Skip to main content

Research Repository

Advanced Search

“I Do Not Have to Hurt My Body Anymore”: Reproductive Chronicity and Sterilization as Ambivalent Care in Rural North India

Lukšaitė, Eva

Authors



Abstract

Drawing on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork in rural Rajasthan, India, I examine women's narratives of chronic reproductive suffering and the practices they employed to relieve it. Cumulative effects of adverse and ordinary reproductive events and exhaustion from caregiving were often seen as reproductive suffering, while sterilization emerged as an act of care toward women's ever-weakening bodies. Sterilization has been an integral part of the often coercive, incentive- and target-driven population control program in India. Rural women, however, described sterilization not as a form of violence but as an act of care, despite its ambivalence. In the context of reproductive chronicity—a persistent reproductive suffering recurring alongside reproductive events, available care options, relations within which these options are located, and structural conditions that shape women's lives—care and suffering are intimately and ambiguously intertwined.

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Mar 4, 2022
Online Publication Date May 7, 2022
Publication Date 2022-09
Publicly Available Date May 30, 2023
Journal Medical Anthropology Quarterly: international journal for the cultural and social analysis of health
Print ISSN 0745-5194
Publisher American Anthropological Association
Volume 36
Issue 3
Pages 312-328
DOI https://doi.org/10.1111/maq.12709
Keywords India; care; chronicity; reproduction; sterilization
Publisher URL https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/maq.12709

Files





You might also like



Downloadable Citations