On 28 December 2016, the Government of India passed a national disability act which for the first time recognised genetic blood disorders—thalassemia, sickle cell disease, and haemophilia—as disabilities, entitling affected individuals to affirmative action. While it was welcomed by patient communities, this policy decision also sowed seeds of collective anxieties regarding the assessment of the required degree of disability in affected individuals. Thirteen months later, a set of national guidelines were published that dictated the procedures for determining whether a patient meets this ‘benchmark disability’ standard, thus materialising the collective anxieties of blood disorder patient communities. Utilising ‘patchwork ethnography’ as a methodology, in this article I focus on haemoglobinopathy (thalassemia and sickle cell disease) patient communities in India to investigate the ‘certificate anxieties’ that stem from the difficulties of certifying disability percentage for those with genetic blood disorders. These anxieties arise from the tensions between a (bio)constitutional reordering of disability categories and the contestations of these categories, which are rooted in articulations of citizenship rights. I argue that such contested constitutionalisms give rise to productive tensions in State–(disabled) citizen relations that have the potential to realign institutions with citizens’ accounts of social justice.
{"title":"“Our Blood Itself Is Disabled!”: Haemoglobinopathy, Certificate Anxiety, and Contested Constitutionalism in Disability Legislation in India","authors":"Sanghamitra Das","doi":"10.17157/mat.9.3.5770","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17157/mat.9.3.5770","url":null,"abstract":"On 28 December 2016, the Government of India passed a national disability act which for the first time recognised genetic blood disorders—thalassemia, sickle cell disease, and haemophilia—as disabilities, entitling affected individuals to affirmative action. While it was welcomed by patient communities, this policy decision also sowed seeds of collective anxieties regarding the assessment of the required degree of disability in affected individuals. Thirteen months later, a set of national guidelines were published that dictated the procedures for determining whether a patient meets this ‘benchmark disability’ standard, thus materialising the collective anxieties of blood disorder patient communities. Utilising ‘patchwork ethnography’ as a methodology, in this article I focus on haemoglobinopathy (thalassemia and sickle cell disease) patient communities in India to investigate the ‘certificate anxieties’ that stem from the difficulties of certifying disability percentage for those with genetic blood disorders. These anxieties arise from the tensions between a (bio)constitutional reordering of disability categories and the contestations of these categories, which are rooted in articulations of citizenship rights. I argue that such contested constitutionalisms give rise to productive tensions in State–(disabled) citizen relations that have the potential to realign institutions with citizens’ accounts of social justice.","PeriodicalId":74160,"journal":{"name":"Medicine anthropology theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-08-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47930859","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article is an anthropological examination of the health-seeking behaviours of Rohingya refugees living in crowded camps in Bangladesh, in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. One international organisation providing medical care in the Kutupalong camp has found non-cooperation among the residents regarding the health facilities on offer to them. This ethnography highlights the Rohingya refugees’ active ‘mistrust’ (Carey 2017) of these medical services. We argue that these prevalent forms of mistrust provide a lens through which their individual life trajectories and politics can be understood in the context of the history of their systemic oppression by the Myanmar government. We reflect on the precarity and vulnerability of the Rohingya refugees, within which they identify mistrust as a source of resistance and protection. The mistrust of the Rohingya communities also highlights their attempts to communicate with a global public (Canetti 1960) and exhibits the ‘crowd politics’ (Chowdhury 2019) within a continued statelessness which is engendered by the Bangladeshi and Myanmar governments. This article makes an original contribution to the discussion of trust, mistrust, and rumour in society, identifying ‘the crowd’ as a site of resistance, and providing an account of the distinctive experience of the Rohingyas as refugees, and their health-seeking behaviour in the camp.
