Toxic Disruptions

Polycystic Ovary Syndrome in Urban India

Gauri S. Pathak (Autor)

Buch | Softcover

158 Seiten

2024
Routledge India (Verlag)
978-0-367-77447-9 (ISBN)

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This book provides a unique ethnographic account of women living with polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) in India. It examines how contaminated environments and political–economic changes render urban middle-class women in India vulnerable to PCOS, a condition which has the potential to disrupt conventional, normative feminine biographies of marriage and childbearing.

The volume revolves around two main themes: how toxic landscapes, the endocrine disrupting chemicals suffusing them, and the political–economic environments related to them are linked to endocrine disorders such as PCOS; and how the biosocial disruptions caused by PCOS are both affecting women and reflective of changes in contemporary urban India. The author draws on anthropological fieldwork to investigate these connections through a fresh approach, combining a political ecological framework with perspectives from the anthropology of toxic exposures and health–environment systems.

The first of its kind, this volume will be indispensable to students and researchers of anthropology, particularly medical anthropology, medical sociology, human geography, science and technology studies, medical humanities, health–environment systems, endocrine disorders, public health, and South Asian studies.

Gauri Pathak is a medical anthropologist and associate professor at the Department of Global Studies, Aarhus University, Denmark. Her research focuses on the interactions between the body and its environment, consumption practices, and processes of globalization in South Asia, especially urban India. A former Homi Bhabha fellow, she is a founding member of the Plastic Lives social science consortium, and her current project, supported by a Carlsberg Young Researcher Fellowship, revolves around ethnographic investigations of human–plastic entanglements and the resulting toxic exposures. Besides her work on plastics and the lived experiences of polycystic ovary syndrome, she has also investigated beauty work and body projects in urban India.

Acknowledgments

1 Introduction: Contaminated Landscapes, Endocrine Disruption, and PCOS

2 “A New Normal”: Health Since Economic Liberalization

3 “Hormones Play Havoc with Your Body”: Toxic Locations and PCOS

4 “Health Is No More a Priority”: PCOS and Clinical Encounters

5 “When You Are 17 or 18, It Doesn’t Bother You”: Living with PCOS

6 “Kids Will Be a Bonus”: PCOS and Intimate Modernities

7 Conclusion: Toxic Disruptions

Bibliography

Index

Erscheinungsdatum	27.07.2024
Zusatzinfo	2 Tables, black and white; 2 Halftones, black and white; 2 Illustrations, black and white
Verlagsort	London
Sprache	englisch
Maße	156 x 234 mm
Gewicht	310 g
Themenwelt	Medizin / Pharmazie ► Medizinische Fachgebiete ► Gynäkologie / Geburtshilfe
ISBN-10	0-367-77447-X / 036777447X
ISBN-13	978-0-367-77447-9 / 9780367774479
Zustand	Neuware