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This collection expands scholarly understandings of citizenship in an age in which the material body and its health, vitality, and natural and social environments not only create and discipline the citizen-subject, but also provide the conditions necessary for its recognition and political agency. Together, the chapters consider biocitizenship as a unique mode of biopolitical governance, but also as a response and sometimes a resistance to it. Looking closely at the ways in which the body and citizenship interanimate each other, the collection moves away from biocitizenship as a static form of biomedical subjectivity or category of belonging and redefines it as a dynamic and essential—sometimes generative, and sometimes limiting—element of biopolitics. The book has three primary goals: to serve as the first multidisciplinary forum on biocitizenship, bringing together a variety of voices from different fields (including voices from outside the academy); to redefine biocitizenship as a broad mode of political action linked to health, bodies, and life; and to critically interrogate both the “bio” and “citizenship” of biocitizenship.

Black women’s voices are infrequently theoretically centered in health literatures about how they experience and co-create their health, and it is even rarer for Black girls to be taken into account as reliable knowers. Black Women’s Health explores the real-life meanings and everyday practices of health (i.e., mental, physical, emotional, and sexual) for the African American mothers and daughters whose narratives comprise the research. The book draws from extensive fieldwork and focus groups conducted with African American mothers and their adolescent daughters ages 12–18 in North Carolina in their discussions about health, sexuality, intimacy, and transitions to “womanhood” in a variety of contexts. In this case, micro-theory draws on multiple concepts to reveal patterns of intergenerational health practices and communication. The methodological framework draws from a Black feminist and intersectional theoretical orientation to situate Black women’s and girls’ health. Black Women’s Health is thus the first scholarly book to treat the health status of African American mothers and daughters as integrally linked. Black Women’s Health probes the various ways in which African American mothers discuss vital issues with their daughters, and how their daughters co-construct, interpret, and resist maternal and cultural narratives of health, sexuality, and racial identity. These direct accounts highlight how African American women and girls navigate their health and intimate relationships, as well as the various health disparities rooted in the racism, sexism, and class marginality they experience.

The Business of Birth examines the effects of malpractice and reproductive rights laws on maternity care practices in the US from 1995 to 2015. It is a common public belief that frivolous malpractice claims and women’s choices shape hospital birth practices. This book uses mixed methods to demonstrate that this belief is inaccurate. The Business of Birth carefully documents how there are interconnected systems of laws and policies, or legal “regimes,” that influence birth practices in unexpected ways. When it comes to malpractice, the standard of care that defines malpractice is internal to the medical profession. This means that tort laws do not exert the external pressure that physicians believe they do, although professional associations, liability insurers, risk managers, and hospital legal counsel reinforce a fear of liability risk. This fear can encourage obstetricians to intervene into labor and birth with scientifically unsupported technology or procedures with known risks. But reducing liability risk can encourage risky practices that promote organizational efficiency over patient safety. The Business of Birth also examines the implications of reproductive rights laws for maternity care practices, defining states that protect women’s reproductive rights as woman-centered and those that protect fetuses as fetus-centered. Reproductive justice theory argues that pregnant women’s rights during childbirth are connected to laws governing the full spectrum of reproduction. Woman-centered approaches to pregnancy and abortion promote choice, informed consent, and the right to bodily integrity when women give birth, while fetus-centered regimes limit women’s rights and choices during birth.

Based on a multimethod study that centers on interviews with over 30 conservationists, field biologists, ecologists, paleontologists and over 3 years of my fieldwork on urban beaches in the New York City area, the Florida Keys, and international conferences, Catch and Release explores the interspecies relationships between humans and horseshoe crabs—our multiple sites of entanglement and enmeshment as we both come to matter. As I show, crabs and humans make each other in particular ways. Humans have literally harvested the life out of horseshoe crabs for multiple purposes; we interpret them for understanding geologic time, we bleed them for biomedical applications, we collect them for agricultural fertilizer, we eat them as delicacies, we rescue them for conservation, we capture them as bait, we categorize them as Endangered. In contrast, the crabs make humans matter by revealing our species vulnerability to endotoxins, offering opportunities for career opportunities and profiteering off of crab bodies, and fertilizing the soil of agricultural harvest for human food. In these acts of harvesting, I consider how horseshoe crabs and humans make meaning of events such as the Anthropocene (the epoch of geologic time that attributes climate change and species decline to human activities), global warming, and biomedical innovation.

The natural world is marked by an ever-increasing loss of varied habitats, a growing number of species extinctions, and a full range of new kinds of dilemmas posed by global warming. At the same time, humans are also working to actively shape this natural world through contemporary bioscience and biotechnology. This book posits that cloned endangered animals in zoos sit at the apex of these two trends, as humans seek a scientific solution to environmental crisis. Often fraught with controversy, cloning technologies significantly affect our conceptualizations of and engagements with wildlife and nature. By studying animals at different locations, the book explores the human practices surrounding the cloning of endangered animals. Ultimately, the book concludes that the act of recalibrating nature through science is what most disturbs us about cloning animals in captivity, revealing that debates over cloning become, in the end, a site of political struggle between different human groups. Moreover, the book explores the implications of the social role that animals at the zoo play in the first place—how they are viewed, consumed, and used by humans for our own needs. A unique study uniting sociology and the study of science and technology, the book demonstrates just how much bioscience reproduces and changes our ideas about the meaning of life itself.

