Gender and Health in Post-Socialist Society

Catalog description

In terms of gender and health arrangements, post-socialist societies have provided through the course of their history examples both of radical empowerment and of evident discrimination, rapid emancipation and conservative backlashes. Social policy researchers frequently refer to this as a sui generis social laboratory, where health and gender policy experiments have taken place. This course aims to examine the premises and societal outcomes of such 'experiments' both on the empirical and conceptual levels. The course pursues two interconnected goals (1) to explore the specificities of gender and health in post-socialist societies, i.e. to consider how these phenomena are grounded in and affected by the political and institutional transition from state socialism; (2) to explore theoretical insights that social studies of the post-socialist experience provide for our understanding of health and gender. The course is structured thematically and chronologically. By tracing transformations of socialist and post-socialist gender order the first part of the course introduces students to the political and institutional context of societies under consideration. The second part of the course discusses social science categories that are used to analyze gender and health (medical professionalism, medical knowledge, emotions in healthcare, etc.) and examines, how attention to socialist and post-socialist experience can enhance our conceptualizations. The third part is devoted to different dimensions of health and gender inequalities on post-socialist space. Empirical researches discussed in this part are mostly concerned with the case of Russia, but are not limited to it. Generally, the course builds into the discussion on what analytical results can be gained through comparing health and gender in post-socialist and 'Western' contexts, and what variations between and within…