Women in Pain: Gender and Morbidity in Mexico

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Summary: Gender and Morbidity in Mexico Review
Review: Finkler discusses the ways in which the lives of poor Mexican women are entwined with sickness and health. The book's concept is that of "life's lesions"--the bodily insults engendered by the adversities of existence, inimical social relationships, and unresolved tensions in the women's daily experiences. At the book's heart are the life histories of ten women drawn from a sample of 205 clinic patients with varied nonfatal symptomatologies. The life histories illustrate both the subjective nature of sickness and its embeddedness in material conditions and prevailing ideological currents. The sick women are compared with a sample of 54 healthy women from the same social strata and neighborhoods. Significantly, while most husbands of the healthy women hold stable jobs, most husbands of the sick women have transient sources of livelihood. The author posits that the more precarious economic resources of the latter households give rise to more adverse marital interactions, which in turn resonate on the wives' life lesions. Several theoretical chapters explore the connections between gender and sickness, and one deals with historical and contemporary perspectives on male-female relations and ideologies about women in Mexico. Upper-division undergraduate through professional.