Duvet woman versus action man: the gendered aetiology of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome according to English newspapers, 2019, Tobbell et al

Paywalled at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14680777.2019.1595694
Sci Hub, https://sci-hub.se/10.1080/14680777.2019.1595694

 

it seems to be coming from the angle that CFS/ME is a mental health issue that is stigmatised (like other mental health disorders). The fact that the genders are treated differently is almost irrelevent in this context.

 

It's a media journal with some research elements not a science journal, per se, so it's not going to be written with the same standards as a scientific journal.

Specifically, the 'constructionist feminist perspective' is a statement of framework for the argument that will follow. For example, you might do the same paper with a Marxist framework.

It seems pointless to peer review this stuff, because it's more suited to academic textbooks, but I suppose research publishing is a big industry now.

Media journals (and humanities journals in general) are mainly to publish theses, even if they use research methods in those theses. These are arguments, not scientific research. They might use quantitative and qualitative data for certain papers, but this isn't the kind of paper you'd use at NICE; it's something that would get used in humanities academia for university students to use in their essays.

From the journal's own mission statement:

(emphasis mine)

ETA: The feminist framework is clearly the critical part. The empirical bit is the data trawling which will service the critical part. But it looks like the priority is the critical (i.e., argument-based) element rather than the empirical element.

 

That's really weird. Your daughter, especially, is slap bang in the middle of the second age group cluster.

 

I would be curious to see how patterns have changed recently.
The articles I can recall reading (in the last few years) mostly follow the pattern of either:
-Young person (more often female), active in [sport] and/or [art hobby], wanted to become [idealistic career], tragically cut down before the prime of life.
*or*
-Mom who is tragically unable to care for her children very much.

I suppose the second one is pretty gendered, but not in any particularly offensive way.

...
I would imagine that the farther back you go the more sexist the articles become.

 

General comment:

I haven't met many men who feel their ME is not stigmatized.

What I have noticed is that I was able to relate the discriminatory way that my ME is viewed to many discriminatory events in my life that appear to be targeted at my gender.

Of course, there are many things that people like to discriminate against, and different people will have a different set.

About media representations:

I actually noticed the same thing from the parents in Forgotten Plague. Parents of a man patient spoke about their son missing a career/ life in general /sports or some things like that, while parents of a woman patient said that their daughter should be "getting married and making babies."

I noticed because my own parents were always more interested in whether I got married and made babies than whether I had a career and life in general. While I always wanted to travel and have a career.

As it turned out, I did neither.

 

True, which is why I am very circumspect about what I call my health problems at work. That said, I do recognise a gender bias however: I still remember a (woman) GP telling me "no, you're genuinely ill, not like those women who just refuse to get out of bed".

 

Author information
Rebecca Murray

Rebecca Murray is a post-doctoral researcher affiliated with the Department of Psychology at The University of Huddersfield. Her work uses social media to enable the participation of chronically ill people in research. E-mail: Rebecca.murray@hud.ac.uk
Katy Day

Katy Day is a senior lecturer in psychology at Leeds Beckett University. Katy is a critical social and feminist psychologist. Her research focuses on gender and class identities and the gendered and classed dimensions of body management practices, body and eating distress and family food work. E-mail: K.day@leedsbackett.ac.uk
Jane Tobbell

Jane Tobbell is a University Teaching Fellow at The University of Huddersfield. Her research work focuses on the construction of identity as the result of participation in different communities. E-mail: j.tobbell@hud.ac.uk

 

Interesting. It's a weird mix, I have to say. The journal seems a bit muddled. Critical theory + scientific research doesn't really seem like a good pairing to me. They do different things. The first is a 'what if', academic exercise, whereas the second is a 'this is what we found' situation.

If you're looking for empirical evidence, then using a feminist framework is irrelevant. The data is the data. Perhaps they've tacked it on to meet the paper's remit because they couldn't get it published elsewhere?

Critical theory isn't usually concerned with objective truths but rather with different approaches to reading or understanding a text. Combining this with scientific research that seeks objective truths would only seem to undermine the science part.

You'll see lots of undergrads using Freudian theory in their English papers, for example, not because it's accurate or they believe it but because it's a framework they can write about enough to score points on essays. I don't think many of those students take it seriously. Likewise, half the ones using Marxist frameworks are not communist, or even socialist. Maybe this journal missed the memo?

 

I'm sorry: what? Where? When? Did it happen in total secrecy? Or not at all?

Uh, sorry but: GTFO.

 

Certainly helps them to control the outcome. I guess at least they write their bias for everyone to see.

 

GFTO?

Yes, I've googled it but none of the results fit.

So does it mean

"Great Find, That's Obvious"?

or

"Gobsmacked, Freakish, Totally Offensive"?

 

Get the fuck out.

 

Thank you.

That is not an answer that google came up with.

 

Damn, typo

 

What a whole load of utter bollocks. The kind of drivel the cultural studies teacher on my parallel course tries to get her students to spout but fails miserably. All the women with CFS I read about in the tabloids are either kick-boxers, burlesque dancers, or starting a career in modelling or as a therapist having overcome adversity with their strength of character and are getting ready to spread their positive message.

Yep, everything's a construction.

I guessed.