and economic desperation. Further research and analysis of these poorly understood and rarely recorded modern phenomena and the associated informal economy is needed.

The criminal justice system uses oversimplified stock narratives that place women who kill into limiting categories of ‘bad’, ‘mad’ and/or ‘victim’. These narratives deny women's agency by portraying their actions as lacking humanity, rationality and/or intentionality. Many feminist scholars argue that new narratives are needed to recognise women who kill as fully human, volitional subjects. This chapter uses the case of Maria Barberi to examine why and how defences founded on a victim-based agency fail. In 1895, Barberi killed Domenico Cataldo in a Manhattan barroom after enduring months of psychological, physical and sexual abuse. Her defence was grounded in the unwritten law – a widely held belief that people had the right to avenge their honour (when impugned by infidelity, seduction or sexual assault) with lethal violence. The case went through four stages: the initial trial, resulting in a murder conviction and death sentence; a nation-wide clemency campaign; an appeal; and a retrial, resulting in an acquittal. Throughout this process, Barberi's agency was undermined by negative stereotypes of gender and ethnicity, the political goals of women's rights activists, and Barberi's own self-interests. Ultimately, this case demonstrates that agency-based narratives are both difficult to deploy and desperately needed.