Cervical cancer is the third leading cause of death among women in Venezuela, with poor and working-class women bearing the brunt of it. Doctors and public health officials regard promiscuity and poor hygiene—coded indicators for low class, low culture, and bad morals—as risk factors for the disease.
Drawing on in-depth fieldwork conducted in two oncology hospitals in Caracas, Marked Women is an ethnography of women's experiences with cervical cancer, the doctors and nurses who treat them, and the public health officials and administrators who set up intervention programs to combat the disease. Rebecca G. Martínez contextualizes patient-doctor interactions within a historical arc of Venezuelan nationalism, modernity, neoliberalism, and Chavismo to understand the scientific, social, and political discourses surrounding the disease. The women, marked as deviant for their sexual transgressions, are not only characterized as engaging in unhygienic, uncultured, and promiscuous behaviors, but also become embodiments of these very behaviors. Ultimately, Marked Women explores how epidemiological risk is a socially, culturally, and historically embedded process—and how this enables cervical cancer to stigmatize women as socially marginal, burdens on society, and threats to the "health" of the modern nation.
"Marked Women is richly detailed and lucidly written. Rebecca Martínez masterfully develops her arguments with honesty and great compassion, situating her analyses at the intersections of disease, sexuality, morality, and citizenship. Her insights into the disparate power dynamics responsible for the persistent stigmatizing of cervical cancer in Venezuela provide new, much-needed perspectives on this tragic global health phenomenon."—Carole H. Browner, University of California, Los Angeles
"Rebecca Martínez's remarkable ethnographic eye and ear discern how pathologies of public health infrastructures and professional socialization inscribe gender and class stereotypes not only on bodies but on popular perceptions of poor women and the cervical cancers that too often kill them."—Clara Mantini-Briggs, co-author of Stories in the Time of Cholera: Racial Profiling during a Medical Nightmare
"In this excellent work of feminist medical anthropology, Martínez (women's and gender studies, Univ. of Missouri) focuses on the ways neoliberalism has affected health care in Venezuela....The transcriptions of the patients' responses are informative, disturbing, and often upsetting, but their articulation of their feelings draws readers into their narratives. They are not just ethnographic material but real women with real lives. The book is appropriate for upper-division undergraduate and graduate courses in gender studies, anthropology, and Latin American studies."—H. Aquino, CHOICE
"Martínez presents an ethnography of cervical cancer that powerfully analyses biomedical and public health practice first in the neoliberal context of the 1990s and then in the socialism of Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro...This reader very much hopes that Martínez continues her work, particularly at this historical moment of intense political and humanitarian crisis in Venezuela."––Tita Chico, The Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory
