ABSTRACT
This chapter will focus on the advantages and pitfalls of using an intersectional approach to understand and target health disparities and health inequalities. Social studies of medicine have often argued the need for interdisciplinary perspectives to understand health matters which are often confined to the sphere of medicine only. The need for social scientists perspectives are particularly urgent when it comes to understanding health disparities that occur along the lines of gender, race/ethnicity and class. The chapter will describe the usefulness of intersectionality in this context. Using Mc Calls concepts of anti-, intra- and intercategorical complexity, the chapter will build upon three empirical cases: (1) The development within medicine towards precision/personalised medicine. Here I will discuss how current trends in biomedicine (in particular human genetics) reify notions of biological differences between women and men and between different ethnically or racially defined groups, and how intersectionality as an anticategorical tool can dismantle such beliefs; (2) The case of migrant health disparities. Using an intracategoreical approach I will problematise the notion of “the migrant” in health policy and show how an intersectional approach is more beneficial to clinical practice; (3) The case of social epidemiology. Using an intercategorical approach I will discuss how a more nuanced (and complex) picture of existing health disparities can be researched and its benefits for policy. In a concluding part I will discuss how these different empirical cases links to the wider theoretical debate about intersectionality and the more general discussion in feminist theory on identity, but with a particular focus on body/medicine/health.
