State Intimacies

Reviews / Votes

"Centering the under-researched phenomenon of surgical sterilisation in India, and critically examining this within the framework of care, State Intimacies makes significant scholarly contributions to the study of gender, reproduction and the state. With an incisive and evocative ethnography, Fiks brilliantly deals with entanglements of bureaucracy, public healthcare, entrenched hierarchies, reproductive labour, and gendered power relations in rural north India." * The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology



"This critical, compassionate, and sensitive ethnographic description of women's reproductive lives in an area shaped by poverty and medico-political intervention is of relevance to medical and political anthropology scholars, as well as for scholars working on gender and reproduction and on South Asia at large. The author has successfully managed to condense data and insights based on her fieldwork from a previous decade into a convincing and relevant volume that also benefits from both hindsight and recent scholarly debates." * Asian Ethnology



"Sterilization 'camps' have earned a bad press in India - and rightly so. Yet, as Eva Fiks demonstrates in her elegant intervention, coercion is entangled with care for village women contending with the reproductive chronicity that is integral to their daily lives." * Patricia Jeffery, Professor Emerita, University of Edinburgh



"The book draws on detailed ethnographic research and is rich with empirical details that are framed within larger debates on women's health, care, and state formation. The introduction immediately draws in the reader. It is a well-written and well-researched book." * Lipika Kamra, Jindal Global University



"This book is a critical account of how the sterilisation procedures fit into the life worlds of rural women...[It] powerfully demonstrates that care is temporary while suffering continues." ? Social Anthropology