Frånvarande kvinnliga subjekt - en analys av medicinska texter om klimateriet

Abstract

The artide "Missing female subjects. An analysis of medical texts about menopause" focuses on medical discourses about women and middle age. More concretely, it presents an analysis of artides in Läkartidningen from 1990 through 2001. Läkartidningen is the official journal of the Swedish Medical Association and has a distribution of nearly 30 000 copies. The analysis is based upon three qualitative methods. We begin with a combination of content analysis and narrative analysis - focusing on what is being said and how it is being said - and continue with discourse analysis - focusing on what is being constructed. What we discovered is that the commonly used term 'middle age' is here re-defined as menopause, and menopause is represented through a particular narrative where loss of fertility is followed by descriptions of problems and symptoms and where the medical profession offers solutions - foremost amongst these is the use of hormone treatment. At a discursive level, women are represented not as women but as "woman" - a body. This body is seen as a fixed, biological category which can be studied independently of how any woman would define herself and independently of how women may experience and reflect on their lives and their bodies. Women as active subjects embedded in complex social relations are made invisible in these texts, as are differences between women. This article is part of a larger research project "Middle-aged bodies and gendered identities", financed by the Swedish Science Council. Theoretically, the project aims at contributing to a further understanding about the interlinkage of biological, social and cultural aspects in (discourses on) middle age, identity and the body. Empirically, it makes use of different sources: medical and literary texts, populär scientific texts, as well as interviews with middle aged women and men and with medical doctors.