Medical Anthropology Quarterly最新文献

In the contemporary American political landscape, gerrymandering and the passage of anti-abortion legislation are intimately connected in what I call reproductive gerrymandering. I develop this concept as an analytic tool to understand the disjuncture between the passage of laws restricting reproductive healthcare access and the will of the majority of voters. In this ethnographic project, Ohio serves as an important case study where efforts to elect a supermajority of extremist anti-abortion Republican officials has allowed for the passage of unpopular legislation restricting abortion. I argue that the mundane bureaucratic processes involved in electoral redistricting and state budget procedures are forms of bureaucratic violence that result in structural harm experienced by pregnant people, especially those who are most marginalized. Reproductive gerrymandering provides a means for theorizing the connections across domains involving partisan redistricting, reproductive governance in the form of anti-abortion legislation, and the structural violence experienced by pregnant people seeking abortion.

This paper explores how Brazilian Black queer women's sensorial knowing expresses the ways that anti-Blackness and anti-queerness are experienced within Brazilian gynecological spaces. I show how Black queer forms of sensory representations signal the intimacy of occupying place and time in power relations. What does it mean to feel, touch, and see the mechanisms of prejudice and institutional power? What are the sounds and vibrations of racism and heteronormativity in medicine? What do the senses tell us about Black queer bodies' orientations and adverse reactions within those spaces? I engage the senses to understand how sensorial knowledge is keenly embedded in the evidence and informs how Black queer life is shaped within the quotidian. I discuss how sensorial experiences for the critical possibilities of conceptualizing sensoriality and social meanings of medical space and place and in relation to the material world of gynecology and its technologies.

At the only standalone pediatric hospital in Zambia, patient wellbeing often rests in the hands of bedsiders. Bedsiders are caregivers, often family, who sit at the patient's bedside, feeding, cleaning them, and running medical errands. Bedsiders are critical human infrastructure for the hospital and its staff. In our research, we heard repeatedly that bedsiders must have a “heart” for caregiving, taking on unremunerated and exhausting informal labor. We draw on Wendland's “heart for the work,” a phrase commonly used among healthcare workers in Malawi and Zambia describing the medical profession, to explore what this metaphor reveals about care.

This article analyzes 40 years of Black feminist scholarship, art, and grassroots activism dedicated to the lives and legacies of the "foremothers of American gynecology." Infamously, in Montgomery, Alabama, between 1845 and 1849, up to 16 enslaved women were exploited at a backyard hospital, some subjected to surgical experimentation by Dr James Marion Sims. He was a famous and world-renowned surgeon who died in 1883, with a reputation as "the father of modern gynecology." Sims achieved the medical knowledge that catapulted him into American and European fame, using skills gained from the exploitation of the enslaved women in his early career. Famously, three of these women are referenced by their first names: Anarcha, Lucy, and Betsey. This research asks: how have these important figures been remembered in 20th and 21st-century Black feminist scholarship, art, and grassroots community activism? Further, what are the broader impacts of this pathbreaking truth, reckoning, and reconciliation work?