In the shadows of the War on Drugs in Mexico

Facing the global ecological crisis, international organizations, national governments, financial institutions and private business have supported the idea of a green economy searching for win-win scenarios and public-private partnerships. Unfortunately, this perspective does not usually consider alternative conceptions of well-being, justice and happiness. The case of the Barro Blanco hydroelectric project in Western Panama warns against the underlying assumptions of the prevailing environmental discourse of sustainable development. Unless development projects start considering different opinions, ideals and expectations, there will be the possibility for protracted conflict and severe environmental damage as happened with the forceful flooding of Ngabe communities in a hydroelectric reservoir linked with the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) of the Kyoto Protocol. As negotiations continue for new market-based mechanisms to mitigate climate change, lessons should be learned from the Barro Blanco debacle to find new pathways that reduce greenhouse emissions and at the same time respect human rights and indigenous worldviews and territoriality.

Women's History, Women's Health Audra Jennings (bio) Deirdre Cooper Owens. Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2017. xiv + 165 pp.; ISBN 978-0-8203-5135-3 (cl); 978-0-8203-5475-0 (pb). Tanya Hart. Health in the City: Race, Poverty, and the Negotiation of Women's Health in New York City, 1915–1930. New York: New York University Press, 2015. xi + 329 pp.; ISBN 978-1-4798-6799-8 (cl). Jennifer Nelson. More Than Medicine: A History of the Feminist Women's Health Movement. New York: New York University Press, 2015. xi + 265 pp.; ISBN 978-0-8147-6277-6 (cl); 978-0-8147-7066-5 (pb). In response to the untimely death of Representative Elijah Cummings (D-MD), the historian Ibram X. Kendi wrote, "There may be no more consequential white privilege than life itself. The privilege of being on the living end of racism." Kendi noted that black men have the lowest life expectancy in the United States. Black women also die years sooner than white women and are far more likely than white women to die during pregnancy.1 Bodies, particularly the bodies of people of color and women, stand at the center of politics in the age of Trump. Death, fear, and the loss of freedom, agency, and bodily autonomy shape the political present as people of color continue to die at the hands of police at disproportionate rates; a staggering number of Americans—including children—die in mass shootings; allegations of sexual assault create no barrier to public office; a growing number of states pass restrictions on abortion, which in some states have narrowed access to legal abortion to have effectively banned safe, legal access to the procedure; and mass incarceration and detention at the border disproportionately ensnare people of color living in poverty in a system where private corporations profit from their suffering. The scholars Deirdre Cooper Owens, Tanya Hart, and Jennifer Nelson bring a painful past into focus. They show that racism, nativism, and misogyny have shaped the development of American medicine, access to care, or lack thereof, and the quality of care as well as the context and tone of its delivery—a system that linked white privilege to "life itself." [End Page 164] In Medical Bondage, Cooper Owens situates the growth of modern American gynecology in the context of chattel slavery and mass immigration, two systems that provided physicians access to women who endured the experimental surgeries that gave rise to modern gynecology. She aims to move beyond the illnesses that initially drew physicians' attention and the pain and exploitation of enduring (often repeated) experimental procedures while, in the case of slave women, also being forced to work as surgical assistants in addition to other forms of labor. Cooper Owens instead elucidates the skilled nursing labor that these women provided, centers the importance of this labor and these women's lives and bodies in the development of gynecology, and works to give nuance to the lives and experiences of women who appear in the historical record often only as subjects of the men who experimented on them and exploited their labor. Cooper Owens examines the contradictions inherent in slavery and the science of race and the ways these contradictions shaped the development of American gynecology. She notes that "slavery created an environment in which black women performed more rigorous labor than white women and some white men" (3). This brutal reality influenced physicians' perceptions of enslaved patients. White physicians operated on black women's bodies to maintain or restore their reproductive capacity and find cures for white women's gynecological ailments. That physicians sought these cures by experimenting on black women's bodies underscores their understanding that there were no differences in how white and black women's bodies functioned. Yet physicians went about their work believing in and furthering prevailing ideas about race that "erased gender distinction" when considering black women's health and physical strength, perceiving them to be "stronger medical 'specimens'" (3). Cooper Owens demonstrates that through the system of slavery, southern physicians gained power, influence, and subjects from whom they painfully extracted new knowledge. She...

