Bodily Subjects Essays on Gender and Health, 1800–2000 - PDF
نویسندگان: racy Penny Light, Barbara Brookes, and Wendy Mitchinson
خلاصه: Constant good health is a chimera: the thing we all want, don’t notice when we have it, and mourn when we lose it. Being “healthy” is also something that women and men “do” in different ways. 1 The authors in Bodily Subjects all explore the historical entanglement between gender and health to expose how women and men “did” health in a variety of locations, from the nineteenth-century English Poor Law Union of Stourbridge, an early twentieth-century Aboriginal reserve in Queensland, Australia, to A I D S activists on the streets of Toronto in the 1990s. Our volume takes as its subject how gender is integral to the understanding of health and the way its meaning is embedded in cul- tural contexts connected to place and time. Our title reflects the way in which the body is both a subject of inquiry and a phenomenological experience. There is no “I” without a body and that body, Foucault has argued, is subject to regimes of power. 2 The title, Bodily Subjects, then, should be read in two ways. First, it re- fers to the embodied meanings of health for men and women and how these have expanded over time, from an able body signifying health in the nineteenth century to concepts of “well-being,” a psychological interpretation, which came to dominate health discourse in Western countries by the late twentieth century. Second, it refers to the way in which ill health turns individuals into subjects of the medical gaze. Medical expertise is brought to bear in diagnosing and treating indi- viduals in ways that are seen through the lens of gender