The Woman in the Body: A Cultural Analysis of Reproduction by Emily Martin Beacon Press, 1987 Paperback, 276 pp $1195 Winner of the 1988 Eileen Basker Memorial Prize As anthropology at its best can do, this book exposes hidden cultural assumptions about the nature of reality Martin has produced a powerful study of the dialectic between medical metaphors for women's reproductive processes and women's own views of those processes She and her associates interviewed 165 white and black women, seeking a balance between the three life stages of puberty, childbearing, and menopause 43% of her interviewees were working-class; 57% middleclass Early on Martin came up against one of the greatest dangers of studying one's own society Hearing women discuss uterine contractions as separate from the self and labor as something one "went through," and reading the same in medical texts, she at first thought that her interviews had turned up views of the body that simply reflected actual scientific fact It took her some time to realize that such scientific views are not "fact" but culturally grounded statements of an underlying ideology To get at this ideology Martin studied medical texts for the "grammar" that scientific medicine uses to describe female bodies In this medical grammar, she finds industrial society writ small The female reproductive tract is a machine designed to produce a baby; accordingly, menstruation represents failed production, connoting both a productive system that has failed to produce and one that produces only useless waste Such metaphors, disturbing to a society whose existence depends upon continued production, lead to menstruation's description in medical texts in highly negative terms: The fall in blood progesterone and estrogen, which results from regression of the corpus luteum, deprives the highly developed endometrial lining of its hormonal support    Disintegration starts    The endometrial arteries dilate, resulting in hemorrhage through the weakened capillary walls; the menstrual flow consists of this blood mixed with endometrial debris    (quoted on p 48) (Martin contrasts this with a description of male reproductive physiology which speaks of the "remarkable" cellular transformation from spermatid to mature sperm, its "amazing" nature and "sheer magnitude") Confronting the argument that the above is not value-laden but simply a factual description of menstruation, Martin examines medical descriptions of the analogous regular shedding and replacement of the lining of the stomach, finding in a number of texts no references to degeneration, but instead a stress on the periodic "renewal" of the stomach lining Concluding that writers can choose to depict what happens to the lining of stomachs and uteruses either negatively as breakdown and decay or positively as continual production and replenishment, Martin suggests an alternative medical description of menstruation: A drop in the formerly high levels of progesterone and estrogen creates the appropriate environment for reducing the excess layers of endometrial tissue Constriction of capillary blood vessels causes a lower level of oxygen and nutrients and paves the way for a vigorous production of menstrual fluids    Such a description would far more accurately reflect women's own more positive assessments of the menstrual fluid as the desired product Viewing pregnancy as the sole purpose of female reproductive organs and despising menstruation as a "waste" ignores the reality that most women do not intend to get pregnant most of the time (and so are often joyful when menstruation begins), and conceals "the true unity women have    [Menstruation is] the one thing we all share" (p 112) In spite of ambivalence about the "disgusting mess," most interviewees felt that menstruation defines them as women and insisted that they wouldn't want to give it up Teens spoke of the joy of getting their periods so they could be part of the in-group that shared the women's "special secret," of mothers and sisters greeting their first menstruation with "You're a woman now! …

The Woman in the Body: A Cultural Analysis of Reproduction

HALL, Stuart. A identidade cultural na pos-modernidade. Traducao: Tomaz Tadeu da Silva, Guaracira Lopes Louro. 4. ed. Rio de Janeiro: DP&A. 2000. 102 p.

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A identidade cultural na pós-modernidade

Remaking the nation: place, identity and politics in Latin America

In this research, we evaluate the response of Brazilian consumers to corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives accompanied by a price increase. We demonstrate that the extent to which Brazilian consumers perceive a company to be socially responsible (i.e., their CSR perceptions) is related to both the basic transactional outcome of purchase intentions as well as two relational outcomes: the likelihood to switch to a competitor and to complain about the CSR-based price increase. More interestingly, we find that these relationships are jointly mediated by the consumers’ perceptions of price fairness and feelings of personal satisfaction. Perhaps most interesting, we find that these mediating effects vary with consumer purchasing power; the mediating effect of price fairness on purchase intention is stronger for lower income than for higher income consumers, whereas the mediating effects of personal satisfaction on switching and complaining intentions are stronger for higher income than for lower income consumers.

