Please register here by 19 May.
Gendering chronic illness: Intersectional perspectives on biomedical care and patient communities
22-23 May 2024, Tampere University
The workshop investigates the complex, often subtle ways in which chronic illnesses and pain are gendered. Drawing on multiple disciplinary backgrounds, including sociology, anthropology, gender studies, cultural studies, science and technology studies and history, the papers presented in the workshop ask how ideas about differences between genders become pinned to specific chronic conditions. Why are some chronic illnesses, such as migraine or fibromyalgia, associated with particular ideas of gender even when there may be no established connection between the condition and a gendered biological mechanism? What kinds of intersecting differences, such as race, class, age or disability, are mobilised (or dismissed) in how chronic pain is and has historically been approached in biomedicine, represented in culture, or experienced by patients? Drawing on case studies of and examples from biomedical practices and knowledge production, patient activism, and accounts of living with chronic illness and persistent pain, the workshop seeks to provide new insights on the impact of the gendering of chronic illness on ideas of healthy bodies, temporality of illness, and good care. We hope to understand how conceptualisations of gendered differences differ across clinical and patient communities, and how practices of gendering chronic illnesses and pain shape biomedical practices of care or possibilities for patient activism.
Workshop programme
Venue: Lyhty, Tampere University Main Building
Wednesday 22 May
10:15 Welcome
10:30-11:30 Soile Ylivuori (University of Helsinki): “The Air of this Island is mortal to most Europeans”: Intersections of pain, gender, and race in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world
11:30-11:45 Coffee & tea
11:45-12:45 Mona Mannevuo (University of Helsinki): Treating a “non-disease” – Neurasthenia in medical discourse, 1880-1920
12:45-14:00 Lunch break
14:00-15:00 Ahalya Ganesh (Tampere University): Evolution of the fibromyalgia construct in biomedical literature
15:00-15:15 Coffee & tea
15:15-16:15 Anna Ovaska (Tampere University): Pain, Trauma and Cultural Narratives of Fatness: Reading Roxane Gay’s Hunger in a Narrative Medicine Classroom
Thursday 23 May
10:00-11:00 Maria Temmes (Tampere University), Elina Helosvuori (University of Helsinki) & Venla Oikkonen (Tampere University): Negotiating treatability: Patients, clinicians and severe endometriosis pain
11:00-11:15 Coffee & tea
11:15-12:15 Ina Hallström (Stockholm University): Endo Politics: How Identity Obstructs the Recognition of Endometriosis
12:15-13:30 Lunch break
13:30-14:30 Lilli Aini Rokkonen (Tampere University): Migraine and motherhood: Negotiations on care and reproduction
14:30-14:45 Thank you!