Feminism and the sociology of gender, health and illness

This editorial considers how the study of gender and health has played out in the pages of the Sociology of Health and Illness over the past quarter century, paying particular attention to how a theory of gender has informed empirical work and the relevance of gender studies for the feminist challenge to sexism and the patriarchal order. Work in this journal on gender and health has considered the invisibility of women, grappled with the conflation of sex and gender and interrogated polarised binary thinking, attempting to use sociological approaches to the body and novel post-structural metaphors to analyse both gendered roles and their relationship with gendered bodies and states of health and illness.