Medical Innovation and Female Patient Agency

• In Event: 262 - Section on Science, Knowledge, and Technology Refereed Roundtable Session and Business Meeting
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 01.

Abstract

A persistent criticism of Science and Technology Studies of Medicine is that such research typically focuses upon privileged actors creating the innovation in question and building the network stabilizing it. Such studies ignore less privileged actors—i.e., those “implicated actors” who are often end-users of the innovation of focus (Star 1991; Clarke and Montini 1993: 45; Clarke 2000: 40). This article contributes further to our understanding of end-user agency in medical innovation projects. This article argues that women have acted, at times, to reject the process of identity definition and representation associated with medical innovations. Such acts, while not initiated collectively and not linked to an organized social movement , have aggregated up into a real force changing/mediating courses of development. Such acts derive their power from the disjuncture between the larger project inscribing a particular identity for women upon which its supportive network becomes dependent, and women’s distinctive place and identity in society. This article develops a conceptualization of this type of agency through a comparative examination of how American women responded to the identity inscribed for them in two projects: first, the ob/gyn project linking culdoscopy with psychopathology in the early post-World War II years; then, the project carrying gynecologic laparoscopy across community hospitals during the early 1970s.

Author

• James R. Zetka, SUNY/Albany