Читать книгу The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Medical Sociology - Группа авторов - Страница 34

Feminist theory in medical sociology has been linked in some instance to social constructionist accounts of the female body and its regulation by a male-dominated society. Social and cultural assumptions are held to influence our perceptions of the body, including the use of the male body as the former standard for medical training, the assignment of less socially desirable physical and emotional traits to women, and the ways in which women’s illnesses are socially constructed (Annandale 2014). Other feminist theory is grounded in conflict theory or symbolic interaction, and deals with the sexist treatment of women patients by male doctors and the less than equal status of female physicians in professional settings and hierarchies (Riska and Wegar 1993; Hinze 2004). There is, however, no unified perspective among feminist theorists other than a “woman-centered” perspective that examines the various facets of women’s health and seeks an end to sexist orientations in health and illness and society at large (Annandale 2014; Nettleton 2020).

Intersectionality theory, originating among American black feminist scholars has been one of the more promising feminist theoretical perspectives expanding into medical sociology (Collins 2015, 2019; Collins and Bilge 2016). It calls attention to the multiple forms of social inequality affecting black women and other disadvantaged individuals. In doing so, it expresses an activist orientation connected to community organizing, identity politics, coalition politics, and social justice. The approach focuses on examining forms of discrimination and inequality stemming from gender, race, ethnicity, class, age, nation, and sexual orientation, and makes the key point that such variables are not simply individual characteristics but operate simultaneously at multiple levels in people’s lives. Thus, individual and group characteristics cannot be fully understood by prioritizing one variable (e.g. class) over another (e.g. gender) since all such variables combine to disadvantage some people in relation to others at the same time. People do not experience inequality only from the standpoint of one social characteristic but undergo all of them concurrently. Intersectionality theory therefore provides a perspective intended to investigate the interaction of numerous characteristics of a population, not only at the individual level but also at structural levels in order to capture the multiple factors that influence individual lives. Most of the research using intersectionality theory, however, has been qualitative because of the difficulty in measuring all variables simultaneously using quantitative methods.