Classing Health: Mothers, Risk Management, and the Body During and After Pregnancy

• In Event: 2212 - Section on Body and Embodiment Refereed Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 01. Capitalism, Bodies and Reproduction of Difference

Abstract

This paper is based on in-depth interviews conducted with 70 poor, working class, and middle class women during 2010-11 in California and Florida. Specifically, I examine how mothers from different class backgrounds respond to the gendered expectation that women should care for their health and bodies (and those of others) in ways that are both risk-aware and risk-averse. Whereas middle-class women tended to focus on risks and risk-prevention strategies that were costly and whose benefits were sometimes uncertain (e.g., alternative dietary and vaccination practices), poor and working-class mothers tended to emphasize health strategies with demonstrable short-term benefits to wellbeing and to balance the costs of those strategies with other family needs (e.g., for emotional reassurance or financial stability). I argue that while financial and educational differences between the two groups account for some of these mothers’ differing practices and priorities, such differences also reflect and reinscribe social inequality in the realm of culture: middle-class mothers’ practices become markers of highly valued cultural capital, offering their children distinction (even—perhaps especially—when those practices offer little benefit to health).

Author

• Katherine Mason, Wheaton College