Exploring the Dirty Side of Women's Health [Paperback]

In this book, a team of international contributors examine bodies, leakage and boundaries, illuminating the contradictions and dilemmas in womens healthcare.

Using the concept of pollution, this book highlights how women and health issues are categorised, and health workers and women are confined to roles and places defined as socially appropriate. The book explores in-depth current and historical practices, such as:

• childbirth and midwifery practice
• policies and social practices around breastfeeding
• gynaecological nursing, female incontinence and sexually transmitted infections
• miscarriages and termination of pregnancy.

Addressing things out of place, from the idea of dirty work to feeling dirty, from diagnoses that disrupt our self-image to beliefs and practices which undermine health service provision, this book uses the contradictions in our thinking around pollution and power to stimulate thinking around womens health.

1. Language and Status: The Disappearing and Reappearing Midwife  2. Genetic Traits as Pollution: The Case of 'White English' Carriers of Sickle Cell/Thalassaemia Traits  3. Midwives: Defiling Women!  Section 2: Leakage and Labelling  4. Containing the Leaking Body: Female Incontinence and Formal Health Care  5. Leaky Bodies and Boundaries: Older Women and Early Miscarriage  6. I Just Felt Really Dirty : Womens Responses to a Diagnosis of Chlamydial Infection  Section 3: Breastfeeding as Pollution  7. Resisting the Gaze: The Subversive Nature of Breastfeeding  8. The Pollution of Objective Scientific Practice by Anecdotal Stories of Personal, Vicarious or Cultural Experience: The Denial of Embodied Knowledge  9. Not in Public Please: Breastfeeding as Dirty Work&nlã'