SO322 Concepts Exam Study Guide

Gendered systems of power

• Gender understood as system of power that is used to produce or reproduce new hierarchies or inequalities of power

• Patriarchy (assumes a heteronormative understanding of heterosexual relationships as the norm/default), matriarchy, cisnormativity

Biological sex vs. gender

• Biological sex: A biological category of sex assigned at birth

• Gender: A social category of performance aspects of how people perform their identities (clothing, appearance, speech patterns)

  • Gender ideology has become politicized (stricter abortion rights, restricted K-12 education on gender)

  • Promotes that a certain lifestyle is coded as dangerous

  • Several examples of people whose identities do not align with mainstream or heteronormative ways of collapsing biological sex and gender might expect

• The way we maintain certain classification systems, that can end up meaning we favor one way of classifying bodies over another

Gender as a social determinant of health

• Gender works as system, distributing resources in different ways to different people, causing forms of inequality seen through health disparities

  • Women and girls often face more barriers to healthcare information and services than men

    • Mobility restrictions, lack of access to decision-making power, lower literacy rates, discriminatory attitudes of healthcare providers

  • Notions of masculinity encourage boys and men to smoke, and take on greater risks and not seek help

Essentialism

• The idea that the characteristics of persons or groups are significantly influenced by biological factors, and are therefore largely similar in all human cultures and historical periods 

  • Ex) An essentialist would argue that sexual orientation is a given “truth” to individuals–it is thought to be inherent, biologically determined, and essential to their being 

  • “Women are naturally nurturing”

• According to this essentialist logic, racial categories thought to be “natural” or “essential” are created and thought to be influenced by biological factors within the context of racialized power relations, dooming African Americans into slavery, racial segregation, lynching, and white supremacy 

  • African Americans seen as biologically inferior

Gender essentialism

• Sex equals gender, and that linkage between biological sex and the expectations we have of one’s gender is true across all human groups and time (that someone’s sex and gender is a “given” truth that cannot be changed)

  • Would argue that since the beginning of time, people have been born as either males or females

  • Those assigned male at birth might be expected to go on living certain kinds of lives and identify with a certain gender identity

    • Ex) Stereotypical breadwinner of the family, expected to be more aggressive/violent, less emotional, physical appearances (short hair) 

• Social scientists work against an essentialist approach to gender 

Biological determinism

• Defined as a general theory, which holds that a group’s biological or genetic makeup shapes its social, political, and economic destiny

• Ex) Sex is typically thought to be a biological “fact” where bodies are classified into two categories, male and female 

  • Predetermined by your biological sex, determining your social roles 

  • Our biology determines our fate, our destiny

Social determinants of health and how it’s approached by Watkin-Hayes

• Social conditions in which people are born, grow, live, work, and age, and people’s access to power, money, and resources 

  • Unfair and avoidable differences in health status seen within and between countries

• Can be read as decoupled from deeper critiques of power and inequality; sometimes used in superficial ways as opposed to deep, structural analyses of why disparities exist

• The environmental conditions in which we grow up in, that nurture us toward certain patterns/directions rather than the born, natural things we are given 

  • Structure people’s unequal access to power, money, and resources  

• Social determinants of health is more neutral but injuries of inequality is meant to attack the social systems; injuries caused by larger social systems that made it much more likely for those people to contract HIV and have a harder time managing HIV

Fundamental social causes of health

• Money, power, knowledge, prestige, and social connections/networks that exacerbates health disparities 

• Linked to the unequal distribution of power, money, and resources 

• Interested in explaining why social patterns of disease may persist despite effective interventions on potent risk factors

  • Ex) Sanitation, smoking, drugs

    • Watkin-Hayes: Several examples of folks having a vast amount of information, but because of the social conditions in which they were living, they coped with drugs to continue surviving (felt they were necessary aspects of their life) 

      • How much of an individual choice it may be

    • Those mainly affected by it are in countries with poorer access to resources and historically shaped by colonialism 

