Abstract

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Medicalization has infiltrated nearly every facet of contemporary life. Many conditions, once seen as moral or criminal, or not seen at all, were rapidly created or transformed into medical treatable conditions. As the biomedical governance of life took shape, such conditions also received new names and classifications while being progressively associated with a number of symptoms or even modes of being. The advances of medicalization, and its own definition and scope, have not remained unquestioned. For many, medicalization has become both all-pervasive and problematic inasmuch as it appears to simultaneously indicate a social and existential danger. As in Foucault’s critical approach, medicalization would represent an institutionalized system of control over bodies and minds. From the 1960s and 1970s onwards, it has been consistently the object of criticism and concern with a growing abundance of studies aimed at describing inappropriate or even abusive instances of medical authority interpreted as medical imperialism. From this stance, the negative aspects of medicalization are brought to light while other dynamics are often overlooked. One of this dynamics must highlight that instead of one-dimensional medical model, medicalization has been construed as a key site of struggle and contestation, quite often involving actors – human rights movements, for instance – external to the medical profession. The focus on contestation to medicalization implies reflecting on different forms of struggle. On the one hand, those demanding for more recognition through the increase of medicalization, and, on the other, those demanding to eliminate medical control. Recognition can therefore work in opposite ways, even when commonly showing that processes of medicalization are objects of intervention by multiple medical and non-medical actors. In this sense, the concept of medicalization needs further clarification, a step that implies not only an identification of all of those involved in overturning of contesting medical imperialism, but, most importantly, a distinction between medicalization and pathologization. Such distinction is quite often overlooked, even if it brings to light a vast number of conceptual and practical implications. Indeed, we aim to foster the reflection on how pathologization and medicalization can occur independently, despite the close ties that bind the two concepts. In sum, can the two concepts be thought of as different? In what sense? The realm of gender and sexuality, from feminist opposition to the pathologization of women’s bodies, LGBT contestation of homosexuality as a disorder, or, more recently, the struggles of transgender stakeholders for the dephatologization of gender variant identities, has been fertile in providing us with examples of contestations to the acceptance of the sick role and the subsequent transformation of a pathology into a human right pertaining to the person and/or the group. Similar processes can also be seen when race or ethnicity were at stake and medical knowledge was used to legitimize a certain form of subalternity.

In this call for papers we invite theoretical as well as empirical papers that might further the discussion on the boundaries of medicalization and dephatologization. We welcome in particular papers that contribute to advance research on the sites where processes of contestation and processes of medicalization as well as pathologization are closely intertwined.

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Session organizer(s)

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Sofia Aboim (PT) – Ph.D. (ISCTE-IUL 2004), is a permanent research fellow at the Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Lisbon. Her research interests include gender and sexuality, feminisms, masculinities studies, and trans-scholarship as well as critical theory and post-marxism, modernity and post-colonialism. She has published several articles in Portuguese and international journals as well as a number of books, including Plural Masculinities. The remaking of the self in private life (Ashgate, 2016). She is working on other book projects on masculinities as well as gender and modernities while developing research projects on the same topics. Currently, she coordinates the project TRANSRIGHTS (Consolidator Grant) financed by the European Research Council (transrightseurope.wordpress.com/).

 

Pedro Vasconcelos (PT) – (Doctorate in Sociology at ISCTE-IUL 2011). He teaches at graduate and post-graduate levels since 1996 at ISCTE-IUL, where he is tenured Auxiliary Professor. He was a directing member of the Portuguese Association of Sociology between 2002 and 2006 and Director of the Department of Sociology of ISCTE-IUL from to 2014-2017. He dedicates himself to sociological research since 1992. Presently his main research interest are gender theory, gender relations and categorizations, masculinities and femininities. He is senior researcher in the European Research Council funded project TRANSRIGHTS:

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