Elise Andaya's "Pregnant at Work"

Elise Andaya is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University at Albany and author of Conceiving Cuba: Reproduction, Women, and the State in the Post-Soviet Era.

She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Pregnant at Work: Low-Wage Workers, Power, and Temporal Injustice, and reported the following:

Page 99 plunges us into the historical and political-economic conditions that have produced the chronically underfunded and under-resourced state of New York City’s public safety-net hospitals (hospitals that are committed to providing care to all patients regardless of their ability to pay). I argue that this disinvestment into safety-net care reflects an entrenched devaluation of racialized life, as the institutions that serve low-income people (in New York City, predominantly people of color) are slowly stripped of resources, producing apparently “natural” conditions of scarcity that force constant triaging of care. This broader political-economic context is often invisible to those who seek or give care at the hospital, yet it fundamentally shapes clinical temporal structures; pregnant low-wage service sector workers endure long waits for prenatal appointments that they see as a lack of respect for their time while providers feel rushed, time- pressured, and underappreciated for their time.

Through this glimpse of the safety-net hospital in which I conducted interviews and observation for almost a year, page 99 provides one example of the book’s broader argument: that the organization of time is a key vector through which classed, racialized, and gendered experiences of social inequality are produced and reproduced through pregnant bodies, institutions, and across the generations. What the reader will not understand from this page, however, is how the time structures of precarious low-wage service work in New York City shape experiences of pregnancy and access to prenatal care for the women employed in these industries. Further—and importantly!—the reader will not get a taste of the rich clinical observational work that informs this research nor of women’s often poignant narratives of working while pregnant. The temporal injustice that these lay bare should spur us all to call for broader policy reform.

Visit Elise Andaya's website.

--Marshal Zeringue