Tag: women

Cancer and the Kali Yuga: Gender, Inequality, and Health in South India

By Cecilia Coale Van Hollen

As news spread that more women died from breast and cervical cancer in India than anywhere else in the world in the early twenty-first century, global public health planners accelerated efforts to prevent, screen, and treat these reproductive cancers in low-income Indian communities. Cancer and the Kali Yuga reveals that women who are the targets of these interventions in Tamil Nadu, South India, hold views about cancer causality, late diagnosis, and challenges to accessing treatment that differ from the public health discourse. Cecilia Coale Van Hollen’s critical feminist ethnography centers and amplifies the voices of Dalit Tamil women who situate cancer within the nexus of their class, caste, and gender positions. Dalit women’s narratives about their experiences with cancer present a powerful and poignant critique of the sociocultural and political-economic conditions that marginalize them and jeopardize their health and well-being in twenty-first-century India.

Read the book here.

Preventive Strikes: Women, Precancer, and Prophylactic Surgery

By Ilana Löwy

Modern scientific tools can identify a genetic predisposition to cancer before any disease is detectable. Some women will never develop breast or ovarian cancer, but they nevertheless must decide, as a result of genetic testing, whether to have their breasts and ovaries removed to avoid the possibility of disease. The striking contrast between the sophistication of diagnosis and the crudeness of preventive surgery forms the basis of historian Ilana Löwy’s important study. Löwy traces the history of prophylactic amputations through a century of preventive treatment and back to a long tradition of surgical management of gynecological problems. In the early twentieth century, surgeons came to believe that removing precancerous lesions – a term difficult to define even today – averted the danger of malignancy. This practice, Löwy finds, later led to surgical interventions for women with a hereditary predisposition to cancer but no detectable disease. Richly detailed stories of patients and surgeons in the United States, France, and the United Kingdom allow Löwy to compare the evolution of medical thought and practice – and personal choice – in these different cultures.

Preventive Strikes aims to improve our understanding of professional, social, and cultural responses to cancer in the twenty-first century and to inform our reflections about how values are incorporated into routine medical practices.

Read the book here.

Living the Body: Embodiment, Womanhood and Identity in Contemporary India

By Meenakshi Thapan

This book explores the development of a sociology of embodiment in the context of women’s lives in contemporary, urban India. Through a critical analysis of gender and class, the author unravels the complexities that are intrinsic to the multi-layered and fluid construction of a woman’s identity in relation to embodiment.

Living the Body: Embodiment, Womanhood and Identity in Contemporary India is the first book that unfolds an understanding of women’s experience of embodiment by a careful analysis of the facts gathered from an Indian metropolis. The author brings out numerous voices representing multiple subjectivities through interviews of working class slum women, professional upper class women, adolescent young women in secondary schools and in a slum, and the visual and textual representation of women in a women’s magazine in English.

Read the book here.

Kitchen-table Society: A Case Study of the Family Life and Friendships of Young Working-class Mothers in Urban Norway

By Marianne Gullestad

Through two years of anthropological fieldwork in the suburbs of Bergen, Norway’s second-largest city, the author has listened carefully to the conversations of young working-class women. In this intimate study, she examines how the lives of these women are shaped, what dignity and self-respect mean to them, and how they define their identities as women. This book discusses topics such as the rising rate of divorce, women’s culture, and how these women play a crucial role in creating and maintaining a cultural lifestyle for their families.

Read the book here.

The 4B movement: envisioning a feminist future with/in a non-reproductive future in Korea.

By Jieun Lee and Euisol Jeong

Recently, in Korea, young feminists launched the 4B (4非) movement: bihon, bichulsan, biyeonae, bisekseu, meaning the refusal of (heterosexual) marriage, childbirth, romance, and sexual relationships. The 4B movement encompasses not only criticisms of the pro-natalist turn in state policy and protests against it, but also various forms of self-help discussions and practices that are explicitly oriented towards women’s individual futures. In this article, Lee and Jeong explore how the 4B movement has given young feminists the opportunity to envision the future that they had been discouraged from imagining. Presenting a lived critique of contemporary Korea, these feminists ask how young women are led to imagine their current, single life as a temporary state, as consumer capitalism and the patriarchal state together place these young non-married women in an economically vulnerable position. They see this as achieved by endorsing ‘feminine’ desires and a presentist lifestyle, as well as excluding non-married women from opportunities in the job market and state-sponsored benefits in welfare services. They argue that the 4B movement and its discourses on the future and self-help could offer these women one possible way to envision a feminist future as individuals without being part of the state’s reproductive future.

Read the article here.

Marked Women: The Cultural Politics of Cervical Cancer in Venezuela

By Rebecca G. Martinez

Cervical cancer is the third leading cause of death among women in Venezuela, with poor and working-class women bearing the brunt of it. Doctors and public health officials regard promiscuity and poor hygiene—coded indicators for low class, low culture, and bad morals—as risk factors for the disease.

Drawing on in-depth fieldwork conducted in two oncology hospitals in Caracas, Marked Women is an ethnography of women’s experiences with cervical cancer, the doctors and nurses who treat them, and the public health officials and administrators who set up intervention programs to combat the disease. Rebecca G. Martínez contextualizes patient-doctor interactions within a historical arc of Venezuelan nationalism, modernity, neoliberalism, and Chavismo to understand the scientific, social, and political discourses surrounding the disease. The women, marked as deviant for their sexual transgressions, are not only characterized as engaging in unhygienic, uncultured, and promiscuous behaviors, but also become embodiments of these very behaviors. Ultimately, Marked Women explores how epidemiological risk is a socially, culturally, and historically embedded process—and how this enables cervical cancer to stigmatize women as socially marginal, burdens on society, and threats to the “health” of the modern nation.

Read more here.

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