The transformation of medical practices, processes of medicalization, and the expansion of medical control into various spheres of life have rendered health not merely a biological condition, and care for health not solely the result of individual choice. In this context, gender serves as an analytical lens that makes it possible to trace how institutional norms and cultural expectations shape understandings of health and illness, bodily states, and socially acceptable forms of responsibility for oneself and for others. In everyday life, this is reflected, for example, in the tendency to associate women’s health care with appearance, while masculine gender socialization may hinder men from seeking medical help in a timely manner.
The aim of this section is to create an open space for dialogue between scientific and practical knowledge about health and medicine, as well as to reflect on how health, medicine, and bodily care are shaped and lived within a gender-organized social context, in order to explore how social science can be applied in practice. We invite participation both from those who work or plan to work in the medical and social fields, and from researchers studying the social, cultural, and gendered contexts of health and medicine.
The section’s initial theoretical framework is based on the idea that health-related behavior cannot be reduced to purely individual choice or rational decision-making. Health-related lifestyles are formed within the context of social structures, cultural representations, and gender norms that define what is considered acceptable, responsible, and “proper” attitudes toward the body and illness. At the structural level, following Deborah Lupton’s approach, we proceed from the assumption that medicine is not merely a set of clinical practices, but a cultural system in which bodies, emotions, and technologies are intertwined with issues of power, morality, and identity, including gender identity (Lupton, 1994). Physicians and patients, medical institutions and state authorities, medical education institutions, as well as charitable and social organizations both reproduce and shape the cultural system of medicine and the gender order embedded within it. In turn, the medical system influences individual practices of care and gender differences within them.
At the level of individual experience, we propose to consider self-care and care for one’s health as one of the ways in which identity is expressed. Practices of care and health-related lifestyles are closely connected to a person’s social position and reflect it. Thus, good health and adherence to a healthy lifestyle often function as status symbols in contemporary society. At this level, the conceptualization of health is further enriched by viewing it as a narrative through which individuals make sense of their experiences and make decisions for their future embodied selves (Kriger, 2021).
Another key assumption of the section is that the biological body experiencing health and illness is never neutral. It is socially charged and becomes a space through which society exercises control, discipline, and moral regulation (Sontag, 1978; Laing, 2018).
A special place in the section’s conceptual framework is occupied by the works of Anna Temkina and Elena Zdravomyslova. By conceptualizing care for one’s own and others’ health as labor and as a moral practice, they demonstrate its close connection to the gender order. Health care thus appears not merely as an individual choice, but as a form of social responsibility that has historically been largely assigned to women — mothers, nurses, caregivers, and physicians.
Key Questions of the Section
How do gender norms and expectations shape everyday practices of health care and attitudes toward illness?
How are gender differences reflected in clinical decision-making, medical knowledge, and doctor–patient interactions?
Why do studies of women’s and men’s health develop unevenly, and what are the consequences of this imbalance for medicine and health policy?
How can gender approaches from the social sciences and humanities be integrated into practical medical thinking and the ethics of care?