The Social Value of "Physiological Autonomy":

This paper examines the experience of incontinence and continence as described by twelve communitydwelling older women. Variation in these experiences is vitiated when the dichotomy of continentlincontinent is imposed as the most appropriate "symbolic ordering" for the experience. Loss of bladder control, what older women called "leaking," may be treated analytically as a particular kind of unrestrained behavior that interferes with "physiological autonomy." Thus incontinence poses real and symbolic challenges to the older woman's status as an adult.