Includes bibliographical references and index.

"Women in North India are socialized to care for others, so what do they do when they get a disease like diabetes that requires intensive self-care? In Sugar and Tension, Lesley Jo Weaver uses women's experiences with diabetes in New Delhi as a lens to explore how gendered roles and expectations are taking shape in contemporary India. Weaver argues that although women's domestic care of others may be at odds with the self-care mandates of biomedically-managed diabetes, these roles nevertheless do important cultural work that may buffer women's mental and physical health by fostering social belonging. Weaver describes how women negotiate the many responsibilities in their lives when chronic disease is at stake. As women weigh their options, the choices they make raise questions about whose priorities should count in domestic, health, and family worlds. The varied experiences of women illustrate that there are many routes to living well or poorly with diabetes, and these are not always the ones canonized in biomedical models of diabetes management"--

"Sugar and Tension is about a group of women with type 2 diabetes who live in India's capital, New Delhi. Type 2 diabetes is a chronic disease resulting from a low level of insulin, a hormone excreted by the pancreas that regulates blood sugar. It is a highly complex disease to manage, requiring intensive and sustained self-care. However, many Indian women are trained from an early age to prioritize the needs of others above those of themselves, including their parents, their in-laws, their children, and their spouses. What happens when women in that situation get diabetes? Whose wellbeing is prioritized then? Questions about how women in North India negotiate self- and other-care are especially timely, given current public debates around women's changing economic and social positions in the country, and particularly about their rights and roles in public spaces. Lesley Jo Weaver worked with a large sample of women to interrogate these factors, along with finding out how they obtain medical help, the medicine they need, and the social and emotional support that would make their lives easier. Most of these women believed other-care activities to be of the utmost importance even if they were not able to fulfill them, and they went to great lengths to uphold them to whatever extent they were able. Engagingly written, this book will be an important contribution to the study of this chronic disease"--