About this session
For International Women's Day, 2022, join Brighton and Sussex Medical School's Dr Papreen Nahar, Senior Research Fellow (Medical Anthropology and Global Health), who will discuss her new book: Childlessness in Bangladesh:
Intersectionality, Suffering and Resilience, in conversation with Prof Maya Unnithan, Director of the Sussex Centre for Cultures of Reproduction, Technologies & Health (CORTH), and Prof Trudie Gerrits, Co-Director of the Health, Care and the Body Research Group at the University of Amsterdam.
Dr Nahar's book examines the intersectionality and stratified lived experience of rural poor and urban middle-class childless women in Bangladesh.
Childless women in Bangladesh, an over-populated country where fertility control is the primary focus of health policy, are all but non-existent.
Dr Nahar offers an alarming account of stigma, abuse, ostracism and violence against these women, sharing their experiences of marginalisation in a culture that idealises motherhood. In such a reality, the experience of childlessness, particularly for women, can be much more severe than what is defined as ‘infertility’ in the biomedical sense.
As childlessness is a complex interaction between biology, society and culture, the book illustrates the ways in which infertility transforms a health problem into social suffering. Although Bangladeshi childless women are systematically excluded by various structural forces, it appears they do not succumb to their circumstances; rather, they develop resilience and agency to become survivors of their new, albeit bleak, lives.
Book to attend this online event here >