En praktisk lösning - om styrningsteknologier inom könsutredningar

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to explore the technologies of government that are created within gender disorder assessments as an institution. I have done so by utilizing Norman Faircloughs discourse analysing instrument “communicative action”, which focus on the social institution as relational. The material is strategically chosen by gathering texts from the Swedish state, the psychiatric clinics, NGO:s and by performing interviews with transsexual patients. When analysing the communication of the main agents, I have concluded that practices highly are a result of repeating text and speech inside the institution. The psychiatric assessments can also be seen as an illustration in changes in how citizens are governed in advanced liberal societies, where the role of the state has been gradually reduced in favour of other agents. I consider that the change illustrates an “acting at a distance”-mentality where the patient is introduced to participate in the definition of the care in what I call “negotiation as a technology”. At the same time, the patient is hold accountable for the outcome of the assessment. I have also found that the assessments have a specific “auditing” feature that enables various forms of expertise to legitimize resolutions on the count of certain kind of “practical” knowledge, and, further, how diagnosis is used as a programmatic tool. Simultaneously the results show that the changed governing of the transsexual patient is complex, gradual and still intertwined with an “old” kind of “top down” regulation in psychiatric assessments.