• Fundamental causes become apparent only under conditions of change 

• Vaccinations: Community protection

  • People of higher SES (baseline level of privilege) may be more conservative towards vaccinations, and have the resources/safety net to protect themselves once contracting an illness 

    • Those foregoing health insurance may be confident that they can pay out of their own account for treatment instead of being a part of a broader social safety net

      • Less mortality rate

      • With more money, power, and resources, people can take on greater risks and insulate themselves from risk 

  • Whereas those with poor access to money and resources, have to rely on health insurance or cannot even afford it 

    • Higher mortality rates, thus increased protection 

  • Ex) A grocery store worker not connected with medical professionals and low-wage vs. someone forgoing vaccination but has the medical networks to get access to supreme healthcare 

Treating gender and race as this essential thing when…

• We sometimes treat gender and race as this essential thing that isn’t the product of social construction; by claiming that we know what it means, we’re sort of erasing that it isn’t gender causing that health outcome, but it is the structure and system

  • People believing that women are at a higher risk of contracting something, but it is because of these broader systems

  • Inadvertently casting the problem as rooted in biological differences and downplaying the role of socially structured inequalities 

Injuries of inequality

• The cumulative physical, mental, and social scars resulting from economic, racial, and gender-based marginalization

• Dimensions shaped by gender, race, class, and sexuality, as the likelihood of occurrence is not random but shaped by where we are on the social hierarchy

  • “The brutal truth deserves emphasis: injuries of inequality produce, and are produced by a compromised ability to protect oneself from harm” 

  • Ex) Sexual abuse as an injury of inequality that shaped women’s susceptibility to drug exposure and HIV

Gendered division of labor

• Gender as a power system where some people do certain kinds of labor 

• Ex) Women are a part of the paid economy around Lake Victoria, laboring and selling the fish (a sexual economy) 

  • Women are actively part of the broader labor economy, but their role is to sell the fish (women are not just at home, they still engage in the economic market)

    • Able to use sex as a means of accessing more fish or resources in order to benefit from being able to sell more fish 

    • Changing ecology of Lake Victoria have made the gendered division of labor more pronounced (harder to catch fish, therefore men go out and spend longer time finding fish, and are encouraged to sexually engage with other women, increasing the spread of HIV)

    • Not that people don’t know safe sex/condoms and HIV’s spread, Mojola is questioning why do we see this persistence of this high rate of transmission (particularly diagnosis of women in these communities) even though there are public health measures imposed in these communities 

    • Women have less bargaining power because they rely on sex work for means of survival, therefore they must engage in sex with men who do not want protected sex

      • They risk losing business

Social constructionism

• “A theory of knowledge that holds that characteristics typically thought to be immutable and solely biological–such as gender, race, class, ability, and sexuality–are products of human definition and interpretation shaped by cultural and historical contexts”

• Highlights the ways in which racial and gender categories are concepts created, changed, and reproduced through historical processes within institutions and culture 

• The systems themselves are socially constructed

  • Although we say sex or disease is biological, the way that we make sense of who falls into what sex category or who is diagnosed with the biological markers of a certain disease, is actually socially constructed 

Contested illnesses

• Illnesses that people experience that are very real, and are trying to make sense of, but we don’t have the biological framework or legitimated scientific knowledge to make sense of that thing 

• Their social reality doesn’t map onto our social expectations of what a disease should look like 

• Ex) Chronic fatigue 

  • When someone has disabling symptoms affecting their quality life with no biological markers, that adds tension because providers find it difficult to treat them 

• Something that not all medical providers believe as a disease itself (disease is delegitimated) 

Conrad Barker’s three findings

• 1) Cultural meaning of illness: Ways that we assign worth, value, or expectations at the level of meaning

• 2) Illness experience as socially constructed: How one’s behavior and identity are socially read or them making sense of their experience 

