Full Description
This book provides a detailed, intimate portrait of a community of women living in a shantytown (favela) in northeastern Brazil, while exploring the complex interplay between gender, sexuality, power, and disease. It reveals how poor Brasileiras are constrained by dominant cultural constructions of female sexuality as a dangerous force that must be controlled by men; yet these women also manipulate these expectations by using their sexuality as a means to secure economic support from men. The book argues that these constructions affect their interpretations of medical discourse on the prevention of cervical cancer. Since women view sex as both a force they can't control and as a necessary tool for their survival, they choose to de-emphasize medical warnings against risky sexual behavior, with grave consequences for their health. The text is threaded with poignant, humorous, sometimes graphic, and always memorable depictions of the women's lives in the shantytowns, making this serious anthropological study a highly readable one as well.
Contents
1. Introduction: Culture, Gender, and Ethnography 2. The Ilha: Life in a Brazilian Shantytown 14 3. "A Woman Has to Stay in the House": Gender and Sexuality in the Ilha 27 4. Sexuality and Risk: Biomedical Constructions of Brasileira Sexuality 40 5. Sexuality as Survival: Favelada Constructions of Women's Sexuality 55 6. Expedient Boundaries: Security and Agency in the Ilha 76 7. Rearranging Risk: Local Understandings of the Pap Smear 89 8. "I've Eaten so Many Good Men SinceYou Left": Liberdade, Resistance, and Ambivalence in the Ilha 97 9. "You Get it if You Go out Looking for a Man": Cervical Cancer and Stigma 118 10. Living with Inflammation, Dying from Cancer, and Curing an Incurable Disease 135 11. Some Survivors 156 Appendix One: Methodology 160 Appendix Two: Economic Data for the Sample of Women with Cancer 163 Appendix Three: Impact of Screening Services on Cervical Cancer Morbidity and Mortality 165 Appendix Four: Nonbiomedical Forms of Healing. 169 Notes 177 Works Cited 193 Index 205
