National healths
Subtitle: gender, sexuality and health in a cross-cultural context
By: edited by Michael Worton and Nana Wilson-Tagoe.
Contributors: Worton, Michael, 1951-; Wilson-Tagoe, Nana.
Publisher: UCL; Cavendish Pub.
Published: 2004
Place of publication: London; Portland, Or
Language: eng
Number of pages: 232
Subjects: Medical anthropology; Diseases -- Cross-cultural studies; Health -- Cross-cultural studies; Sex -- Health aspects; Body, Human -- Social aspects; Body image
Genres: Cross-cultural studies.
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 healthcare." "The wide-ranging introduction provides a historical and theoretical framework for what is defined here as Cultural Medicine, whilst 15 original essays demonstrate from different perspectives that health is not merely a physiological and medical issue, but also a cultural and ethical one." "This book 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."--Jacket.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: PART I: THE POLITICS OF SICKNESS AND HEALTH; title: Female genital mutilation: contesting the right to speak of women's bodies in Africa and the West -- Nahid Toubia; title: Albanian masculinities, sex-work and migration: homosexuality, AIDS and other moral threats -- Nicola Mai; title: The semantics and politics of childbearing and motherhood in contemporary African literature -- Nana Wilson-Tagoe; title: What difference did empire make? Sex, gender and sanitary reform in the British Empire -- Philippa Levine; title: Dangerous blood: mensturation, medicine and myth in early modern England -- Margaret Healy -- PART II: THE REPRESENTATION OF SICKNESS AND HEALTH; title: Remembrance of health lost: dis/figuring Africa in European AIDS writing -- James N. Agar; title: Vulnerable margins: the iconography of blood, dirt and disease in the early twentieth-century South African settler novel -- Lynda Morgan; title: Sex in a hot climate: moral degeneracy and erotic excess in The story of Jan Daraa -- Rachel Harrison; title: Some fundamental riddles of cholera: sex, sodomy and representations of the fundament -- George S. Rousseau; title: Behold the (sick) man -- Michael Worton -- PART III: LEARNING FROM SICKNESS AND HEALTH; title: Infectious social change: tuberculosis and exile among Tibetan refugees in Dharamsala -- Audrey Prost; title: Angry women and the evolution of Chinese medicine -- Shigehisa Kuriyama; title: Reading gender in ancient Egyptian healing Papyri -- Stephen Quirke; title: René and the 'Mal du Siècle': a literary role model for the negotiation of problematic sexual identity in nineteenth-century Europe - the case of Custine and Amiel -- Caroline Warman; title: Poetry, pictures and the sexual demographics of health -- Deborah Kirklin.