Thursday, October 14, 2021 ・ 9 AM-5 PM ・ Zoom Webinar
In this interdisciplinary and geographically wide-ranging one-day conference, we aim to bring together scholars from public health and the humanities, from the medical sciences and the social sciences, whose areas of research will help us consider past and present relationships of gender and health.
Few would disagree that gender matters for understanding health, healthcare delivery, and health-related policies, particularly as gender intersects with other social and geopolitical categories in generating inequalities and inequities in disease, mortality, access to health care, and so forth. Most observers are also very aware that gender is critical to understanding the many social and environmental determinants of health, such as economic development, access to clean air and water, the impact of climate change, access to education, among others. Yet we still have much to learn about the relationship between gender and health across varying geographic and temporal contexts, such that we might be able to grapple with the relationships of gender and health within a global or transnational perspective or to understand the historical underpinnings of these relationships. How does gender interact with global political, economic, and social institutions to influence the ways in which individuals access, make choices about, and/or resist healthcare across national borders? How do gender inequities in the balance and use of power in global health institutions and global health policy impact local experiences of physical and mental health and well-being? Why do women constitute the majority of both front-line health workers and domestic care workers in so many areas around the world, and what implications does this have for their own and societies’ health and well-being? How are transnational actors, such as pharmaceutical industries, medical institutions, or political spokespersons, influencing local ideas about what is “natural” for the bodies of men, women, or non-binary people? How best ought we understand and respond to the biopolitics of developing global markets in semen, oocytes, human milk, surrogacy labor, childcare, and so forth?
While the questions posed above offer some food for thought, presentations that contribute to any aspect of the broader goal of understanding gender and health in a global, transnational, and historical perspective are welcome. We encourage talks that examine the intersection of gendered inequalities with other social categories such as race, religion, class, and sexuality and proposals that examine global health crises in relation to the processes of constituting subjectivities in health practices and various understandings of the body, disease, and wellness.
This conference is funded in part by five (5) Title VI National Resource Center grants from the U.S. Department of Education.
9:00 am – Opening Remarks
Mary Gallagher, International Institute Director and Amy and Alan Lowenstein Professor of Democracy, Democratization, and Human Rights, University of Michigan
9:15 - 11:15 AM – Power & Health: Examining Decision-Making
Moderator:
Moniek van Rheenen, Doctoral Candidate, Anthropology, University of Michigan
Panelists:
Yun Zhou, Assistant Professor, Sociology, University of Michigan
Of Sex and Stress: Gendered Precarity and Women’s Sexual Decision-making in Contemporary Urban China
Emine Evered, Associate Professor, History, Michigan State University
Syphilis and the State in Early Turkish Republic
Elizabeth J. King, Associate Professor, Health Behavior and Health Education, University of Michigan
Gender & Power: Navigating access to healthcare for women who inject drugs in Russia
Victoria Langland, Director, Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies; Associate Professor, History and Portuguese, University of Michigan
Brazil and the Global Turn toward Breastfeeding
12:00 - 2:00 PM – Maternal, Infant, and Child Health in Comparative Perspective
Moderator:
Grace Argo, Doctoral Candidate, History and Women's Studies, University of Michigan
Panelists:
Seema Jayachandran, Professor, Economics, Northwestern University
Son preference and girls' health in India
Cheryl Moyer, Associate Professor, Learning Health Sciences; Obstetrics and Gynecology, University of Michigan
Understanding the role of gender in maternal and newborn health research in Ghana
Monica Das Gupta, Research Professor, Sociology, Maryland Population Research Center, University of Maryland
Son preference and “missing girls” in Asia: What drives it, what might help reduce it? Lessons from South Korea
Daniel Iddrisu, MA Student, Masters in International and Regional Studies–African Studies specialization, University of Michigan
Using the Malaria Indicator Survey to Understand the role of Female-Headed Households in Prevention, Care-seeking and Treatment for Malaria among children in Ghana
3:00 - 5:00 PM – Collective and Gendered Bodies: Visualizing Health
Moderator:
Cynthia Gabriel, Lecturer, Women's and Gender Studies; Advisor, Gender & Health, University of Michigan
Panelists:
