Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Spouses as the “Strong Arm” of Health Care

• In Event: 3120 - Gender, Health, and Medicine

Abstract

Marriage benefits health in part because spouses help each other recover from illness and injury via care, provide solace for emotional distress via emotion work, and regulate each other’s diet, exercise, and substance use via health behavior work. Yet, midlife (age 40-60) is characterized by an increase in encounters with health care due to routine mid-life screenings and the onset of more serious physical health events that require engagement with formal medical care. However, spousal efforts to prompt health care have not been fully theorized as part of the broader swath of marital health work. Further, health work processes are clearly gendered and varies by sexuality, yet few studies have examined how spousal influence in health care is shaped by gender and sexuality. The present study analyzes in-depth interviews with 90 midlife gay, lesbian, and heterosexual spouses to determine how spouses initiate formal health care for each other, and how these processes vary by gender and sexuality. Our results show that gay, lesbian, and heterosexual spouses tend to influence each other’s use of formal health in three broad areas: routine appointment making, appointment facilitation, and medicalizing health symptoms. Using gender-as-relational theory, we further show how these processes depend not only on one’s own gender, but the gender of a spouse. Heterosexual women continuing to perform the bulk of this work and heterosexual men fail to perform this work for their wives; this reflects cultural narratives of masculinity and femininity in heterosexual couples. Gay and lesbian appear to both mirror heterosexual dynamics but also have somewhat unique dynamics including mutual work to promote each other’s health. In this way, gay and lesbian couples offer an alternative approach to the highly gendered norm, suggesting a possible for strong arming to be undertaken by any gender, not only women.

Authors

• Corinne Reczek, Ohio State University

• Alexandra Kissling, Ohio State University

• Lauren Elizabeth Gebhardt-Kram, Ohio State University

• Debra Umberson, University of Texas-Austin