sheryl nestel

Colour Coded Health Care offers a review of relevant academic and community-based research on racial disparities in the health of Canadians appearing between 1990-2010. In addition to surveying the research on mortality and morbidity by racialized groups in Canada, it surveys the evidence of bias, discrimination and stereotyping in health care delivery. This research shows non-European immigrants are twice as likely as the Canadian-born to report deterioration in health subsequent to immigration. Moreover, Black immigrants were 76 percent more likely to assess themselves as “unhealthy” than other racialized groups. Recent research on the physiological impact of racism suggests that living in a racist environment increases the risk of illness for racialized individuals. Some studies also suggest that racialized people experience racism in their interactions with the health care system, which may have an impact on access to health care and to life-saving screening procedures. This sur...

"[T]here is no vantage outside the actuality of relationships between cultures, between unequal imperial and non-imperial powers, between different Others, a vantage that might allow one the epistemological privilege of somehow judging, evaluating and interpreting free of the encumbering interests, emotions and engagements of the ongoing relationships themselves" (Edward Said, 1989, p. 216). "Biology is an historical discourse, not the body itself" (Donna Haraway, 1989, p. 290). In 1939, American anthropologist Margaret Mead gave birth to her daughter Catherine in Manhattan's French Hospital, "after many years of experience...in remote villages -- watching children born on a steep wet hillside, in the `evil place' reserved for pigs and defecation" (Mead, 1972, p. 249). Before the birth, she had convinced her obstetrician, Claude Heaton, as well as her pediatrician, Benjamin Spock, to agree to very specific and unusual arrangements for the birth and subsequent care of the infant. Mead insisted that no anesthesia be administered to her unless absolutely necessary and that the baby be allowed to breastfeed on demand. In order to win the cooperation of the nursing staff in meeting these rather extraordinary requests, Heaton showed them a film on childbirth made by Mead and her husband Gregory Bateson during their anthropological field work in New Guinea (Mead, 1972). Mead viewed the female bodies of her New Guinea subjects and other "Primitives" (1) as immutably invested with the "immediacy of the human body plan" (Mead, 1967, p. 57) and therefore able to provide indisputable proof that Mead's own birth plan adhered scrupulously to the trajectory of what she called "woman's biological career line" (Mead, 1967, p. 174). It was Mead's intention in much of her work to juxtapose examples of cultural patterns in other parts of the world with those in North America in order to dislodge notions of what was perceived as natural in North American society (Fischer, 1986). In the 1960s, Mead lent her considerable reputation as well as her anthropological research to the burgeoning North American childbirth reform movement (Edwards and Waldorf,1984). Her cross-cultural studies of childbearing among what she termed "Primitive" women seemed to prove that the medical technology and control which were the norm in American obstetrics distorted women's natural reproductive function. Mead's work and her personal example seemed to protest alienation from the body and argue for a restoration of the self to a "full and easy harmony with the nature of the cosmos" (Torgovnik, 1990, p. 228). Mead was neither the first nor the last critic of technological childbirth to argue that the reproductive behaviour of Primitive women was paradigmatically human. These arguments, produced and sustained by various forms of anthropological knowledge, have been used for well over a century by both radical reformers and some who would defend medical hegemony over childbearing. Together with the visual images which sustain them, they form a powerful discursive armament for those who have struggled recently to redefine childbearing in the West. However, the power and salience of the arguments and representations derive primarily from their ability to construct a racialized Other, "found to have just those properties that the writer's culture lacks and needs" (Haraway, 1989, p.390). While the issue of representation has assumed a central role in contemporary theory, what has been largely neglected is the imperial context which gave rise to various forms of racial representation (Said, 1993). The arguments for natural childbirth examined here rely on a discourse of normalcy and naturalness in the reproductive lives of non-Western women. These arguments are buoyed by visual representations of the reproductive acts of those women, representations which exist within a web of sexual and racial artistic conventions informed, in part, by colonial and postcolonial relations of racial domination. …

RésuméCet article décrit la pratique du «tourisme de la profession de sage-femme» par laquelle, les sages-femmes en Ontario ont fait des stages dans des cliniques de maternité de pays du Tiers-monde en vue d'obtenir l'expérience clinique qu'elles ne pouvaient pas obtenir ici avant la légalisation de la profession dans la province. Plusieurs sages-femmes ont aussi pu mieux se faire reconnaître sur le plan professionnel pour leurs connaissances directes des méthodes obstétriques utilisées par les femmes du Tiers-monde, c'est-à-dire par des femmes qui, selon une mythologie soutenue dans le mouvement pour l'accouchement naturel, posséderaient, en ce qui concerne les accouchements, des connaissances féminines innées qui n'auraient pas encore été corrompues par les pratiques médicales des pays de l'Ouest. L'émergence nouvelle de la profession de sage-femme en Amérique du Nord est un exemple convaincant de la manière dont, par des affirmations épistémologiqu...

1. Health Can Soc. 1996-1997;4(2):315-41. A new profession to the white population in Canada: Ontario midwifery and the politics of race. Nestel S. Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. PMID: 11623726 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]. Publication Types: Historical Article. ...

The relationship between feminism and colonialism has been fruitfully explored in recent scholarly work through the examination of Western women's travel. In this century as in the last travel has provided women in the West with the opportunity to claim social identities unavailable ...

The Boundaries of Professional Belonging: How Race has Shaped the Re-emergence of Midwifery in Ontario' Sheryl Nestel PREFACE In the summer of 1995, the interdisciplinary childbirth educator's training program that I had taught for several years-a collaboration between a suburban ...

This essay reviews recent feminist scholarship, autobiographical narrative and fiction which explores nurses' engagement with empire in Africa and elsewhere in this century. Such literature suggests that while nursing work may have improved native health in colonized regions, it also contributed significantly to the establishment and stabilization of the racialized order of colonial rule. Of particular significance was colonial nursing's