• 3) Medical knowledge as socially constructed

Cultural meaning of illness: Ways that we assign worth, value, or expectations at the level of meaning

• The ways in which we socially make claims about the morality and stigma associated with different kinds of diagnoses

• Whether we think someone is a good or bad person based on the diagnosis they have

  • Ex) “Obesity as sinful” (gluttony) affect individuals’ support for different public policies aimed at reducing obesity

• Cultural meanings have an impact on the way the illness is experienced, how it’s depicted, how society responds, and the policies created

  • More difficult for people with certain illnesses to manage the stigma than the illness 

    • Stigma limits access to treatment and affects relationship and identity 

      • Makes people less likely to seek treatment for fear of being mistreated by healthcare providers and publicly associated with a tainted condition 

    • Nothing inherent about a condition that makes it stigmatizing, rather the social response to the condition that make a condition stigmatized 

• Contested illnesses that are not recognized or acknowledged by physicians

  • Medically suspect since they are not associated with any known physical abnormality 

  • Doesn’t fit into physicians’ framework 

  • Sufferers are burdened by the cultural meaning of a medically invisible condition 

• Social meaning of impairment does not emanate from the impairment itself, but from the fabric of everyday life

  • The body has an impairment (loss of limb) while society creates the disability 

  • But transforming an able-bodied world into a world better meeting the needs for people with disabilities should be emphasized 

  • Deaf as an identity with social reality pathologizing the condition 

Illness experience as socially constructed: How one’s behavior and identity are socially read or them making sense of their experience 

• Differs from cultural meaning in the sense that one’s own experience with the condition and social aspects of your environment shapes how you experience that illness

• The worlds of some individuals shrink when they are immersed in day-to-day aspects of managing a chronic illness (being unable to participate in conventional life shapes their perception of their illness and life)

  • Getting cut off from routines of conventional life (unable to work, spend time with family, socialize with friends)

  • Nothing to look forward to

• Individuals with epilepsy try to maintain self-control, skirt embarrassment and discrimination, and avoid becoming the object of a public crisis

  • Participating in daily activities of life can be difficult when their illness is so pathologized (their behavior is socially read by other people as negative) 

• The creation of a new illness identity

  • Ex) Cancer survivor

  • Illness-based social movements, forging new communities based on illness identities, and forming their own knowledge about their medical conditions

  • Agency and resistance are key to the illness experience 

• Links with legitimacy deficit 

Medical knowledge as socially constructed

• Competing medical knowledges: Cultural approaches of medical knowledge not created in a lab, lay expertise, people through their experiences (with no medical degree)

• Healthcare literacy exacerbates disparities experienced by marginalized communities

  • Lack of medical knowledge influence communities’ willingness to address illnesses 

  • Cancer mortality rates higher amongst Black women than white women

• Doctors given the ultimate authority 

  • The treatments given to is based on their social construction and observation of the world

  • Medicine is an incredibly powerful institution that wields such authority and legitimacy (invalidates patient’s experiences) 

  • But patients carry great knowledge about their embodied experiences, and should be understood and listened to

• Medicalization: Defining human problems or experiences as medical problems 

  • Something to be fixed (pathologized)  

  • Women’s natural reproductive functions (pregnancy, childbirth, menstruation) are constantly medicalized

• As much as we can try to collectively control all the variables, we don’t have perfect technology

  • Medical institutions trying to claim certainty and legitimacy when in reality, much is unknown or misunderstood 

Legitimacy deficit

• Legitimacy deficit: Contested illnesses that are delegitimized according to societal expectations for that illness

  • Legitimacy for diseases are real when there are symptoms linked to a biological pathology 

    • Thus, “invisible” disorders like depression, schizophrenia, and chronic pain in the brain are contested 

    • When doctors cannot locate an organic cause of their symptoms, patients may fear that the pain is literally “all in their head” 

      • Diagnosis plays a crucial cultural role in legitimating the experience of being ill 

      • Diagnosis can relieve a person, allowing them to know that their experience has been acknowledged and accepted 

