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After more than a decade of postpositivist health care research and an increase in narrative writing practices, social scientific, qualitative health research remains largely disembodied. The erasure of researchers' bodies from conventional accounts of research obscures the complexities of knowledge production and yields deceptively tidy accounts of research. Qualitative health research could benefit significantly from embodied writing that explores the discursive relationship between the body and the self and the semantic challenges of writing the body by incorporating bodily details and experiences into research accounts. Researchers can represent their bodies by incorporating autoethnographic narratives, drawing on all of their senses, interrogating the connections between their bodily signifiers and research processes, and experimenting with the semantics of self and body. The author illustrates opportunities for embodiment with excerpts from an ethnography of a geriatric oncology team and explores implications of embodied writing for the practice of qualitative health research.

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This article extends the discussion of the subjective and positioned nature of the researcher in ethnography by examining how a cancer survivor conducting fieldwork in an oncology clinic shapes and is shaped by the experience. Narratives of lived experience interrupt the academic essay to demonstrate my dynamic understanding of the clinic and the connections between my experiences and those of the patients and staff. I explore how my experiences with cancer shape how I understand the patients and staff; how viewing the clinic from multiple viewpoints affects my understanding of it; and how this process influences my understanding of my own experiences as a cancer survivor.Mrs. O'Neih looks up at me from her wheelchair a few feet away in the small examination room, and then looks over at Dr. Fontanella. This patient is a very large woman in her early seventies. An oxygen tube threads its way behind her ears and under her nose. Mrs. O'Neil wears a sleeveless hot pink blouse and a clashing mauve polyester vest and pants. Folds of fat hang loosely off her arms. Her enormous left breast, swollen from an inoperable tumor, droops down over her waist, straining taut the fabric of her blouse. Coarse white hair emerges from her scalp, abruptly turning bright dyedorange after an inch or so. Dr. Fontanella begins to examine Mrs. O'Neil in preparation for her chemotherapy treatment in the infusion center down the hall.On first sight of this woman sitting by her husband and young grandson, I feel only a distant and impersonal sympathy. I listen to her recount test results and symptoms to the doctor in her heavy Brooklyn accent, not unmoved by her plight, but tirgd and distracted by how much my knee hurts.