Our sociological knowledge base about plastic surgery has been predominantly constructed in free market contexts, leaving uncertainties as to how sociological theory around agency, identity, and structure apply in the context of publicly funded plastic surgeries. We draw on narratives of Australian women while waiting for abdominoplasty in the public system and recounting their post-surgical realities to understand the relational, dependent and interdependent agency–structure networks in which women's bodies, affects, lives and eligibility requirements are enmeshed. We found women adopted a ‘deserving’ identity to help them claim and enact agency as they felt and navigated the layered structures that govern publicly funded abdominoplasty in Australia, and theorise how this might influence unfolding patterns of social life. We explicate the importance of locating women's lived experiences of medical (dys)function vis-à-vis the sociocultural histories of medicine, health, gender and citizenship that give rise to publicly funded healthcare.

Purpose – The goal of my study is to investigate women's tattooing in a phenomenological way, and to go in-depth into a “handful” of cases with the purpose of discussing tattooed women's daily lives and experiences. The main purpose of this study is to contribute to the scholarly literature on the sociology of the body, and particularly to women and tattoos. Methodology/approach – Open-ended conversational interviews and feminist phenomenological methods together shed light on the possible connection between gendered attitudes about women's bodies and tattoos and tattooed women's personal feelings of beauty and femininity. Findings – In this particular chapter, I describe the connections between women's tattoos: (1) personal or individual beauty and (2) femininity. Findings show that although women tend to think that tattooing goes against current societal beauty norms and ideas of femininity, many women feel that their tattoos make them more beautiful. Originality/value of chapter – This study offers important insights into the social experiences of extensively tattooed women and, therefore, contributes to a more sociological and gender-specific glimpse of women's lives and tattooing. My discussion of and findings on tattooed women's lived experiences, however partial, should promote wider conceptualizations of the tattooing phenomenon, allow a wealth of tattoo meanings and experiences to come into the spotlight, and point to new ways to study tattoos and gendered bodies in the future.

El Salvador's violence against women (VAW) and antiabortion laws present optimal empirical ground to examine the intersection of familyism ideology, laws, and the state relevant beyond this case. Analyzing legal documents, content of laws, and newspapers, we juxtapose these two laws that have followed different applications within the same socio-legal context and historical time, legal reasoning, and juridical structure to identify a common thread: the control of women's bodies and devaluation of women's lives enshrined in the legal system. "Familyism" ideology embedded in the law prioritizes family over women's rights where social class emerges as a central factor. The analysis centers the state, as it interacts with and responds to pressures from the international community and domestic political forces to create, align, and implement antiabortion and VAW laws while devaluing gender ideologies that seek to protect women. In sum, both laws prioritize family at the expense of women's rights and lives, especially poor and socially disadvantaged women.

doi: 10.5216/ree.v12i3.7589A menopausa é uma fase da vida da mulher a que está associado vários tabus e sobre a qual permanece uma visão negativa e depreciativa, construída com base nas ideias da medicalização da sociedade e da atenção à saúde. O presente artigo tem por objetivo discutir a menopausa sob a perspectiva da desmedicalização. Nesse contexto, a medicalização pelo uso de terapia de reposição hormonal é utilizada como uma possível solução para as mudanças fisiológicas que ocorrem durante a menopausa, gerando na mulher a expectativa de permanecer sempre jovem e bela. Este estudo aborda a terapia de reposição hormonal a partir de sua relação com a medicalização do corpo e do cuidado; resgata o fisiológico e natural das transformações inerentes ao período e que são marcantes no corpo e na vida das mulheres; apresenta o cuidado desmedicalizado como estratégia para melhorar a qualidade de vida de mulheres que vivenciam a menopausa. Assim, entende-se que cabe aos profissionais que lidam com esse grupo específico o papel de desmistificar essa fase da vida e possibilitar informações de modo a favorecer o empoderamento das mulheres e desenvolver os cuidados sob a perspectiva da desmedicalização. Descritores: Enfermagem; Menopausa; Saúde da Mulher.