Tuğçe Kayaal, Assistant Professor, History, Furman University
Making Heteromasculine Subjects: Boy Scout Organizations in the Late Ottoman Empire (1908-1918)
Yiming Wang, MA Student, Masters in International and Regional Studies–Chinese Studies specialization, University of Michigan
Gender, age and bodies: the visibility of aging female bodies in Chinese history
Stephanie Koning, National Institutes of Health Ruth L. Kirschstein Individual Postdoctoral Fellow, Northwestern University
Structural violence against women and population health: The histories and futures women’s bodies carry at the Thai-Myanmar border
Kasia Klasa, PhD candidate, Health Services Organization and Policy, University of Michigan
The COVID-19 Pandemic in Central and Eastern Europe
Monica Das Gupta is a research professor at the University of Maryland, College Park MD. Before that, she worked in the World Bank’s Development Research Group in Washington DC (1998-2012); Harvard University’s Center for Population & Development Studies in Cambridge MA (1992-98), and the National Council of Applied Economic Research in New Delhi (1982-92). She trained in anthropology and demography at the London School of Economics, and the Institute for Development Studies, University of Sussex, UK. She has published extensively on issues of population, poverty, and development—including on child health, gender and health, and public health systems for communicable disease control.
Emine Evered is an associate professor of history at Michigan State University. Her research and writing focus on Ottoman Empire and Turkish Republic. Thematically she is interested in histories of education, secularization, gender, public health, and (recently) intoxicants in Turkey. Her publications include Empire & Education under the Ottomans (2012) and a series of authored/co-authored articles that appeared in Journal of Historical Geography, Health and Place, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, Political Geography, Gender, Place and Culture, International Journal of Drug Policy, and Landscape History. Currently, she is completing a book manuscript, tentatively entitled, Social History of Alcohol in Turkey. Her research has been supported by the National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation, National Endowment for Humanities/ARIT, Mellon Foundation’s Humanities without Walls, and a range of fellowships and grants from Michigan State University. She regularly teaches courses on the history of Islam, the modern Middle East, women and gender, and—most recently—alcohol from global and social history perspectives.
Daniel Iddrisu is pursuing a Masters in International and Regional Studies with specialization in African studies. He obtained a BA degree from the University for Development Studies, Ghana (2017). He worked as a teaching assistant with the University for Development Studies, (2017/2018). His research focuses on gender, development, and health.
Seema Jayachandran is a professor of economics at Northwestern University. Her research focuses on economic issues in developing countries, including gender equality, labor markets, health, and environmental conservation. She serves on the board of directors of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) and is the chair of J-PAL's gender sector. She is also co-director of the National Bureau of Economic Research's program in Development Economics and co-editor of the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics. In addition, she writes regularly for the New York Times and serves on CARE's board of directors. Prior to joining Northwestern, she taught at Stanford University. She earned a PhD in economics from Harvard University, a master’s degree in physics and philosophy from the University of Oxford where she was a Marshall Scholar, and a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from MIT.
Tuğçe Kayaal is an assistant professor of the modern Middle East and Islamic world at Furman University, History Department. She received her PhD in Near Eastern studies from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and completed the Women's Studies Certificate Program in the same university. Her research and teaching interests incorporate sociocultural history of the late Ottoman Empire and the early Republic of Turkey; history of childhood and youth sexuality; history of bodies and sexualities in the Middle East; love, intimacy, and sexual desire in the late Ottoman and the Early Republic of Turkey; queer youth cultures in the Middle East; discourses of sexual deviancy in the Ottoman Empire. Kayaal's dissertation, "Wartime Bodies: Politics of Sexuality and War Orphans in the Late Ottoman Empire (1913-1923)," explores the efforts the Ottoman Empire took to regulate sexual behaviors of war orphans during the Balkan Wars (1912-1913) and World War I (1914-1918). Her research investigates how age-, sex-, ethnicity-, and religion-based categories intertwine with and mutually inform each other in cultivating colonial subjects. She published her research in academic journals and edited volumes.
