"Long overdue . . . Hausman's focus on cultural representation rather than real mothers and practices is savvy and strategic in removing the debates from personal stories and investments to the ways in which this volatile topic becomes embedded in cultural values, language, and imagery."
---Alison Bartlett, University of Western Australia
Viral Mothers: Breastfeeding in the Age of HIV/AIDS addresses modern fears of dangerous motherhood, focusing on preoccupations with mothers' bodies as vectors for infection and contamination. The book examines how the maternal body is perceived as a conduit for disease, drugs, or contaminants that end up in the body of an innocent---and pure---infant. Paying special attention to HIV transmission through breastfeeding, Viral Mothers examines ideologies of maternal embodiment that influence public health protocols and mothers' behaviors worldwide.
The medical community has known since the late 1980s that HIV is passed through breast milk from infected mothers to their babies. In highly industrialized countries, HIV-positive mothers are advised not to breastfeed their babies, but in poor countries breastfeeding has continued to be a predominant and medically recommended practice as a partial solution to problems of infant health and welfare in resource-poor contexts. Now, in areas of high rates of HIV infection and high infant mortality, decisions concerning infant feeding are, literally, about life and death. Public health debates concerning breastfeeding and HIV transmission must consider both the mortality associated with not breastfeeding and the possibility of HIV infection from mother to child.
The transmission of HIV through breastfeeding is a medical and public health issue that touches on and augments contemporary concerns about bodies, germs, and the environment. These concerns affect all people around the globe as we struggle with the meanings of health, risk, and embodiment in modernity. Viral Mothers addresses and explores the dense cultural meanings evoked by mothers' postnatal transmission of HIV. In so doing, the book pays special attention to fears of contamination and contagion that emerge as consequences of a medicalizing modernity. The main themes of the book---risk, purity, denial, and choice---define the terms through which the viral mother is constituted in discourse and enacted publicly as a set of identifiable, culturally legible, concerns.
Bernice L. Hausman is Professor of English at Virginia Tech. She is also the author of Mother's Milk: Breastfeeding Controversies in American Culture.
Illustration: ©iStockphoto.com/timeless
"Have you taken your vitamins today?" That question echoes daily through American households. Thanks to intensive research in nutrition and medicine, the importance of vitamins to health is undisputed. But millions of Americans believe that the vitamins they get in their food are not enough. Vitamin supplements have become a multibillion-dollar industry. At the same time, many scientists, consumer advocacy groups, and the federal Food and Drug Administration doubt that most people need to take vitamin pills.
Vitamania tells how and why vitamins have become so important to so many Americans. Rima Apple examines the claims and counterclaims of scientists, manufacturers, retailers, politicians, and consumers from the discovery of vitamins in the early twentieth century to the present. She reveals the complicated interests--scientific, professional, financial--that have propelled the vitamin industry and its would-be regulators. From early advertisements linking motherhood and vitamin D, to Linus Pauling's claims for vitamin C, to recent congressional debates about restricting vitamin products, Apple's insightful history shows the ambivalence of Americans toward the authority of science. She also documents how consumers have insisted on their right to make their own decisions about their health and their vitamins.
Vitamania makes fascinating reading for anyone who takes--or refuses to take--vitamins. It will be of special interest to students, scholars, and professionals in public health, the biomedical sciences, history of medicine and science, twentieth-century history, nutrition, marketing, and consumer studies.
Winner of the Organization for the Study of Communication, Language, and Gender 2013 Outstanding Book Award
Winner of the 2013 Bonnie Ritter Book Award from the Feminist and Women's Division of the National Communication Association
The feminist women’s health movement of the 1960s and 1970s is credited with creating significant changes in the healthcare industry and bringing women’s health issues to public attention. Decades later, women’s health issues are more visible than ever before, but that visibility is made possible by a process of depoliticization
The Vulnerable Empowered Woman assesses the state of women’s healthcare today by analyzing popular media representations—television, print newspapers, websites, advertisements, blogs, and memoirs—in order to understand the ways in which breast cancer, postpartum depression, and cervical cancer are discussed in American public life. From narratives about prophylactic mastectomies to young girls receiving a vaccine for sexually transmitted disease, the representations of women’s health today form a single restrictive identity: the vulnerable empowered woman. This identity defuses feminist notions of collective empowerment and social change by drawing from both postfeminist and neoliberal ideologies. The woman is vulnerable because of her very femininity and is empowered not to change the world, but to choose from among a limited set of medical treatments.
The media’s depiction of the vulnerable empowered woman’s relationship with biomedicine promotes traditional gender roles and affirms women’s unquestioning reliance on medical science for empowerment. The book concludes with a call to repoliticize women’s health through narratives that can help us imagine women—and their relationship to medicine—differently.
READERS
Browse our collection.
PUBLISHERS
See BiblioVault's publisher services.
STUDENT SERVICES
Files for college accessibility offices.
UChicago Accessibility Resources
home | accessibility | search | about | contact us
BiblioVault ® 2001 - 2024
The University of Chicago Press