Fiks’ ethnography is empirically rich and methodologically thoughtful. Her weaving of in-depth inter views, thick ethnographic description and sustained attention to everyday clinical spaces provides a vivid portrayal of how national policy is enacted and contested in rural lives. The scenes she reconstructs – sterilisation camps, health centres, and domestic negotiations – evoke the affective and ethical complexity of reproductive decision-making under constraints. The innovative conceptual lens of reproductive chronicity is a central contribution."

Across eight chapters, the author discusses her rich ethnographic findings bringing together people, places, tools, cultures, and practices that help us think through sterilization, care, and chronicity from a fresh new perspective...Fiks provides a nuanced portrayal of the varied caste and class cleavages that operate in the enforcement of sterilization services to poor, tribal women in rural Rajasthan.

Centering the under-researched phenomenon of surgical sterilisation in India, and critically examining this within the framework of care, State Intimacies makes significant scholarly contributions to the study of gender, reproduction and the state. With an incisive and evocative ethnography, Fiks brilliantly deals with entanglements of bureaucracy, public healthcare, entrenched hierarchies, reproductive labour, and gendered power relations in rural north India. The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology

Sterilization ‘camps’ have earned a bad press in India – and rightly so. Yet, as Eva Fiks demonstrates in her elegant intervention, coercion is entangled with care for village women contending with the reproductive chronicity that is integral to their daily lives. Patricia Jeffery, Professor Emerita, University of Edinburgh

The book draws on detailed ethnographic research and is rich with empirical details that are framed within larger debates on women’s health, care, and state formation. The introduction immediately draws in the reader. It is a well-written and well-researched book. Lipika Kamra, Jindal Global University

This book is a critical account of how the sterilisation procedures fit into the life worlds of rural women… the book powerfully demonstrates that care is temporary while suffering continues. Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale