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- Title
Invoking vali: painful technologies of modern birth in south India.
- Authors
Van Hollen, Cecilia
- Abstract
As reproduction becomes increasingly biomedicalized throughout the globe, reproductive technologies are used in unique ways and imbued with different meanings. This article explores why lower-class women in south India in the 1990s were demanding to have childbirth labors induced with oxytocin drugs while rejecting anesthesia. Cultural constructions of women's reproductive power are evoked and reworked in discourses of modernity that explain this preference. Discourses on relationships among gender, pain, and modernity relate to political-economic constraints on hospitals to perpetuate this practice.
- Publication
Medical anthropology quarterly, 2003, Vol 17, Issue 1, p49
- ISSN
0745-5194
- Publication type
Journal Article
- DOI
10.1525/maq.2003.17.1.49