Pragmatic Women and Body Politics

Volume of accessible essays exploring women's varied responses to medical technology.

This thought-provoking volume explores women's interaction with medicine. In a series of accessible case studies, the contributors show that women react pragmatically to medical technology, with responses ranging from acceptance to resistance or indifference. This book will be a key text in medical anthropology and women's studies.This thought-provoking volume compares the responses of women in a variety of countries and cultural settings to modern medical technologies. The contributors describe how women in East Africa deal with infertility, how American women respond to pre-natal diagnostic screening, how women in China and Japan choose to make use of reproductive technologies. The essays also explore wider themes, such as the emergence of the breast cancer movement, and how women confront environmental hazards which threaten them and their families. It is often assumed that women are passive in the face of biomedical technology, but this book shows that they make pragmatic choices, with responses ranging from acceptance to rejection or indifference. The reception of biomedical technology is situated in its local cultural contexts, and vital issues of women's health are related to political and ethnic concerns.