Where’s Social Work? A Critical Analysis of Gender Invisibility, Ethical Conflict, and Advocacy in Medical Teams

The traditional biomedical and person-in-environment (PIE) perspectives are often found in conflict when framed within broader gender discrimination and consumerist health care practices. Our critical feminist analysis addresses the case of Katie, a vulnerable health care recipient, whose intersecting identities fall outside of the “margins of acceptability.” Communication deficits among team members and a lack of clear care protocols become evident. Insurance demands to justify coverage undermine the processes of beneficence and the ethic of care required for emancipatory advocacy. We present the tripartite paradigm of transformative complicity, cultural humility, and systems-based empowerment to address the complex ethical dilemmas that emerge. Strategies informed by experimental ethnography help us model effective transdisciplinary dialogue by inviting voices/commentators to rise from the margins (foot/endnotes) and decenter authorial power. Using an emancipatory social work framework, we offer actionable steps which, as revealed by our commentators, are often lacking from the medical team's and care recipient’s toolbox. We call ffor discursive courage to chip away at the socially constructed myths of biological and moral deficit that merge gender, colorism, class, and invisibility in the web of historical and structural discrimination. In addition, we welcome service seekers, as therapeutic colleagues, in the process of systemic empowerment.