Abstract of the Dissertation
“A Poor Woman’s Disease”: An Ethnography of Cervical Cancer and Global Health in Guatemala
by
Anita Chary
Doctor of Philosophy in Anthropology
Washington University in St. Louis, 2015
Professor Bradley Stoner, Chairperson
This dissertation explores the politics of care surrounding cervical cancer in Guatemala. Since the mid-2000s, a variety of Guatemalan and international actors and institutions involved in global health interventions and research have developed programs to prevent and treat the disease. Drawing on fifteen months of ethnographic research conducted in non-governmental organizations and Guatemala’s oncology referral hospital, I examine the structural and social forces that influence whether and how impoverished Guatemalan women access cervical cancer screening and treatment against the backdrop of an inadequate public health system. By tracing how these forces play out in women’s lives, I demonstrate that while institutions associated with global health—particularly non-governmental organizations—offer care to women, they provide aid in uneven and selective ways. I suggest that these organizations prioritize certain lives and certain types of interventions over others.
My analysis shows that care is structured by representations of particular people as being worthy of response and worthy of particular responses. I argue that global health donors and practitioners deem poor Guatemalan women worthy of intervention based on two dominant ways of viewing women within the context of global health. The first perspective values women as reproducers and caregivers who ensure the stability of society and future generations. The second focuses on women as rights-bearing subjects and seeks to alleviate their suffering in order to promote gender equality. These two approaches to women sometimes work in concert and sometimes in opposition, and are often at the heart of decisions to extend care to women as well as justifications about the type of care that is offered. Sentiments about helping women and children, associated with both approaches, can inspire a collective sense of progress among global health donors and practitioners in ways that obfuscate women’s disparate access to new resources associated with global health funding as well as the ongoing deterioration of public health systems. In these ways, the contemporary landscape of global health both offers apertures to and imposes strictures upon poor women seeking care.
“A Poor Woman’s Disease”: An Ethnography of Cervical Cancer and Global Health in Guatemala
by
Anita Chary
Doctor of Philosophy in Anthropology
Washington University in St. Louis, 2015
Professor Bradley Stoner, Chairperson
This dissertation explores the politics of care surrounding cervical cancer in Guatemala. Since the mid-2000s, a variety of Guatemalan and international actors and institutions involved in global health interventions and research have developed programs to prevent and treat the disease. Drawing on fifteen months of ethnographic research conducted in non-governmental organizations and Guatemala’s oncology referral hospital, I examine the structural and social forces that influence whether and how impoverished Guatemalan women access cervical cancer screening and treatment against the backdrop of an inadequate public health system. By tracing how these forces play out in women’s lives, I demonstrate that while institutions associated with global health—particularly non-governmental organizations—offer care to women, they provide aid in uneven and selective ways. I suggest that these organizations prioritize certain lives and certain types of interventions over others.
My analysis shows that care is structured by representations of particular people as being worthy of response and worthy of particular responses. I argue that global health donors and practitioners deem poor Guatemalan women worthy of intervention based on two dominant ways of viewing women within the context of global health. The first perspective values women as reproducers and caregivers who ensure the stability of society and future generations. The second focuses on women as rights-bearing subjects and seeks to alleviate their suffering in order to promote gender equality. These two approaches to women sometimes work in concert and sometimes in opposition, and are often at the heart of decisions to extend care to women as well as justifications about the type of care that is offered. Sentiments about helping women and children, associated with both approaches, can inspire a collective sense of progress among global health donors and practitioners in ways that obfuscate women’s disparate access to new resources associated with global health funding as well as the ongoing deterioration of public health systems. In these ways, the contemporary landscape of global health both offers apertures to and imposes strictures upon poor women seeking care.