Embodying Honor

"Even as the effects of modernity and development, global inequities, and exclusionary government policies challenge traditional ways of life in eastern Sudan and throughout many parts of Africa, reproductive traumas - infertility, miscarriage, children's illnesses, and mortality - disrupt women's reproductive health and impede their efforts to achieve the status that comes with fertility and motherhood." "In Embodying Honor Amal Hassan Fadlalla finds that the female body is the locus of anxieties about foreign dangers and diseases, threats perceived to be disruptive to morality, feminine identities, and social well-being. As a "northern Sudanese" viewed as an outsider in this region of her native country, Fadlalla presents an intimate portrait and thorough analysis that offers commentary on the very notion of what constitutes the "foreign." Fadlalla shows how Muslim Hadendowa women manage health and reproductive suffering in their quest to become "responsible" mothers and valued members of their communities. Her historically grounded ethnography delves into women's reproductive histories, personal narratives, and ritual logics to reveal the ways in which women challenge cultural understandings of gender, honor, and reproduction."--book jacket.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.