Gendered Pathologies

Interrogating Gendered Pathologies points out and critiques unjust patterns of pathology. Erin A. Frost and Michelle F. Eble assemble a transdisciplinary approach from/to technologies, rhetorics, philosophies, epistemologies, and biomedical data to consider the effects of biomedicine’s gendered norms on people’s lives. Using a range of complementary and intersectional theoretical approaches, contributors ask questions about rhetoric’s role in healthcare and how it differs depending on patient embodiment and the ways nonnormative bodies are pathologized. These chapters engage common narratives about the ways in which gender in healthcare is secondary and highlights the stories of people who have battled to prioritize their own bodies through extraordinary difficulties. Employing a multiplicity of voices, the book represents a number of different perspectives on what it might look like to return health and medical data to embodied experience, to consider the effects of gendered and intersectional biomedical norms on lived realities, and to subvert the power of institutions in ways that move us toward biomedical justice. This collection contributes to the burgeoning field of health and medical rhetorics by rhetorically and theoretically intervening in what are often seen as objective and neutral decisions related to the body and to scientific and medical data about bodies. Interrogating Gendered Pathologies will be of interest to feminist scholars in the field of rhetoric and writing studies, specifically those in the rhetorics of health and medicine, as well as scholars of technical communication, feminist studies, gender studies, technoscience studies, and bioethics. Contributors: Leslie Anglesey, Mary Assad, Beth Boser, Lillian Campbell, Marleah Dean, Lori Beth De Hertogh, Leandra Hernandez, Elizabeth Horn-Walker, Caitlin Leach, Jordan Liz, Miriam Mara, Cathryn Molloy, Kerri Morris, Maria Novotny, Sage Perdue, Colleen Reilly

Gendered Pathologies examines nineteenth-century literary representations of the pathologized female body in relation to biomedical discourses about gender and society in Victorian England. According to medical and scientific views of the period, the woman who did not conform to the dictates of gender ideology was, biologically speaking, aberrant: a deviation from the norm. Yet, although marginalized in a social sense, the "deviant" woman was central as a literary and cultural trope. Analyzing novels by Charles Dickens, H. Rider Haggard, and Thomas Hardy alongside Foucault's notion of perverse sexualities and Herbert Spencer's model of the social organism, Archimedes argues that the pathologized female body displaces or resolves, on a narrative level, larger cultural anxieties about the health of the British as a species. While earlier feminist investigations asserted that bourgeois ideology helped to construct scientific discourses about female sexuality and social behavior, this study takes these assertions as a starting point . Examining incest, racial stereotyping, and neurasthenia, Gendered Pathologies attempts to shed light on the ways in which biological thinking permeated British culture in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Gendered Pathologies examines nineteenth-century literary representations of the pathologized female body in relation to biomedical discourses about gender and society in Victorian England. Analyzing novels by Charles Dickens, H. Rider Haggard, and Thomas Hardy alongside Foucault's notion of perverse sexualities and Herbert Spencer's model of the social organism, Archimedes argues that the pathologized female body displaces or resolves, on a narrative level, larger cultural anxieties about the health of the British as a species.

In the delta region of Nigeria, women seeking HIV care face a plethora of deeply gendered inequalities. As a result, HIV-positive women are often unable to use the treatment schemes that are seemingly available to them. Pathologies of Patriarchy brings together a geographic analysis of gendered inequalities with practical implementation questions concerning the limits of current global health programming. This book is an experiential analysis of HIV treatment programs that includes first-hand accounts of how female patients explain and cope with the poor access to and the inconsistencies in the delivery of HIV service care that complicates their adherence to treatment, as well as the complex power relations they navigate daily. Eloho Ese Basikoro also addresses the failures of policymakers who talk about gender mainstreaming but fail to deliver sustainable health services for disenfranchised women suffering from the social stigma and alienation associated with seropositivity. This inter-regional study is of great interdisciplinary interest to a wide variety of scholars and policymakers, whether they are researching gendered inequality from a geographical, anthropological, or global health perspective or are interested in broader concerns about development and inequality in sub-Saharan Africa.

