Medical Anthropology Quarterly最新文献

In the aftermath of the Supreme Court's 2022 decision to overturn the federal right to abortion, much public and political debate has surrounded gestating and in vitro embryos' "personhood." In this paper, I draw on 15 months of participant observation in biomedical spaces of infertility to reveal how embryos can be enacted as not only unborn children but as many different kinds of entities. I examine how embryos become "multiple" as in vitro fertilization (IVF) professionals inseminate, monitor, and transfer them into patients' bodies: enacting them as makeable, contingent, recordable, animatable, predictable, introducible, praisable, and appraisable entities. Providing a new perspective into the varied ontologies of in vitro embryos, this paper has far-reaching implications for the anthropological study and politics of reproductive medicine and politics today.

Global health regimes have reversed the role of traditional birth attendants (TBAs) from partners in the fight against maternal and child mortality to barriers to indicator-driven care. In rural Tanzania, widespread fear of government surveillance and punishment for non-compliant individuals and organizations that climaxed during the presidency of the late John Magufuli (2015-2021) put increased pressure on TBAs. To negotiate tensions, TBAs adopted the position that they only escort women to health facilities for birth. We argue that TBAs' insistence on this only both occludes and protects their multiple caring roles and responsibilities in a context of harsher home birth penalties, yet limited efforts to improve systemic shortages in the rural health system. TBAs' performance of "we only escort women" operates both as the sedimentation of policies, a way to resist them, and means to hold space for TBAs in the wake of ambiguous global and national health policies.

Despite the transformative contributions of Black feminist thought, medical anthropology often fails to recognize or center the works of Black feminist thinkers. We argue that Black feminist theory is critical for a study and praxis of new approaches to healing, health, medicine, illness, disability, and care. We can't continue to simply recognize that current systems are failing us; Black feminist theory moves us past recognition toward transformative liberation. This special issue emerges from works and conversations leading up to, during, and after the first Black Feminist Health Science Studies Collaboratory, held virtually in May 2021. Through the Collaboratory, we propose a new form of coming together around the sharing of knowledge and practice based in Black feminist thought and Black feminist healing arts. The collection of works that follow demonstrates and provides practical means toward a more liberatory practice of medical anthropology.

Attending closely to the lived experiences of people moving in and out of Medicaid-funded institutions, I argue that "the streets" are critical to understanding healthcare in US urban poverty. Exploring the relationship between "the streets" and Medicaid-funded institutions, this essay asks: How does the relationship between "the streets"-and in the words of my research interlocutors-"life on the other side" shape life in Medicaid-funded institutions in the Northeast US city? How do the social and symbolic conditions of this relationship-conditions structured by anti-Blackness-formulate the human in urban poverty? By joining Medicaid-funded institutions together as a broader health-governing network, I demonstrate how these institutions become boundary spaces that reveal the socially and symbolically interdependent worlds of "the streets" and life off them. Ultimately, this essay argues that "the streets" contain the social and symbolic conditions that dehumanize the poor through the logics of anti-Blackness, thus defining the terms of humanization that Medicaid-funded institutions afford.