28th and 29th of November 2022, Amphithéâtre Pasquier, Campus des Cordeliers, 15-21 Rue de l'École de Médecine, 75006 Paris

“Medicalization” refers to the process of “defining a problem in medical terms, usually as an illness or disorder, or using a medical intervention to treat it” (Conrad, 2005: 3). The first studies  on  medicalization  emerged  in  the  1960s  and  1970s  (Pitts  1968,  Freidson  1970,  Zola 1972) and drew from Parsons (1951), who notably theorized medicine as an institution of social control. These pioneering works had a critical approach to medicalization, and often used the term to signify  “overmedicalization”. Indeed, they associated medicalization with the growing authority  of physicians in  modern  society,  and they  emphasized  the  medical  power  of these practitioners to define and control what we recognize as “pathological”.

However, in the 1970s, research on medicalization didn’t only stem from intellectual fields  such  as  social  constructivism,  it  also  benefited  from  socio-political  practices, and  in particular from emerging Women’s Health Movements in the US and in Western countries. In the literature on  medicalization,  the  influence  of  feminist  movements is in  fact deemed  as crucial: “although it is a gender-neutral  term,  the  concept  of  medicalization  historically  has been linked to women” (2012: 127) according to Susan E. Bell and Anne  E. Fegert. Indeed, studies published in the 1970s mainly focused on the “connections between women’s bodies and  the  greater  control/medicalization  of  them  by  a  predominantly  male  medical  profession and a gendered scientific knowledge base” (Bell, Fegert, 2012: 129). In so doing, this research concentrated  on  gender-specific  experiences  like  childbirth  and  menstrual  cycles  (Leavitt, 1984; McCrea, 1983) and on power relations inherent to the patient/doctor relationship. \

In the 1980s, Riessman (1983) and Bell (1987) were pivotal in contesting the hypothesis of medicalization as a top-down process in which women patients were passive victims. This trend  has  been  confirmed  by  more  recent  research  that  has  expanded  the  scope  of medicalization to include ways in which medicalization affects both men and women, and ways in  which  patients  participate  in  the  medicalization  or  demedicalization  of  their  condition.

Indeed,  recent  studies  emphasized how problematic  a  dichotomous  view  of  gendered medicalization can be (Clarke et al., 2003). In our eyes, the complexity of the intersection of gender & sexuality and medicalization is visible in many ways:

•  Gender biases in medicine do not only translate into the overmedicalization of socio-cultural phenomena, they can also lead to the undermedicalization of some pathologies. Not having a diagnosis can for example limit the access to the role of patient, with all its associated rights and privileges (Glenton, 2003; Nettleton, 2005). This is especially relevant  to  under-researched  and  under-treated  conditions  like  chronic  fatigue, fibromyalgia and endometriosis, etc.

• The influence of gender in medicalization has often been viewed in binary terms, while it has in fact historically affected intersex and trans communities in particular (Giami, 2012; Johnson, 2019).

• Patients  have  long  been  deemed  mere  victims  of  the  process  of  medicalization. However, recent studies have given a greater importance to the active participation of patients both at the individual and collective level (Figert, 2010). One can thus ask how the contemporary expansion of expert patients may shift medicalization. For instance, to  what  extent  are  pathographies  and  illness  narratives (literary,  pictural, cinematographic,  etc.) a form of the patient’s active participation in medicalization (Jutel and Russel, 2021)? 

As early as 1992, Conrad noted that “gender is an important factor in understanding medicalization”  (Conrad,  1992:  222).  Hence,  this  conference  seeks  to  explore  what  the category of “gender” can bring to medicalization research. While it is common to use both categories of “sex” (biological) and “gender” (social) in medicine (the latter being used more and more often), it is important to remember that even in medicine, a binary view of sex and gender  can  be  misleading.  As  Epstein  noted,  though  in  medicine  we  tend  to  treat  sex  as  a “dichotomous variable” (Epstein, 2007: 253), our  criteria of differentiation remain rather ambiguous and the biological demarcations themselves are unstable as they stem from social and political constructs.

Thus,  this  event  is  especially  interested  in  the  scientific  approaches  to  gender  and medicalization, exploring their interrelation through non-binary lenses.

Contact: gender.medicalization@gmail.com

Organizing Committee

• Carla Robison (Gender Initiative), PhD candidate in Comparative Literature, EA 4510 Centre de Recherche en Littérature comparée, ED 19 Littératures françaises et comparées, Sorbonne University.

• Julia Tinland (Biomedical Humanities Initiative), Postdoc at the SiRIC CURAMUS, SND, Sorbonne University / Chair on Health Democracy and involvement of peope dealing with cancer, team CanBIOS, UMR SESSTIM, Aix-Marseille Université..

• Lucie Vanhoutte (Biomedical Humanities Initiative), PhD candidate in Demography-Anthropology, UMR 7206 Eco-anthropologie, ED227 Écologie & évolution, Sorbonne University.

• Anne Fenoy (Biomedical Humanities Initiative), PhD candidate in Philosophy of medicine and science, UMR 8011 Sciences, normes, Démocratie, ED 433, Concepts et langage, Sorbonne University.

• Marion Bonneau, Doctor in ancient greek studies at Sorbonne University, Médecine grecque et Littérature technique UMR 8167 Orient et Méditerranée; associated member of Laboratoire de recherche Fabrique du Littéraire (FabLitt), Université Paris 8 Vincennes Saint-Denis.

Scientific Committee

• Jean-Christophe Abramovici, Professor in French Literature, 18th century, Centre d’études de la langue et des littératures françaises, Sorbonne University.

• Solenn Carof, Associate professor in sociology, GEMASS, Sorbonne Université

• Thomas Constantinesco, Professor in American Literature, 19th century, Voix Anglophones Littérature et Esthétique, Sorbonne University.

• Claire Crignon, Professor of philosophy of medicine, Archives Henri-Poincaré - Philosophie et Recherches sur les Sciences et les Technologies, Lorraine University.

• Frédéric Regard, Professor in English Literature, 19th-21st centuries, Voix Anglophones Littérature et Esthétique, Sorbonne University.

• David Teira, Professor in Philosophy of Medicine, Sciences, Normes Démocratie, Sorbonne University.

• Anne Tomiche, Professor in Comparative Literature, 20th-21st centuries, Centre de Recherche en Littérature comparée, Sorbonne University.