Clio Women, Gender, History 37 | 2013 When Medicine Meets Gender Nicole Edelman and Florence Rochefort (dir.) Electronic version URL: http://journals.openedition.org/cliowgh/276 DOI: 10.4000/cliowgh.276 ISSN: 2554-3822 Publisher Belin Electronic reference Nicole Edelman and Florence Rochefort (dir.), Clio, 37 | 2013, « When Medicine Meets Gender » [Online], Online since 15 April 2014, connection on 25 September 2020. URL : http:// journals.openedition.org/cliowgh/276 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/cliowgh.276 This text was automatically generated on 25 September 2020. Clio 1 How has medicine contributed to shape bodies, from Antiquity to the present day? Can it be said that illnesses such as cancer, have a gender? When English women were banished to mental asylums in the nineteenth century, how did they rebel? Are our ideas about hormones and the menopause gender-related? In this issue of Clio, we discover a new history of the practice and discourse of medicine. Comment la médecine a-t-elle contribué à fabriquer les corps de l’Antiquité à nos jours ? Comment les maladies, tel le cancer, ont-elles, elles-mêmes, un genre ? Comment les aliénées anglaises du XIXe se sont-elles rebellées ? Comment les conceptions des hormones ou de la ménopause sont-elles liées au genre ? À travers ce numéro de Clio, c’est une nouvelle histoire des pratiques et des discours médicaux que l’on découvre. EDITOR'S NOTE Editor for the English online edition: Siân Reynolds Clio’s book reviews [“Clio a lu”] are not translated into English. They are available in French on the website of Clio. Femmes, Genre, Histoire : https://journals.openedition.org/ clio Clio, 37 | 2013 2 TABLE OF CONTENTS To our readers Editorial Nicole Edelman Male and female bodies according to Ancient Greek physicians Jean-Baptiste Bonnard Crazy brains and the weaker sex: the British case (1860-1900) Aude Fauvel The gender of cancer Ilana Löwy Sexing hormones and materializing gender in Brazil Emilia Sanabria Andropause and menopause: sexuality by prescription Véronique Moulinié Current Research Medicine and sexuality, overview of a historiographical encounter: French research on the modern and contemporary periods Sylvie Chaperon and Nahema Hanafi Writing the history of the relations between medicine, gender and the body in the twentieth century: a way forward? Delphine Gardey Testimony The anthropologist, the doctors and the transgender experience: an interview with Laurence Hérault Sylvie Steinberg and Laurence Hérault Varia The reconfiguration of gender relations in Syrian-American feminist discourse in the diasporic conditions of the late nineteenth century Dominique Cadinot “As long as the absence shall last”: proxy agreements and women’s power in eighteenth- century Quebec City Catherine Ferland and Benoît Grenier Clio, 37 | 2013 3 To our readers Translation : Siân Reynolds 1 The same format, the same layout inside, but a new sub-title – Femmes, Genre, Histoire [Women, gender, history]. A modified cover, but one that preserves the visual identity of CLIO, Histoire, Femmes et Sociétés. Together, these features indicate both the continuity of our journal and its new direction. 2 CLIO HFS was launched in 1995, in a context marked both by the creation of similar journals in several European countries, and by the publication of the five volumes of Histoire des femmes en Occident (1991-1992) [History of Women in the West], providing an impetus to be followed up. The University of Toulouse-Le Mirail had been since the 1970s one of the few centres of women’s studies in France. Its University Press (PUM) took on the journal, and handled it efficiently and sympathetically for the18 years (36 issues) during which we worked together, gradually positioning the journal in the French and international intellectual context. 3 The term genre (gender) was not originally included in our subtitle, for fear that in France it would not be readily understood. When the editorial board later raised the question of introducing it, our publishers found it difficult to agree, largely because of the problems it would generate for title indexes. With issue No 37 we have taken this step: but for the editorial team, today as in the past, women’s history, gender history, and the histories of masculinity and sexuality remain complementary and inter-related fields of study. 4 In the years since 2000, the fields of women’s/gender history, previously marginalized in France, have acquired intellectual and institutional legitimacy. In this changed environment, CLIO HFS recently received twofold recognition of its standing from the CNRS (Centre national de la recherche scientifique). First, the journal has been granted a full-time post of editorial secretary, as from 1 January 2013. Cécile Thiébault, who was already sharing her expertise with us, has been appointed to this position. Since the editorial secretariat now has an institutional base in Paris,1 it became desirable, for logistical reasons, to move to a Parisian publisher. From now on, CLIO Femmes, Genre, Histoire will be handled by the publishing house of Belin. Several members of the editorial committee have already worked with this publisher on a previous venture: the textbook for schools and universities edited by the Mnémosyne collective: La Place des Clio, 37 | 2013 4 femmes dans l’histoire: une histoire mixte [The Place of Women in History: a mixed history] (2010). 