Deformities and Diseased: The Medicalization of Women’s Breasts

The Cultural Construction of Risk Understandings through Illness Narratives: Table 1

“…The course of our study also highlights a distinction that is often obscured in past research about biomedicine (Lupton 2003;Thompson 2005). In this study, Western, technologybased, interventionist medicine is described as biomedicine, which is consistent with the literature (Ferguson 2000;Potts 2000). It encompasses accumulated historical medical knowledge, as well as dominant social discourses revolving around illness, that are attributed to the medical establishment and health-care institutions.…”

Comfort, Control, or Conformity: Women Who Choose Breast Reconstruction Following Mastectomy

“…Unlike psychosocial research, feminist analyses situate breast reconstruction as a form of social control (Ferguson, 2000), as perpetuating stereotypes of women and their bodies (Kasper, 1995;Lorde, 1980), and as a façade of recovery from a breast cancer crisis (Broom, 2001;Crouch & McKenzie, 2000). Ferguson (2000) argues that breast reconstruction is used to promote conformity to societal norms of beauty and femininity.…”

“…Ferguson (2000) argues that breast reconstruction is used to promote conformity to societal norms of beauty and femininity. Situated amongst a broader medicalisation of women's breasts, she states that women with different-sized breasts or a different-number are considered deviant.…”

Towards a rhizomatic perspective of the medicalized Body? A Review on Medicalization and Gender

“…On the contrary, all of these definitions might be integrative. The classification of such a complex process as medicalization is far from simple; sometimes it was possible to identify clearly an author's interpretation of medicalization and affiliation (e.g., Asma, 2009;Durazo, 2006;Fingerson, 2006;Ferguson, 2002;Stoppard and Gammell, 2003).…”

“…In the past, and particularly in texts that focus on the beginning of the 19th and the 20th century, medical professionals were viewed mostly in a negative perspective. Some of the reasons cited for this negativity were they performed experimental procedures on the body (e.g., Hickey, 2006;Ferguson, 2002;Lopez, 1998), medicalized reproduction and labor (e.g., Light, 2013;Hart et al, 2006;Woliver, 2002;Riessman, 1998) without evidence of their safety or effectiveness (Ratcliff, 2002), performed surgery without anesthesia on slaves (e.g., Hickey, 2006), were xenophobic (e.g., Riessman, 1998), were profit oriented (e.g., Barnack-Tavlaris, 2015;Hart et al, 2006;Woliver, 2002), encouraged the use of certain "drugs as routine aid to socialization" (e.g., Hart et al 2006: 158;Conrad and Schneider, 2014) and created a demand for drugs for patients (e.g., Riessman, 1998), inspected, regulated, and controlled the body to medicalize sexuality (e.g., Hickey, 2006), aggressively superintended a mother's parenting (e.g., Sanders, 2017;Greil, 2002), allied with manufacturing industries (e.g., Light, 2013;Fergunson, 2002), did not inform patients of other sources of help (e.g., Stoppard and Gammell, 2003), and reinforced negative stereotypes about women (e.g., McClellan, 2017;Wolf, 2012), particularly impoverished women (e.g., Lopez, 1998). One study also shows how medicalization research can be used to reinforce judicialization and influence courts to medicalize violence (e.g., Chrisler and Gorman, 2015).…”