ABSTRACTWomen are finding appeal in (or, at minimum, a lower level of resistance to) caesarean delivery despite the health risks that it poses, and I investigate how this decision figures into a broader pattern of women's gender socialisation within a culture that is deeply anxious about women's bodies. I review scholarship on caesarean delivery, and use social practice theory to map possible contact points between theories of embodiment, a sociology of gender, and the specific practice of caesarean section. I consider caesarean delivery as a component of a social practice, and adopt a practice framework to analyze women's motivation for selecting (or consenting to) caesarean delivery. I detail the materiality of the hospital, the medicalisation of women's bodies, and women's antagonistic body relationship to reveal some of the less immediately apparent reasons why caesarean delivery has been normalised and rendered invisible as part of the pattern of modern childbirth. Interventions to address the further escalation of caesarean delivery might consider how this decision aligns with other social practices. I conclude that activism addressing the social conditions that make caesarean delivery so attractive may radiate out to other aspects of women's lives where the practices of normative femininity have proven equally restrictive.

Settler Violence? Race and Emergent Frontiers of Progress in Honduras Christopher A. Loperena (bio) The displacement of black and indigenous peoples from sites of economic opportunity in Honduras, and the systematic enclosure of the natural resources within their territories, is intimately tethered to white socio-spatial imaginaries and the politics of frontier making. In this essay, I analyze how elite investors, with support from the state and multilateral development banks, mobilize the ideology of national progress to further disenfranchise rural communities of color and to legitimate acts of violence against land and environmental activists. This violence has increased dramatically since the 2009 coup against Manual Zelaya Rosales, which was followed by a surge in extractivist activities throughout the national territory. In the quest for land, mestizo elites harness both legal and physical coercion to seize vital natural resources within indigenous and black territories.1 The process of turning indigenous territories into frontier zones for economic development underscores not only the racialized dimensions of dispossession but also the ways in which violence is used to hasten the power and racial domination of mestizo settlers over indigenous and black peoples.2 Settler colonialism, according to Patrick Wolfe, entails conquering the land and then populating the conquered territory with the victorious people. Although qualitatively different from the colonial project imposed by the Spanish and Portuguese—at least from an ideological perspective, since it was contingent on the incorporation of indigenous peoples into the national body politic—settler colonialism remains pertinent to analyses of race relations in Latin America. Wolfe states that settler colonialism is an ongoing process premised on a “logic of elimination.”3 Through an analysis of settler violence, I elucidate the relationship between settler colonial logics and contemporary development practices in Honduras. The ongoing removal and elimination of indigenous and black peoples is epitomized by the targeted repression and killing of key indigenous social movement activists, including the March 2016 assassination of Goldman Environmental Prize winner Berta Cáceres. [End Page 801] The logic of elimination is also expressed through legal arrangements that erode collective property rights and undermine black and indigenous sovereignty over the natural resources within their territories. Although Honduras has signed and ratified international legal conventions on the territorial rights of indigenous and tribal peoples, the state has aggressively pursued development projects that directly violate these rights. Even communities in possession of titles to their lands are subject to these forms of expropriation, particularly when the motive is couched within the discourse of national progress. Progress as Settler Colonial Logic In Latin America, national progress is crucially bound up with white socio-spatial epistemologies, which relegate indigenous peoples to a mythical past and thus render invisible contemporary indigenous peoples’ existence and political vitality.4 Indeed, the ideology of indo-Hispanic racial mixture, or mestizaje, has been used to negate indigenous and black territorial claims and to buttress the political and economic aspirations of the mestizo elite. The incorporation of indigenous peoples into the nation through the ideology of mestizaje ultimately furthers the whitening project on which postcolonial national identity was founded.5 Aspirations to whiten the nation gain material coherence through development practice. Following Keisha-Khan Perry, I understand development projects as the spatial dimension of the whitening ideology.6 The proliferation of extractivist economic activities within black and indigenous territories asserts national sovereignty over the natural resources to which rural communities of color lay claim, and thereby buttresses white spatial imaginaries. Sharlene Mollet’s research in the Honduran Mosquitia illustrates how indigenous land use practices are defined as backward and thus deemed, by the state, unsuitable for market production.7 In this way, racist understandings of indigenous inferiority position mestizo colonos (settlers) as more apt to use the land productively and thus legitimates their continued presence and spatial dominance over black and indigenous peoples. Indeed, the notion of “idle” or “underutilized” land has served as a central justification for the usurpation of lands in areas populated by indigenous and black peoples and which have been folded into the agrarian reform policies adopted by the state, beginning with the Agrarian Reform Law of 1962. Because indigenous and black peoples’ lands were often classified as underutilized, they were subject...

