Description
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.
Author: Rebecca G. Martínez
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 06/05/2018
Pages: 296
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.05lbs
Size: 8.90h x 5.90w x 0.80d
ISBN13: 9781503606432
ISBN10: 1503606430
BISAC Categories:
- Social Science | Anthropology | Cultural & Social
- Medical | Health Care Delivery
- Social Science | Sociology | General
About the Author
Rebecca G. Martínez is Assistant Professor of Women's and Gender Studies at the University of Missouri.