      • People with migraines struggle to be taken seriously by physicians 

      • Likely to receive blame, be silenced, or be ignored

  • Legitimacy deficit has made it harder for people suffering from migraines to discuss their pain and experiences 

    • Made to feel like their experiences are small and don’t fit into a box of neurobiological disorder 

    • Sufferers questioning if they really are suffering from migraines 

    • High levels of internalized stigma with people worrying if they cannot fulfill their “sick role”

Gendering specific disease (Kempner)

• Gender organizes how we understand the body, even when body parts are not directly related to biological sex

  • Migraines and cluster headaches are constructed as having different brains that operate in highly gendered ways 

    • Ex) Contrasting migraine is typically associated with women while cluster headache is typically associated with men

    • Migraines is constructed as a feminized, sensitive nervous system that demands too much of its surroundings while cluster headaches is constructed in masculine terms: hyperrational but prone to risk taking

• How gendering has become ingrained in our cultural and institutional lives to justify unequal power relations

• Women’s bodies are considered deviant

  • Ex) Biomedicine treats pregnancy and menopause as diseases even though they are normal and ordinary aspects of women’s reproductive lives

The “sick role”

• Built into our social contract (our responsibilities as a member of a social community) that we are exempted from some responsibilities if we meet certain kinds of criteria of the “sick role” 

  • Those who don’t fit that perfect socially constructed box, are doubted, malingered, and stigmatized

    • Deemed as parasitic to the broader social community (faking the illness, not trying to get better)

    • Fulfilling the "sick role" can be scrutinized if they cannot find a biological marker or physical abnormality, which can leave people suffering from medically invisible conditions to face stigma and malingering

  • Conditioned in having to prove with some kind of quantifiable metric that their illness is real and experienced 

  • Legitimacy deficit has made it harder for people suffering from migraines to discuss their pain and experiences 

    • Made to feel like their experiences are small and don’t fit into a box of neurobiological disorder 

    • Sufferers questioning if they really are suffering from migraines 

    • High levels of internalized stigma with people worrying if they cannot fulfill their “sick role”

Matrix of domination

• A position within that matrix of interlocking systems of oppression sensitizes people to something true about a reality that otherwise would be obscured from view 

  • Aspects of one’s identity as being a multiplication equation of 1’s (1x1x1)

    • Rather than taking a cumulative approach, all of these pieces factor into a person’s identity but that doesn’t make someone less or more oppressed (just makes different experiences of oppression)

  • Inhabiting 1 specific identity within a system of racism that intersects with a system of patriarchy that intersects with a system of sexuality that creates a whole single (Collins looks at the whole slice, less about the degree of harm)

Giving voice to people experiencing different intersections of the matrix of domination…

• Helps us produce a more just society or better knowledge (insight and production)

• White masculinity has historically been taken as true and universal, while others are often dismissed, ignored, or treated as less universal 

  • So tunnel visioned that it ignores the valuable truth 

• By paying attention to marginalized groups and putting them at the center, we can improve our knowledge 

• If we care about creating good knowledge and truths, we have to figure out how to be inclusive as possible in understanding how people living intersected identities are experiencing the social world and pay attention to these social dynamics that end up shaping what a given society takes to be truth and the way our institutions operate and who they serve

• We cannot elevate one situated standpoint that can capture the whole truth, we need everybody’s situated standpoints to have a full picture in understanding the social world 

• The conceptual lens of the simultaneity of race, class, and gender oppression (social interlocking systems of power) is important for understanding why people are experiencing the world they are and the claims they make about the world 

• Anyone who makes a knowledge claim about what is true, comes from a situated partial perspective that tells us something about someone’s location within the matrix of domination, at a point of intersection of interlocking systems of power 

• Making sure that subordinated groups left out of the knowledge production process are allowed to be producers of their own knowledge and experiences, and shape what is said to be “true” about the social world 

Standpoints and partial perspectives

• That all of us can only see so much of the world, because we are living in our own situated, partial perspective

• None of us has access to universal truth (we cannot understand what everyone is going through) 

• How can a single person create science that can capture the experiences and reality of everyone?