Feminist Theory: Radical Lesbian

“There’s a River to Consider”Heid E. Erdrich’s “Pre-Occupied” Susan Bernardin (bio) part 1: as long as the river flows Water is Life. This is the resounding refrain of the Nodapl movement centered at the Standing Rock Reservation. Beginning in April 2016 with the creation of Sacred Stone Camp, the small Nodapl encampment along the Cannon Ball River in North Dakota grew over several months into a community of many thousands. Supported by hundreds of Native nations, as well as international Indigenous communities and non-Indigenous allies, the Nodapl movement marks an extraordinary moment in a continuing history of Indigenous actions on behalf of land and water threatened by ruinous extractive industries. The aptly named Dakota Access Pipeline, the latest in a long pipeline of assaults on Indigenous territories, threatens the Missouri River and its vast watershed. The interconnected water systems imperiled by oil contamination underscore that rivers are, in the words of International Rivers Director Jason Day, “a ribbon of life” (Public Radio International). Nodapl’s national and international visibility was made possible by the collaborative groundwork of Indigenous activists and non-Indigenous allies in recent movements such as Idle No More and Tar Sands blockades. The message and meaning of “water is life” also has deep roots in local Indigenous communities that have always recognized that rivers are veins and arteries connecting peoples and territories. For example, in 2010, Twin Cities–based poet, curator, and filmmaker Heid E. Erdrich (Turtle Mountain Ojibwe) curated Original Green, an exhibit featuring four Indigenous artists—Gwen Westerman, Carolyn Lee Anderson, Bobby Wilson, and Gordon Coons—who offered perspectives of St. Anthony’s Falls and the Mississippi River. This exhibit was [End Page 38] part of a series called Greening the Riverfront, which addressed “how the Minneapolis riverfront has transformed, beginning with the Dakota and Ojibwe people and their relationship to the land, their removal by Euro-Americans, the rise of industrialization in the area, and the recent steps to embrace sustainability as a goal, as well as a look toward future initiatives” (Regan). The Mississippi River, whose major tributary is the Missouri River, emerges from headwaters in Ojibwe territory and moves through Dakota and other Indigenous territories along its 2,350 miles. It is also one of the most polluted rivers in the United States. Erdrich’s curation of this exhibit fed a broader arterial network of Ojibwe and Indigenous women artists and activists who have worked to make visible the continuing claims of this and other threatened riverine systems. On March 1, 2013, Sharon Day, executive director of the Indigenous Peoples Task Force, led a small group of Ojibwe women, helpers, and allies from the headwaters of the Mississippi River at Lake Itasca in northern Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico. The Mississippi River Walk, according to Day, was a “ceremony. . . . [E]very step we took was a prayer for the water” (“Ojibwe Water Walker”). The River Walk served as a moving mnemonic that was intended to remind, reassert, and reactivate ongoing relationships and responsibilities toward the Mississippi River. Social media networking about the River Walk extended its geographical reach by connecting Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples across territories. In the fall of 2012, three First Nations women and one non-Native woman—Sylvia McAdam, Nina Wilson, Jessica Gordon, and Sheelah McLean—turned to Facebook and Twitter to declare “#IdleNoMore” in the face of the proposed legislative assaults on Indigenous lands and waterways by Bill c-45, created by the government of Stephen Harper, prime minister of Canada.1 Bill c-45 jettisoned environmental protections in order to streamline energy development in Canada. In launching teach-ins and making the threat of Bill c-45 more visible, these four women and the movement they inspired reaffirmed the potentiality of digital spaces for carrying words across territories, linking Indigenous peoples across geopolitical borders not of their own making. As Stephanie Fitzgerald quips about Idle No More’s formation, “The power of four women and a hashtag cannot be underestimated” (122). The central role of Indigenous women in the formation of Idle No More and in related movements such as the Nodapl movement reaffirms [End...

