Introduction

Imagine waking up every day in a body that is perceived to need medical treatment

whether it’s a body in need of altering your natural look from cosmetic surgery to managing

pregnancy as a health risk. This is a woman’s reality. Medicalization is the process of treating

nonmedical problems as medical issues that require medical treatment. Everything natural about

the woman’s body has been medicalized and it has a negative unhealthy effect on women. This

directly affects not only women’s bodies but also their embodied experiences as a woman.

Societal standards, misconceptions, and the pervasive influence of the medical field play a huge

role when it comes to the medicalization of women’s bodies. Bodies in general are used daily to

walk, survive, and produce. As men’s bodies are made to produce, so are the women but for

some reason women’s bodies are under a large telescope when it comes to the role their body

plays in society. Throughout the years feminist sociologists have studied the role that women

play in sociology. This has allowed them to see many differences in how women's bodies are

studied in different aspects of gender and medicalization.

Many instances affect how a woman is affected by medicalization. Such as beauty

standards and the effect that being perceived as unattractive has on a woman. Women who are

usually viewed as attractive aren’t perceived the same as women who are seen as “attractive”.

This plays a huge role in how a woman perceives herself which can lead her to undergo a series

of medicalized beauty work such as plastic surgery to alter her natural appearance.

Medicalization of women’s bodies when dealing with child labor plays a huge role as well due to

how they are seen as objects without the medical field truly caring about how a woman’s body

should be handled when she’s pregnant. Women’s bodies are often medicalized in the natural

occurrence of menopause as well. The medical field makes it seem like women going through

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menopause is not something that naturally happens and needs medical treatment when it should

not. In addition to that, medicalization takes a lot of natural processes of women and turns these

processes into an unnatural thing that needs medical treatment. The medicalization of women’s

bodies ranging from beauty standards to child birth to menopause negatively impacts women’s

bodies by formulating women’s natural bodily processes as a condition that needs medical aid.

Medicalized Beauty Standards

Society puts pressure on women to participate in cosmetic surgery. In “Beauty Work:

Individual and Institutional Individual and Institutional Rewards, the Reproduction of Gender,

and Questions of Agency” it displays the effect that alters the natural body medically to adhere to

societal constructs and expectations for what a woman's body should look like. This article also

touches on how a more attractive physical appearance plays a better role in how a person is

perceived by others. “This work ranges from mundane acts like putting on makeup to

extraordinary decisions like undertaking cosmetic surgery. Because women’s appearances are

more carefully scripted and scrutinized than men’s” (Kwan & Trautner, 2009, p. 54). The

perspective that society implants in women’s subconscious is displayed through every type of

body work that takes place from putting on makeup to cosmetic surgery.

The standards to alter your appearance in hopes of making you more “beautiful”

negatively impact women because it forces them to feel the need to participate in many forms of

beauty work. “Studies exploring the perspectives of women who undertake cosmetic surgery

illuminate a central tension between free will and co-optation” (Kwan & Trautner, 2009, p. 58).

Women can be influenced by outside societal standards and cosmetic surgery leaves them stuck

between a rock and a hard place. Since societal pressure has a heavy impact on a woman’s

self-image which leads them to want to conform to societal standards. Medicalized beauty work

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plays a huge role in women and how they perceive their bodies. Since women are more likely to

be critiqued for the way, they look in comparison to their male counterparts. Which reinforces

gender norms and the pressure that society places on women to feel the need to be more

attractive. To achieve these goals, it can lead a woman to get medicalized beauty work such as

plastic surgery on any body part. Medicalized beauty work isn’t limited to plastic surgery; it can

be through liposuction and other practices of making the women’s body more “attractive” to

society. When it comes to the agency that women have over their bodies, they do have the

freedom to not conform to these societal standards, but to what extent? If society is constantly

tearing down a woman for the way she looks she’s bound to change it. Whether it’s through

doing makeup, working out, etc. These body practices and techniques play a huge role in how

women are viewed and there are instances where medicalized beauty work can help a woman

feel more beautiful. This leads women to not have agency over their bodies because they’re

constantly being perceived by society.

