Marginalised Bodies in Health

Last week, a paper that took a lot of writing, revising, editing, reviewing, discussing, and conversations to get published finally was made available. The collaboration between Os Keyes, Burren Peil, Rua Williams and me is titled Reimagining (Women’s) Health: HCI, Gender and Essentialised Embodiment (preprint) and talks about what HCI currently does with the term combination of “Women’s Health” and how the field might think about gendered dimensions of health further. To be a tad more punchy: Going further we need to make sure that “women” does not equal “white cis-women” and that “health” does not equal “reproductive concerns”.

Generally, the paper consists of two parts: a critical discourse analysis of papers that self-identified with the specific term and two speculative designs trying to envision a small portion of potential pathways around marginalised (gendered) health and HCI. We discuss these then in the light of the previous critique to illustrate how our point is not to expect a utopian perfection in individual research contributions, but to expand of what we collectively consider relevant. Feel free to take a peak!

Illustration of a person holding their head and wistfully looking down.