{"title":"‘Medicine in Name Only’: Mistrust and COVID-19 Among the Crowded Rohingya Refugee Camps in Bangladesh","authors":"Sadaf Islam, N. Mookherjee, Naveeda Khan","doi":"10.17157/mat.9.2.5424","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17157/mat.9.2.5424","url":null,"abstract":"This article is an anthropological examination of the health-seeking behaviours of Rohingya refugees living in crowded camps in Bangladesh, in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. One international organisation providing medical care in the Kutupalong camp has found non-cooperation among the residents regarding the health facilities on offer to them. This ethnography highlights the Rohingya refugees’ active ‘mistrust’ (Carey 2017) of these medical services. We argue that these prevalent forms of mistrust provide a lens through which their individual life trajectories and politics can be understood in the context of the history of their systemic oppression by the Myanmar government. We reflect on the precarity and vulnerability of the Rohingya refugees, within which they identify mistrust as a source of resistance and protection. The mistrust of the Rohingya communities also highlights their attempts to communicate with a global public (Canetti 1960) and exhibits the ‘crowd politics’ (Chowdhury 2019) within a continued statelessness which is engendered by the Bangladeshi and Myanmar governments. This article makes an original contribution to the discussion of trust, mistrust, and rumour in society, identifying ‘the crowd’ as a site of resistance, and providing an account of the distinctive experience of the Rohingyas as refugees, and their health-seeking behaviour in the camp.","PeriodicalId":74160,"journal":{"name":"Medicine anthropology theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-04-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46593528","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Vietnam’s national response to the COVID-19 pandemic is informed by its past experiences of fighting endemic disease. This response involves an emerging biosocial paradigm of long-term adaptation to living with the co-presence of viral infections. Moving beyond traditional anthropological work, this article issues an invitation to (re)think crowds and COVID-19. I offer a path forward by engaging in an interdisciplinary dialogue, drawing inspiration from a wide range of sources to understand this unfolding problematic. Through the lens of its public transport service Saigon Bus and environmental protests, I examine how the 2020–21 ‘pandemic season’ (mùa dịch) in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam’s largest city, has transformed consciousness about crowds, ways of being in (un)crowded public spaces, and the regulation of networked public space. In doing so, this article explores existing and emerging shifts in policymaking and transformations of urban Vietnamese social relations, in the context of the emerging biosocial paradigm. The article contributes to medical anthropology by analysing the impact of pandemic prevention policies on the transformation of crowds—from being viewed as anti-state assemblies requiring social control into a form of pro-state participatory citizenship, exemplified by public engagement with networked activist communities in a ‘more-than-human’ world.
{"title":"Social Distancing, Interaction, and (Un)crowded Public Space in Mass Transit in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam","authors":"Catherine Earl","doi":"10.17157/mat.9.2.5375","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17157/mat.9.2.5375","url":null,"abstract":"Vietnam’s national response to the COVID-19 pandemic is informed by its past experiences of fighting endemic disease. This response involves an emerging biosocial paradigm of long-term adaptation to living with the co-presence of viral infections. Moving beyond traditional anthropological work, this article issues an invitation to (re)think crowds and COVID-19. I offer a path forward by engaging in an interdisciplinary dialogue, drawing inspiration from a wide range of sources to understand this unfolding problematic. Through the lens of its public transport service Saigon Bus and environmental protests, I examine how the 2020–21 ‘pandemic season’ (mùa dịch) in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam’s largest city, has transformed consciousness about crowds, ways of being in (un)crowded public spaces, and the regulation of networked public space. In doing so, this article explores existing and emerging shifts in policymaking and transformations of urban Vietnamese social relations, in the context of the emerging biosocial paradigm. The article contributes to medical anthropology by analysing the impact of pandemic prevention policies on the transformation of crowds—from being viewed as anti-state assemblies requiring social control into a form of pro-state participatory citizenship, exemplified by public engagement with networked activist communities in a ‘more-than-human’ world.","PeriodicalId":74160,"journal":{"name":"Medicine anthropology theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-04-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42265170","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In this article, I address an issue that emerged during my ethnographic fieldwork in Brazil in 2018, which received little attention during the Zika virus outbreak that took place in the country during 2015–17. My fieldwork revealed that, interestingly, despite the epidemic and its associated risk of birth defects, some couples who were attending a fertility clinic (most of whom came from a middle- or upper-class background, with access to private health care) chose to take the risk of a pregnancy instead of delaying their plans. I argue that this case study of assisted reproductive technology (ART) is a ‘grey zone’ whose investigation aids understanding of how the Zika epidemic was managed in Brazil. By looking at the potentiality of pregnancies and prospective babies for (infertile) couples, we can analyse how fertility clinics influenced the ability of couples to engage in ART during the epidemic and explore which kinds of reproductive services were offered to patients during this time. More broadly, this case study permits the examination of how the specific case of ART sheds light on the issue of risk/reward in wider reproductive decision-making during the epidemic. In many ways, I conclude, one can say that the Zika virus epidemic came to challenge both the timing of reproduction and the choice to become pregnant.
