Thalassemic Women’s Biographical Trajectory: Retracing Gender Inequalities in Health Policies

Scientific reductionism has made sure that the biological phenomena were abstracted from the social and cultural contexts in which they occur. As a result, institutions of medicine and patient care processes have not taken into account the social and cultural determinants of the illness, therefore concealing a Western and masculine norm. Only recently, gender studies have managed to claim importance of the gender in the process of medical practices capable of dealing with diverse health cultures.

This chapter proposes further reflections on gender inequalities in health policy for the care and management of thalassemia, taking into account of the differences in health needs, and gendered experience and meanings of illness. It will analyze the medicalization of the female body in the thalassemia experience.

Qualitative data for this study came from the biographical narratives of 10 thalassemic women in the care of the Polyclinic of Messina (Italy).

The analysis will highlight an inequality between men and women not only in the degree and modes of medicalization of the bodies but also in the incorporation of an imagination that encages the woman in the necessary role of wife and mother, making the illness an experience particularly dolorous.

These findings can help shape health policies in the cure of thalassemia, which take into account gender differences as an indispensable element in the compliance with the therapeutic process.

They report on the urgency to deconstruct the social imagination according to which a woman is a “real” woman only if she is also a mother.