A global health scholar, Elizabeth King studies women’s health, gender-equitable access to prevention and health care services, and disparities in engagement in HIV care and treatment. The majority of her research focuses on Russia, and she has conducted public health research in Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa. She holds a PhD in health behavior from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and an MPH in global health from Yale University. Dr. King received her BA in Slavic Languages and Literatures from the University of Kansas and was a Fulbright scholar in the Faculty of Sociology at St. Petersburg State University (Russia).
Katarzyna (Kasia) Klasa is a PhD candidate in health services organization and policy at the University of Michigan’s School of Public Health, Department of Health Management and Policy. Broadly, her interests lie at the intersection of public health, risk/resilience, and politics. She uses mixed methods to compare health policies and politics across high- and middle-income countries, drawing from cross-disciplinary training in nursing, healthcare management, public health, economics, and political science. She received her MPH in global health management and policy from the University of Michigan, and both a BS in economics and BS in nursing from the University of Pennsylvania.
Stephanie Koning is a social epidemiologist and demographer with primary interests in biosocial determinants of women’s health and maternal and child health; structural violence, conflict, and social stress; and the health implications of migration, displacement, and legal status. She has led or co-led multiple data collection projects using survey, interview, and ethnographic methods, and uses quantitative analytical techniques from biostatistics, machine learning, and quasi-experimental design. Her work focuses on global health and (in)equity, particularly in North American and Southeast Asian settings.
Victoria Langland is an associate professor in the Departments of History and Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Michigan and the current Director of the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies. She is the author of Speaking of Flowers: Student Movements and the Making and Remembering of 1968 in Military Brazil (Duke University Press, 2013) and the co-editor of The Brazil Reader: History, Culture, Politics, 2nd edition, (Duke University Press, 2019), and Monumentos, Memoriales y Marcas Territoriales (Siglo XXI, 2003). Langland's current book project is a history of breastfeeding, wet-nursing, and human milk banking in Brazil that looks at how public policies, national and transnational breastfeeding advocacy, and the actions of breastfeeding women have transformed understandings and practices about infant nutrition and women’s roles over time.
Cheryl Moyer is an associate professor of learning health sciences and obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Michigan Medical School. She is also the associate chair for diversity, equity and inclusion in the Department of Learning Health Sciences. Her research focuses on the social and cultural factors that influence maternal and neonatal health outcomes in sub-Saharan Africa, including an emphasis on facility-based delivery, neonatal mortality, social autopsy, and the assessment of ‘near-miss mortality’—or those mothers and babies who suffer a life-threatening complication but ultimately survive. She led a 3-year USAID-funded project in northern Ghana that used social autopsies to explore maternal and neonatal deaths, sociocultural audits to explore the determinants of maternal and neonatal near-misses, and GIS technology to map the location of deaths and near-misses against clinical, demographic, social, and cultural determinants. She also serves as a co-Investigator on a randomized clinical trial of group-based prenatal care in 14 hospitals in the eastern region of Ghana.
Yiming Wang is an MA student at the Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan. He got his BA in history from Fudan University in Shanghai. His research interests include women, gender, and masculinity in late Qing and Republican China.
Yun Zhou is an assistant professor of sociology and Chinese Studies at the University of Michigan. Trained as a social demographer, Zhou’s research examines social inequality and state-market-family relations through the lens of gender, marriage, and reproduction. With a focus on gender equity and authoritarian reproductive governance, Zhou’s current project investigates the demographic, political, and gendered consequences of China’s recent ending of the one-child policy.
