Síndromes en femenino: el discurso biomédico sobre la fibromialgia

Abstract

Part of the production about gender and health carried out from the social sciences has been centred in hegemonic medical discourse on health and woman’s body. These studies report that Western medicine has generated and reproduced social values that have been useful to justify and to legitimate a situation of inferiority and woman’s discrimination. Inside this field of studies it has had special relevance those works focused explicitly in the medical discourse about the woman, the reproduction and the sexuality. In the last years these have been enlarged with others that, taking as a point of departure illnesses and/or situations that affect to both sexes and that they are, therefore, seemingly neutral, show the same androcentric elaboration on the illness. This is the case of the fibromyalgia, an illness with high prevalence in women. In this article I will show how the fybromialgia has been generated as a women’s illness. This characterization has supposed a deslegitimation of the syndrome and of the people suffering this condition.