ABSTRACT
This chapter considers how culture and identity influence health. It also considers two aspects of culture and identity that are commonly studied as important shapers of health experiences: gender and race. Humans are social beings, shaped by their cultural contexts. Important aspects of an individual’s identity reflect their affinity with particular cultural groups, based on factors such as gender, class, race, ethnicity, and sexuality. In the context of gender, for instance, “there is, therefore, no universal ‘woman,’ but various possible enactments of ‘womanhood’ with certain strands of identity having greater salience according to specific contexts”. Beliefs around the healthiness of particular behaviors are shaped by both expert opinion and social norms, which may reinforce or contradict one another in complex ways. Culture can drive beliefs about which behaviors are healthy or unhealthy. Individuals receive health-related messages from many professional and informal sources, and must make sense of these different messages, even when they contradict one another.
