Description

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The Cancer Within examines cervical cancer in Romania as a point of entry into an anthropological reflection on contemporary health care. Cervical cancer prevention reveals the inner workings of emerging post-communist medicine, which aligns the state and the market, public and private health care providers, policy makers, and ordinary women. Fashioned by patriarchal relations, lived religion, and the historical trauma of pronatalism, Romanian women’s responses to reproductive medicine and cervical cancer prevention are complicated by neoliberal reforms to medical care. Cervical cancer prevention – and especially the HPV vaccination – provided Romanians a legitimate instance to express their conflicting views of post-communist medicine. What sets Romania apart is that pronatalism, patriarchy, lived religion, medical reforms, and moral contestation of preventive medicine bring into line systemic contingencies that expose the historical, social, and cultural trajectories of cervical cancer.
 

About the Author

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CRISTINA A. POP is an assistant professor of medical anthropology at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska. 
 

Praise For…

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"The Cancer Within is a compelling analysis of Romanian women’s resistance to cervical cancer screening and the HPV vaccine by a cultural 'insider.' In this wide-ranging and readable account, Pop reveals how Romanians’ reproductive lives and choices are profoundly shaped by the country’s violent history of reproductive governance under Ceausescu, as well as by inequities of health care delivery in the post-communist era."
— Elise Andaya

"Beautifully written and theoretically inspired, this vivid and pathbreaking ethnography shows how history continues to haunt Romanian women’s sexual and reproductive lives, and how post-socialist healthcare provides no panacea for a cervical cancer crisis and accompanying HPV vaccine hesitancy. The Cancer Within is a must-read for those interested in gender, sexuality, and reproductive health, as well as medicine in the post-socialist era."
— Marcia Inhorn

"The Cancer Within is a compelling analysis of Romanian women’s resistance to cervical cancer screening and the HPV vaccine by a cultural 'insider.' In this wide-ranging and readable account, Pop reveals how Romanians’ reproductive lives and choices are profoundly shaped by the country’s violent history of reproductive governance under Ceauşescu, as well as by inequities of health care delivery in the post-communist era."
— Elise Andaya