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Issues of sexuality and gender are hotly contested in both religious communities and national cultures around the world. In the social sciences, religious traditions are often depicted as inherently conservative or even reactionary in their commitments to powerful patriarchal and pronatalist sexual norms and gender categories. In illuminating the practices of religious traditions in various cultures, these essays expose the diversity of religious rituals and mythologies pertaining to sexuality. In the process the contributors challenge conventional notions of what is normative in our sexual lives.
Long-acting and reversible contraceptives, such as Norplant and Depo-Provera, have been praised as highly effective, moderately priced, and generally safe. Yet, as this book argues, the very qualities that make these contraceptives an important alternative for individual choice in family planning also make them a potential tool of coercive social policy. For example, policymakers have linked their use to welfare benefits, and judges, to probation agreements. In this book, authors from the fields of medicine, ethics, law, and the social sciences probe the unique and vexing ethical and policy issues raised by long-acting contraception. The book offers comprehensive ethical guidelines for healt...
Feminist Theory Reader is an anthology of classic and contemporary works of feminist theory, organized around the goal of providing both local and global perspectives.
Most Americans assume that the United States provides a gold standard for human rights—a 2007 survey found that 80 percent of U.S. adults believed that "the U.S. does a better job than most countries when it comes to protecting human rights." As well, discussions among scholars and public officials in the United States frame human rights issues as concerning people, policies, or practices "over there." By contrast, the contributors to this volume argue that many of the greatest immediate and structural threats to human rights, and some of the most significant efforts to realize human rights in practice, can be found in our own backyard. Human Rights in Our Own Backyard examines the state o...
Most Americans would be surprised to learn that their government has declined to join most other nations in UN treaties addressing inadequate housing, poverty, children's rights, health care, racial discrimination, and migrant workers. Yet this book documents how the U.S. has, for decades, declined to ratify widely accepted treaties on these and many other basic human rights. Providing the first comprehensive topical survey, the contributors build a case and specific agendas for the nation to change course and join the world community as a protector of human rights.
Memoirs of Wenner-Gren Foundation anthropological conferences by the former president of the foundation. Visit our website for sample chapters!
This critical collection engages many of the health problems of greatest concern to most African women today: death during pregnancy and the need for assistance in childbirth; the spread of the AIDS epidemic; mental illness and domestic violence, which appears to be increasing along with civil unrest and war; the persistence of harmful practices such as female genital mutilation; and the impact of structural adjustment programmes on health and access to health care.
"This book introduces a practice based and contextually sensitive approach to studying lived religion, employing cases from diverse disciplines, locations, and traditions and providing accessible guides to students and novice researchers eager to begin their own exploration of religious and spiritual practices"--
Hippocrates' Woman demonstrates the role of Hippocratic ideas about the female body in the subsequent history of western gynaecology. It examines these ideas not only in the social and cultural context in which they were first produced, but also the ways in which writers up to the Victorian period have appealed to the material in support of their own theories. Among the conflicting tange of images of women given in the Hippocratic corpus existed one tradition of the female body which says it is radically unlike the male body, behaving in different ways and requiring a different set of therapies. This book sets this model within the context of Greek mythology, especially the myth of Pandora and her difference from men, to explore the image of the body as something to be read. Hippocrates' Woman presents an arresting study of the origins of gynaecology, an exploration of how the interior workings of the female body were understood and the influence of Hippocrates' theories on the gynaecology of subsequent ages.
Ranging in time and locale, these essays, which combine theoretical argument with empirical observation, are based on research in historical and cultural settings. The contributors accept the notion that all knowledge is socially and culturally constructed and examine the contexts in which that knowledge is produced and practiced in medicine, psychiatry, epidemiology, and anthropology. -- from publisher description.