  • Thus she argues that for us to have objective knowledge, we must bring in as many perspectives and treat them all as equally valid

• If we care about creating the valid and best knowledge, we must pay attention to all the situated standpoints, particularly elevating historically subordinated and silenced groups 

Intersectionality

• Multiple positionalities of an individual’s being that shapes how they are perceived and treated by broader society and how they experience the world 

• Traffic intersection

  • Flows of traffic as a pedestrian tries to cross that intersection

    • If that pedestrian is subordinated on an axis of race and gender as they try to navigate that traffic (force of subordination) from multiple directions, they are more likely to get hit 

    • Traffic from one direction can launch someone into oncoming traffic from another direction

    • Possible to get hit from both directions at the same time 

• Theorizing harm in a cumulative framework

  • Being a Black woman is a distinct difference from being a white woman

    • People are disproportionately harmed at different levels than other people at different intersections 

  • Compound discrimination is additive (1+1+1)

  • With each additional layer of an interlocking system of oppression, there’s a quantitative increase 

  • Clear of not trying to make a hierarchy of oppression, but is trying to build a system from a legal point that can make harm and damages and may be compounded

• Crenshaw looks at the different layers of cake

Relationships between “injuries of inequality” and intersectionality

• Sexual violence, poverty, and drug economy are all interlocking systems of oppression that increases women’s susceptibility to HIV, and is elevating their voices 

  • How the intersection of people’s identities has shaped their experiences, but also provides insight into potential resistance 

• How black women themselves built these grassroot networks, moving from “dying from” to “living with” 

• “Injuries of inequality" similarly sounds like theorizing harm in a cumulative framework 

  • People’s intersecting identities throwing them in all directions of these “conjoining multiple systems of subordination” that harm is cumulated 

Framing institutions (meso)

• Offer new language, adaptive skills, and practical knowledge that shape how we interpret new life conditions and determine whether we ultimately see a new life situation as a platform for growth 

  • How people are framing or making sense of the HIV diagnosis, and a pivotal step in influencing cognitive shift

  • Motivating them to engage in self care, to visit their doctors regularly, manage their diets, take prescribed medications, reduce and manage stress, address drug addiction problems, and learn about symptoms and medications 

• Aren’t always positive 

  • Some institutions help frame what the HIV diagnosis means for their lives in ways that are empowering while other institutions will reframe HIV in ways that are disempowering or harmful

  • Some churches framed HIV with a stigmatizing effect, harming women’s ability in engaging in these transformative projects 

    • Delivered damaging and shaming messages about HIV/AIDs 

• Emotional peer support 

• Social services (government support and funding) 

• Recognition, identity and destigmatization 

  • Making sense of their HIV diagnosis in ways that help them feel visible 

    • Help make sense of the conditions that led them to dying from HIV 

      • Psychosexual trauma (sexual violence in childhood, adolescence, and adulthood)

      • Sense of personal responsibility for these things that happened to them but are caused by larger social structures 

      • Personal agency: Power coming from within that allows them to leverage available options, leading to choices and behaviors that can fall inside or outside the lines of normative behavior 

• Language: A different way of talking about HIV 

  • Careful-specific language “An HIV positive woman” → “A woman living with HIV/AIDs” (WLWHA)

• Networks

  • Sensitize people to programs 

Cognitive shift (micro/individual)

• An epiphany, or an awakening that helped launch a successful life transformation 

• Cognitive reappraisal and emotion-regulation (reinterpreting the situation to change maladaptive thinking) 

• “The internal mindset shift that suggests that ‘things have to change’ often takes place after an external pivotal event or set of interactions” 

  • A light bulb moment

    • An awareness of the way that the macro structures, meso level dynamics and micro interactions are shaping their lives 

