acase@tulane.edu / This dissertation is an ethnographic study of the corruption narratives surrounding the quest for and the delivery of reproductive health care in contemporary Romania. Using as case study two public health campaigns targeting cervical cancer through early detection (Papanicolaou testing) and prevention (Human Papilloma Virus vaccination), it explores the ways Romanian women imagine the newly liberalized state and define themselves as post-Socialist citizens. The recent reforms in the provision of medical care have highlighted once again reproduction as a site of contestation. In sharp contrast with the Socialist pro-natalist policies, we currently witness the state’s progressive withdrawal from regulating reproduction, paralleled with the privatization of significant segments of reproductive health care delivery and with the marketization of women’s health. The range of reproductive choices has multiplied, but the emergence of new standards of inclusion/exclusion has limited the access to adequate care for many Romanian women. My interlocutors’ multi-layered discourses of reproduction and corruption are intrinsically ideological, revealing a folded blaming: of the former Socialist state paternalism and of the present post-Socialist state failure. In this context of unprecedented socio-cultural transformation, personhood becomes situational, shifting back and forth from Romanian citizen (when blaming the state for failing to provide proper reproductive assistance), to private person (when resisting mandatory national reproductive care programs). If we aim to decipher women’s responses to the Pap testing and HPV vaccination campaigns, we need to go beyond the ethnographically documented understandings of ‘risk, ’prevention,’ and ‘early detection.’ In a place such as present-day Romania, where bribe-offering is the idiom through which patients and doctors communicate, reproductive health care constitutes a privileged locus for analyzing how corruption discursively tames unsettled medical landscapes. By gathering the corruption narratives surrounding reproductive health care delivery, this dissertation grasps the micro-political factors that shape women’s local interactions, but it also analyzes the impact of “small scale” findings at a national and transnational level. My anthropological account – of what appears in retrospect to be “the chronicle of a failure foretold” – would be a crucial tool for policy makers in their future attempts to implement successful reproductive health programs. / 1 / Cristina A. Pop
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:TULANE/oai:http://digitallibrary.tulane.edu/:tulane_58236 |
| Date | January 2016 |
| Contributors | Pop, Cristina A. (author), Masquelier, Adeline (Thesis advisor), School of Liberal Arts Anthropology (Degree granting institution) |
| Publisher | Tulane University |
| Source Sets | Tulane University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text |
| Format | electronic, 312 |
| Rights | No embargo, Copyright is in accordance with U.S. Copyright law. |
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