SMA awards: Polgar, Hughes, and Rivers Awards Recipients
This year’s winner of the Rivers undergraduate Prize is Tiffany Star Behringer, from the University of Pennsylvania. Her essay “Changing paradigms of the one-child Policy: Exploring the Cultural Model of Reproduction and Gender Role of Chinese Immigrant Women” offers an ethnographic exploration of reproductive choice in this immigrant community. Using interviews with Chinese women in the US at the beginning of their reproductive lives, she notes that ideas about childbearing are closely tied to considerations of gender equality, the status of women, and occupational labor. She found that women did not find life easier in the US despite both countries’ rhetorical commitment to gender and work equality and despite these women’s embrace of the possibility of having more children here than in China. Rather, the new cultural and governmental milieu produced in some cases just as much, though different, and sometimes more confusion than would be seen in China. Her work is also subtle in that it undertakes to affirm literature that shows how women’s attitudes and behaviors here in the US provide us with insight about the ineffectiveness of China’s one Child policy, with a good deal of resentment lying just below the surface of compliance seen there.
The winner of the Hughes Graduate Student Paper Prize this year goes to Benjamin Hickler for his essay “Sexually Violent Predators and the Truth about the Future.” In this essay, Ben takes a close look at the new technological and legal apparatuses that attempt to evaluate the risk of recitivism among so-called violent predators. The category itself, he notes, is quite broad—referring at one extreme to the consensual sexual relations of a man with a 17 year old “minor” and at the other extreme to the violent molestor and murdering pedophile. In looking through the materials used in courtrooms and medical and psychiatric settings, along with interviews with lawyers and medical experts as well as SVPs, Ben explores not just the attempts to ground the ideas of risk of recitivism in biology –in brain reactions and penile stimulation rates—but also how these apparatuses might be a harbinger of the future for many instance of medico-legal collaboration. The attempt to predict the future of medical and legal offenses in a compliant public that also believes in the accuracy of new biological technologies is quite frightening. We look forward to seeing revised versions of it submitted to MAQ.
Finally, the winner of this year’s Polgar Prize for the best essay in volume 17 of MAQ goes to Charles Briggs, for his essay entitled: “Why Nation-States and Journalists Can’t Teach People to be healthy: Power and Pragmatic Miscalculation in Public Discourses on Health”. In this essay, Charles provides us with an encapsulated version of the brilliant analysis of discursive relations between media, various publics, public health efforts and an epidemic of cholera in Venezuela, that can be found in his new book co-authored with Clara Mantini-Briggs “Stories in the Time of Cholera.” In this article, we learn about the ways that journalists helped script the racial profiling of various publics—making poor peasants into unsanitary subjects who harbored and in some sense were made “blamable” for the epidemic and, on the other hand, sanitary citizens, whose imagined lifestyles of hygienic discipline were seen as models for public health messages. In constructing the epidemic in this way, the media became allied with public health efforts that in the end completely missed their mark in being able to enlist participation of those victims of the epidemic who needed the most help. With clarity and a wealth of cogent ethnographic materials, he shows us how this sort of ascription of diseases and populations is not just a thing of the colonial past (where we have seen it described often) but is actively produced in the late 20th century as epidemics still unfairly affect the poorest of the poor and as conditions of structural inequality and globalization continue to be masked by medicalized discourses of public health intervention.