就筆者所見，目前有關陰門陣的研究已有James Parsons、澤田瑞穗、相田洋、李建民、及Paul A. Cohen等人為文探討，其中以李建民較為深入。本文即以這些研究為基礎，進一步探討女體與戰爭的關係。主要探討以下幾個問題；（一）以女性裸體為主的陰門陣的內容及特色為何？（二）女性的身體為何具有厭砲的能力？（三）何種身分的女體具有厭砲的能力？總的來說，陰門陣提供了我們探討明清的女體與戰爭關係一個相當好的例子。我們認為，日本學者澤田瑞穗與相田洋的「以陰剋陽說」似乎並不足以完全解釋陰門陣現象。當我們把視野擴大至女體與厭勝關係時，義和團團民的心態反映了明清婦女裸身所具有的污穢象徵意義，而這套觀念自明末以來被運用在戰事上，義和團運動時，裸婦被視為是保護洋砲，破除法術的主角，這和明末清初以陰門陣抗砲所隱含的觀念相類似，都認為女體－尤其是裸婦具有厭勝力量。義和團的這種視女體污穢的觀念正可解釋為何在明末以來的戰爭中，會出現用裸婦來厭砲的陰門陣現象。

Sociocultural context of women's body image

Objectives : The uterus plays an important role in the woman's body. In Korean Medical literature, the uterus is mentioned in various contexts according to different perspectives on its meaning and function. An examination of these various contexts is crucial in understanding the meaning of the uterus and to better understand and approach woman's body. Methods : Aside from the most widely used term Jagung(子宮), there were various terms used to refer to the uterus. Based on a list of these terms, the Siku Qianshu collection of medical literatures was investigated. Contents related to the definition, shape, location, function were extracted and examined. Results : Among the findings, first, there were various terms referring to the uterus similar to contemporary understanding. Some of them referred to the uterus as a whole, while others referred to specific parts, one of which is the placenta. Some reflected a broader perspective on the meaning of the uterus. Second, the functions of the uterus could be summarized as gate keeping, and the maintenance of uterine environment that is related to menstruation, pregnancy, and childbirth. Third, based on the examination of the meaning of the uterus and its functions, perspectives on the uterus in Korean Medicine could be summarized into two. Conclusions : One viewed uterus as an organ dedicated to reproduction, similar to today's common understanding. According to this view, uterus is a special organ specific to women, which functions as an incubator for the fetus. The other viewed the uterus as an intangible source of life in the woman's body. As a general source of life to all human beings, it is not a passive organ but functions as an active source in woman's life phenomena. The two perspectives are not in conflict, but rather reflect the broad range of thought on the concept of the uterus in Korean Medicine. In today's biomedical society, the diversity and flexibility of these perspectives could shed light on medical practices that have resulted from extreme views on the woman's body.

