Fwd: Sussex seminar Univ of Sx - Tues 14 Feb 1pm "experiences of breast cancer among middle class women in Mumbai, India"

[Chris]

forwarding for wider info - please pass on as you wish - keep well 
and warm - Chris
< with apologies if cross-posted>

>NGender: postgraduate seminar series in gender studies.
>
>Tuesday 14th Feb at 1.00 in Silverstone Building, University of 
>Sussex, Flamer, Brighton, Room 317.
>
>All welcome!
>
>Details of the paper below:
>
>
>Alison Macdonald
>Department of Anthropology, UCL
>Chair: Ana Porroche
>Seeing the self as subject: experiences of breast cancer among 
>middle class women in Mumbai, India
>This paper considers experiences of breast cancer survivorship among 
>urban middle class women in India.The experiences of these women, 
>who make up a small and marginal community of breast cancer charity 
>volunteers, describe particularly painful moral struggles initiated 
>through the trauma of breast cancer. These struggles, located within 
>the "familial body" (Cohen 1998), centre upon gendered ideals of 
>self sacrifice as a key modality through which being a "good" mother 
>and "virtuous" wife is realised yet this also forms the impetus for 
>internal ethical deliberations in which 'relationality' is reworked 
>and a 'subjecthood' revealed and cultivated. The paper attempts to 
>go beyond an analysis of structure and agency whereby such 
>experiences could be perceived as acts of resistance or solely 
>instances of agency, and instead considers how such ethical 
>reckonings of personhood are being described at a level of 
>conducting ideas about the 'who am I' (Humphrey 2008) in the context 
>of post coloniality and social change. The paper situates such 
>struggles in the wider social milieu of middle class urban India, 
>where emergent ideas concerning 'self-care' and healthy living, 
>ideals of the 'modern' and 'new' Indian woman (Sunder Rajan 1993; 
>Thapan 2009) are transforming more 'traditional' sites of self 
>making, such as motherhood (Donner 2009) and the family (Cohen 1998) 
>and creating novel modes through which to self-craft modern selves.
>Biography:
>Doctoral candidate in Social Anthropology; Supervised by Dr Sahra 
>Gibbon & Dr Rebecca Empson; Funded by an Economic and Social 
>Research Council (ESRC) Studentship; Masters of Research in 
>Anthropology; University College London, 2008; Funded by UCL 
>Graduate School grant & departmental research bursary; BSc 
>Anthropology; University College London, 2007
>Current Research:
>'Selves as subjects and therapeutic socialites: experiences of 
>breast cancer in middle class urban India'
>My current PhD research, compromising 18 months fieldwork in Mumbai 
>seeks to explore how experiences of breast cancer among middle class 
>breast cancer survivors and cancer charity volunteers, produces 
>certain kinds of subjectivities that are intersected by specific 
>conceptualisations of self, gender and Hindu spirituality. At the 
>same time, the thesis attempts to outline how these emergent selves 
>may be linked to the mobilisation of collective group identities and 
>produce varieties of 'biosocial' practices and possible 
>'therapeutic' relations within the wider charitable and biomedical 
>milieu of India.
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