Headache medicine’s problems with legitimacy persist despite the “discovery” of a neurobiological mechanism underlying migraine. For while the emphasis on the brain does somewhat mitigate migraine’s association with psychosomatic, feminized personalities, locating migraine in the brain also managed to inscribe gendered cultural assumptions about the personalities of headache patients into the physical structure of their bodies. The newly biomedicalized migraine has not eliminated characterizations of a migraine patient as a particular kind of person, but instead has transformed the moral character of the migraine patient into a new, still highly gendered biomedical configuration.

Joanna Kempner in Not Tonight