Manligt läkarskap, kvinnliga läkare och normala kvinnor : Köns- och läkarskapande symbolik, metaforik och praktik

Sammanfattning: This study focuses on how gender is constructed in two central cultural arenas: a professional and a private arena. It is based on participant observations at two University hospital clinics, a women’s clinic and a general surgery clinic, and interviews with gynaecologists, surgeons as well as heterosexual couples. The dissertation is divided into three major parts of analysis.In the first part of the analysis, the symbolical doing of gender by men and women physicians in their professional everyday lives is studied. The second part focuses on how the same actors construct gender metaphorically, when they talk about the medical profession and their professional everyday lives. The analysis shows how gender is made, both symbolically and metaphorically, in relation to constructions of a distanced physicianship and hierarchy. However, two gendered ideals of physicianship emerge. Women are to present a balanced physicianship; they are to indicate aspirations for a masculine connotative ideal of physicianship, presenting qualities attributed to men, but, at the same time, to indicate that they do it as women. This act of balancing is further complicated by conceptions of authentic womanhood, stipulating unambiguous signs of femininity, as well as expectations of the visible to correspond with a feminine inner core.In the third part, gendered and gendering practices in heterosexual couples’ negotiations of work in the home are analyzed. Both he and she adhere explicitly to norms of gender equality, but they use different strategies for the realization of a gender equal relationship. Her strategies are directed towards changing an askew and gendered division of work in the home. His strategies include (re)defining the issue of gender equality, in such ways that gender equality is established despite an askew and gendered division of work. While a traditional gender order thus is being challenged (by her), his resistance and the negotiation practices used are simultaneously in accordance with a gender order of his superiority and her subordination.Finally, the contextual analysis brings attention to the various meanings of gender and indicates the very chameleon-character of gender as a central dimension in the reproduction of a traditional gender order.