This article is Part II in a series of articles wherein I explore teenage pregnancy and young motherhood in the context of HIV, specifically the ways in which young mothers interact with their families beyond pregnancy and into young motherhood. In the anecdotes below, some teenagers highlight reasons why their families help with childcare. Many…
Category: Gender, Sex, Relationships
Young Motherhood and Familial Care (Part I)
This article is Part I in a series of articles wherein I explore teenage pregnancy and young motherhood in the context of HIV, specifically the ways in which young mothers interact with their families beyond pregnancy and into young motherhood. The experiences I describe herein are based on my ethnographic fieldwork with teenagers and young…
A Different Gaze
Foucault was a French philosopher known for his interrogation of knowledge and structures of power. In Birth of the Clinic (1973) he described how the medical gaze arose from 18th-century dissection, which exposed ‘what for centuries had remained below the threshold of the visible and expressible’ developing further through 19th-century pathological anatomy, which reduced…
“A Hallowed Institution”: The Bordel Militaire de Campagne (Mobile Field Brothels) and the Making of Military Prostitution in France Following World War One
Reflecting on the French system of military prostitution known as Bordels Militaires de Campagne (BMC, Mobile Field Brothels) during the First World War, Dr. Léon Bizard wrote in his memoirs (1925): It was a mêlée, a hard, dangerous, and disgusting business. Fifty, sixty, up to a hundred men of all colors and races to relieve…
Fertility and Consent in Machiavelli’s Writing
Today Machiavelli is known almost exclusively as a political thinker, but to his contemporaries he was also an expert on herbs and poisons. Though his medicinal writings no longer exist, Machiavelli is cited twice in 16th-century manuals as an expert on spider poison. Likely, he would have been extremely familiar with the early modern…
Calories: The measure of nurture
The date was October 28, 1935. The night could have been peaceful and relaxing for 26-year-old Fukuda Katsu living in Tokyo if her husband did not complain about dinner. After quibbling about her cooking of rice, he rebuked Katsu for lack of knowledge: “You are too indifferent about calories.” His words were like a slap…
Colonial Lit(t)eraria: Topographies of Purity and Pollution on the Bank of the Ganga
Is there a link between the histories of the sanitation of the Hooghly and the formation of a discourse of sanitary womanhood in colonial Calcutta? The river in question, Hooghly or Ganga, was the epitome of pollution for the British while being synonymous with purity for the colonized Hindu. The historian Pratik Chakrabarti makes an…
Black and Beautiful, Smoke and Mirrors: The Freed One’s Granddaughter Wears a Crown
Facing down the barrel at the end of my reproductive year, the advent of menopause amplified my embodied differences.
Abortion in Surreal Times: Obstacles for the Youngest Patients in a Post-Roe World
“Our first patient is 11-years-old.” That’s the first thing I heard when I walked into clinic the last week of June. It was a few days after the Dobbs decision and the beginning of a new era in the U.S.: Roe v. Wade had been overturned—the constitutional right to abortion had been revoked. In California,…
Echoing Women from Sarah Parton’s “Ruth Hall”: Croup Cough and Sound Intuition in the 19C and Today
My toddler’s cough wakes me in the night — the sound has a quick attack, starting like a bark, and an abrupt end, like a choke — triggering my adrenaline. This gasp in the dark warrants a call to the pediatrician’s office. I rush into his room to get him to sit up and drink…