Public Health and Sexual Morality: Venereal Disease in World War II Australia

Sturma, Michael

doi:10.1086/494465

Cited by 14 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 1 publication

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“…In the not too distant past, however, medicine's relationship to social morals was more apparent (Sturma 1988;Foucault 1990). As Turner (1984:264) has noted, "health depended on morality because improper lifestyles constituted the root of personal illness and the immorality of the individual was a product of social disorder."…”

Section: Morality and Diseasementioning

confidence: 99%

Purity and passion: Risk and morality in Latina immigrants’ and physicians’ beliefs about cervical cancer

Martínez

Chávez

Hubbell

1997

Medical Anthropology

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This paper examines how physicians' beliefs about risk factors for cervical cancer compare with Mexican and Salvadoran immigrant women's views (hereafter Latina immigrants). Between August 15, 1991 and August 15, 1992, we conducted ethnographic interviews with 39 Mexican immigrant women, 28 Salvadoran immigrant women, and 30 physicians in northern Orange County, California. Physicians and Latina immigrants converge on their beliefs that sexual behavior is a predominant risk factor for cervical cancer. They diverge, however, on their reasons. Latina immigrants' perceptions of health risks are embedded in a larger set of cultural values centering around gender relations, sexuality, and morality. Latina immigrants also emphasized men's behavior as risk factors. Physicians' views, on the other hand, are largely based on the epidemiology of cervical cancer risk factors. They emphasized beginning sexual relations at an early age, multiple sexual partners, and infection with sexually transmitted viruses. Some physicians, however, displayed moral interpretations of the sex-based risk factors for cervical cancer through the use of the culturally-loaded term "promiscuous" in place of "multiple sexual partners," through specific references to morality, and through characterizations of women at risk for cervical cancer. Both the physicians and the Latina immigrants in our study paid considerably less attention to sodoeconomic factors. Our results have important implications for physicians who provide health care for Latina immigrants. Physicians should be clear to point out that women need not be "promiscuous" to get cervical cancer.

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Section: Morality and Diseasementioning

confidence: 99%

Purity and passion: Risk and morality in Latina immigrants’ and physicians’ beliefs about cervical cancer

Martínez

Chávez

Hubbell

1997

Medical Anthropology

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“…For example, sanitationist practices have often been deployed as a response to moral panics, allowing for aspects of the social order to be aYrmed and symbolically mapped out through ritualistic acts of exclusion of punishment. An example of the deployment of sanitationist controls has been the periodic enforced detention of women ('prostitutes' and 'good time girls') during wartime as a measure to control venereal disease (see Sturma 1988). The occasional use of sanitationist controls to isolate or enforce treatment upon bodies deemed to be polluted or at-risk has regularly been used as an attempt to resolve fears and ambiguities associated with disorder in situations where 'magic bullets' have been unavailable.…”

Section: Practices Of Public Healthmentioning

confidence: 99%

Competition paper. Prostitution and public health in New South Wales

Scott

2003

Culture, Health & Sexuality

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“…5 Early penal release schemes were formative in aligning convicts with colonial growth. 32 Bio-political power is not so much interested in modifying the body, as much as containing threats and intervening in those processes where life is determined. Women convicts were circulated in the interstices of colonial life and penal administration through the regulation of sexual conduct, domestic labour, reproduction, and marriage.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Penal and colonial politics over life: women and penal release schemes in NSW, Australia

Chartrand

2014

Settler Colonial Studies

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What are often considered ancillary practices to prison operations today, penal release schemes such as parole, have long been a formative part of a penal apparatus to facilitate a circulation of penal populations. As an operant of bio-political and other power modalities, penal release schemes serve broader colonial and penal projects to promote the growth, health, and wealth of the state. In looking at women in New South Wales from the onset of convict transportation, I consider how penal release schemes organize and circulate women in accordance with norms and processes of labour, life, and health from the beginning of colonial settlement into the present. In considering women, the bio-political function of the penal apparatus is made more apparent given that the body is a privileged site for such power. I argue that women are enlisted into a penal ethos that seeks to circulate the productive aspects of the population, while eliminating unwanted ones. In settler colonial societies today such as Australia and Canada, colonial and penal worlds converge and the penal has taken on a novel function of circulating penal populations in and out of social functioning.

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Public Health and Sexual Morality: Venereal Disease in World War II Australia

Cited by 14 publications

References 1 publication

Purity and passion: Risk and morality in Latina immigrants’ and physicians’ beliefs about cervical cancer

Purity and passion: Risk and morality in Latina immigrants’ and physicians’ beliefs about cervical cancer

Competition paper. Prostitution and public health in New South Wales

Penal and colonial politics over life: women and penal release schemes in NSW, Australia

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