Full Description
In today's globalised world, it is increasingly important to understand the otherness of different societies and their beliefs, histories and practices. This book focuses on a burning cultural issue: how concepts and constructions of gender and sexuality impact upon health, medicine and healthcare. Starting from the premise that health is neither a universal nor a unitary concept, it offers a series of interdisciplinary analyses of what sickness and well-being have been, are and can be.
The originality of this book is its cross-cultural and trans-historical approach. Bringing together specially commissioned work by both major critical voices and young scholars in fields ranging from anthropology and art history to philosophy, political science and sociology, this volume challenges many traditional assumptions about gender, medicine and health-care. Issues addressed include: the politics and realities of female genital mutilation; sex-work and migration; the portrayal of mothering in contemporary African writing; the representation of AIDS in literature, photography and the media; the place of gender in ancient Egyptian health papyri; the dramatisation of morality and sexual over-indulgence in Thai literature; the relationship between myths of menstruation and power in early modern England; the role of anger in traditional Chinese medicine; and the ways in which both disease and sexual identities were redefined by cholera in the nineteenth century.
The wide-ranging Introduction provides a historical and theoretical framework for what is defined here as Cultural Medicine, whilst fifteen original essays demonstrate from different perspectives that health is not merely a physiological and medical issue, but also a cultural and ethical one.
An invaluable research and study resource, this book is written in a clear and accessible style and will be of interest to the general reader as well as to students of all levels, to teachers of a wide range of disciplines, and to specialist researchers of cultural studies and of medicine.
Contents
Introduction, Michael Worton; chapterover Overview, Nana Wilson-Tagoe; Part 1 The Politics of Sickness and Health; Chapter 1 Female Genital Mutilation, Nahid Toubia; Chapter 2 Albanian Masculinities, Sex-Work and Migration, Nicola Mai; Chapter 3 The Semantics and Politics of Childbearing and Motherhood in Contemporary African Literature, Nana Wilson-Tagoe; Chapter 4 1This essay owes much to the research undertaken in the writing of Prostitution, Race and Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire (2003). Fuller versions of the arguments made here can be found in that volume., Philippa Levine; Chapter 5 Dangerous Blood, Margaret Healy; Part 2 The Representation of Sickness and Health; Chapter 6 Remembrance of Health Lost, James N Agar; Chapter 7 Vulnerable Margins, Lynda Morgan; Chapter 8 Sex in a Hot Climate, Rachel Harrison; Chapter 9 Some Fundamental Riddles of Cholera, George S Rousseau; Chapter 10 Behold the (Sick) Man, Michael Worton; Part 3 Learning from Sickness and Health; Chapter 11 Infectious Social Change, Audrey Prost; Chapter 12 1Grateful acknowledgment is due to the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation, which supported the research for this chapter, and to Dr Li Jianmin, from whose help and advice I have benefited in countless ways., Shigehisa Kuriyama; Chapter 13 Reading Gender in Ancient Egyptian Healing Papyri, Stephen Quirke; Chapter 14 René and the 'Mal du Siècle', Caroline Warman; Chapter 15 Poetry, Pictures and the Sexual Demographics of Health, Deborah Kirklin;
