Conditions of life in the city: medicine and gendered relations in Maputo, Mozambique

Abstract

How do material conditions, urban life strategies, and postcolonial medical infrastructures shape the practices of care available to patients and families in Maputo? How do global health interventions articulate with urban economies, colonial legacies, and gendered relations? Under what conditions is health made available in Mozambique's capital? This article explores these questions through the experiences of one young woman as she moves through clinical and city spaces and through changing familial and residential situations. Showing how health is shaped by gendered relations and material circumstances (or condições) as they are refracted through urban space, her experiences make clear that care both requires and creates complex material‐relational conditions rooted in clinic practice, urban forms, and gendered social and familial life. In the midst of complex medical regimes and rapidly changing urban spaces, these conditions constitute the ground on which women access medicine but also give rise to exclusions from forms of care produced by both biomedicine and social relations. Arguing for greater attention to the role of gender, urban space, economy, and exchange in theorizing health in situated urban and transnational spaces, this article advocates for accounts that go beyond biomedical and clinical framings of life, health, and well‐being and that centre relational accounts of life in the city.

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