Publication year: 2011
Source: Social Science & Medicine, In Press, Accepted Manuscript, Available online 29 June 2011
Raewyn, Connell
Public policy documents on gender and health mostly rely on categorical understandings of gender that are now inadequate. Post-structuralist thought is an advance, but relational theories of gender, treating gender as a multidimensional structure operating in a complex network of institutions, provide the most promising approach to gendered embodiment and its connection with health issues. Examples are discussed in this article. A crucial problem is how to move the analysis beyond local arenas, especially to understand gender on a world scale. A relational approach to this question is proposed, seeing gendered embodiment as interwoven with the violent history of colonialism,…
Highlights: ► Gender is best understood as a multidimensional structure of embodied social relations, and health effects are produced in the processes that constitute gender. ► Gender is present in all social institutions, continuously producing effects on bodies, and the gender order necessarily has a global dimension. ► Analyses of gender must recognize multiple feminist perspectives, and give weight to paradigms from the global periphery. ► Gender orders are dynamic, not static, creating new embodied social realities, interwoven with other social dynamics. ► There is a need to think transnationally about the agents of change in the relations of gender and health.