Learning from infertility: gender, health inequities and faith healers in women's experiences of disrupted reproduction in Rajasthan

Abstract

Infertility is a neglected area of public health in India despite the significant implications it has for the health of poor women. It is also less prominent in social science research due to its characterization as a biomedical problem. On the contrary, as suggested in this article, a focus on infertility provides important insights into the gendering of reproductive identity and the ways in which power is exercised by the family, religion, state and health personnel. Building upon recent studies of infertility as ‘lived experience’ elsewhere in the world, the article demonstrates that emic and situated meanings of gender, body and self as become apparent in local discourse on infertility in India are important for social theory as well as health policy. Focusing on individual agency and the social meaning of infertility the article critically evaluates the therapeutic intervention of faith healers to suggest ways in which local healers enable women to distance themselves from gender inequities in reproduction at the same time as they reaffirm them.

Keywords:

• infertility
• local healers
• gender inequity
• lived body
• India

Notes

1. Oomen, ‘A Decade of Research on Reproductive Tract Infections’ and Bang and Bang, ‘Women's Perception of White Vaginal Discharge’; Gittelsohn et al., Listening to Women Talk About Their Health.

2. See Indian Institute of Population Sciences, National Family Health Survey 2005 and Van Balen and Inhorn, ‘Interpreting Infertility’.

3. Greenhalgh, Situating Fertility and Kielmann, ‘Barren Ground’.

4. Inhorn, Quest for Conception; Inhorn, ‘Missing Motherhood’; and Van Balen and Inhorn, ‘Interpreting Infertility’.

5. Kielmann, ‘Barren Ground’.

6. Ibid. and Janzen, The Quest for Therapy among others.

7. Indian Institute of Population Sciences, National Family Health Survey 2005.

8. UNFPA, State of the World Population Report 2008 and WHO, Traditional Medicine Strategy 2002–2005.

9. Ram, ‘Rationalising Fecund Bodies’.

10. Inhorn, Quest for Conception; Inhorn, ‘Missing Motherhood’; Inhorn, ‘Middle Eastern Masculinities in the Age of New Reproductive Technologies’; Inhorn and Van Balen, ‘Interpreting Infertility’; Greil, ‘Infertile Bodies’; Feldman-Savelsburg, ‘Is Infertility an Unrecognised Public Health and Population Problem?’; Becker, ‘Deciding Whether to Tell Children’; Kielmann, ‘Barren Ground’; Edwards, ‘Explicit Connections’; Ragone, ‘How Race is Being Transfigured’; Franklin, Embodied Progress; and Reissman, ‘Even If We Don't Have Children’.

11. The villages of Khatipura and Gilaria and the township of Jagatpura are all in the Sanganer division of Jaipur district in the south eastern part of the city. The slum (referred to as Darana, a pseudonym) is in the eastern part of Jaipur city.

12. The shukker babashrine in the rural hinterland of Jaipur is popularly known as a place for pilgrimage and healing from chronic, primarily mental, illness. Dedicated to a Muslim pir, it has a large following amongst Hindus as well. Healing takes place through residence at the shrine and participation in exorcism and other rituals of healing.

13. Barrett, Aghor Medicine.

14. Kapadia, Siva and Her Sisters.

15. Ibid., 93; also see Gold, ‘Gender’; Patel, Fertility Behaviour; Unnithan-Kumar, ‘Emotion, Agency and Access’; Unnithan-Kumar, Reproductive Agency; and Unnithan-Kumar, ‘Kinship’ for similar anxieties around menstruation, fertility and personhood in the North Indian context.

16. Oomen, ‘A Decade of Research on Reproducitve Tract Infections’.

17. For a fuller version see Unnithan-Kumar, Reproductive Agency.

18. Also see Inhorn, Quest for Conception, for the use of weakness as a cultural idiom of male and female infertility in Egypt.

19. Also Unnithan-Kumar, ‘Emotion, Agency and Access’.

20. Ramasubban and Rihshyaringa, ‘Weakness (“Ashaktapana”) and Reproductive Health among Women in a Slum Population in Mumbai’.

21. See fuller version in Unnithan-Kumar, ‘Emotion, Agency and Access’.

22. Van Balen and Inhorn, ‘Interpreting Infertility’.

23. Edwards, ‘Explicit Connections’; Franklin, Embodied Progress; Ragone, ‘How Race is Being Transfigured’; and Becker, ‘Deciding Whether to Tell Children’.

24. Inhorn, Quest for Conception, and her recent work on the masculinities of middle eastern men, 2004.

25. Becker, ‘Deciding Whether to Tell Children’.

26. Goffman as cited in Becker, ‘Deciding Whether to Tell Children’, 119.

27. Patel, Fertility Behaviour; Reissman, ‘Even If We Don't Have Children’; Reissman, ‘Positioning Gender Identity’; and Unnithan-Kumar, Reproductive Agency.

28. Kielmann, ‘Barren Ground’; Cornwall, ‘Looking for a Child’; and Feldman-Savelsburg, ‘Is Infertility an Unrecognised Public Health and Population Problem?’.

29. Inhorn, Quest for Conception.

30. Ibid.; Inhorn, ‘Missing Motherhood’ Patel, Fertility Behaviour 1994; Reissman, ‘Even If We Don't Have Children’; and Reissman ‘Positioning Gender Identity’.

31. Kielmann, ‘Barren Ground’.

32. Inhorn, ‘Middle Eastern Masculinities in the Age of New Reproductive Technologies’.

33. Ibid.

34. Becker, ‘Deciding Whether to Tell Children’.

35. Daniels, ‘Fathers, Mothers and Foetal Harm’.

36. Greil, ‘Infertile Bodies’; Martin, The Woman in the Body, Unnithan-Kumar, ‘Reproduction, Heath, Rights’; and Unnithan-Kumar, ‘Kinship’.

37. Greil, ‘Infertile Bodies’.

38. Unnithan-Kumar, ‘Emotion, Agency and Access’.

39. Unnithan-Kumar, Reproductive Agency.

40. Anagost, ‘A Surfiet of Bodies’.

41. Johnson-Hanks, Uncertain Honor.

42. Cornwall, ‘Looking for a Child’.

43. Kielmann, ‘Barren Ground’, 135.

44. Ginsburg and Rapp, Conceiving the New World Order and Thompson, ‘Strategic Naturalising’.

45. Bledsoe, Contingent Lives.

46. Thompson, ‘Strategic Naturalising’ and Bordo, Unbearable Weight.

47. Inhorn, ‘Introduction’.

48. Unnithan-Kumar, ‘Emotion, Agency and Access’.