The representation of women in three medical texts

Abstract

The theoretical framework of this paper is based on the literature on language and ideology as well as language and gender, focussing on the reflection of gender ideologies in medical texts. Three medical texts were analysed with regard to the linguistic representation of women. While one text is taken from a gynaecological textbook, the other two texts are representative of popular medical books. The main objective of the study was to determine how ideologies of gender are reflected in the authors’ choice of lexis, and the syntactic relations in the texts. The findings indicated that the use of language mirrors the ideological orientation of the authors, and that medical discourse is characterised to a large degree by sexist language.

Australian English‐language textbooks: the gender issues

“…Winfield 1984;Scutt 1985;Stirling 1987;Harres 1993;Pauwels 1997;Pauwels and Wrightson-Turcotte 2001), Australian studies of gender representation in textbooks are scanty (e.g. Healy and Ryan 1974;Freebody and Baker 1987;Clarkson 1993;Ritchie 2005).…”

“…More recently, Pauwels and Wrightson-Turcotte (2001) examined generic pronoun use in public speech as exemplified in radio programmes broadcast in Australia, finding that the preferred choice was semantically singular they. Evidence of sexist language has been noted in legal texts (Winfield 1984;Scutt 1985) and medical texts (Harres 1993).…”