Tenderness (central), sensitivity and/or distress: Tracing gendered enactments of fibromyalgia in medical research

Despite being unrelated to feminized organs or bodily processes, the contested condition called fibromyalgia is said to be overwhelmingly feminized and diagnosed predominantly in (assumed-) women. Few social scientific studies have explored the reasons or pathways for fibromyalgia's genderedness. In this article, I analyze medical scholarship on fibromyalgia over five decades to trace how it is gendered in this body of knowledge and how this genderedness is negotiated. I show that the genderedness of fibromyalgia is enacted multiply through the construction of fibromyalgia patient archetypes, through the reinscription and repudiation of clinical axioms in research design, and the elucidation of diagnostic criteria.