PMID: 22338291Feb 18, 2012Paper

"To open oneself is a poor woman's trouble": embodied inequality and childbirth in South-Central Tanzania

Medical Anthropology Quarterly
Sydney A Spangler

Abstract

Various theories exist for the ways in which social and material disparities are incorporated within human bodies and then expressed as health outcomes with uneven distributions. From a political economy perspective, one pathway involves processes of social exclusion that take place on articulating local and global fields of power. This study explores such situated processes as they produce and perpetuate embodied inequality at childbirth in the Kilombero Valley of South-Central Tanzania. Ethnographic narratives illustrate how these processes differentially affect the kind of care women seek and receive. Also described are women's complex yet pragmatic responses to potential exclusion in the attempt to secure a safe and otherwise positive outcome. In a culturally constructed world of childbirth, face-to-face claims on entitlement to biomedical services collide with enactments of discrimination at multiple levels, creating a space of contestation for social and material positioning as well as for physical well-being.

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Citations

Nov 19, 2013·Infectious Diseases of Poverty·Merrill Singer
Mar 5, 2014·Journal of Midwifery & Women's Health·Sydney A SpanglerLynn Sibley
Mar 7, 2014·Medical Anthropology Quarterly·Katerini T Storeng, Dominique P Béhague
Apr 15, 2017·Medical Anthropology Quarterly·Michael R Duke
Aug 24, 2017·Lab on a Chip·Catherine E MajorsRebecca Richards-Kortum
Mar 25, 2019·Health Policy and Planning·Marta Schaaf, Stephanie M Topp
Nov 13, 2020·BMC Pregnancy and Childbirth·Myrrith Hulsbergen, Anke van der Kwaak

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