Can I read No Alternative : Childbirth, Citizenship, and Indigenous Culture in Mexico on EtoBox?

No Alternative : Childbirth, Citizenship, and Indigenous Culture in Mexico by Rosalynn A. Vega is a nonfiction available to read on EtoBox.

What is No Alternative : Childbirth, Citizenship, and Indigenous Culture in Mexico about?

Recent anthropological scholarship on "new midwifery" centers on how professional midwives in various countries are helping women reconnect with "nature," teaching them to trust in their bodies, respecting women's "choices," and fighting for women's right to birth as naturally as possible. In No Alternative , Rosalynn A. Vega uses ethnographic accounts of natural birth practices in Mexico to complicate these narratives about new midwifery and illuminate larger questions of female empowerment, citizenship, and the commodification of indigenous culture, by showing how alternative birth actually reinscribes traditional racial and gender hierarchies. Vega contrasts the vastly different birthing experiences of upper-class and indigenous Mexican women. Upper-class women often travel to birthing centers to be delivered by professional midwives whose methods are adopted from and represented as indigenous culture, while indigenous women from those same cultures are often forced by lack of resources to use government hospitals regardless of their preferred birthing method. Vega demonstrates that women's empowerment, having a "choice," is a privilege of those capable of paying for private me

Who reads No Alternative : Childbirth, Citizenship, and Indigenous Culture in Mexico?

Author

Rosalynn A. Vega

Publisher

University of Texas Press

Published

2018

Language

EN

ISBN

9781477316788

Category

nonfiction

Subjects

History, Medical, Anthropology