Doctoral Dissertation Grant: An Enthnography of Biomedicines, Bodies, and Pharmaceuticals

Cornell University, Ithaca NY

Investigators

Abstract

This project will examine the role of changing values in translating and adopting reproductive technologies in a community with low fertility and a high demand for women's labor. In examining a medicine that customizes, predicts, regulates, and restores menstrual cycles, this research will re-examine a reproductive technology beyond its definition as birth control. This is important study to do in order to understand the social and cultural factors of a drug being adopted to bio-medically discipline bodies. The study will be of interest to clinicians, physicians, users and policymakers to understand the different needs and values of communities in the adoption of pharmaceutical pills for regulating fertility. Using a multi-sited research strategy, this project brings together an ethnographic analysis of women's daily lives in urban communities with research on how doctors, pharmaceutical actors, family planners, and women's interest groups construct the pill as a medical object. This research links the pill's uptake to the broader processes of pharmaceuticalization that have both promoted the pill's uses as a lifestyle drug and constructed it as a medicine that corrects for the compromised health of women's reproductive systems. It examines the co-production of women's new social identities as workers and new medicalized discourses on their bodies. These discourses extend theoretical interest in STS on materiality and technoscientific objects to a broader investigation of global biomedicine(s), reproduction, and pharmaceuticals. This project will elucidate how local understandings of medicine, the state's reproductive needs and pharmaceutical efforts to transform well-being into a commodity are shaping, extending and limiting a reproductive technology.