Risk, Reproduction, and Narratives of Experience

As Carole Browner explains in her foreword: "These chapters compellingly reveal that although we anthropologists tend to speak of biomedicine in hegemonic terms, in fact its penetration is quite variable and often ambivalently met. . . . Risk, Reproduction, and Narratives of Experience sheds new light on a troubling core aspect of medicalization processes, which simultaneously render pregnant women more docile subjects even as they are impelled to actively engage with biomedicalized prenatal care regimes. . . . We also see that a consummate means by which states seek to consolidate power in the reproductive realm is through expansion of the biomedical concept of risk. This critical observation emerges repeatedly in this collection."

Lauren Fordyce is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Bucknell University.

Amínata Maraesa is Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at Hunter College of the City University of New York and the Department of Latin American and Puerto Rican Studies at Lehman College of the City University of New York.