Pragmatic Women and Body Politics / Edition 1

by Margaret Lock, Patricia Alice Kaufert

Overview

This thought-provoking volume explores women's responses to medical issues and technologies, from infertility in East Africa to prenatal screening in America. It also addresses wider themes, including the emergence of the breast cancer movement, and reactions to environmental hazards. In a series of accessible case studies, the contributors show that women react pragmatically to medical technology, with responses ranging from acceptance to resistance to indifference. This book will be a key text in medical anthropology and women's studies.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521629294
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	01/29/1998
Series:	Cambridge Studies in Medical Anthropology , #5
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	380
Product dimensions:	6.02(w) x 9.02(h) x 1.02(d)

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.

Editorial Reviews

"The volume invites fascinating reflections about the connection between soma and psyche and the role of gender in globalization." APA Review of Books

From the Publisher