Women in North India are socialized to care for others, so what do they do when they get a disease like diabetes that requires intensive self-care? Drawing from her new book Sugar and Tension: Diabetes and Gender in Modern India (Rutgers University Press 2019), Dr. Lesley Jo Weaver explores how women’s self-care choices, though at odds with the mandates of biomedical managed disease, do important cultural work that may buffer women’s mental health by fostering social belonging. This calculus raises questions about whose priorities should count in domestic, health, and mental health spheres and underscores that routes to living well or poorly with chronic diseases are not always the ones canonized in biomedical models.
Sponsored by:
Department of Anthropology
South Asia Initiative
Center for Global Mental Health