5 Secondly, the journal has been granted the financing to become a bilingual publication, with versions in French and English. In view of this major change, five new members have joined the enlarged editorial board: a sociologist, a political scientist and three historians, including one British-based and one American-based colleague. The French version will continue to be issued twice a year in a paper edition – we remain attached to this identity and format – and in digital form on the website revues.org to which we have been linked since early in its existence. The English version of which Clio 37 is the first to be translated will be digital only, and will be published on English-language portals on the internet, with the aim of moving quickly towards self-financing. It will make Clio. Femmes, Genre, Histoire better known internationally, including in countries where English is accessible but not the main language. At the same time this will bring us new contributors. 6 Publishing our journal in two languages is exciting, but it is also a challenge. CLIO has always aimed, in its thematic issues, to tackle all historical periods and a range of geographical territories, as well as to be open to early-career researchers. Since the journal’s beginnings, we have also set out to make known research from abroad, by translating articles from different historiographical traditions and other methodological or theoretical approaches. In this spirit, the workshop held to celebrate our first 15 years was dedicated to global history, as one way of indicating this. At different stages in its development, such intellectual interchange has considerably enriched women’s/ gender history, through mutual borrowings, transpositions and adaptations, while maintaining critical awareness and not avoiding controversy. With the translation of our articles into English, we expect to be able to take an even greater part in the debates ranging across national and disciplinary frontiers, and in the many interactions that go to make up scholarly dialogue. We hope thereby to increase further the intellectual interest arising from our field of research – one which is deeply engaged in key issues in society. To our new readers : welcome ! The editorial board NOTES 1. In the Groupement d’Intérêt Scientifique: Institut du Genre, created in 2012 by the Institut des Sciences Humaines et Sociales of the CNRS. Clio, 37 | 2013 5 Editorial Nicole Edelman Translation : Siân Reynolds 1 This issue of Clio aims to look at the history of medicine through the lens of gender, covering several geographical areas and several periods, from Antiquity to the present. The 1970s saw the emergence in France both of the history of medicine1 and of women’s history, which has never neglected medical topics, either in the early days,2 or in the context of the new social history of medicine which developed in the 1990s.3 Initially, historians both of women and of medicine focused on the persistent identification of women’s bodies as “natural”, and on the ways in which medical publications considered them to be inferior in status; other early fields of interest were sexuality,4 and the history of women as carers. And while in France gender history was for some time overshadowed by women’s history, the approach through gender has now been opened up for some decades: works on gender and medicine have become numerous.5 They are often associated with anthropological and sociological research, and are prepared to rub shoulders with philosophy, as the articles collected here suggest. They concentrate in particular on Antiquity and the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (regretfully, it was not possible to cover Clio’s usual broader chronological range.) The rich seam of gender studies 2 The articles by historians and anthropologists in this issue raise questions about medical knowledge and practice, revealing how, and to what extent, they have participated (or not) in creating biological, ethical and political norms that validated hierarchies between the sexes, since the days of Antiquity. The contributors pinpoint certain trends and complex developments in scientific knowledge, associated with medical and technological discoveries, many of them dating from the early years of the twentieth century. They offer surveys of the field from a methodological and historiographical point of view; they demonstrate how visions of the body and sexual identity have changed; and they also underline the fact that medical science is not neutral, all the less so since its object of study is the human being, and the scientist- Clio, 37 | 2013 6 physician has therefore been both the subject and the object of his/her own research.