Medicalization of Childbirth

Medicalization of labor disconnects the mother from the pregnancy experience and turns

it into a situation that needs medical monitoring. In “Laboring Now: Current Cultural

Constructions of Pregnancy, Birth, and Mothering” we get a glimpse of how society has

constructed a negative view of women’s bodies in the aspect of pregnancy enabling society to

medicalize women’s bodies. “Medicine had to emphasize the disease-like nature of pregnancy,

its “riskiness,” to justify medical management” (Rothman, 2010, p. 50). Being pregnant

shouldn’t have this negative impact on women and shouldn’t need to be medicalized by society

because pregnancy is a natural instance for a woman’s body.

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 This takes the power away from the woman when it comes to her embodied pregnancy

and childbirth experience. The woman isn’t in control of her pregnancy, instead, the physicians,

nurses, and hospital staff oversee this experience. “When physicians think about it, they like to

think of themselves as managing the labor itself: steering its course, speeding it up or slowing it

down, “handling” or “managing” it much the way one “manages” a car on a highway”(Rothman,

2010, p. 56). The approach that physicians have doesn’t show that they care about the mothers

mind, body, and spirit. Let alone what she wants for her body, it minimizes her agency and leaves

the control in the hands of the physician. Not only does it take away the experience from the

mother in total, but it alienates her from the process her body is undergoing. Women have no

choice but to give their agency to the doctors when it comes to childbirth because of the

medicalization of their bodies. “The irony, of course, is that this construction occurs at the very

same moment the sonographer is looking for the signs and symptoms that would indicate the

fetus is not developing normally. In that case, the woman would be encouraged to consider

abortion, and the “baby” would be quickly/reconstructed as a fetus or even a “genetic mistake,”

and “abnormality” (Rothman, 2010, p. 49). This describes the early processes in the stages of

pregnancy, and how the sonographer is medically looking for things that could potentially be

wrong with a woman’s child. This can cause so much anxiety about the pregnancy in general

which could potentially lead to unfavorable results for the pregnancy due to the high amounts of

stress that aren’t beneficial to a woman’s body during this period. The sonographer encouraged

the author to make a connection with the “baby” as she looked for something to medically be

wrong with it which is very ironic. Imagine making a strong connection with a growing fetus

inside of yourself, but something tragic happens to the fetus which results in a miscarriage or a

mutation so bad the mother and family might consider getting an abortion. It’s a terrible negative

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but this is the negative role that medicalization plays in women’s processing of numerous natural

things that happen to women's bodies.

The expectations from the medical field when it comes to women’s pregnancies do not

always correlate with what the woman’s body might need. A woman shouldn’t constantly have

to be stressed over what abnormality they’re growing fetus could potentially get because of

something that happened while it was in the womb. Women must conform to these medicalized

norms around pregnancy which can cause them to experience alienation from their own body,

but also from the fetus growing inside of her. Especially because the medical field objectifies

women in the aspect of childbirth.

In this article, the author also touches on a few differences between the medical and

midwifery models when it comes to childbirth. “When women were sedated through labor and

made unconscious for delivery, then the only possible description of birth is an “operation”

performed by a surgeon on a patient. And this was the basic model for more than fifty years.”

(Rothman, 2010 p. 52). Before the 1970s medicine would use anesthesia for birth which

prohibited the woman from being awake during childbirth but also represents how painful it was

to give birth because of the way it had been medicalized. Comparing midwifery to the medical

approach of childbirth the medical version is much more painful for women. Midwives

specialize in women’s reproductive health so it’s something that they know very well as opposed

to the regular medical field where doctors are known to rush out mothers if they don’t give birth

within a certain time. Doctors in the regular medical field aren’t experts when it comes to

handling women’s bodies and it shows through their numerous negative encounters with women

dealing with pregnancy which can cause a woman to feel out of place within her own body. “

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Medicalization of Menopause

Medicalization of women’s bodies makes menopause seem abnormal due to the medical

field constantly making women’s natural occurrences a medical condition that needs treatment.

