Page 161 - The ISA Handbook in Contemporary Sociology

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became a project of modification and interpretation of men’s underutilization of
enhancement (Crossley, 2005; Featherstone, health services and their assumed under-
2000; Shilling, 2005). These theoretical per- reporting of health symptoms.
spectives drew attention to the negotiated Recent feminist critiques of classical and
character of the social order and the themes contemporary sociological theory point to
of conflict and cooperation as the built-in the importance of unravelling the gendered
dynamics between agency and structure. assumptions inherent in theoretical perspec-
While early sociological works on the tives in sociology (e.g., Adkins, 2004; Witz
body gave some credit to feminist research and Marshall, 2004). This is also the case for
as the vanguard that had brought this topic to theories in medical sociology and the sociol-
the domain of sociology, the same authors ogy of health and illness. The founding
have been criticized for not seeing the rele- concepts – the sick role and the role of the
vance of gender in their own analysis of the physician – exemplify how the two phenom-
body (Adkins, 2004; Witz, 2000). ena rested on a consensus perspective.
Although originally both were gender neu-
tral concepts, the sick role became conceptu-
alized as compatible with the traditional
The invisible theme
female role, while the medical profession
A recent book on the history of medical soci- became a prototype of the kind of new occu-
ology in the US provides an encyclopedic pational and contractual (male) relations that
overview of the stages of the institutionaliza- emerged in modern society.
tion and subsequent trends of medical sociol- This consensus theory of health has had a
ogy as an academic discipline (Bloom, 2002). strong position in mainstream American
In that review, official agencies (e.g., NIH) medical sociology, where the sex-role theory
are given a crucial role in the development of of health has been an underlying theme in
medical sociology, while the women’s health empirical research on women’s health. The
movement and the crucial Boston Women’s theme of conflict was introduced in the
Health Collective publication, Our Bodies, mid-1980s, when role-strain theory became a
Ourselves (Davis, 2002) and later feminist way of explaining women’s, but also more
theorizing on health are totally absent. recently men’s health (e.g., Rosenfield, 1992;
Mainstream American medical sociology is Umberson et al., 2006).
presented unproblematically as malestream. The second reason for the marginalization
Two theoretical developments in sociology of feminist theorizing and research in med-
might explain this general trend in the sociol- ical sociology stems from the relegation of
ogy of health. feminist research on health to the field of
First, the general tenets of theorizing on women’s studies rather than mainstream
gender and health grew out of the conflation medical or health sociology. The conflict per-
of sick-role theory and sex-role theory spective in theorizing on gender and health
(Gerhardt, 1989). The functionalist interpre- stems back to the feminist critique of the
tation of women’s high rates of illness has male-dominated profession and the sug-
been called the ‘compatibility hypothesis’, gested male-biased character of medical
which refers to the compatibility between the knowledge in the 1970s. The feminist per-
housewife role and the sick role (Gerhardt, spective grew out of the critique of the male
1989: 280). The argument was that women’s body as the standard of health in the 1970s
expressive role in society was congruent with (see Boston Women’s Health Collective,
the adoption of the sick role (e.g., Cooperstock, 1973; Chesler, 1972) and emerged as a the-
1971). This cultural interpretation of the matic issue in the work of academic activists
higher morbidity of women than men is still such as Barbara Ehrenreich (Ehrenreich and
today taken to be a valid framework in the English, 1973, 1978) in the US and of