Chapter 8 212 is important to emphasize that a central premise of gender-sensitive research in medicine is to focus on gendered social positions and experiences rather than on decontextualized ‘risky’ identities or behaviours, and to analyse if, when and how these gendered identities, roles and relations as social positions and experiences become contextual risk factors for health. Qualitative study design In Chapter 4 I used a qualitative approach to unravel when and how gender identities, roles and relations become relevant in illness experiences and care preferences of people with PD. This study posed challenges about how to investigate ‘doing gender’ in interview studies because the interview setting is an occasion in which both the interviewer and the interviewee actively and primarily engage in a process of meaning making about the concept of ‘doing gender’ rather than observing the actual performances in real-world settings. A previous review on ‘doing gender’ reported that numerous studies cite the use of the concept, yet, the vast majority did so in ways that did not reflect the concept’s intellectual roots in ethnomethodology and the study of social practices.13 The authors argue that interviews are less appropriate for accessing the situated practices that characterizes the ‘doing of gender’ because they provide little information about what people actually do in interaction with others and the routine ways in which gender is accomplished. Nentwhich et al (2013) state that: “if gender is not seen as a fixed category that can be defined prior to the research conducted, the actual practices of constructing or performing that identity must be analysed. Instead of taken women and men at face value, researchers must be careful not to reify everyday taken for granted assumptions about gender but to critically investigate how they actually come into being.”14 From this theoretical perspective, being a ‘man’ or a ‘woman’ is the outcome of a social process rather than the starting point and I acknowledge that by making participants’ gender identity explicit in the interviews as a starting point for the investigation does not reflect the intellectual roots of the original concept of ‘doing gender’. However, Nentwhich et al. also argued that theoretical concepts are never only informed by static theory but also shaped by their practical application in empirical research.14 In studying ‘doing gender’ it has become equally important to understand people’s own evaluation of ‘doing gender’ as a personal practice, besides investigating its social structural foundation; to investigate what counts as ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’ and in which circumstances it is accentuated for individuals in their daily lives. Because one cannot assume e.g. that what is considered ‘feminine’ in society at large, will also be defined as ‘feminine’ in a personal and/or
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