{"title":"Assisted Reproductive Technologies: A Grey Zone in the Zika Epidemic in Brazil?","authors":"H. Prado","doi":"10.17157/mat.9.2.5141","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17157/mat.9.2.5141","url":null,"abstract":"In this article, I address an issue that emerged during my ethnographic fieldwork in Brazil in 2018, which received little attention during the Zika virus outbreak that took place in the country during 2015–17. My fieldwork revealed that, interestingly, despite the epidemic and its associated risk of birth defects, some couples who were attending a fertility clinic (most of whom came from a middle- or upper-class background, with access to private health care) chose to take the risk of a pregnancy instead of delaying their plans. I argue that this case study of assisted reproductive technology (ART) is a ‘grey zone’ whose investigation aids understanding of how the Zika epidemic was managed in Brazil. By looking at the potentiality of pregnancies and prospective babies for (infertile) couples, we can analyse how fertility clinics influenced the ability of couples to engage in ART during the epidemic and explore which kinds of reproductive services were offered to patients during this time. More broadly, this case study permits the examination of how the specific case of ART sheds light on the issue of risk/reward in wider reproductive decision-making during the epidemic. In many ways, I conclude, one can say that the Zika virus epidemic came to challenge both the timing of reproduction and the choice to become pregnant.","PeriodicalId":74160,"journal":{"name":"Medicine anthropology theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-04-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48751334","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
All Danish adults have access to their electronic medical records on the e-health platform Sundhed.dk, which is intended as a means to empower patients. But what happens when patients see their paraclinical test results presented as numbers which are flagged as either ‘normal’ or ‘abnormal’? Based on fieldwork in general practices and consultations, and on observations of individuals living with chronic illnesses, we investigated how patients and physicians interpret and interact with such numerical values, creating, as we argue through the words of Gregory Bateson, ‘epistemological errors’. We show how health record transparency blurs the patient’s senses and understanding and makes it harder for them to interpret their state of health and to trust the clinical judgement of health professionals. We argue that the immediate access to test results triggers a runaway process in which numerical values (be they normal or abnormal in comparison with a standard point of reference) transform into a threat to life itself. As such, our ethnography underlines the intricate contradiction between the trust placed in biomedical sciences and the uncertainty involved in testing, diagnosing, and treating. Patients’ access to all test results leads to a quest for certainty—one never fully obtainable, which thus instead mobilises new uncertainties.
{"title":"The Tyranny of Numbers: How e-Health Record Transparency Affects Patients’ Health Perceptions and Conversations with Physicians","authors":"B. Kristensen, J. Brodersen, A. B. R. Joensson","doi":"10.17157/mat.9.2.5529","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17157/mat.9.2.5529","url":null,"abstract":"All Danish adults have access to their electronic medical records on the e-health platform Sundhed.dk, which is intended as a means to empower patients. But what happens when patients see their paraclinical test results presented as numbers which are flagged as either ‘normal’ or ‘abnormal’? Based on fieldwork in general practices and consultations, and on observations of individuals living with chronic illnesses, we investigated how patients and physicians interpret and interact with such numerical values, creating, as we argue through the words of Gregory Bateson, ‘epistemological errors’. We show how health record transparency blurs the patient’s senses and understanding and makes it harder for them to interpret their state of health and to trust the clinical judgement of health professionals. We argue that the immediate access to test results triggers a runaway process in which numerical values (be they normal or abnormal in comparison with a standard point of reference) transform into a threat to life itself. As such, our ethnography underlines the intricate contradiction between the trust placed in biomedical sciences and the uncertainty involved in testing, diagnosing, and treating. Patients’ access to all test results leads to a quest for certainty—one never fully obtainable, which thus instead mobilises new uncertainties.","PeriodicalId":74160,"journal":{"name":"Medicine anthropology theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-04-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42541108","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Urgent Priorities, Slow Scholarship","authors":"Mat Editorial Collective","doi":"10.17157/mat.9.2.7138","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17157/mat.9.2.7138","url":null,"abstract":"Editorial to the April issue of 2022.","PeriodicalId":74160,"journal":{"name":"Medicine anthropology theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-04-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42559676","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In this Position Piece, we explore the hegemony of innovation and the construction of gendered futures in global health through the Sayana® Press, a device that delivers a version of the contraceptive drug commonly known as Depo-Provera. The device has generated tremendous enthusiasm amongst global family planning advocates for its effectiveness and ease of use, including administration by community level providers and self-injection. Claims about its potential are compelling: advocates hope it will dramatically increase access to contraceptives, and thereby unlock the social and material emancipatory promise of family planning. We offer preliminary observations about Sayana Press as an ethnographic and discursive object and further the scholarly conversation on humanitarian design by considering the gendered dimensions of global health technologies. The advent of Sayana Press reflects several significant trends in global health including the intensification of the innovation imperative and the bypassing of investments in infrastructure—both bolstered by the recent rise of the ‘self-care agenda’. Further, we suggest that global health technologies are also techniques in the Foucauldian sense—scripting new subjectivities and bodily norms towards gendered futurities. Finally, we note the dual role of the state in sexual and reproductive health as both source and object of reproductive governance.
