NCJ Number
214029
Journal
Violence Against Women Volume: 12 Issue: 4 Dated: April 2006 Pages: 393-406
Date Published
April 2006
Length
14 pages
Annotation
This essay provides a critical review of the essay, Gender and PTSD (2002) which attempts to add the gender question as a category of psychological analyses in PTSD (posttraumatic stress disorder), separating data analyses based on biological sex.
Abstract
The edited volume of the 2002 Gender and PTSD is a collection of literature reviews that attempt to account for gender in the etiology, assessment and/or diagnosis, comorbidity, treatment, research, and policy regarding posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). However, in PTSD research, gender has not been adequately deconstructed in its contributions to, causes of, and risk factors for PTSD. It is crucial and essential to read scientific research with a critical analysis of how language, methodologies, and epistemological frameworks can exclude the possibilities for action and behavior in women who are traumatized. To resist gendered prescriptions for experience and be driven by a desire to understand and effectively treat women who are traumatized means to question exactly to whom scientific measurement criteria apply and how “science-as-usual” presupposes a specified female subject. This essay offers a feminist critique of Gender and PTSD. It attempts to deconstruct the editors’ use of the term gender as obscuring the true category of analysis throughout the text, which is biological sex. It is important to think about how women come into the analysis already defined, devoid of an attempt to understand the roles that gender, race, and class interplay in PTSD. Specifically, women’s voices and lives are frequently seen as obscured by this essay.