“Sterilization ‘camps’ have earned a bad press in India – and rightly so. Yet, as Eva Fiks demonstrates in her elegant intervention, coercion is entangled with care for village women contending with the reproductive chronicity that is integral to their daily lives.” • Patricia Jeffery, Professor Emerita, University of Edinburgh
“The book draws on detailed ethnographic research and is rich with empirical details that are framed within larger debates on women’s health, care, and state formation. The introduction immediately draws in the reader. It is a well-written and well-researched book.” • Lipika Kamra, Jindal Global University
The public healthcare system in rural India is chronically under-resourced. It embodies and often perpetuates the wider politics of the Indian state towards its rural communities with provisions of care that are deeply entangled with violence and disgust. For rural women, such care deepens reproductive chronicity while providing temporary relief. Grounded in women’s everyday realities and experiences in sterilization camps and other healthcare settings in rural Rajasthan, State Intimacies examines the mundane workings, ambiguities and fragilities of care in post-colonial rural North India.
Eva Fiks is a Lecturer in Medical Anthropology at Keele University, United Kingdom. Her work on reproduction, biomedicine, care and the state in North India has been published in Ethnos, Medical Anthropology, Anthropology & Medicine, Anthropology Today and Medical Anthropology Quarterly.
BISAC: SOC002010 SOCIAL SCIENCE/Anthropology/Cultural & Social; SOC032000 SOCIAL SCIENCE/Gender Studies; SOC026020 SOCIAL SCIENCE/Sociology/Rural
