GENDER AND HEALTH:
ETHNOGRAPHIC APPROACHES
HBHE 655, Anthro 558, WS 698, NES 592
Friday 2-5 pm, 2237 Lane Hall
Winter 2002
Marcia C. Inhorn, PhD, MPH
M5140 SPH II, phone 615-9786, minhorn@umich.edu
Office Hours: Friday Mornings, by Email Appointment
Course Description
This interdisciplinary graduate seminar, open to students in public health, anthropology,
women’s studies, and Near Eastern studies, is designed to explore in an in-depth fashion
ethnographic approaches to gender and health issues around the globe. Weekly, studentled, feminist-oriented discussions will revolve around thirteen, anthropological
ethnographies, including many of the winners of the Society for Medical Anthropology’s
Eileen Basker Prize for outstanding research in gender and health. Students in this course
will gain broad exposure to a number of exigent global women’s health issues, issues of
ethnographic research design, and the interdisciplinary theorizing of feminist, (medical)
anthropological, and public health scholars. In particular, this course will demonstrate
how anthropologists studying women’s health issues in a variety of Western and nonWestern sites, including the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, and Asia, have
contributed to social and feminist theory. Through humanistic engagement in women’s
lives, anthropologists have contributed considerably to theoretical debates about women’s
embodiment, agency, desire, identity, suffering, and resistance to (dis)ease-producing
social relations and conditions. Topics they have highlighted in their work include the
social construction and “disciplining” of the female body; women’s changing health
needs throughout the life cycle; the essentialization of women as reproducers in the West
and across various global sites; the medicalization and technologization of women’s
reproductive health; the health-demoting effects of racism, poverty, patriarchy, and
inhumane conditions of labor; and, ultimately, how women narrativize and make
meaning of their suffering.
Course Assignments
1) Keeping Up, Being There, Breaking the Silence: I intend for this seminar to be a
feminist reading group, where we engage with each other, courteously and constructively,
in a thoughtful and reflexive conversation about the relationship between gender and
health, as exemplified through a series of sixteen feminist ethnographies (thirteen to be
discussed in class, three to be read on your own). Clearly, sixteen books in one semester
constitutes a heavy reading load; thus, in my view, your major “assignment” is simply
keeping up with these readings, being there each Friday, and “breaking the silence,”
individually and collectively, about many important women’s health issues that are rarely
discussed in “polite company.” Everyone is expected to participate in these
conversations, which are intended to be very friendly, informal, but nonetheless thought-
provoking and rigorous. You will be evaluated in this course in large part on your
classroom engagement over the course of the semester. 40% of the total grade
2) Leading a Discussion: Each participant in this seminar will lead (or, in a few cases,
co-lead) the discussion during one Friday during the semester. We will decide this
schedule on the first day of class. As discussion leader, you are expected to briefly (no
more than 10-15 minutes) summarize the book, withholding any critical comments for the
classroom discussion that follows. Pedagogically, I want us to find the value in each
book, rather than only looking for faults. As part of your role as discussion leader, you
should print out for each member of the class a list of what you consider to be the four
major questions for discussion raised by the book. Your job is to systematically cover
these questions during the course of the discussion, as well as “run” the seminar more
generally. I also consider this running of the seminar to be practice for future teaching.
20% of the total grade
3) Comparative Book Review Essay: Each participant in this seminar will write one
final, 15-page paper, a comparative essay on the three additional books not discussed in
class (Finkler’s Women in Pain, Kahn’s Reproducing Jews, Sobo’s Choosing Unsafe
Sex). The review should be written in Reviews in Anthropology format; instructions and
an example will be provided. The essay should summarize and critically review each
book, but the essay should also be explicitly “synthetic,” examining the three books’
similarities and differences and attempting to outline some common theme(s).
References to other books are allowed in the essay, but not required. This essay is due no
later than Friday, April 19, but can be turned in any time during the semester. (Early
papers are, indeed, encouraged, although not required.) 40% of the total grade
Schedule of Readings (All books available at Shaman Drum and on reserve in SPH
library.)
I.
II.
III.
IV.
Imagining Reproductive Bodies
Jan. 18, Martin, The Woman in the Body
Jan. 25, Lock, Encounters with Aging
Feb. 1, Delaney, The Seed and the Soil
Medicalization and the Technological Imperative
Feb. 8, Davis-Floyd, Birth as An American Rite of Passage
Feb. 15, Rapp, Testing Women, Testing the Fetus
Feb. 22, Inhorn, Quest for Conception
Mar. 8, Hunt, A Colonial Lexicon
Troubling Motherhood
Mar. 15, Ginsburg, Contested Lives
Mar. 22, Scheper-Hughes, Death Without Weeping
Mar. 29, Boddy, Wombs and Alien Spirits
Endangering Daughters
Apr. 5, Gruenbaum, The Female Circumcision Controversy
Apr. 12, Croll, Endangered Daughters
*Apr. 19 Nichter, Fat Talk (* During finals week, with permission of the class)