
State Intimacies
Sterilization, Care and Reproductive Chronicity in Rural North India
Eva Fiks(Author)
Berghahn Books (Publisher)
Published on 1. April 2024
Book
Hardback
242 pages
978-1-80539-464-8 (ISBN)
Description
The public healthcare system in rural India is chronically under-resourced. It embodies and often perpetuates the wider politics of the Indian state towards its rural communities with provisions of care that are deeply entangled with violence and disgust. For rural women, such care deepens reproductive chronicity while providing temporary relief. Grounded in women's everyday realities and experiences in sterilization camps and other healthcare settings in rural Rajasthan, State Intimacies examines the mundane workings, ambiguities and fragilities of care in post-colonial rural North India.
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
More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Oxford
United Kingdom
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Product notice
Library binding
Illustrations
Bibliography; Index; 22 Illustrations
Dimensions
Height: 235 mm
Width: 157 mm
Thickness: 18 mm
Weight
507 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-80539-464-8 (9781805394648)
DOI
10.3167/9781805394648
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions

E-Book
04/2024
1st Edition
Berghahn Books
€24.49
Available for download

E-Book
04/2024
1st Edition
Berghahn Books
€24.49
Available for download
Person
Eva Fiks is a Lecturer in Medical Anthropology at Keele University, United Kingdom. Her work on reproduction, biomedicine, care and the state in North India has been published in Ethnos, Medical Anthropology, Anthropology & Medicine, Anthropology Today and Medical Anthropology Quarterly.
Content
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Notes on Transliteration
List of Abbreviations
List of Characters
Map
Introduction
Chapter 1. The Camp
Chapter 2. The Laparoscope
Chapter 3. The Motivators
Chapter 4. Jugad
Chapter 5. Reproductive Chronicity
Chapter 6. Hierarchy Work
Conclusion
Glossary
References
Index
Acknowledgements
Notes on Transliteration
List of Abbreviations
List of Characters
Map
Introduction
Chapter 1. The Camp
Chapter 2. The Laparoscope
Chapter 3. The Motivators
Chapter 4. Jugad
Chapter 5. Reproductive Chronicity
Chapter 6. Hierarchy Work
Conclusion
Glossary
References
Index