Synopses & Reviews
As Carole Browner explains in her foreword: "These chapters compellingly reveal that although we anthropologists tend to speak of biomedicine in hegemonic terms, in fact its penetration is quite variable and often ambivalently met. . . . Risk, Reproduction, and Narratives of Experience sheds new light on a troubling core aspect of medicalization processes, which simultaneously render pregnant women more docile subjects even as they are impelled to actively engage with biomedicalized prenatal care regimes. . . . We also see that a consummate means by which states seek to consolidate power in the reproductive realm is through expansion of the biomedical concept of risk. This critical observation emerges repeatedly in this collection."
Review
"An easy and pleasurable read from beginning to end."
--Global Public Health
Synopsis
Vivid ethnographies of reproductive risk and responsibility that speak to the conflicts between pregnant women and mothers and state-sanctioned biomedicine.
Lauren Fordyce is Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Bucknell University.
Am nata Maraesa is Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at Hunter College of the City University of New York and the Department of Latin American and Puerto Rican Studies at Lehman College of the City University of New York.
Synopsis
Vivid ethnographies of reproductive risk and responsibility that speak to the conflicts between pregnant women and mothers and state-sanctioned biomedicine
About the Author
Lauren Fordyce is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Bucknell University. Aminata Maraesa is a Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at Hunter College of the City University of New York and the Department of Latin American and Puerto Rican Studies at Lehman College of the City University of New York.
Table of Contents
CONTENTS
Introduction: The Development of Discourses Surrounding Reproductive Risks
Lauren Fordyce and Aminata Maraesa
Complications in Measuring and Defining Risk
Conceiving Risk in K'iche' Maya Reproduction
Matthew R. Dudgeon
Failing to See the Danger: Conceptions of Pregnancy and Care Practices among Mexican Immigrant Women in New York City
Alyshia Galvez
The Vital Conjuncture of Methamphetamine-Involved Pregnancy: Objective Risks and Subjective Realities
Alison B. Hamilton
Biopolitical Narratives of Risk and Responsibility
Birth and Blame: Guatemalan Midwives and Reproductive Risk
Sheila Cosminsky
"They Don't Know Anything": How Medical Authority Constructs Perceptions of Reproductive Risk among Low-Income Mothers in Mexico
Vania Smith-Oka
Local Contours of Reproductive Risk and Responsibility in Rural Oaxaca
Rebecca Howes-Mischel
New Countryside, New Family: The Discourses of Reproductive Risk in Postsocialist Rural China
Qingyan Ma
Struggles over the Embodiment of Reproductive Risk
Negotiating Risk and the Politics of Responsibility: Mothers and Young Child Health among Datoga Pastoralists in Northern Tanzania
Alyson G. Young
Shifting Maternal Responsibilities and the Trajectory of Blame in Northern Ghana
Aaron R. Denham
Imaging Maternal Responsibility: Prenatal Diagnosis and Ultrasound among Haitians in South Florida
Lauren Fordyce
A Competition over Reproductive Authority: Prenatal Risk Assessment in Southern Belize
Aminata Maraesa