Sandra Eder

Visiting Scholar

Ph.D.

Residence: January 1–March 31, 2013

Profile

My research historicizes and contextualizes the conceptualization of “gender” within modern biomedicine. I understand scientific medicine as a practice that plays out within a complex web of knowledge production, materialities, local biologies, relationships, experiences, and affect. Therefore, my projects focus on the practices (clinical, surgical, psychological) through which gender is enacted as a biomedical category. Accordingly, my study shifts the focus from the particularity of a person’s sexuality and gender identity to the generality of patients within medical lifeworlds. This allows me to see concepts of gender as they are enacted within the complex fabric of the medical encounter and as related to concepts of health and norms as much as to cultural scripts of masculinity and femininity.

I am working on two projects at the moment. One is a book manuscript (based on my doctoral research), titled Making Gender, Practicing Health, in which I analyze the role clinical practices and the complex fabric of clinical encounters between physicians, patients, and their families has played in the coining and development of “gender role.” Using previously inaccessible patient records, archival materials, and published case studies, I explored the lifeworlds of doctors, patients, and their families as they made sense of the notions of health and disease, and of masculinity and femininity. In my other project, I explore the emergence of “happiness” as a treatment goal in medicine. I am especially intrigued by a shift in the conceptualization of sex in medicine, within which “correct sex” is defined not by any biological markers, but as what allows a person “to grow up happily.” Health is measured in terms of a prognosis of “happiness.” I plan to further investigate a shift in which happiness and a patient’s adjustment to society became an increasingly important biosocial treatment goal.

I am currently a faculty member at the Institute of the History of Medicine at Zurich University. I received my PhD from the Institute of the History of Medicine at Johns Hopkins University (Dissertation: “The Birth of Gender: Clinical Encounters with Hermaphroditic Children at Johns Hopkins (1940-1956).”)