Power & Health: Examining Decision-Making
Yun Zhou, Assistant Professor, Sociology, University of Michigan
Of Sex and Stress: Gendered Precarity and Women’s Sexual Decision-making in Contemporary Urban China
Extensive research has documented the changes in population dynamics and family lives around the world over the past several decades. Scholars highlight a gradual decoupling—both ideological and behavioral—of sex, marriage, and childbearing. This project turns to contemporary China and asks: Under renewed emphasis of “family stability” and women’s roles at home from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leadership in recent years, how is the contour of this decoupling evolving? How do women make sense of their sexual and reproductive choices, or the lack thereof? I draw on 115 in-depth interviews with heterosexual-identifying urban women and men, alongside textual analysis of anonymous discussions in online forums and message boards. I examine women’s decision-making surrounding sexual activities outside of marriage, in relation to their access to and experiences of gynecological care. I highlight how encounters with gynecological violence and fears of pregnancy and diseases contribute to a prevailing sense of gendered precarity. Sex thus becomes the locus of stress.
Emine Evered, Associate Professor, History, Michigan State University
Syphilis and the State in Early Turkish Republic
This paper examines the emergence of state-led anti-syphilis campaigns in Turkey during the 1920s and 1930s and explores how the state created a new medical and moral order surrounding its citizens’ sexualities. Amid the Ottoman Empire’s collapse, Turkey’s fledgling Ministry of Public Health and Social Services sought to deal with the increasing prevalence of syphilis throughout its rural communities as connected with the return of soldiers from World War I. In this context of public health, matters of sex, reproduction, and sexual health were subject to state intervention and control in ways that included but also transcended concerns over morality. Implementing this transition, the state proceeded carefully to ensure that its efforts to govern the sexual lives of its citizens did not contradict with societal mores or values. Making syphilis a subject for state regulation, moral pronouncements regarding the disease were reframed, represented, and dispersed as lessons in public health. In my paper, utilizing information from official and unofficial primary sources, I analyze this transformation as part of a broader process of medicalization and state expansion that reshaped understandings of sexuality, morality, and reproduction during the socio-political transitions from a religious empire to a nominally secular nation-state.
Elizabeth J. King, Associate Professor, Health Behavior and Health Education , University of Michigan
Gender & Power: Navigating access to healthcare for women who inject drugs in Russia
Results based on a qualitative study conducted in St. Petersburg, Russia will be presented. The research study was guided by the Theory of Gender and Power and included in-depth interviews with service providers and women who inject drugs. Factors such as fear, partner dynamics, financial insecurity, stigma, and gender norms were found to influence if and how women navigated accessing healthcare services, including HIV prevention and treatment services. This talk will also include reflection on the need for interventions that take into account issues of gender and power in order to improve health outcomes for women who inject drugs.
Victoria Langland, Director, Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies; Associate Professor, History and Portuguese, University of Michigan
Brazil and the Global Turn toward Breastfeeding
This presentation will focus on the period of the 1950s to the 1970s when numerous international health organizations and aid agencies sought to improve infant nutrition in the so-called developing world. As part of this process, the dovetailing of historically low breastfeeding rates in Western countries and a growing critique of the corporate marketing of human milk substitutes contributed to a global concern with early weaning. In Brazil, the focus of my research, this resulted in increased national attention to the breastfeeding and weaning decisions of women in poor areas, where infant mortality rates were highest. Yet, as I hope to demonstrate, the community of Brazilian policymakers who led these examinations often misread or mischaracterized their fellow citizens, influenced by the transnational messaging of this period, particularly where this sustained ideas about gender, race, and geography that had long circulated within Brazil. In presenting these findings, I hope to contribute to discussions around how transnational discourses influence local ideas and practices and to consider what is lost in these moments.
Maternal, Infant, and Child Health in Comparative Perspective
Seema Jayachandran, Professor, Economics, Northwestern University
Son preference and girls' health in India
In India, the eldest son is responsible for supporting his parents in old age, and he plays important roles in Hindu funeral rites. Having a son to fulfill these roles is very important to couples, and parents tend to favor their eldest son over their other children. This talk will discuss how eldest son preference shapes couples' fertility decisions and their investments in their children in India, with important implications for girls' health.