{"title":"The Innovation Imperative in Global Health: Gendered Futurity in the Sayana® Press","authors":"M. MacDonald, Ellen E. Foley","doi":"10.17157/mat.9.2.5765","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17157/mat.9.2.5765","url":null,"abstract":"In this Position Piece, we explore the hegemony of innovation and the construction of gendered futures in global health through the Sayana® Press, a device that delivers a version of the contraceptive drug commonly known as Depo-Provera. The device has generated tremendous enthusiasm amongst global family planning advocates for its effectiveness and ease of use, including administration by community level providers and self-injection. Claims about its potential are compelling: advocates hope it will dramatically increase access to contraceptives, and thereby unlock the social and material emancipatory promise of family planning. We offer preliminary observations about Sayana Press as an ethnographic and discursive object and further the scholarly conversation on humanitarian design by considering the gendered dimensions of global health technologies. The advent of Sayana Press reflects several significant trends in global health including the intensification of the innovation imperative and the bypassing of investments in infrastructure—both bolstered by the recent rise of the ‘self-care agenda’. Further, we suggest that global health technologies are also techniques in the Foucauldian sense—scripting new subjectivities and bodily norms towards gendered futurities. Finally, we note the dual role of the state in sexual and reproductive health as both source and object of reproductive governance.","PeriodicalId":74160,"journal":{"name":"Medicine anthropology theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-04-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45277816","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In 2018, the World Health Organization (WHO) announced the addition of Disease X, a hypothetical infectious threat, to its blueprint list of priority diseases. In the construction of discourse that circulated following this announcement, conceptions of Disease X intersected with representations of Africa. In our article, we share a broad strokes analysis of internet narratives about Disease X and Africa in the six months before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic (July–December 2019) and during its first six months (January–June 2020). Our analysis focuses on how the scientific concept of Disease X was applied by ‘non-experts’ to make meaning from risk, uncertainty, and response. These non-experts drew in parallel upon more general representations of power, fear, and danger. This research is particularly relevant at the time of writing, as online narratives about COVID-19 vaccination are shaping vaccine anxiety throughout the world by drawing upon similar conceptions of agency and inequality. Because Disease X in Africa still looms as a perceived future threat, considering the narratives presented in this paper can provide insight into how people create meaning when faced with a scientific concept, a global health crisis, and the idea that there are other crises yet to come.
{"title":"Disease X and Africa: How a Scientific Metaphor Entered Popular Imaginaries of the Online Public During the COVID-19 Pandemic","authors":"Kelley Sams, C. Grant, A. Desclaux, K. Sow","doi":"10.17157/mat.9.2.5611","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17157/mat.9.2.5611","url":null,"abstract":"In 2018, the World Health Organization (WHO) announced the addition of Disease X, a hypothetical infectious threat, to its blueprint list of priority diseases. In the construction of discourse that circulated following this announcement, conceptions of Disease X intersected with representations of Africa. In our article, we share a broad strokes analysis of internet narratives about Disease X and Africa in the six months before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic (July–December 2019) and during its first six months (January–June 2020). Our analysis focuses on how the scientific concept of Disease X was applied by ‘non-experts’ to make meaning from risk, uncertainty, and response. These non-experts drew in parallel upon more general representations of power, fear, and danger. This research is particularly relevant at the time of writing, as online narratives about COVID-19 vaccination are shaping vaccine anxiety throughout the world by drawing upon similar conceptions of agency and inequality. Because Disease X in Africa still looms as a perceived future threat, considering the narratives presented in this paper can provide insight into how people create meaning when faced with a scientific concept, a global health crisis, and the idea that there are other crises yet to come. ","PeriodicalId":74160,"journal":{"name":"Medicine anthropology theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-04-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43066708","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-04-28DOI: 10.1163/2210-7975_hrd-9709-2015030
Eana Meng, J. Lenhard
In this Review essay, we examine some of the latest and needed scholarship on harm reduction: Travis Lupick’s Fighting for Space: How a Group of Drug Users Transformed One City’s Struggle with Addiction (2018); Jarrett Zigon’s A War on People: Drug User Politics and a New Ethics of Community (2019); Kimberly Sue’s Getting Wrecked: Women, Incarceration, and the American Opioid Crisis (2019); and Nancy Campbell’s OD: Naloxone and the Politics of Overdose (2020). Our authors present us with intimate windows into a diverse array of geographies, peoples, and technologies—from women’s jails, prisons, and community treatment programmes in Massachusetts to Vancouver’s downtown; from Copenhagen’s safe injection sites to prisons in Scotland. While varied in methods and approaches, these works unequivocally push for alternative imaginings to what one of Campbell’s protagonists dubs the ‘North American disaster’. Harm reduction is front and centre to these authors’ envisioning of a kinder, more loving, and more accepting future. Embracing harm reduction both requires and initiates a radical rethinking of how drug use is viewed, and our authors have given us crucial insight and analyses into how such reorientations are possible. We encourage continued scholarship on this topic, especially on non-Western options.
