ANTHRO 136K Lecture Notes - Lecture 10: Hitech, Misogyny, Stoicism
28 Jun 2018
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ANTHRO 139K - Lecture 10 - The Medicalization of Women's Bodies
Medical Anthropology
●Medical anthropology is the study of how health and illness are shaped, experienced,
and understood in the context of environmental, socio cultural, historical, and political
economic forces.
●It looks at issues from the local to global scale, including interrelated multi-sites.
●It is one of the largest sub-disciplines of the American Anthropological Association.
Medicalization
●The process by which:
○Medical problems are institutionalized and removed from sociocultural contexts
and environments.
○Non-medical (sociocultural) problems become defined as medical problems -- as
pathologies, illnesses, disorders -- in need of professional medical intervention.
●Not just a scientific enterprise but a social one:
○A political economic process.
○A method of social control
●Levels of medicalization:
○Conceptual
■Medical terms define a problem
○Institutional
■An issue, program, or process becomes legitimized by physicians and the
medical establishment
○Interpersonal
■The complex dynamics of doctor/patient relations.
●Always involves relations of power that cut across gender, sexuality, class, race,
ethnicity, age, able-ness, etc.
Foucault and the “Medical Gaze”
●A social construction of reality and truth.
●In modernity the medical establishment became an institutional regime of power and
knowledge.
○Disciplinary power harnesses biopower to make docile bodies into nodes for
productive power that fortifies social control.
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○Biopolitics order entire populations
●People become subject to the disciplinary “medical gaze”
○Controlled by the medical model from birth to death.
○People develop an internalized gaze that transforms their consciousness.
■The self is viewed as a medical artifact.
●BARKTY’S CRITIQUE AND EXPANSION OF FOUCAULDIAN THEORY:
○The medical establishment is patriarchal.
○Women are procreative property.
○Women are subject to a “medical gaze” of greater intensity.
●INTERSECTIONAL FEMINIST EXPANSION OF BARTKY
○Women of various socioeconomic statuses
○Women of color
○Women of the LGBTQI community
○Senior women
○Women with disabilities
Women and Medicalization
●Menstruation
●Infertility
●Birth control
●Childbirth
●Menopause
●Abortion
●Eating disorders
●Cosmetic surgery
●Anti-aging medicine
●It is important to understand that in modernity, women were and are not passive
victims of medicalization:
○Early on, middle and upper-middle class women worked and cooperated with
physicians in the medicalization of women’s bodies, and with birth control and
childbirth in particular.
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○By the late 1960s, middle class feminists were critiquing and protesting aspects
of the medicalization of women’s bodies.
○Depending on the sociocultural, political, economic, and environmental contexts
of the era, women of the working and poor classes were in support of different
aspects of the medicalization of their bodies, while at other times they protested
and resisted different aspects.
Menstruation
●A normal biological function for girls and women.
●Back through history and throughout many global cultures, menstruation has been
viewed as shameful, dangerous, dirty, and/or polluting; something that should be
hidden and kept secret.
○Menstruating women were not to be touched.
○Women were banished from their family and community during their periods.
○Women underwent cleansing rituals before, during, and after their periods.
●In modernity with the medicalization of women’s bodies and the medical gaze,
menstruation is viewed as having the capacity to become physically and mentally
pathological. Although some women do have menstrual problems, medicalization
contributes to the notion that women have an essential, biological characteristic that
makes them weak and inferior.
○Too long or too short.
○Too much or too little blood.
○PMS
○PMDD – Premenstrual dysphoric disorder
○Bleeding (“normal” or otherwise) is suppressed through extended life-cycle birth
control pills.
Infertility
●Reproductive technologies have expanded the medicalization of infertility.
●For example, infertility was once an individual, familial, and/or social issue in which
infertile couples received various degrees and combinations of support and criticism.
●With modernity infertility has come under the medical gaze and is now “fixable” with
appropriate medical treatment.
●In the U.S. in 2006, 41,343 live births occurred after the application of reproductive
technologies.
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
Document Summary
Anthro 139k - lecture 10 - the medicalization of women"s bodies. Medical anthropology is the study of how health and illness are shaped, experienced, and understood in the context of environmental, socio cultural, historical, and political economic forces. It looks at issues from the local to global scale, including interrelated multi-sites. It is one of the largest sub-disciplines of the american anthropological association. Medical problems are institutionalized and removed from sociocultural contexts and environments. Non-medical (sociocultural) problems become defined as medical problems -- as pathologies, illnesses, disorders -- in need of professional medical intervention. Not just a scientific enterprise but a social one: An issue, program, or process becomes legitimized by physicians and the medical establishment. Always involves relations of power that cut across gender, sexuality, class, race, ethnicity, age, able-ness, etc. A social construction of reality and truth. In modernity the medical establishment became an institutional regime of power and knowledge.
