Abstract

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Health inequalities research in Europe has developed around autonomous or semi-autonomous thematic axes with a predominant emphasis on the impact of socioeconomic status and a considerable interest in the effect of gender, ethnicity or immigrant status. In this light, we are aware of the health advantage that people with higher income, occupational status or education seem to enjoy, of women’s greater burden of morbidity and men’s higher mortality rates and of the health inequalities between immigrants or ethnic minorities and native majorities. Recently however, a number of scholars inspired by the intersectionality theory have been problematising the fact that the aforementioned categories -as all social categories- are mutually constituted and shape individual experience of health simultaneously. From this viewpoint, they address socio-economic position, gender, ethnicity but also race, sexuality and other categories as non-distinct entities that underlie intersecting systems of power like racism and heteropatriarchy which entrench health inequalities. In this light, research conducted from an intra-categorical perspective has revealed the unique experience of disease among multiply marginalised social groups like Black immigrant women or Black gay and bisexual men or Latinas with severe mental illness. Additionally, inter-categorical approaches have highlighted the differential processes that distinct social groups use to leverage class or gender advantage in order to utilise their entitlement to treatment or the increased risk of poor health among bisexual men and women who experience increased economic and social disadvantage relative to other groups emerging from the combination of gender and sexuality. Inequalities imply asymmetric relationships between individuals occupying differential positions within the same social space. Hence, questions regarding the health impact of the intersections between multiple experiences of discrimination and socio-economic marginalisation as well as of the intersections between different kinds of privileges (e.g. being a white middle class man) or between privilege and disadvantage (e.g. being a white highly educated woman) need to be further explored both in terms of individual experience and in terms of structural arrangements that allow for these unequal relationships to emerge. Such work will reveal the social processes and the corresponding categories (i.e. sexism - gender) relevant for the emergence of health inequalities in different contexts as well as the extent that these inequalities differ across contexts.

This session welcomes papers that integrate intersectionality and power relations in the understanding of health inequalities and are considered with the intersecting processes of social exclusion. Presenters are invited to discuss findings from empirical research conducted from intra-categorical or inter-categorical perspective using qualitative or quantitative methods. Purely theoretical and critical contributions are also encouraged. Since the shift towards intersectionality informed research has been recent, this session aims to give space for an integrative discussion around the potential theoretical contributions in the field but also around the emerging methodological challenges.

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Session organizer(s)

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Anna Gkiouleka (UK) – PhD student at the University of York, Department of Sociology and a collaborator in the HiNEWS project (Health Inequalities in European Welfare States). She holds a Master of Science in Migration, Ethnic Relation & Multiculturalism from Utrecht University. Her research interests and PhD thesis focus on the integration of the intersectionality theory in the study of health inequalities with a particular emphasis on the role of gender, social class and immigration status as social categories experienced at the individual level and as reflections of systems of social power at the structural and institutional level.

 

Daniel La Parra (ES) – Associate Professor - Head of Department of Sociology II (University of Alicante). Sociologist (PhD, UA) and Master of Science in Epidemiology (London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine). Director of the World Health Organization Collaborating Centre on Social Inclusion and Health (Interuniversity Institute of Social Development and Peace, University of Alicante). Member of the Spanish State Council of the Roma People. Expert at the Spanish National Commission on the Social Determinants of Health. Editor of the Roma Inclusion Newsletter published by WHO/Europe in cooperation with the European Commission – Directorate-General for Health and Consumers and IUDESP.

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