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Linie 4: Pretty intimate! How to create closeness and distance with all your senses during gynaecological examinations

© Malin Houben

While abdominal examinations are part of everyday life for gynaecologists, this is a special and often vulnerable situation for many patients. Doctors use their senses - sight, hearing, touch and smell - to recognise symptoms, make diagnoses and assess the health of their patients. This lecture is about how doctors and patients also use their senses when interacting with each other to create closeness and distance in an intimate situation.

Malin Houben's lecture entitled "Quite intimate! How to create closeness and distance with all your senses during gynaecological examinations" is dedicated to the question of how intimacy is created and maintained in medical situations. For her doctoral thesis, she visited a gynaecological practice and witnessed numerous conversations and gynaecological examinations. Based on her detailed observations, she shows how words, gestures and looks are used to create the necessary closeness for the examination as well as a professional distance.

Malin Houben is a sociologist and is doing her doctorate at the BGHS on the subject of "Gynaecological practice - an ethnographic study". As a research associate, she has researched and taught at various universities on the topics of the body, gender, sexuality and health. Since 2024, she has been investigating experiences of violence in medical care in the research project "GYNVEPI - towards an understanding of gynecological violence" at the School of Public Health.

The lecture will take place on Wednesday, 21 May 2025 at 6.15 pm in room 240 at the VHS Bielefeld, Ravensberger Park 1. The lecture is held in German.