Event Description
While
diagnosis is important in identifying and curing disease, it also has a strong
social impact. Diagnosis can be a source of anxiety or of relief, of hope
or of despair. It structures the experience of health and illness,
deciding what counts at normal, defining who is responsible for what
disorders, providing frameworks for communication and structuring
relationships. It presents a point around which tensions may develop, and
interests collide. This presentation will present the sociology of
diagnosis, underlining how the material reality of disease is both shaped by,
and influences, social life, with a particular focus on women’s experience of
illness.
Annemarie
Jutel is author of Putting a Name to It: Diagnosis in Contemporary
Society (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011). Jutel
trained as a nurse at l'Ecole d infirmieres in Nantes, France and has practiced
in France, the US and now New Zealand. She left clinical work in 2000 to focus
on sociological aspects of health and illness. Her ground-breaking work in the
sociology of diagnosis focuses on how medical classification interacts with
social and cultural interests. She has written on the medicalisation of
overweight, female sexuality and foetal death.
Lunch
will be served, please RSVP: mfe@drexel.edu
Co-sponsored
event by Women's Studies and the Working Group on Commodification, Technology
& Gender |
