Embodied marginalization: Exploring the social determinants of cervical cancer disparities.

摘要

n order to address the persistent unexplained disparity in cervical cancer rates among marginalized groups of women in the United States, a novel theoretical model of embodiment of social environment is proposed. The construct of embodiment, based on Nancy Krieger's eco-social model, is traced from feminist poststructural theory of the body and incorporated into a dynamic, theoretical framework. The physical manifestation of bodily health and illness is continually created by the dynamic interplay of the social environment, individual subjectivity and physiologic substrate. This proposed model was tested with the hypothesis that social environment and subjectivity affect health outcome and that they are mediated by physiologic substrate. A secondary data analysis was utilized of women going to colposcopy for abnormal Pap tests with measures of all the key proposed variables. Results. A total of 503 cases were available for analysis. The dataset represented a diverse population of women, over 70% of the cases reporting a self-defined minority racial/Ethnic affiliation. The sample was primarily poor (54.9% reported a household income less than