MODELS OF GENDER PERSPECTIVE IN WOMEN’S HEALTHCARE NARRATIVE
MODELS OF GENDER PERSPECTIVE IN WOMEN’S HEALTHCARE NARRATIVE

Summary/Abstract: The narrative of women’s healthcare structured and mapped can be useful for scholars interested in the cultural dimensions of gender and feminism in order to analyse the social context of disease and illness. Healthcare reflects cultural models of health and care (Gadow, 1994) and for the purpose of more effective medical services recognizing women’s patterns of illness, the narrative could be very helpful to medical practitioners and medical professionals. The medical narrative is mainly composed of scientific and political metaphors (Gadow, 1994). These can can be translated into objectifying, and the exactly opposed, depending on each feminine story of illness, as offered by the patient and embraced and understood by the doctor. What makes feminine stories relevant is not just to one voice, but a whole group of potential voices and this is the question that might be answered through the analysis of women’s narrative in medical care. Narrative medicine is generally defined as elements of narratives set in a narrative order, with beginnings, middle narratives, and ends, which usually falls into the task of the medical professional to arrange and depends on the narrative skills pertained. The paper will analyse the relationship between the women’s health narratives and the ways in which medical professional perceive and act upon their health complaints and concerns, aiming at better healthcare and more accurate and timely prevention of illness. The paper will stress the peculiarities of the female pain, especially the thesis according to which women’s pain is often misunderstood and disregarded until they prove as sick as a male patient, complaining of the same subjective level of pain. We shall show that womanhood has been subjected to pain in social history and deeply rooted in different cultures as to be embraced and natural. Such an embodied misconception of the relativity of pain in women along with narrative gender specifics could make a useful perspective, especially if there can be identified narrative models with concrete outcome in medical practice as teachable and comprehensive to medical professionals.

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