Cheryl Moyer, Associate Professor, Learning Health Sciences; Obstetrics and Gynecology, University of Michigan
Understanding the role of gender in maternal and newborn health research in Ghana
Improving maternal and newborn health in sub-Saharan Africa requires an understanding of many complex, interrelated factors that span individual, household, community, and health system levels. As an interdisciplinary medical, public health, and social science-oriented research team, we have not explicitly examined the role of gender during our more than a decade of collaborative research in rural northern Ghana focused on mothers and their newborns. However, the importance of gender has proven itself time and again. This talk reflects two examples: 1) The role of grandmothers as gatekeepers for care-seeking; and 2) Blaming women: the behavioral versus situational explanation for poor outcomes.
Monica Das Gupta, Research Professor, Sociology, Maryland Population Research Center, University of Maryland
Son preference and “missing girls” in Asia: What drives it, what might help reduce it? Lessons from South Korea
Son preference is driven by specific cultural patterns that are found in many parts of Asia: East, South, and West. Much policy effort has been made to reduce son preference, with varying degrees of success. South Korea offers a useful case study of how these cultural patterns can change rapidly in a given setting. South Korea is the first country to shift from strong son preference to a growing preference for daughters. This presentation examines the factors associated with this radical shift.
The data analyzed are from the 2012 Korea General Social Survey, a national survey of 1,396 people. The outcome variable was derived from the survey question, “If you were to have one child, which one would you like to have - son, daughter, or no preference?” Multinomial logistic regression was used to examine the association between reported child gender preference and a range of social and cultural variables.
43.3% of respondents reported daughter preference, 35.7% preferred sons, and 21% were indifferent. The odds of preferring daughters are highest among urban residents, younger people, more educated, female, atheists, and less traditional attitudes on gender roles.
Other studies in South Korea find that intergenerational support between parents and daughters is strengthening relative to sons. This is no longer an agrarian society where aging parents depend financially on sons. In today’s urban economy people can save for retirement, and have national health insurance. However, people want companionship and care over their increasingly long lives, which they perceive daughters as more likely to provide than sons.
Daniel Iddrisu, MA Student, Masters in International and Regional Studies–African Studies specialization, University of Michigan
Using the Malaria Indicator Survey to Understand the role of Female-Headed Households in Prevention, Care-seeking and Treatment for Malaria among children in Ghana
This talk presents the role of female-headed households in the prevention, care-seeking, and treatment of malaria among children in Ghana. The talk also identifies the challenges that female-headed households go through in an attempt to cater to the health needs of the children and the entire household. The state of female-headed households with regards to access to other social amenities is also identified. The talk will also present the strategies that female-headed households adapt to meet the health needs of children in the household.
Collective and Gendered Bodies: Visualizing Health
Tuğçe Kayaal, Assistant Professor, History, Furman University
Making Heteromasculine Subjects: Boy Scout Organizations in the Late Ottoman Empire (1908-1918)
This paper explores the cultivation of heteromasculine subjectivities among the Ottoman youth by focusing on boy scout organizations of the early twentieth century. Boy scout organizations in the Ottoman and global contexts are widely studied by historians of childhood, gender, and war.
[For some examples to this scholarship, see: Lucy Andrew, “‘Be Prepared!’ (But Not Too Prepared): Scouting, Soldiering, and Boys’ Roles in World War I,” Boyhood Studies 11, no.1 (Spring 20218): 47-62; Benjamin Rene Jordan, Modern Manhood and Boy Scouts of America: Citizenship, Race, and the Environment (1910-1930) (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016); Mehmet Beşikçi, The Ottoman Mobilization of Manpower in the First World War: Between Voluntarism and Resistance (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2012); Sevil Özçalık and Gerhard Grüsshaber, “‘Frank, Fresh, Frish, Free’ at the Bosphorous? Selim Sırrı and the German Model of Youth Mobilization in the Late Ottoman State, 1909-1918),” Middle East Critique 24, no.4 (2015): 375-388.]