Childfree and Happy examines how millennia of reproductive beliefs (or doxa) have positioned women who choose not to have children as deviant or outside the norm. Considering affect and emotion alongside the lived experiences of women who have chosen not to have children, Courtney Adams Wooten offers a new theoretical lens to feminist rhetorical scholars’ examinations of reproductive rhetorics and how they circulate through women’s lives by paying attention not just to spoken or written beliefs but also to affectual circulations of reproductive doxa. Through interviews with thirty-four childfree women and analysis of childfree rhetorics circulating in historical and contemporary texts and events, this book demonstrates how childfree women individually and collectively try to speak back to common beliefs about their reproductive experiences, even as they struggle to make their identities legible in a sociocultural context that centers motherhood. Childfree and Happy theorizes how affect and rhetoric work together to circulate reproductive doxa by using Sara Ahmed’s theories of gendered happiness scripts to analyze what reproductive doxa is embedded in those scripts and how they influence rhetoric by, about, and around childfree women. Delving into how childfree women position their decision not to have children and the different types of interactions they have with others about this choice, including family members, friends, colleagues, and medical professionals, Childfree and Happy also explores how communities that make space for alternative happiness scripts form between childfree women and those who support them. It will be of interest to scholars in the fields of the rhetoric of motherhood/mothering, as well as feminist rhetorical studies.

This book connects a rhetorical examination of medical and public health policy documents with a humanistic investigation of cultural texts to uncover the link between gendered representations of health and cancer. The author argues that in western biomedical contexts cancer is considered a women’s disease and their bodies are treated as inherently oncogenic or cancer-producing, which leads to biomedical practices that adversely impact their bodily autonomy. She examines how these biases traverse national boundaries by examining the transmission of biomedical cancer practices from the US and international organizations to Kenya. This book is suited to scholars and students working in the fields of Rhetorics of Health and Medicine, Medical Humanities and Gender Studies. It is also of interest to medical professionals and readers interested in globalism and global health.

Gender and Psychopathology explores the gender differences in psychiatric syndromes in terms of symptoms, courses of illness, epidemiology, and treatment responses. The book addresses the reasons for the differences from many competing and additive points of view by distinguished multidisciplinary contributors. This text includes comprehensive up-to-date DSM-IV categories of illness for the male-female differences in psychiatric disorders. Depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, eating disorders, somatoform disorders, sleep disorders, and addictions are among the topics explored. Those interested in specific issues can read particular chapters of interest because each chapter is complete in itself. This is the first book to explore gender differences in psychopathology. Gender and Psychopathology will be informative and useful to students, researchers, and mental health clinicians of all disciplines.

An exploration of how to bring medicine into the twenty-first century with our understanding of gender and sex differences. Over millions of years, male and female bodies developed crucial physiological differences to improve the chances for human survival. These differences have become culturally obsolete with the overturning of traditional gender roles. But they are nevertheless very real, and they go well beyond the obvious sexual and reproductive variances: men and women differ in terms of digestion, which affects the way medications are absorbed. Sensitivity to pain is dependent on gender. Even the symptoms of a heart attack manifest differently in a man than in a woman. And yet the medical establishment largely treats male and female patients as though their needs are identical. In fact, medical research is still done predominately on men, and the results are then applied to the treatment of women. This is clearly problematic and calls for a paradigm change—such a paradigm change is the purpose of Gender Medicine. Praise for Gender Medicine “Gender Medicine is cutting edge in that the author challenges the historical and antiquated paradigms that women and men are interchangeable with respect to their physiology, pharmacology and pathophysiology excluding their reproductive organs. There is a shocking paucity of resource material showcasing the most current and complete evidence on sex and gender-based medicine. Marek Glezerman’s book is a comprehensive and pleasurable read; it will enlighten both medical and nonmedical audiences and is highly applicable to the effective clinical practice of medicine in the twenty-first century.” —Alyson J. McGregor M.D., MA, FACEP, Director, Division of Sex and Gender in Emergency Medicine (SGEM), Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown Universit “This fascinating work will teach readers a great deal about sex, gender, and the human body. A must-read for health-care practitioners and anyone interested in medicine.” —Library Journal, starred review