Search

Medicalization occurs when an aspect of embodied humanity is scrutinized by the medical industry, claimed as pathological, and subsumed under medical intervention. Numerous critiques of medicalization appear in academic literature, often put forth by bioethicists who use a variety of "lenses" to make their case. Feminist critiques of medicalization raise the concerns of the politically disenfranchised, thus seeking to protect women—particularly natal sex women—from medical exploitation. This article will focus on three feminist critiques of medicalization, which offer an alternative narrative of sickness and health. I will first briefly describe the philosophical origins of medicalization. Then, I will present three feminist critiques of medicalization. Liberal feminism, trans feminism, and crip feminism tend to regard Western medicine with a hermeneutics of suspicion and draw out potential harms of medicalization of reproductive sexuality, gender, and disability, respectively. While neither these branches of feminism—nor their critiques—are homogenous, they provide much-needed commentaries on phallocentric medicine. I will conclude the paper by arguing for the continual need for feminist critiques of medicalization, using uterus transplantation as a relevant case study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In health research, the concept of risk is used in several domains. It features in epidemiology and health promotion as well as in the sociology and anthropology of health and illness. Important problems are embedded in risk as an analytic category, and some of these are widely discussed within the discipline. First, risk cuts out the experience of illness and replaces it with problematic objectifications. Second, there are a multitude of different meanings assigned to risk which make it problematic as an analytic category. Third, the question of uncertainty has, along with the discourse of risk, attained a solely normative meaning of threat, or has become a residual category in anthropology and social science. Fourth, the individualizing character of the concept of risk eclipses the collective, historical, social and political processes that contribute to the uncertainties of life. Departing from the methodological approach to ‘social suffering,’ this paper will argue through two ethnographic studies that normative and individualizing assumptions lead social studies to overlook the way that local actors, rather than narrowly controlling contingency, may engage in it and live with it as a normal experience of human life. Along with risk, there are variations in local attitudes to uncertainty and there are socially shared ways of accounting for and acting with it. A major challenge for social studies is to embrace the need for the development and implementation of a neutral, non-normative language of contingency. The paradigm of social suffering enables a broader perspective to be brought to bear upon the lived experience of affliction and illness so as to expose a greater variation in human responses to the distress of everyday life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the social construction of diagnosis and illness in several ways. First, I discuss the centrality of social construction in medical sociology. Next I discuss the major role of diagnosis in social construction, leading to the need for a sociology of diagnosis. I emphasize controversial and conflictual diagnoses, as a first step toward a more general sociology of diagnosis. Then I put forth a typology of social construction, involving four combinations based on whether a condition is generally accepted and whether a biomedical definition is applied. Next I detail a series of stages in the social construction of a condition. In that process, my primary concern is the initial social discovery, which is essentially a matter of diagnosis, with a secondary emphasis on illness experience. This is followed by stages of treatment and outcome, which recursively affect social construction. I conclude by noting the health policy implications of the social constructionist perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]