Consumer Reactions to CSR: A Brazilian Perspective.

The ‘everyday’ of banal nationalism – ordinary people’s views on Italy and Italian

This article examines the socio‐historical effects of the intersection of representations of gender, race, and the nation which determine black Brazilian women's subaltern social position and inform their self‐representations. This intersection is presented from two perspectives: analysis of quantitative data and a case study. Through the examination of socio‐economic data on black women participation in the labour market, it show that, when compared with white women and black men, black women are unequally concentrated in certain low paid jobs in the service industry, such as for instance domestic work. Through a brief case study, basically interviews with women from different colours and social classes — i.e. domestic workers and their employers — it shows how the particularities of domestic work inform black women's race and gender self‐definitions.

Linking gender, class and race in Brazil1

In this article, I examine how stereotypes are deployed in the process of experiencing national identities. Specifically, I analyse how a group of Brazilian academics who have studied in Europe and the United States have dealt with stereotypical notions of Brazilians as “warm people” who establish friendship “easily.” Ideas about a “greater emotionality,” which were often seen as negative from a European colonial perspective, are embraced and re-signified by them as a positive feature of Brazilian national identity, particularly when compared to the supposed “closed nature” of some Europeans. I argue therefore that the presence of such stereotypes contributes to reinforce a subjective sense of Brazilianess and also reveals the negotiations of power relations in the process of elaborating Brazilian national identity.

Stereotypes and National Identity: Experiencing the “Emotional Brazilian”

Este artigo analisa o modo como a gestacao e tratada na Revista da Gestante - em particular a visao de um processo que pode ser em grande parte controlado pela gestante. Nessa publicacao as reportagens fornecem, atraves de um discurso prescritivo, "dicas" para uma gravidez "tranquila e feliz". O foco das materias e a percepcao de uma natureza emotiva a gravidez, durante a qual os sentimentos de medo e ansiedade seriam recorrentes. Atraves da analise dos sentimentos tematizados, destaco uma visao da gestante como agente autonomo e relativamente isolada do seu circulo social, a nao ser pela estreita relacao com os especialistas medicos. Consequentemente, o problema do controle de si e das emocoes, tema caro as sociedades ocidentais modernas, torna-se uma questao para a gestante.

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Um estado emotivo: representação da gravidez na mídia

In this essay, I discuss the presence of the categories rudeness and offence in the discourse on friendship produced by a group of middle class English people resident in London. The frequent reference to these categories, rather than to the so called positive emotions, reveals the tensions regarding the negotiation of personal space which crosscut this discourse, which in turn highlight the problematic space that friendship occupies within the field of social relations. This essay draws on the analytical tools of a pragmatic approach within the area known as "anthropology of emotions", developed in the last decade in the Unites States. If at first emotion concepts were mainly studied cross-culturally, nowadays they are seen as discursive practices situated within the wider field of social relations and negotiations of power. As such, emotions cease to be treated as an internal, purely subjective experience, in order to be analysed as a discursive practice with external effects on both private and public spheres.

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Mágoas de amizade: um ensaio em antropologia das emoções

Neste trabalho, busco refletir sobre a centralidade do parto como projeto, presente em certos grupos de gestante e mesmo em politicas de humanizacao do parto. A partir de entrevistas com mulheres de camadas medias do Rio de Janeiro que esperavam seus primeiros filhos, discuto como este material constitui-se em uma narrativa, com comeco (o desejo de ter filhos e a concepcao), meio (a mudanca nos comportamentos e na relacao com outros) e fim (o parto antecipado). Examino quais elementos e fios condutores se destacam, quais atores sociais sao incorporados nestas historias e de que modo. Argumento que a gravidez pode ser vista como uma categoria cultural que informa a experiencia fisica e subjetiva da gestacao, articulada a nocoes de pessoa e genero. O material analisado sugere que a gravidez como um todo, incluindo o parto, se torna um projeto para as mulheres pesquisadas, tensionado entre nocoes de feminilidade e de maternidade.

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Claudia Barcellos Rezende

Papers

Linking gender, class and race in Brazil1

Stereotypes and National Identity: Experiencing the “Emotional Brazilian”

Um estado emotivo: representação da gravidez na mídia

Mágoas de amizade: um ensaio em antropologia das emoções

O parto em contexto: Narrativas da gravidez entre gestantes no Rio de Janeiro