Pragmatic Women and Body Politics
Pragmatic Women and Body Politics
£36.00
GBPThis thought-provoking volume compares the responses of women in a variety of countries and cultural settings to modern medical technologies. The contributors describe how women in East Africa deal with infertility, how American women respond to pre-natal diagnostic screening, how women in China and Japan choose to make use of reproductive technologies. The essays also explore wider themes, such as the emergence of the breast cancer movement, and how women confront environmental hazards which threaten them and their families. It is often assumed that women are passive in the face of biomedical technology, but this book shows that they make pragmatic choices, with responses ranging from acceptance to rejection or indifference. The reception of biomedical technology is situated in its local cultural contexts, and vital issues of women's health are related to political and ethnic concerns.
- Explores issues of women's health and medicine in a variety of social and cultural contexts; very broad approach to women's health
- Essays are theoretically informed but accessible case studies, range geographically from Zanzibar to China to Canada
- Proposes a sophisticated view of women's health, not concentrating just on reproductive health or passive responses to medicine
Product details
January 1998Paperback
9780521629294
380 pages
229 × 153 × 26 mm
0.714kg
Available
Table of Contents
- Introduction Margaret Lock and Patricia Kaufert
- 1. Remembering Amal: reflections on birth and the British in Northern Sudan Janice Boddy
- 2. Resistance and embrace: Sudanese rural women and systems of power Ellen Gruenbaum
- 3. Not only women: science as resistance in open door Egypt Soheir A. Morsy
- 4. Inscribing the body politic: women and AIDS in Africa Brooke Grundfest Schoepf
- 5. Barren ground: contesting identities of infertile women in Pemba, Tanzania Karina Kielmann
- 6. Wives, mothers, and lesbians: rethinking resistance in the US Ellen Lewin
- 7. The consequences of modernity for childless women in China: medicalization and resistance Lisa Handwerker
- 8. Perfecting society: reproductive technologies, genetic testing and the planned family in Japan Margaret Lock
- 9. An ethnography of the medicalization of Puerto Rican women's reproduction Iris Lopez
- 10. Situating resistance in fields of resistance: Aboriginal women and environmentalism John D. O'Neil, Brenda D. Elias and Annalee Yassi
- 11. Women, resistance and the breast cancer movement Patricia Kaufert
- 12. Selective compliance with biomedical authority and the uses of experiential knowledge Emily K. Abel and C. H. Browner
- 13. The mission within the madness: self-initiated medicalization as expression of agency Mark Nichter
- References.