{"title":"Harm Reduction— And What Keeps Us From Embracing It Fully","authors":"Eana Meng, J. Lenhard","doi":"10.1163/2210-7975_hrd-9709-2015030","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/2210-7975_hrd-9709-2015030","url":null,"abstract":"In this Review essay, we examine some of the latest and needed scholarship on harm reduction: Travis Lupick’s Fighting for Space: How a Group of Drug Users Transformed One City’s Struggle with Addiction (2018); Jarrett Zigon’s A War on People: Drug User Politics and a New Ethics of Community (2019); Kimberly Sue’s Getting Wrecked: Women, Incarceration, and the American Opioid Crisis (2019); and Nancy Campbell’s OD: Naloxone and the Politics of Overdose (2020). Our authors present us with intimate windows into a diverse array of geographies, peoples, and technologies—from women’s jails, prisons, and community treatment programmes in Massachusetts to Vancouver’s downtown; from Copenhagen’s safe injection sites to prisons in Scotland. While varied in methods and approaches, these works unequivocally push for alternative imaginings to what one of Campbell’s protagonists dubs the ‘North American disaster’. Harm reduction is front and centre to these authors’ envisioning of a kinder, more loving, and more accepting future. Embracing harm reduction both requires and initiates a radical rethinking of how drug use is viewed, and our authors have given us crucial insight and analyses into how such reorientations are possible. We encourage continued scholarship on this topic, especially on non-Western options. ","PeriodicalId":74160,"journal":{"name":"Medicine anthropology theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-04-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47384067","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Based on online semi-structured interviews with middle-class women who were pregnant or had recently given birth in Western Europe (France, Spain, the United Kingdom, and Switzerland), this study analyses how motherhood has been experienced and performed during the COVID-19 pandemic. The article reflects on the specific new risk assessments and responsibilities that emerged during the pandemic by showing women’s coping strategies concerning lockdowns and other public health measures. Using a COVID-19 lens also allows a broader analysis of middle-class families’ concerns about performing ‘good motherhood’. By highlighting the discrepancies between women’s expected and actual experiences, the prescriptive aspects of pregnancy, delivery, and the postpartum phase are revealed and analysed, prompting us to consider parenting as a form of doing and proving. By underlining the importance attached to the expectant mother’s wellbeing, the partner’s involvement, the support of relatives, and the future socialisation of the baby, we argue that women face a myriad of imperatives to ensure a meaningful experience of motherhood.
{"title":"Becoming a Mother During COVID-19: Adjustments in Performing Motherhood","authors":"Clémence Jullien, R. Jeffery","doi":"10.17157/mat.9.2.5310","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.17157/mat.9.2.5310","url":null,"abstract":"Based on online semi-structured interviews with middle-class women who were pregnant or had recently given birth in Western Europe (France, Spain, the United Kingdom, and Switzerland), this study analyses how motherhood has been experienced and performed during the COVID-19 pandemic. The article reflects on the specific new risk assessments and responsibilities that emerged during the pandemic by showing women’s coping strategies concerning lockdowns and other public health measures. Using a COVID-19 lens also allows a broader analysis of middle-class families’ concerns about performing ‘good motherhood’. By highlighting the discrepancies between women’s expected and actual experiences, the prescriptive aspects of pregnancy, delivery, and the postpartum phase are revealed and analysed, prompting us to consider parenting as a form of doing and proving. By underlining the importance attached to the expectant mother’s wellbeing, the partner’s involvement, the support of relatives, and the future socialisation of the baby, we argue that women face a myriad of imperatives to ensure a meaningful experience of motherhood.","PeriodicalId":74160,"journal":{"name":"Medicine anthropology theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-04-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48083786","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
京公网安备 11010802042870号
京ICP备2023020795号-1
扫码关注我们
求助内容：
应助结果提醒方式：