Paper short abstract:

Polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), a lifestyle disease with outcomes on fertility, appearance, and diabetes risk, affects a growing number of Indian women. Here, I investigate the interaction between sociocultural change in contemporary India, PCOS, and lived experience of the condition.

Paper long abstract:

Polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), an endocrine disorder with no known cure that compromises fertility, is a lifestyle disease affecting a growing number of urban middle-class Indian women. Linked to type II diabetes risk, PCOS is the leading cause of female infertility worldwide, but the syndrome has received scant attention in the social science literature. There is also a paucity of clear epidemiological studies on PCOS in India, but media accounts and medical practitioners have noted a recent rise in cases in urban India and attribute it to modernization, disrupted circadian rhythms, stress, and lifestyle changes following on the heels of neoliberal reforms beginning in 1991, which opened up the country to processes of globalization. PCOS is thus both a symbol of rapid sociocultural change in India and the embodied manifestation of the biosocial stresses caused by such a change. As a lifestyle disease, PCOS must therefore be addressed not in terms of decontextualized lifestyle practices and behaviors—which is the view taken by most medical practitioners—but by locating these behaviors within the specific circumstances in which PCOS-affected bodies are enmeshed, particularly the pressures to embody "modern selves." Nevertheless, I argue that even though the syndrome (through its effects on fertility and appearance) poses a challenge to women's traditional roles as wives and mothers, rapid sociocultural change and medical technology provide women with potential for new identities. Their aspirations are therefore simultaneously aided and constrained by the very same sociocultural changes that make them vulnerable to PCOS.