Cancer and the Kali Yuga

Gender, Inequality, and Health in South India

Cecilia Coale Van Hollen

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780520386532
• eBook ISBN: 9780520386556
• Edition: 1
• Subtopic: Indian & South Asian History

As news spread that more women died from breast and cervical cancer in India than anywhere else in the world in the early twenty-first century, global public health planners accelerated efforts to prevent, screen, and treat these reproductive cancers in low-income Indian communities. Cancer and the Kali Yuga reveals that women who are the targets of these interventions in Tamil Nadu, South India, hold views about cancer causality, late diagnosis, and challenges to accessing treatment that differ from the public health discourse. Cecilia Coale Van Hollen's critical feminist ethnography centers and amplifies the voices of Dalit Tamil women who situate cancer within the nexus of their class, caste, and gender positions. Dalit women's narratives about their experiences with cancer present a powerful and poignant critique of the sociocultural and political-economic conditions that marginalize them and jeopardize their health and well-being in twenty-first-century India.

Table of contents

• Imprint
• Subvention
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Note on Time of Writing and Transliteration
• Introduction
• 1.   History and Hospitals
• 2.   Poverty and Chemicals
• 3.   Women and Work
• 4.   Screening and Morality
• 5.   Disclosure and Care
• 6.   Biomedicine and Bodies
• 7.   Sorcery and Religion
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index