IntroductionGender and health: Relational, intersectional, and biosocial approaches
Section snippets
State of the field and the way forward
Much of the research on sex/gender and health has been dominated by two foci: 1) empirical examinations of trends and explanations for sex differences in disease incidence and mortality and 2) sex-specific disease patterns and corresponding, often differential, investments of research and policy attention to “men's health” and “women's health” needs. Though these efforts have contributed to understanding the distribution and causes of disease and mortality – and have led to dramatic
Features and limitations of the Special Issue
A number of specific features and limitations of the Special Issue warrant mention. This Special Issue originated through the Gender and Health Working Group (2008–2010) of the Robert Wood Johnson (RWJ) Health and Society Scholars Program at Columbia University. This working group consisted of approximately 30 scholars from Canadian and New York area universities with training in a range of disciplines including sociology, political science, public health, medicine, and chemistry, who came
Gender as relational
In seeking to highlight scholarship deploying a relational approach to gender, we intentionally eschewed papers that focused simply on “men's health” or “women's health,” or differences between them, without explicitly interrogating the dynamic workings of gender that produce observed health outcomes. We also sought papers that advance understanding of health practices, outcomes, and policies by applying a relational gender lens and inform gender scholarship by leveraging insights from health
Intersectionality
The gender and health field recognizes the importance of diversity. Yet most conventional gender and health research is limited to considering categories such as sex and gender, or looking at gender in addition to other categories – usually race and/or class – without fully considering and analyzing full contexts, interactional effects with other social locations and influences of power inequities. Intersectionality theory explicitly encourages investigations of numerous intersecting
Biosocial approaches
One challenge in applying a gender relations perspective to gender and health is the need to adequately theorize and engage with the intersection of biological and social aspects of health for men and women. There has been little gender and health research that adequately incorporates biology and the social environment, let alone from a gender relations perspective. This type of biosocial approach to gender and health has the potential to revolutionize our understanding of health for men and
Conclusion and future directions
While the approaches highlighted in this Special Issue do not capture the full breadth of the rapidly changing field, they do represent significant shifts in thinking that have far reaching consequences. The collection of empirical and theoretical papers engage a variety of methodological approaches and signal the growing challenges in thinking through, and responding to, the range of biological and social factors that interact to influence health inequities. Specifically, they demonstrate the
Acknowledgments
The authors thank the participants of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health and Society Scholars Program Working Group on Gender and Health at Columbia University as well the editorial team and anonymous reviewers at Social Science & Medicine. We also wish to express gratitude to Jeanne Mager Stellman, Rebecca M. Jordan-Young, and Lisa Jean Moore for their studious and insightful reviews of the manuscripts and introduction in this Special Issue. We would also like to acknowledge support
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