In different spatial settings, historians demonstrate how boy scout organizations functioned as a disciplinary mechanism and had a significant role in shaping male youth’s ideological orientation and social belonging. In the early twentieth century Ottoman Empire, especially during the Balkan Wars (1912-1913) and World War I (1914-1918), boy scout organizations manifested the wartime government’s desire of military-like social hierarchy outside of the army and military barracks and its application to the daily lives of the youth. Similar to boy scout organizations across the world, one of the main motivations of the Ottoman boy scout organizations was to turn pre-pubescent and pubescent boys into proper adult men and citizens. Alongside inculcating nationalist sentiments in the hearts and minds of Ottoman youth, the Ottoman boy scout organizations also aimed to turn them into heteromasculine subjects by imposing established norms of ideal healthy body types proper same-sex socialization with their fellow scouts.
Using primary sources such as booklets published by the founders of boy scout organizations, photographs, and youth magazines, this paper argues that as the preeminent paramilitary youth organizations of the early twentieth century, boy scouts functioned as primary institutional settings that shaped ottoman male youth’s heteromasculine subjectivity and social belonging at two different levels. First, these institutions thrust upon youth a particular notion of a healthy male body by pursuing strict admission guidelines and training curricula. Second, the form of homosocial bond boy scout organizations relied on was also instrumental in informing ideal healthy masculinity. In so doing, this paper employs an intersectional lens to analyze the connections between gender, health, body, and nation-making policies through the particular case of the late Ottoman Empire.
Yiming Wang, MA Student, Masters in International and Regional Studies–Chinese Studies specialization, University of Michigan
Gender, age and bodies: the visibility of aging female bodies in Chinese history
From the 1980s, China historians began to be interested in women and gender in Chinese medical history. Till now, the history of childbirth, reproduction, and gynecology (“medicine for women”) in China has been a well-established field. However, one under-studied topic is the bodies and health of old women, whose situation mostly fell out of the scope of reproduction-related medicine. In this talk, I want to review the extant studies on the aging female bodies in Chinese medical history and propose some departure points for doing research on this topic as well as some resources we can use. Also, I would like to discuss how age/generation as a category might help us better understand the categorization of bodies/subjects and the construction of femininities in modern China.
Stephanie Koning, National Institutes of Health Ruth L. Kirschstein Individual Postdoctoral Fellow, Northwestern University
Structural violence against women and population health: The histories and futures women’s bodies carry at the Thai-Myanmar border
Fleeing armed conflict and a failed state that has lasted over half a century in Myanmar, women and families have been embarking on perilous journeys to reach the mountainous border region of northern Thailand for decades. Upon fleeing violent conflict, they arrive in a new structurally violent landscape that does not officially recognize refugees and where ethnic minorities have historically been marginalized and excluded from citizenship and related human rights protections. In these violent contexts, women face the dual burden of past trauma and ongoing societal violence and related stress, resulting in life-course patterns of experience and stress that they embody. To investigate the social, biological, and population health implications, I led a local team of researchers to conduct a novel population-based survey of recent mothers at two border sites in northern Thailand in 2017. Newly available interview data and health assessments from 577 women surveyed reveal distinct life-course patterns in chronic and acute violence, displacement, and broader discrimination that variably predict women’s mental health, biological stress, and reproductive health. Findings reveal target areas for future violence prevention and equity, particularly at conflict borders.
Kasia Klasa, PhD candidate, Health Services Organization and Policy, University of Michigan
The COVID-19 Pandemic in Central and Eastern Europe
The COVID-19 pandemic was a shock to health systems around the world, leading to cascading effects felt over a year since its onset. Central and Eastern European (CEE) is a politically, economically, and culturally heterogeneous area that includes EU member states, candidate countries, and non-EU countries. Despite this heterogeneity and the diversity in their pandemic responses, CEE countries face similar challenges and are intricately interconnected with each other and the rest of Europe. This talk will discuss the evolution of the COVID-19 pandemic in Central and Eastern European countries, with a special focus on the pandemic’s impacts on healthcare workers and migrant workers.
