Description
Book SynopsisThis book examines the conflict between cultural ideals of female sexuality in Brazil and the lived reality of sex for women in a poor shantytown in the country's northeast, probing the interplay between sexual expectations, sexual reality, and disease.
Trade Review"
Virtuallly Virgins is a detailed, intimate ethnography of the cancers that afflict the social environment and the social body--real and metaphoric....Because this book is written in accessible language with careful and respectful works and a sense of unapologetic caring and competence, anthropologists should read, use it in classes, and recommend it."---American Ethnologist
Table of Contents1. Introduction: Culture, Gender, and Ethnography 2. The Ilha: Life in a Brazilian Shantytown 14 3. "A Woman Has to Stay in the House": Gender and Sexuality in the Ilha 27 4. Sexuality and Risk: Biomedical Constructions of Brasileira Sexuality 40 5. Sexuality as Survival: Favelada Constructions of Women's Sexuality 55 6. Expedient Boundaries: Security and Agency in the Ilha 76 7. Rearranging Risk: Local Understandings of the Pap Smear 89 8. "I've Eaten so Many Good Men SinceYou Left": Liberdade, Resistance, and Ambivalence in the Ilha 97 9. "You Get it if You Go out Looking for a Man": Cervical Cancer and Stigma 118 10. Living with Inflammation, Dying from Cancer, and Curing an Incurable Disease 135 11. Some Survivors 156 Appendix One: Methodology 160 Appendix Two: Economic Data for the Sample of Women with Cancer 163 Appendix Three: Impact of Screening Services on Cervical Cancer Morbidity and Mortality 165 Appendix Four: Nonbiomedical Forms of Healing. 169 Notes 177 Works Cited 193 Index 205
