Asian immigrant women: gender, body, health and care

Immigrant women from Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam and China are in the centre for the proposed ethnographic research. Focusing on women`s own views and experiences, the proposed project will examine how local and global ideas about the female body intersect with one another and influence Asian women`s views and health-care seeking behavior in a diaspora culture. The overall aim of the proposed project is to produce new knowledge regarding gender, sexuality and reproductive health, including the perspective of health care and health promotion among a hitherto under-researched or virtually neglected ethnic minority group in Austria, that has been continually growing in numbers in recent years. As health service providers will increasingly have to operate in cross-cultural contexts addressing transcultural competence is regarded as a key-qualification for those responsible for providing health care services in multi- ethnic societies. The ongoing dynamic and fluid nature of modern migration in a globalizing world requires continual review of the quality of existing health services and future policy considerations. Hereby the project will link research and practice and will contribute to the empirical grounding of diversity-conscious care. The project also aims to detect sociocultural barriers in the access to existing reproductive health services (e.g. cancer screening programmes: cervical smear tests, mammography). To detect risk-related sexual behavior and practices (e.g sex workers and HIV/AIDS prevention) and risk-factors in regard to self-medication and the use of pharmaceutical products. The habilitation project will increase the influence and importance of female scientists and anthropologists at the Medical University of Vienna and strenghen the interdisciplinary character of medicine. The project also aims to create new scientific networks with Universities in East-Asia (Vietnam, China), offering the potential for further research collaborations and staff and student exchange with new partner countries. Objectives 1) Gender constructions and "gendered bodies": To investigate the influence of deeply rooted social and religious principles and ideas about the female body and its reproductive organs (taboos, moral concepts, ideas about purity/ impurity) and to determine those factors which are relevant for health personell in gynaecology obstetrics departements in Austria. 2) Medical pluralism, health seeking behavior and Kleinman`s "explanatory models": To explore women`s attitudes towards and experiences with Western biomedicine and with Asian medical traditions in dealing with gynaecological problems, or such linked with pregnancy, childbirth and menopause. To investigate the extent of the use of pharmaceutical products sent from Asian countries and of self-medication in the migrant communities.). 3) Body politics, medicalization and women`s health rights: To examine the influence of state population policies (which is Communist policy for Vietnam and China) and ideologies such as the traditional Confucian thinking with preference for sons in China, on women`s past, present and future "choice" of family planning, methods of contraception (e.g. use of intra-uterine devices/ IUD`s) and utilization of modern medical technologies in childbirth (e.g. prenatal genetic screening) in Austria. To put the views expressed by the women in the interviews into perspective, additional data will be collected during ethnographic fieldresearch in Asia and several interviews with hospital staff (gyn/obst) will be conducted in a clinical setting. We will have three bilingual Austrian-Asian researchers in our project-team to support the participatory approach and community involvement in health policy. Methodology: The project is embedded in the conceptional framework of medical anthropology (Arthur Kleinman 1980) focusing on the anthropology of the body. Hereby drawing on the theoretical framework of Pierre Bourdieu (1977), Michel Foucault (1977), the anthropological concept of "embodiment" (Csordas 1994) and the concept of "The Three Bodies" (Scheper-Hughes& Lock 1987) and.The ethnographic research has a formative character with several overlapping stages and parts.