Raewyn Connell: Gender, Health and Healthcare

Abstract

This chapter explores the contribution of Raewyn Connell’s theorisation of gender for understanding policy, research and practice in health and healthcare. It focuses on several interrelated, high-profile global health issues: gender as a social determinant of health disparity, gender-specific health policy and research and gendered health movements (men’s health and women’s health). By way of introduction, the chapter presents and explains the core concepts she has developed and applied in social research over the last 25 years. Gender and Power (1987), Masculinities (1995) and Gender (2009) are the main sources for analysis and discussion. These are supplemented by reference to other texts and the large collection of papers Connell has published internationally in relation to gender since 1987. As the chapter explains, at the heart of Connell’s prolific contribution is a plain-language critique and rejection of category-based understandings of gender as a world of dimorphic bodies and social roles to match. Her theory demands a seismic conceptual shift whereby gender is understood as a specific domain of embodied social process; a dynamic enacted around the sexual reproductive distinction that brings us into being as gendered individuals, groups and institutions. We do gender but always through structures of practice that both constrain and transform our experience of it. The chapter then turns to the gender-related health and healthcare issues outlined above. It draws on and applies Connell’s approach to gender to understand the limitations of prevailing approaches to them.