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Even childbirth is affected by globalization-and in India, as elsewhere, the trend is away from home births, assisted by midwives, toward hospital births with increasing reliance on new technologies. And yet, as this work of critical feminist ethnography clearly demonstrates, the global spread of biomedical models of childbirth has not brought forth one monolithic form of \"modern birth.\" Focusing on the birth experiences of lower-class women in the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu,Birth on the Thresholdreveals the complex and unique ways in which modernity emerges in local contexts. Through vivid description and animated dialogue, this book conveys the birth stories of the women of Tamil Nadu in their own voices, emphasizing their critiques of and aspirations for modern births today. In light of these stories, author Cecilia Van Hollen explores larger questions about how the structures of colonialism and postcolonial international and national development have helped to shape the form and meaning of birth for Indian women today. Ultimately, her book poses the question: How is gender-especially maternity-reconfigured as birth is transformed?

Birth in the Age of AIDS is a vivid and poignant portrayal of the experiences of HIV-positive women in India during pregnancy, birth, and motherhood at the beginning of the 21st century. The government of India, together with global health organizations, established an important public health initiative to prevent HIV transmission from mother to child. While this program, which targets poor women attending public maternity hospitals, has improved health outcomes for infants, it has resulted in sometimes devastatingly negative consequences for poor, young mothers because these women are being tested for HIV in far greater numbers than their male spouses and are often blamed for bringing this highly stigmatized disease into the family. Based on research conducted by the author in India, this book chronicles the experiences of women from the point of their decisions about whether to accept HIV testing, through their decisions about whether or not to continue with the birth if they test HIV-positive, their birthing experiences in hospitals, decisions and practices surrounding breast-feeding vs. bottle-feeding, and their hopes and fears for the future of their children.

Drawing on the seminal theoretical work on stigma by Goffman, this article analyzes stigma through the lens of Parker and Aggleton, who call for the joining of Goffman and Foucault to better grasp relationships among stigma, power and social inequality. Studies on the social impact of HIV/AIDS globally have demonstrated that women tend to be blamed for the spread of HIV/AIDS, and as a result, HIV-positive women face greater stigma and discrimination than HIV-positive men. Based on ethnographic research among 50 HIV-positive women in South India in 2002–2003 and 2004, my research supports this standard argument. However, my findings suggest that the gendering of stigma and discrimination is more complex and context specific. The gendering of stigma varies depending on the social context of private versus public spheres. The tendency to stigmatize women is due in part to cultural constructions of gendered bodies and not only to a gendered double standard of sexual morality, as has been previously reported. Even when a cultural argument about women’s wayward sexuality is evoked, this rhetoric must be understood in part as a strategy to mask economically motivated responses, rather simply being attributed to sexist ideology per se.

This article describes how local responses to global health initiatives on infant feeding for HIV-positive mothers reflect and transform sociocultural values in Tamil Nadu, India. Drawing from ethnographic research conducted from 2002 to 2008, the article compares guidelines for counseling HIV-positive mothers established by UNICEF and WHO with decision-making processes and perceptions of HIV-positive mothers. In addition to the financial considerations, three factors are identified as impinging on this decision: (1) a strong sociocultural value in favor of breastfeeding linked to historical traditions and contemporary state and international development discourses, (2) constructions of class identity, (3) the influence of a rights-based discourse in HIV/AIDS advocacy. This wide range of factors points to the difficulty of implementing the international protocols. This is the first study of its kind to closely examine the complex determinants in HIV-positive women's decisions and evaluations of infant feeding methods in India.

As reproduction becomes increasingly biomedicalized throughout the globe, reproductive technologies are used in unique ways and imbued with different meanings. This article explores why lower-class women in south India in the 1990s were demanding to have childbirth labors induced with oxytocin drugs while rejecting anesthesia. Cultural constructions of women's reproductive power are evoked and reworked in discourses of modernity that explain this preference. Discourses on relationships among gender, pain, and modernity relate to political-economic constraints on hospitals to perpetuate this practice.

The author is a critical feminist medical anthropologist who has been engaged in ethnographic research on women's health issues in India for the past 25 years. Drawing from her own research experiences, this paper explores the methodologies entailed in research as a feminist critical medical anthropologist: by unpacking core methodological assumptions behind each component of her disciplinary position, introducing methodologies at each level—sociocultural anthropology, medical anthropology, critical medical anthropology, and finally feminist critical medical anthropology. It also examines how she has operationalised the fusion of these methodological approaches in her own research projects. The ways in which the findings from this research have contributed to our understanding of gender and can be useful for improving healthcare for women are also discussed.