As a woman ages it’s natural to hit menopause because when a woman’s body hits a certain age

her ovaries stop releasing eggs as a woman progresses in age. Which results in a low production

of estrogen and progesterone. This is a natural occurrence that all women go through, but the

theme of medicalizing the woman’s body is prominent when it comes to menopause. In

“Dominant Cultural Discourses and Sense-Making About Lived Menopausal Experiences” the

message relayed was how the medical field takes something that naturally occurs in women’s

bodies and medicalizes it to view it as an issue that needs medical attention. “Within the

medicine-centered discourse, menopause has been characterized for decades as a medical

condition, specifically an estrogen deficiency disease that requires monitoring and treatment by a

physician” (Elton & Ballard-Reisch, 2013, p. 60). Women’s natural bodily processes have been

affected negatively by medicalization. In another section of this article it says, “The

women-empowerment discourse engaged largely as a response to and critique of the medicine--

centered discourse and its medicalization of menopause (Elton & Ballard-Reisch, 2013, p. 61).

Which shows that women have tried to regain power back from an industry that medicalizes a

naturally occurring thing for all women as they progress in age. Dealing with menopause the

medical field frames it as a deficiency or ailment that needs more hormones or even replacement

therapy, even though it’s something that occurs naturally for women. In the article, there were a

few interviews from women being asked about medicine-centered discourses in which one

woman said, “I wouldn’t have ever known really that I was in premenopause because I was on

birth control pills up until I stopped taking them earlier this year. So, I didn’t know all these

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things were going on until I had blood work, and the doctors started checking everything.”

Saying that she wouldn’t have known that she was premenopausal showed that she trusts the

medical system, but premenopausal is the transition between starting to go through menopause.

There’s no reason why that natural body transformation should be medicalized. This has a large

negative social and psychological impact on women which can lead them to think they are

fragile through this medicalized lens. The medicalized idea of menopause can make a woman

feel like just because she’s aging she isn’t in her prime anymore. Which can lead to reinforcing

negative stereotypes that the medical field presents to women when they go through menopause.

Medicalization has a terrible effect on women’s embodiment. This can cause women to

feel like they’re abnormal and in need of medical care. This could lead a woman to feel

inadequate during a natural stage in life that every woman goes through. While the medical field

makes it seem like something that shouldn’t be occurring it can hurt how a woman perceives

herself and her body even though this is something that happens naturally to all women. It allows

for the medical field to make a profit and benefit from women’s bodies. Menopause is a natural

thing that happens to all women, so it doesn’t make sense as to why this natural process is being

medicalized. This further analyzes the role of agency for women when it comes to their free will

in terms of menopause—emphasizing the idea of whether a woman perceives menopause as a

natural occurrence, or if societal pressure can take over allowing menopause to be a medical

problem. A lot of women may think that they are making their own decisions on how to view

menopause, but it could be a subconscious decision they aren’t even aware of. The article

touched on how women felt as though the physicians were “expert” sources of information” in

dealing with their symptoms that can be linked to menopause. In a way, the agency is lost

because the woman is brainwashed into thinking that an outsider can know her body better than

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her own embodied experiences in the case of menopause and the symptoms it causes. This comes

from the social constructs of medicalization which makes people think that the physicians are the

experts, which isn’t always going to be true in the instance of women’s bodies. Leading women

to believe that medical interventions are necessary to maintain their social values due to this

construct.

