Overview
The Cancer Within examines cervical cancer in Romania as a point of entry into an anthropological reflection on contemporary health care. Cervical cancer prevention reveals the inner workings of emerging post-communist medicine, which aligns the state and the market, public and private health care providers, policy makers, and ordinary women. Fashioned by patriarchal relations, lived religion, and the historical trauma of pronatalism, Romanian women's responses to reproductive medicine and cervical cancer prevention are complicated by neoliberal reforms to medical care. Cervical cancer prevention - and especially the HPV vaccination - provided Romanians a legitimate instance to express their conflicting views of post-communist medicine. What sets Romania apart is that pronatalism, patriarchy, lived religion, medical reforms, and moral contestation of preventive medicine bring into line systemic contingencies that expose the historical, social, and cultural trajectories of cervical cancer.
Full Product Details
Author: Cristina A. Pop
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Imprint: Rutgers University Press
Dimensions:
Width: 15.20cm
, Height: 2.00cm
, Length: 22.90cm
Weight: 0.458kg
ISBN: 9781978829596
ISBN 10: 1978829590
Pages: 228
Publication Date: 13 May 2022
Recommended Age: From 18 to 99 years
Audience:
College/higher education
,
College/higher education
,
Professional and scholarly
,
Tertiary & Higher Education
,
Tertiary & Higher Education
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: In Print
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Reviews
"""The Cancer Within is a compelling analysis of Romanian women’s resistance to cervical cancer screening and the HPV vaccine by a cultural 'insider.' In this wide-ranging and readable account, Pop reveals how Romanians’ reproductive lives and choices are profoundly shaped by the country’s violent history of reproductive governance under Ceausescu, as well as by inequities of health care delivery in the post-communist era."" -- Elise Andaya * author of Conceiving Cuba: Reproduction, Women, and the State in the Post-Soviet Era * ""Beautifully written and theoretically inspired, this vivid and pathbreaking ethnography shows how history continues to haunt Romanian women’s sexual and reproductive lives, and how post-socialist healthcare provides no panacea for a cervical cancer crisis and accompanying HPV vaccine hesitancy. The Cancer Within is a must-read for those interested in gender, sexuality, and reproductive health, as well as medicine in the post-socialist era."" -- Marcia Inhorn * author of America’s Arab Refugees: Vulnerability and Health on the Margins * ""The Cancer Within is a compelling analysis of Romanian women’s resistance to cervical cancer screening and the HPV vaccine by a cultural 'insider.' In this wide-ranging and readable account, Pop reveals how Romanians’ reproductive lives and choices are profoundly shaped by the country’s violent history of reproductive governance under Ceauşescu, as well as by inequities of health care delivery in the post-communist era."" -- Elise Andaya * author of Conceiving Cuba: Reproduction, Women, and the State in the Post-Soviet Era *"
The Cancer Within is a compelling analysis of Romanian women's resistance to cervical cancer screening and the HPV vaccine by a cultural 'insider.' In this wide-ranging and readable account, Pop reveals how Romanians' reproductive lives and choices are profoundly shaped by the country's violent history of reproductive governance under Ceausescu, as well as by inequities of health care delivery in the post-communist era. --Elise Andaya author of Conceiving Cuba: Reproduction, Women, and the State in the Post-Soviet Era
"“Pop carefully considers how the context of reproductive choice and medical intervention is not unique to this neighborhood in Romania. Rather, The Cancer Within offers a framework to consider the broad and shifting structural factors that shape how patients and doctors interact, how parents and grandparents advise their children and grandchildren, and how power dynamics relating to gender complicate the deceptively simple logic that individuals will make choices based on medically accepted notions of good health.”— Piper Sledge, Contemporary Sociology “The central thrust of the theoretical, ethnographic, and practical arguments of The Cancer Within culminate in an urgent call to holistically address Romania’s cervical cancer crisis: the country’s cancerous present cannot be understood – nor improved upon for the future – without confronting the embodied legacy of its communist past.”— Nina J. Francis-Levin, Anthropology Book Forum “Pop’s exposure of fiscal austerity is an especially noteworthy contribution of the book…[and her] evidence of the ramifications of health system oversight… alone is astounding.”— Gerard Weber, American Ethnologist ""Beautifully written and theoretically inspired, this vivid and pathbreaking ethnography shows how history continues to haunt Romanian women’s sexual and reproductive lives, and how post-socialist healthcare provides no panacea for a cervical cancer crisis and accompanying HPV vaccine hesitancy. The Cancer Within is a must-read for those interested in gender, sexuality, and reproductive health, as well as medicine in the post-socialist era.""— Marcia Inhorn, author of America’s Arab Refugees: Vulnerability and Health on the Margins “[The Cancer Within] challenges the idea of the ethnographer as an observer of distant realities, and it shows how deep and enlightening it can be to bring an ethnographic gaze to one’s context of origin…This is an important contribution that makes it possible to better understand not only Romania and its history but also the history of Europe, which is too often analyzed as a homogeneous and univocal whole.”— Cinzia Greco, Medical Anthropology Quarterly ""The Cancer Within is a compelling analysis of Romanian women’s resistance to cervical cancer screening and the HPV vaccine by a cultural 'insider.' In this wide-ranging and readable account, Pop reveals how Romanians’ reproductive lives and choices are profoundly shaped by the country’s violent history of reproductive governance under Ceauşescu, as well as by inequities of health care delivery in the post-communist era.""— Elise Andaya, author of Conceiving Cuba: Reproduction, Women, and the State in the Post-Soviet Era"
"""The Cancer Within is a compelling analysis of Romanian women's resistance to cervical cancer screening and the HPV vaccine by a cultural 'insider.' In this wide-ranging and readable account, Pop reveals how Romanians' reproductive lives and choices are profoundly shaped by the country's violent history of reproductive governance under Ceauşescu, as well as by inequities of health care delivery in the post-communist era.""--Elise Andaya ""author of Conceiving Cuba: Reproduction, Women, and the State in the Post-Soviet Era"" ""Beautifully written and theoretically inspired, this vivid and pathbreaking ethnography shows how history continues to haunt Romanian women's sexual and reproductive lives, and how post-socialist healthcare provides no panacea for a cervical cancer crisis and accompanying HPV vaccine hesitancy. The Cancer Within is a must-read for those interested in gender, sexuality, and reproductive health, as well as medicine in the post-socialist era.""--Marcia Inhorn ""author of America's Arab Refugees: Vulnerability and Health on the Margins"""
Author Information
CRISTINA A. POP is an assistant professor of medical anthropology at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska.
