This chapter examines how patient empowerment seeks to train medical students to cultivate behaviors, attitudes, and values through disciplinary work done on physicians’ and patients’ affects. Because of the pelvic exam’s fraught history of rendering patients as passive objects prior to the intervention of the Women’s Health Movement, this exam serves as an interesting example to tease out threads of patient empowerment and professional authority. Patient empowerment is conceptualized as a technology comprised of discourses, knowledges, and practices that constitute patients as “partners”: fully informed subjects who are responsible for and obligated to participate in the maintenance of their own health.
Our Bodies Ourselves and the Women’s Health Movement in the United States: Some Reflections