Finding voice: Enacting agency for reproductive health in the context of culture and structure by young Nepalese women

Iccha Basnyat, Purdue University

Abstract

Forty-four percent of the females between the ages of 16-24, in Nepal, are already married. Of them, twenty-four percent are already mothers or pregnant with their first child, according to the Ministry of Health (MoH) 2001 Demographic Health Survey. Such that, traditional approaches to health care are concerned [only] with healthy childbearing, without extending the focus beyond childbearing to address wider issues of women’s reproductive rights, restricting women’s health to a narrow focus of fertility rather than on the rights to social well being (Zurayk, 2001; Ostlin, George, Sen, 2003). Questionably, women’s voices are typically absent from the dominant discourse of health communication (Mookerjee, 2003). This absence is particularly salient in the realm of the voices of poor women (Airhihenbuwa, 1992, 1995; Steeves, 2000). Furthermore, on-going research on health does not focus on how people define their meanings of health and how they maintain their health within their own cultural, political and economical context (Garcia, 2006). In doing so, the dominant framework of health campaigns leaves out the broader socio-cultural, political and economic contexts of health determinants; instead, assumes individual loci of responsibility to change. This indicates the need for culture-centered approach, which embraces culture as a constitutive space where unheard voices of the marginalized are centered (Dutta, 2008; Dutta-Bergman, 2004a, Dutta & Basnyat, 2006). Here, the experiences of the marginalized are centralized to examine the discursive processes through which culture has engaged in the social construction of marginalia. Additionally, in utilizing a feminist lens, the invisibility and distortion of women and their experiences (Hedge, 1998) can be situated, analyzed and interpreted within its historical, socio political and economic contexts. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to understand how poor Nepalese women between the ages of 18-24 negotiate and create meaning of their reproductive health. This study is situated to explore how culture and structure influences a woman’s health behavior and furthermore to examine how agency and resistance are enacted in this process. In essence, this study explores narratives about reproductive health as articulated by young Nepalese women living under poverty, to foreground the traditionally unheard and marginalized voices.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Dutta, Purdue University.

Subject Area

Public health

COinS