Authors
Rebecca Ella Howes-Mischel
Publication date
2012
Institution
New York University
Description
Drawing upon eighteen-months of ethnographic research in Oaxaca, Mexico, and Southern California, Gestating Subjects: Negotiating Public Health and Pregnancy in Transborder Oaxaca, argues that the care of rural Mexican women's pregnant bodies illustrates complex negotiations between public health agendas, clinical practices, and community understandings of the terms of modernity, gender, health, and indigeneity that circulate both in Mexico and transnationally. Rich clinic-based data illustrates that Mexican public health institutions' strong focus on disciplining women's bodies reflects a need to prove their own relative modernity—and that epidemiological statistics are central to this need. Oaxacan pregnant women and their bodies are thus key sites for examining the grounded practices through which the recently-shifting terms of modernity in transborder Mexico are constructed, negotiated, and resisted …
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