Pragmatic Women and Body Politics

This volume of accessible essays explores women's varied responses to medical technology.

Klappentext

In a series of accessible case studies, contributors here show that women worldwide react pragmatically to medical technology, with responses ranging from acceptance to resistance to indifference. The study also addresses such themes as the emergence of the breast cancer movement and reactions to environmental hazards. This book will be a key text in medical anthropology and women's studies.

Zusammenfassung
This thought-provoking volume explores women's interaction with medicine. In a series of accessible case studies, the contributors show that women react pragmatically to medical technology, with responses ranging from acceptance to resistance or indifference. This book will be a key text in medical anthropology and women's studies.

Inhalt
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.