    • Based on different inputs from the environment 

    • They then see a potential resource largely thanks to the social safety net built around HIV activism 

• Not an internal defect or deficit of the individual 

• Watkin-Hayes is not saying that people need to individually take more responsibility (bootstrapping way), but is trying to argue that there are structural macro and institutional conditions that have brought women into these scenarios 

Intersectional stigma

• Depending on your intersectional position within a broader matrix of domination, you experience stigma that one picks up over the course of their lives 

• Stigma can be amplified in certain ways for people depending on where they fall in their intersectional location 

  • Whether people are taken seriously or not

  • Chronic pain can be stigmatizing for everybody, but the way that the stigma plays in the world and is felt is very different for groups of people based on where they fall in intersectional locations 

Health-based social movements

• Centrally organized around health, and address: access to or provision/supply of health care services, health inequality and inequity based on several intersected identities, and disease, illness experience, disability and contested illness by challenging science on etiology, diagnosis, treatment, and prevention

R.K. Best’s three ways advocacy shapes policy

• Direct benefits: When advocacy organizations secure advantages for their constituents

  • ALS have a lot more funding for their constituents  (media coverage, ALS ice bucket challenge) 

• Distributive changes: When advocacy organizations enter a political arena and begin receiving direct benefits, the distribution of resources shifts to favor the type of people who are most likely to organize

  • Difference between traditionally excluded groups and socially advantaged advocates 

  • But then that opens up who actually has the resources to get on that platform and advocate for themselves

  • Disease advocacy may have shifted money away from diseases that primarily affect women and black people

    • Low levels of advocacy explain some of the funding disparities

      • Black people are more likely to be blamed for their disease, marginalized groups are often socioeconomically disadvantaged and therefore lack the resources to support advocacy

      • An intersectional stigma that affects how marginalized groups perceive their illness (whether it is deserving of assistance or not)

  • Ex) Ryan White who passed away from HIV (white teenager) from a blood transfusion 

    • Then used him as the name and face of this legislation to gain more traction (had a degree of privilege to strategize) 

    • Since he’s a little white boy (an ideal victim who didn’t do anything wrong (being gay, using drugs intravenously), HIV was more strongly politicized  

      • Politically “pure” 

      • Ended up stigmatizing gay people 

• Systemic effects: When advocates go beyond achieving benefits for their own constituents and change the structures, systems, or schemas of political decision making

  • Why certain diseases get more attention than others comes down to the question of commensuration 

  • Not a static process, we live through moments of change 

  • Distribution of resources and why some groups or diseases get more or less 

    • Being measured or valued in one way over another group 

  • Target populations of worthiness (new schema/rubric)

    • End up reshaping at a macro level, how we culturally rank why some diseases are more worthy of funding than others 

  • A shift from the NIH made funding decisions around health research based on how scientists articulated that information and received funding based on their research to now patient groups going through real and lived experiences 

    • Sounds like an emancipatory move but opens up the topic of the politics of deservingness 

Politics of deservingness

• Who deserves research funding based on their health condition 

• Racial and gender inequality in addition to making it harder for stigmatized conditions to find backing 

Universal design

• The best way to respond to disabilities is to make workplaces and schools universally accessible 

  • Destabilizing the idea that there’s a normal standard person that thrives in that environment and that everyone else who doesn’t thrive, requires accommodations 

  • Instead, we should do away with this exclusionary environment and emphasize that everyone benefits to some extent with these accommodations 

    • Our spaces are ableist to begin with 

    • Ex) Curbed cutout in a city will not only help people who are mobility-impaired, but it helps people pushing strollers (benefit for all people who don’t identify with a disability or impairment) 

    • Rather than seeing these designs as merely benefitting those with disabilities, it is a universal design that benefits everybody

  • How this ties in with menopause

    • Promoting more accepting and safe workplaces to meet a certain kind of moral standard that is more inclusive 

