Teaching Gender in Social Work - MailChimp

Teaching Gender Through Diagnosis in Social Work
Darja Zaviršek
Abstract
The interconnectedness and interdependency of the social construction of
gendered behaviour in the mental health context, the gendered expression of
emotional distress and different processes of ascribing medical diagnosis to
women and men, are still underrepresented in social work teaching. A possible
reason for this is the lack of a multidisciplinary historical and gender-specific
approach and a specific focus on women in teaching social work.
This type of teaching requires a multidisciplinary historical and genderspecific
approach to mental health as a whole and a specific focus on women,
whereby the following issues are examined:
• the social construction of women’s sexuality and sexual politics in
Europe in pre-modernity and modernity;
• the social history of public care institutions and asylums;
• the social construction of psychiatric diagnosis and mental health
treatments in various historical periods and political contexts;
• the social history of medicine and an analysis of bio-politics in
modernity;
• the history of violence in the private sphere and of institutional
violence.
One medical diagnosis that blatantly shows the interdependence of the
aforementioned perspectives and the interdependency between bio-politics
and gender, is hysteria. Even though the critical analysis of the development
of psychiatric diagnosis and asylums has rarely included gendered analysis,
it is widely known that the diagnosis of hysteria (“hystera”– the womb) formed
part of a highly gendered medical discourse. The phenomenon of female
hysteria shows the extent to which social norms and ethics have influenced
the seemingly “neutral” medical discourse, and that an ambivalence towards
paternalism and the autonomy of women, which is present in social policy
and welfare, continue to dominate mainstream teaching in the field of social
science education.
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