Colloque - Greta Bauer : A New Framework for Understanding Social Privilege and Health

Nathalie Bajos

Santé publique (2024-2025)

Collège de France

Année 2024-2025

Colloque - La production sociale des inégalités de santé : approches théoriques et données empiriques. Perspectives internationales

Session 3 : Interroger la structuration sociale des inégalités de santé en anthropologie et en épidémiologie

Greta Bauer : A New Framework for Understanding Social Privilege and Health

Greta Bauer

Professor and Director, Eli Coleman Institute for Sexual and Gender Health, University of Minnesota Medical School

Résumé

While health research has increasingly included a role for stigma and discrimination in impacting health, privilege is often left to be implicitly understood as a lack of these. This undertheorization of privilege limits our understanding of how social power shapes health. I present a seven-fold model of privilege and its intersectional formation. Privilege is conceptualized as taking seven forms: just and fair experience, allowed harmful ignorance, promotion and facilitation, implicitly understood meaning, respect for autonomy and bodily integrity, successful moves to innocence, and assumed good intentions. Each form can be enacted through interpersonal or structural mechanisms. While this seven-fold model can be applied to individual conceptualizations of privilege (e.g., heterosexual privilege, white privilege), an intersectionality framework is key to understanding how power and privilege differentials operate relationally to affect health. Intersectionality helps explain, for example, why the traditional socioeconomic gradient of health has differential returns for people of different races, gender expressions, and disabilities, or why a generally privileged position such as maleness may not present an advantage when considered in relation to other social positions and contexts. I provide a set of thinking tools for incorporating this seven-fold and intersectional understanding of privilege into public health work.

Greta Bauer

Greta Bauer, PhD, MPH is a Professor and Director of the Eli Coleman Institute for Sexual and Gender Health in the University of Minnesota Medical School. She holds the endowed academic chair in sexual health. Prior to 2022, Dr. Bauer was a Professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics in the Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry at Western University in London, Canada, where she held a Sex and Gender Science Chair through the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR). Dr. Bauer has authored more than 150 peer-reviewed papers, book chapters, and technical reports related to health equity. As an epidemiologist, her focus on sexual and gender health has been both substantive and methodological, with a focus on the impacts of social marginalization. She is a leader in transgender and non-binary health, and in incorporating intersectionality into quantitative research methods.