In Ecuador, middle‐class women, and increasingly more working‐class women, eagerly pay to be scarred. Cesarean sections carried out in private clinics leave a lateral scar—the mark of women not subject to the indignities of devalued public medical services. It is not citizenship per se that these women are after with their scars, since in Ecuador, citizenship, especially in the medical realm, is denigrated. Instead, the scar is a sign of a woman's ability to remain distinct from the governed masses who need to make citizenship claims for social services on state institutions. Scars and the bodies that carry them enact a racialized relationship to the nation. Browner bodies can withstand vaginal birth within the disciplines of public maternity care. When women pay for cesarean sections, the private scars make them whiter and more worthy of the nation. After all, they have not taken anything from the state.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/92454/1/jlca1223.pd
