E1. Women’s Health in Global Perspective Chair: Vincenza Mazzeo, Johns Hopkins University
Sarah Duff, Colby College: “I am also oppad again”: Histories of Menopause in the Nineteenth-Century Cape Colony
Prinisha Badassy, University of the Witwatersrand: “I am not a train for Glasgow”: Medico-legal Discourses of Puerperal Insanity and Infanticide in Colonial Natal, 1890-1920
Brooke LeFevre, Baylor University: "'Evidently a Case of Extra-Uterine Pregnancy’: Analyzing Race, Class, and Queerness in the Cincinnati Hospital Obstetrics Ward, 1878-1881”
To paraphrase Utathya Chattopadhyaya, research frameworks in which certain ideas and practices transition in and out of the status ‘medicine’ can risk reifying ‘medicalization’ as a concept. Tracking processes of medicalization in colonial settings have certainly helped to reveal key political and social impacts of biomedical diagnostic and treatment regimes in the global south, demonstrating how they have risen to dominance. Empirical cases also necessarily speak to the unevenness of their spread and the limits of their legitimation, across diverse lifeworlds in settings of inequality, resistance and neglect. The papers in this panel highlight four different case studies showing medicalization in South Africa as dynamic and contingent. In South Africa, quests for wellbeing have long involved multiple sites of knowledge-making, shaped by racial and economic formations of power and by cultures of formal and informal provisions of care and control. The authors here consider how institutions of the family, the courts, the laboratory/field, the clinic – and how different communicative forms – shaped expert, moral and relational pursuits of being well. These accounts, based on rich and diverse archival materials, help to unsettle and nuance approaches to medical histories in colonial contexts.
