Marked Women

Rebecca G. Martínez is Assistant Professor of Women's and Gender Studies at the University of Missouri.

"Marked Women provides insights that only an extended ethnographic engagement can offer. Rebecca Martínez captures the consistent and yet changing political landscape of poverty, class, and race that frames Venezuelan women's lives and health. A must read for anyone interested in Latin America, medical anthropology, neoliberalism, and the social determinants of health."—Leo R. Chavez, author of The Latino Threat: Constructing Immigrants, Citizens, and the Nation "Marked Women is richly detailed and lucidly written. Rebecca Martínez masterfully develops her arguments with honesty and great compassion, situating her analyses at the intersections of disease, sexuality, morality, and citizenship. Her insights into the disparate power dynamics responsible for the persistent stigmatizing of cervical cancer in Venezuela provide new, much-needed perspectives on this tragic global health phenomenon."—Carole H. Browner, University of California, Los Angeles "Rebecca Martínez's remarkable ethnographic eye and ear discern how pathologies of public health infrastructures and professional socialization inscribe gender and class stereotypes not only on bodies but on popular perceptions of poor women and the cervical cancers that too often kill them."—Clara Mantini-Briggs, co-author of Stories in the Time of Cholera: Racial Profiling during a Medical Nightmare "In this excellent work of feminist medical anthropology, Martínez (women's and gender studies, Univ. of Missouri) focuses on the ways neoliberalism has affected health care in Venezuela....The transcriptions of the patients' responses are informative, disturbing, and often upsetting, but their articulation of their feelings draws readers into their narratives. They are not just ethnographic material but real women with real lives. The book is appropriate for upper-division undergraduate and graduate courses in gender studies, anthropology, and Latin American studies."—H. Aquino, CHOICE "Martínez presents an ethnography of cervical cancer that powerfully analyses biomedical and public health practice first in the neoliberal context of the 1990s and then in the socialism of Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro...This reader very much hopes that Martínez continues her work, particularly at this historical moment of intense political and humanitarian crisis in Venezuela."––Tita Chico, The Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory

• Introduction: Caracas, Venezuela: On Arrival1. Hospitals, Patients, and Doctors2. The Ambiguities of Risk: Morality, Hygiene, and the "Other"3. Targeting Women: Bodies out of "Control," Public Health, and the Body Politic4. The Hospital Encounter: Bodies Marked, Mended, and Manipulated5. Women's Agency and Resilience: "They Way I Want to Be Treated"Epilogue: From Neoliberalism to Chávez