It’s the Knowledge That Puts You in Control: The Embodied Labor of Gynecological Educators

Kelly Underman

doi:10.1177/0891243211415847

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It’s the Knowledge That Puts You in Control: The Embodied Labor of Gynecological Educators

Journal article

Peer reviewed

It’s the Knowledge That Puts You in Control: The Embodied Labor of Gynecological Educators

Kelly Underman

Gender & society, v 25(4), pp 431-450

Aug 2011

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/0891243211415847

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Abstract

Studies have recently begun to attend to the ways paid labor is embodied. However, the literature on embodied labor has not adequately addressed occupations for which the site of labor is the worker’s own body. One such occupation is that of gynecological educators—female-bodied instructors who teach breast and pelvic examinations to medical students using their own bodies as models. Drawing on interviews with current and former gynecological educators and professional directors, I ask how workers use their bodies to produce legitimated forms of knowledge and how workers navigate gendered meanings attached to bodies. Gynecological educators use a distancing technique I call strategic dualism, which draws on using constructions of the body as an object while simultaneously relying on subjective experiences. This technique allows them to maintain their knowledge and authority, and suggests that workers are able to selectively draw on gendered meanings about the female body to pursue their goals.