Critical Perspectives In Public Health Feminisms

"A unique and innovative collection, Critical Perspectives in Public Health Feminisms gives space to chronically underrepresented voices in public health through engaging with Public Health Feminisms (PHF). PHF describes a technique of analysis that attends gender and intersections of race, class, sexuality, age, and ability in public health. This edited collection aims to explore what it means to protect and promote the health of all Canadians and brings together perspectives of public health scholars, policymakers, and front-line workers that are often silenced in the field. It aims to support readers with providing analytical tools to help reveal and unpack how public health services, policies, education, and programming in Canada are embedded within patriarchal and colonial ways of knowing and doing."--

A unique and innovative collection, Critical Perspectives in Public Health Feminisms gives space to chronically underrepresented voices in public health through engaging with Public Health Feminisms (PHF). PHF describes a technique of analysis that attends gender and intersections of race, class, sexuality, age, and ability in public health. Including the perspectives of Black, Indigenous, women of colour, refugee, immigrant, (dis)abled, neurodivergent, two-spirit, non-binary, trans and/or gender diverse scholars, this text aims to fill a gap in public health scholarship and practice. Through a social justice approach, it critically addresses how public health services, policies, and programming are unable to protect and promote the health of all Canadians due to their lack of representation and inclusivity from inception to execution. This accessible and thought-provoking volume is essential for upper-year undergraduate and graduate students across all areas in public health and gender and health studies. It provides analytical, theoretical, and methodological tools to inform work in public health services, policies, and programming through a PHF lens.

The past decade has witnessed a significant increase in the construction of health as a security issue by national governments and multilateral organizations. This book provides the first critical, feminist analysis of the flesh-and-blood impacts of the securitization of health on different bodies, while broadening the scope of what we understand as global health security. It looks at how feminist perspectives on health and security can lead to different questions about health and in/security, problematizing some of the ‘common sense’ assumptions that underlie much of the discourse in this area. It considers the norms, ideologies, and vested interests that frame specific ‘threats’ to health and policy responses, while exposing how the current governance of the global economy shapes new threats to health. Some chapters focus on conflict, war and complex emergencies, while others move from a ‘high political’ focus to the domain of subtler and often insidious structural violence, illuminating the impacts of hegemonic masculinities and the neoliberal governance of the global economy on health and life chances. Highlighting the critical intersections across health, gender and security, this book is an important contribution to scholarship on health and security, global health, public health and gender studies.

This book explores the concept of 'critical' public health, at a point when many of its core concerns appear to have moved to the mainstream of health policy. Issues such as addressing health inequalities and their socioeconomic determinants, and the inclusion of public voices in policy-making, are now emerging as key policy aims for health systems across Europe and North America. Combining analytical introductory chapters, edited versions of influential articles from the journal Critical Public Health and specially commissioned review articles, this volume examines the contemporary roles of 'critical voices' in public health research and practice from a range of disciplines and contexts. The book covers many of the pressing concerns for public health practitioners and researchers including: the implications of new genetic technologies for public health the impact of globalization on local practice the politics of citizen participation in health programmes the impact of car-centred transport systems on health the ethics of evaluation methods and the persistence of health inequalities. Critical Perspectives in Public Health is organized into sections covering four key themes in public health: social inequalities; evidence for practice; globalization; technologies and the environment. With contributions from a range of countries including the United States, Canada, the UK, Australia and South Africa, it provides an accessible overview for students, practitioners and researchers in public health, health promotion, health policy and related fields.

this comprehensive volume provides a broad sample of contemporary British feminist work on women and health. It spans the disciplines of psychology, sociology, social policy, social anthropology and economics, and demonstrates the development of feminist theorizing and activism in these areas over the past decade. Topics include: global and national politics of women's health; the 'psychologization' of health: sexuality and AIDS; body image and pregnancy; reproductive technology; substance abuse; breast cancer; and the long-term health problems of women. Calling for a greater understanding of women and health, the contributors acknowledge the gender-based inequities of women's experiences and address the need for social and political change in order to improve the health and health care of women across the lifespan.

Winner of the 2021 BPS Book Award: Academic Text category, this groundbreaking book employs a transdisciplinary and poststructuralist methodology to develop the concept of ‘postfeminist healthism,’ a twenty-first-century understanding of women’s physical and mental health formed at the intersections of postfeminist sensibilities, neoliberal constructs of citizenship and the notion of health as an individual responsibility managed through consumption. Postfeminist healthism is used in this book to explore seven topics where postfeminist sensibility has the most impact on women’s health: self-help, weight, surgical technologies, sex, pregnancy, responsibilities for others’ health and pro-anorexia communities. The book explores the ways in which the desire to be normal and live a good life is tied to expectations of ‘normal-perfection’ circulated across interpersonal interactions, media representations and expert discourses. It diagnoses postfeminist healthism as unhealthy for both those women who participate in it and those whom it excludes and considers how more positive directions may emerge. By exploring the under-researched intersection of postfeminism and health studies, this book will be invaluable to researchers and students in psychology, gender and women’s studies, health research, media studies and sociology.

Beyond the metaphorical use of healthy society as a normative goal of Peace Research, there is little engagement in contemporary Peace Research with questions of global health. Simultaneously, critical feminist approaches to the intersections of different forms of violence and health are rare in Global Health literature. Bringing together feminist Peace Research and Global Health scholarships, this edited book aims to enrich both scholarly traditions. On the one hand, the book provides perspectives from feminist Peace Research that help us to understand and analyse different forms of violence in the gendered realm of global health. On the other hand, the variety of empirical cases analysed in the chapters widens the horizons of Peace Research, in its understanding of what it means to study violence, peace, and justice in everyday lives. The themes dealt in the chapters of the book vary from questions of reproductive health, to non-communicable (e.g. breast cancer) and communicable diseases (e.g. HIV/AIDS), war-time sexual violence, mental health, therapeutic justice, domestic violence, and ageing and dementia. This text will help students and researchers alike navigate Global Health through a feminist lens.

Informed by a wealth of available research, between 1997 and 2010, the UK Labour government introduced a raft of policies to reduce health inequalities. Despite this, by most measures, the UK's health inequalities have continued to widen. This failure has prompted calls for new approaches to health inequalities research and some consensus that public health researchers ought to be more actively involved in 'public health advocacy'. Yet there is currently no agreement as to what these new research agendas should be and despite multiple commentaries reflecting on recent UK efforts to reduce health inequalities, there has so far been little attempt to map future directions for research or to examine what more egalitarian policies means in practical terms. Health Inequalities: Critical Perspectives addresses these concerns. It takes stock of the UK's experiences of health inequalities research and policy to date, reflecting on the lessons that have been learnt from these experiences, both within the UK and internationally. The book identifies emergent research and policy topics, exploring the perspectives of actors working in a range of professional settings on these agendas. Finally, the book considers potential ways of improving the links between health inequalities research, policy and practice, including via advocacy. With contributions from established, international health inequalities experts and newer, up-and-coming researchers in the field, as well as individuals working on health inequalities in policy, practice and civil society settings, Health Inequalities: Critical Perspectives is a 'must buy' for researchers, postgraduate students, policymakers, practitioners, and research funders.