Conclusion

Unrealistic beauty standards, childbirth, and menopause have a pervasive impact of

medicalization on women’s lives. For women who don’t feel like they are attractive enough they

may not feel accepted in society. This can lead them to partake in medicalized beauty work to

change or enhance their physical appearance to conform to society's beauty standards that are set

for women. These processes have a large range but can go from liposuction, nose jobs, botox,

and more. Women who undergo these processes feel the pressure that society sets for them to be

viewed as attractive which can lead to a negative impact on their psychological perceptions

leading to a decrease in self-worth due to their physical appearance.

The medicalization of child labor for women plays a huge role in the negative impacts of

the treatment that women receive from the medical field when it comes to giving birth to a child.

The medical world rarely makes this process easier on the mother because it tends to be a painful

process that can cause a lot of anxiety in a mother's life. This can have not only a negative impact

on the mother but also the child because of the high levels of stress the woman might be going

through during this process. Women going through menopause are also negatively impacted by

the medicalization of their body as well. Creating a negative self-perception of how they view

themselves because their body naturally slows down due to the increase in age. This can lead to

the woman feeling frail and disconnected from her body because of how the medical lens makes

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it seem. They stigmatize it to be a disease that needs treatment when it’s something that naturally

happens to all women. It shouldn’t result in a series of treatments, blood work, and hormones

being added to the body. As a woman goes through menopause this natural occurrence shouldn’t

be seen as an abnormality in the medical field because it leads to a negative impact on the

woman’s self-esteem and body perception as well.

Medicalization plays such an important role in women’s bodily autonomy because it

structurally restricts their agency and choice-making. Medicalization persuades women into

thinking that the medical field knows best for their bodies. Even in comparison to midwives

when it comes to handling women’s pregnancy. Most women leave it up to the hospitals and

other medical areas to handle their pregnancies, but midwives are quite literally experts

regarding women’s reproductive health. Medicalization blurs the view of women because it can

lead them to not understand that the medical field doesn’t always know what’s best for a

woman’s body. This can lead to so many negative perceptions that a woman has against her own

body due to the abnormality that medicalization frames it as. To a point, we can’t fault a woman

because they don’t know any better. After all, this is what society encourages women to believe.

It is the normal in which it’s hard for women to break out of these stereotypes and constructs

because they’re so heavily ingrained in society.

As a society, we need to start moving away from the medicalized view, and we need to

give the power back to the woman herself. Especially because there have been so many things

that have taken power from the woman and given it to the medical field allowing for the medical

field to take over the agency of a woman’s body. Society views these natural processes as

something that isn’t natural and therefore needs medical attention or treatment, and in some cases

both. If women take the power back, they can redefine their embodied experiences and learn to

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value their natural changes instead of criticizing them which the medical field enables. Women

shouldn’t have to feel alienated from their bodies due to the perception that they get from being

engulfed in the medical lens. It isn’t beneficial for women to instill all their faith and trust into

the medical field because all it does is take from the woman. It doesn’t promote happiness and

body positivity for women in society. All medicalization does is critique it and make women feel

like strangers in their bodies, and no woman should have to feel like that. Society has the

potential to move away from these medicalized views, and women can take their agency back for

their bodies. Creating a society where women’s natural processes are celebrated instead of

criticized. Where beauty standards are diverse, and everyone is considered beautiful. Achieving

this perspective starts with breaking down the barriers of the medicalized lens and shifting

society’s understanding towards empowering women’s natural embodied state.

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 References

Elton, J., & Ballard-Reisch, D. (2013). Dominant cultural discourses and sense-making about

lived menopausal experiences. Women and Language, 36(2), 57–79.

Kwan, S., & Trautner, M. N. (2009). Beauty work: Individual and institutional rewards, the

reproduction of gender, and questions of agency. Sociology Compass, 3(1), 49–71.

[Link]

Rothman, B. K. (2010). Laboring now: Current cultural constructions of pregnancy, birth, and

mothering. In L. J. Moore & M. Kosut (Eds.), The body reader (pp. 48–65). New

York University Press.

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