Reviewed by: The Body in Postwar Japanese Fiction Melissa Wender (bio) The Body in Postwar Japanese Fiction. By Douglas N. Slaymaker. RoutledgeCurzon, London, 2004. x, 205 pages. £85.00. When I attempt to focus my thoughts about the body in postwar Japanese fiction, my mind begins to reel. My own recent research reminds me of how buraku and Zainichi Korean authors question the meanings of "blood" and the invisibility of their difference; of individual physical violence as metaphor for national violence; and of the intense physicality of all aspects of life [End Page 482] in the work of Yang Sogil. Yang, whose fiction is both critically acclaimed and stunningly popular, is obsessed with the notion of the "Asian body." This body—unlike that of the contemporary resident of Japan—emerges from and on occasion even revels in its experience of corporeal brutality, animalistic urges (whether for food or sex), and manual labor. The last of these terms is crucial, for Yang's intent is to criticize the way that Japan's economic success has numbed its populace to the very sensations of being alive. At the same time, like many other students of Japanese literature, I think of how the big names of the postwar period, from Hayashi Fumiko to Mishima Yukio, Ōe Kenzaburō, Murakami Ryō, and Yamada Eimi, reflect upon sexuality and gender identity, and frequently their intersection with race (usually Japanese versus white or black). I do not expect Douglas Slaymaker or any other scholar to be able to present a coherent synthesis of all of these issues in a single volume, even if it has a title as grand as this one. I am not even certain such a task would be possible or useful. Rather, I begin my consideration of this book, the primary focus of which is the so-called "flesh writing" (nikutai bungaku) of the early postwar era, by seconding the author's contention that a careful examination of these sometimes-overlooked works will deepen our understanding of Japanese literature in the decades succeeding them. The above thoughts, however random, bring home one of Slaymaker's most important observations: the texts he examines are "foundational to a palette of images that continues to energize imaginaries of the body, and the ramifications of this conceptualization extend to the fiction being produced at the end of the twentieth century" (p. 162). One might imagine, from the above, that the book excavates a range of postwar texts in an effort to reveal the influence of these flesh writers. Rather, The Body of Postwar Fiction joins recent analyses of post-1945 Japanese culture such as John Dower's Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (Norton, 1999), Michael Molasky's The Postwar Occupation of Japan and Okinawa: Literature and Memory (Routledge, 1999), and Yoshikuni Igarashi's Bodies of Memory: Narratives of War in Postwar Japanese Culture, 1945–1970 (Princeton University Press, 2000) by taking as its major focus the early postwar period. This volume is by no means redundant with these other works, for Slaymaker's scope is not as broad as Dower's or Igarashi's and he treats a different set of texts and takes a different approach from Molasky. For the most part, Slaymaker's set of texts consists of the fiction and essays of Tamura Taijirō, Noma Hiroshi, and Sakaguchi Ango, discussed in chapters three, four, and five, respectively. Consideration of these writers is bracketed by contextualizing chapters. In chapter one, he provides a history of the usage and changing connotations of terms of the body before these authors were active. He takes great pains to trace the use of nikutai, but he also [End Page 483] examines the words shintai, seishin, and kokutai and, in chapter two, the role of "the woman's body" in the works of the flesh writers. In chapter six, he turns to the work of five women writers in the 1950s. Although there are references to historical circumstances and the historical references in the texts, historical events per se do not figure large. Nor does some grand theory such as psychoanalysis or poststructuralism. Instead, Slaymaker carefully reports what these writers said, what...

There is no register of breast cancer cases among indigenous populations in Brazil. The objective here was to evaluate the association of clinical and demographic characteristics with mammographic density among indigenous women. Cross-sectional analytical study conducted in indigenous territories in the state of Amapá, Brazil. Women were recruited from three indigenous territories and underwent bilateral mammography and blood collection for hormonal analysis. They were interviewed with the aid of an interpreter. Mammographic density was calculated using computer assistance, and was expressed as dense or non-dense. A total of 137 indigenous women were included in this study, with an average age of 50.4 years, and an average age at the menarche of 12.8 years. Half (50.3%) of the 137 participants had not reached the menopause at the time of this study. The women had had an average of 8.7 children, and only two had never breastfed. The average body mass index of the population as a whole was 25.1 kg/m2. The mammographic evaluation showed that 82% of women had non-dense breasts. The clinical characteristics associated with mammographic density were age (P = 0.0001), follicle-stimulating hormone (FSH) (P < 0.001) and estrogen levels (P < 0.01). The majority of the indigenous women had non-dense breasts. Age, menopausal status and FSH and estrogen levels were associated with mammographic density.