Constructing the Laboring Body: An Exploration of Early Hysterectomies, Premature Menopause, and Aging Among Women Laborers in Rural India
摘要
In this chapter, through a life-course perspective, I outline the possibility of viewing aging through the lens of intersecting complexities of surgical interventions with socio-economic depravities and familial viabilities among female sugarcane cutters who have undergone hysterectomies (surgical removal of the uterus) at ages as early as 22. Drawing on ethnographic evidence from the Beed district of Maharashtra, this chapter investigates how the varied nature of contracts that women are forced to enter, both within and beyond the space of the clinic recasts the way the aging process and aged bodies come into being. Conceptualizing aging as a process of embodied transition, this chapter traces how the experience of social and physiological aging emerges as mutually present in the everyday lives of women who undergo early-age hysterectomies to tackle socioeconomic deprivations and maintain familial viabilities – consequently leading to premature menopause and exacerbating the aging process. In considering the long-term implications of uterus removals in the context of precarious and strenuous working conditions, this chapter explores the multitude of practices that materialize the bodies of women as either reproducers of children or producers of wage labor. This chapter further elucidates how the particularization of bodies of rural women within the separate yet imbricated sites of the clinic, the field, and the household provides critical signposts in tracing how it is not chronological graders of aging but the conflation of social aging with recurring morbidities and subsequently the cessation of their ability to add “economic value” to the household post-early hysterectomies that emerge as an eventual marker of the aged body.