    • UK is farther ahead in the way that the law has thought about approaching menopause 

      • More likely to treat menopause as something that workplaces should be much more responsive to 

Legal outcomes and broader cultural shifts that social movements bring about

• A story of two different groups of actors coming together to achieve aims that might at the beginning seem contrasting, but ultimately both necessary to build a safety net

• Gay men’s health crisis (GMHC): Services

  • Partner of the state

  • Gay men leading the charge, then eventually incorporates the perspectives of Black women living with HIV/AIDs and then transgender women

    • Tent keeps getting bigger 

    • Gay men having the safety and security of being able to advocate (middle-income white men) whereas women could not initially speak up (childcare services taking their children away, stigma around HIV influencing job holding) 

      • Leveraged their simultaneous positions of status–as white men–and marginalization–as sexual minorities–to make a forceful claim against ‘being scripted out of narratives of American national belonging.’ 

  • The fight to expand the HIV safety net

  • The net started reshaping how organizations were supporting and providing medical care to anyone globally

    • Shaped the philanthropic landscape (going into difference spaces in the globe to work with activists on the ground but also demand things from activists)

  • The aids coalition to unleash power (Act Up): Treatments

    • Opposition to the state because they were not interested in protecting the people at all (they don’t care about us) and started doing more radical actions 

    • “Voice of the community” not “bureaucracy serving the community” 

• Vijayakumar's argument

  • Collective leaders frames their work as entrepreneurial women (made more morally pure and innocent) 

    • Comments on clapping of sex workers (that they should cover up in public, etc.) 

    • Not wanting to flaunt their sex worker and frame themselves as different kinds of women who are just trying to make it work 

  • Sexual laborers were more radical in their politics and were not afraid of this transgressive move and ended up finding Global health funders willing to support to some extent the claim that they were sex workers

    • Leaning fully into the fact that they are sex workers (wanted more protection around labor rights to safely conduct their sex work)

  • Conflicts between the two groups (critique of one another), making cases for their own respectability

Inclusion-and-difference paradigm

• “The inclusion of members of various groups generally considered to have been underrepresented previously as subjects in clinical studies; and the measurement, within those studies, of difference across groups with regard to treatment effects, disease progression, or biological processes”

• History of applying a middle-age white male “normative standard” to generalize about the population

• Coming up with standards will prevent us from having gaps in care, but at the same time, social movement organizing pays more attention to how diversity means attending to individual specificity 

Personalized medicine

• Targeting therapies specifically for individuals’ genetic profile 

  • Mapping unique genetic patterns and reinscribing of what it means to be a specific individual 

  • Ex) Not everyone’s period symptoms are the same yet are biological

    • Is personalized medicine achievable for each individual?

• Counter to biomedical scientific truth

  • You can’t have a clinical trial of one person to make generalizable claims within a scientific framework (white male as the standard) 

  • Biomedical research has its own deep logics of what good research is; to do that work, we have to do high level of grouping that gives us large enough samples (generalizing people in these socially constructed buckets) in order to make scientific research which runs counter to personalized medicine 

  • Either ends of the spectrum are not realistic

  • Downfall of this paradigm is that it doesn’t just create new standards, but none of those standards can never capture the full experience of individuals 

  • The naturalizing certain kinds of differences but claiming that because these groups are purely biologically different rather than saying that something can be happening socially that is leading to higher risks for disease in that certain population that could be influencing some of these statistics

• By focusing on groups, they obscure individual-level differences, raising the risk of improper racial or sex profiling in health care

  • Can result in a reductionist, “one-size-fits-all” view of groups 

  • Assumption that all members of a group are the same 

• By emphasizing the biology of difference, they encourage the belief that qualities such as race and gender are biological in their essence, and that these social inequalities can be remedied by attending to those biological particularities

  • Ignoring the role that broader social structures play in producing those outcomes, not because it is gender that produces that outcome (once again, gender is a socially constructed category)