Syracuse University SURFACE Dissertations - ALL SURFACE December 2018 Village Doctors and Vulnerable Bodies: Gender, Medicine, and Risk in North India Jocelyn Killmer Syracuse University Follow this and additional works at: https://surface.syr.edu/etd Part of the Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons Recommended Citation Killmer, Jocelyn, "Village Doctors and Vulnerable Bodies: Gender, Medicine, and Risk in North India" (2018). Dissertations - ALL. 962. https://surface.syr.edu/etd/962 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the SURFACE at SURFACE. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations - ALL by an authorized administrator of SURFACE. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. ABSTRACT This dissertation tracks an uncommon migration: the movement of young women doctors from urban medical colleges to rural clinics in Rajasthan, North India. The ability for young women doctors to transfer their lives to a rural clinic, even for a year or two, is vital for career advancement in Rajasthan’s government health sector. Yet I found that women, over and over, rejected this opportunity, turning this urban to rural migration into a trickle rather than a flow. Through interviews, observations, and travel in urban and rural Jaipur district, I explore the meanings of urban and rural spaces as well as contested understandings of what role doctors should play in the health of the population. I found that rural spaces were discursively marked as particularly dangerous for doctors who are urban, middle-class women. First, moving to a “village of strangers” required shedding one’s protective social network and the paternalistic surveillance that accompanies it.