Diverse Perspectives on Health and Medicine

When we began thinking about the shape of this special issue and the diverse disciplinary and cultural perspectives we ourselves bring to it, we began with an assumption – that diversity of perspective brings inherent value to the feminist questions we might pose about health and medicine, both past and present, allowing us to parse inequities of care, clinical practice and research expertise in fruitful ways. Because biomedicine formed along profoundly gendered lines that were entangled in gender, age, class, caste, disability and race inequalities, and in colonial and imperial regimes, health must therefore necessarily be a feminist issue nuanced by intersectional consideration of multiple forms of discrimination, bias, geopolitics, marginality and exclusion. Only a diverse and multidisciplinary network of scholars engaging with health and medical equity questions in society and culture can help medical and health practice and research to better support the health of all people. Our authors’ perspectives in this special issue thus reflect perspectives from patients, medical researchers, health advocacy and patient-support groups, LGBT, disability and gender-diverse cultures from Australia, Turkey, Taiwan, Spain, Finland and China, with many taking a global perspective; with disciplines ranging from historical studies, anthropology, sociology, gender studies, disability studies, critical autoethnography, media studies and feminist techno-studies.