The odyssey of Depo-Provera is a study of the politics of contraceptive drug risk management, which involves a lengthy struggle over the scientific assessment of the drug's health risk and acceptability of the injectable drug's use. In this struggle, the FDA, the federal government's drug licensing agency, has limited authority to manage the drug's risk and is one participant in a fragmented system of drug risk management that includes The Upjohn Company, physicians, and state judges and legislators. Depo-Provera's odyssey joins its national controversy over its contraceptive approval to its state civil and criminal legal experiences, which take the form of three overlapping stories told by Judith Weisz, Anne MacMurdo, and Roger Gauntlett. At the center of each of their stories is a trial.Judith Weisz chaired the FDA's Depo-Provera Public Board of Inquiry, a science court; Anne MacMurdo was the plaintiff in a state products liability suit against The Upjohn Company; and Roger Gauntlett, the defendant in a state statutory rape trial. Together their stories join the twenty-five-year national controversy over Upjohn's FDA application to have the drug licensed as a female contraceptive to the state medical malpractice and products liability issues raised by its contraceptive use and the criminal justice issues raised by its use as a probation and parole condition for sex offenders. Together they tell a collective story that provides an agenda for the principal participants to more effectively manage Depo-Provera's health risk and for the FDA to seriously consider banning the drug.

Trauma is a universal human experience. While each person responds differently to trauma, its presence in our lives nonetheless marks a continual thread through human history and prehistory. In Critical Trauma Studies, a diverse group of writers, activists, and scholars of sociology, anthropology, literature, and cultural studies reflects on the study of trauma and how multidisciplinary approaches lend richness and a sense of deeper understanding to this burgeoning field of inquiry. The original essays within this collection cover topics such as female suicide bombers from the Chechen Republic, singing prisoners in Iranian prison camps, sexual assault and survivor advocacy, and families facing the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. As it proceeds, Critical Trauma Studies never loses sight of the way those who study trauma as an academic field, and those who experience, narrate, and remediate trauma as a personal and embodied event, inform one another. Theoretically adventurous and deeply particular, this book aims to advance trauma studies as a discipline that transcends intellectual boundaries, to be mapped but also to be unmoored from conceptual and practical imperatives. Remaining embedded in lived experiences and material realities, Critical Trauma Studies frames the field as both richly unbounded and yet clearly defined, historical, and evidence-based.

With accelerating obesity and chronic disease rates worldwide, weight loss has emerged as a central concern in medical and public health efforts to improve health. Managing weight is also a very personal concern for many individuals in their effort to conform to thin social body norms in countries like the United States. Surgical weight-loss techniques (bariatric surgeries) currently are the most effective means to lose massive weight quickly, but they are not uncontroversial. This book reflects four years of ethnographic study by three anthropologists, listening to and learning from patients undergoing bariatric surgeries in a large hospital system in the US. The key theme of this book is “weight” as a physical, emotional, and social phenomenon. Extreme weight can be a trigger for prejudice, stigma, and rejection in the United States today, and the transformation of people’s bodies in the wake of surgery and weight loss is potentially physically and socially profound. By focusing on what happens before, during, and after bariatric surgery, this book examines the complex ways in which body weight now defines many aspects of daily US life. It also highlights the work people are willing to do to meet difficult-to-achieve social expectations.

Heart disease, the leading cause of death in the United States, affects people from all walks of life, yet who lives and who dies from heart disease still depends on race, class, and gender. While scientists and clinicians understand and treat heart disease more effectively than ever before, and industrialized countries have made substantial investments in research and treatment over the past six decades, patterns of inequality persist. This book argues that official accounts of cardiovascular health inequalities are unconvincing and inadequate, and that clinical and public health interventions grounded in these accounts ignore many critical causes of those inequalities. Examining the routine activities of epidemiology the book shows how social differences of race, social class, and gender are upheld by the scientific community. It argues that such sites of expert knowledge routinely, yet often invisibly, make claims about how biological and cultural differences matter—claims that differ substantially from the lived experiences of individuals who themselves suffer from health problems. The book explores how both scientists and lay people define “difference” and its consequences for health. The book explores the deep rifts regarding the meanings and consequences of social difference for heart disease, and the changes that would be required to generate more convincing accounts of the significance of inequality for health and well-being.

Why has breastfeeding re-asserted itself over the last twenty years, and why are the government, the scientific and medical communities, and so many mothers so invested in the idea? This book challenges the widespread belief that breastfeeding is medically superior to bottle-feeding. Despite the fact that breastfeeding has become the ultimate expression of maternal dedication the conviction that breastfeeding provides babies unique health benefits and that formula feeding is a risky substitute is unsubstantiated by the evidence. The book argues that a public obsession with health and what she calls “total motherhood” has made breastfeeding a cause célèbre, and that public discussions of breastfeeding say more about infatuation with personal responsibility and perfect mothering in America than they do about the concrete benefits of the breast. Parsing the rhetoric of expert advice, including the recent National Breastfeeding Awareness Campaign, and rigorously questioning the scientific evidence, the book uncovers a path by which a mother can feel informed and confident about how best to feed her thriving infant—whether flourishing by breast or by bottle.

In 2000, the National Human Genome Research Institute announced the completion of a “draft” of the human genome, the sequence information of nearly all 3 billion base pairs of DNA. Since then, interest in the hereditary basis of disease has increased considerably. This book considers the broad implications of this development by treating “heredity” as both a scientific and political concept. Beginning with the argument that eugenics was an ideological project that recast the problems of industrialization as pathologies of gender, race, and class, the book traces the legacy of this ideology in contemporary practices of genomics. Delving into the discrete and often obscure epistemologies and discursive practices of genomic scientists, the book maps the ways in which the hereditarian body, one that is also normatively gendered and racialized, is the new site whereby economic injustice, environmental pollution, racism, and sexism are implicitly reinterpreted as pathologies of genes and by extension, the bodies they inhabit. Comparing genomic approaches to medicine and public health with discourses of epidemiology, social movements, and humanistic theories of the body and society, the book reworks our common assumption of what might count as effective, just, and socially transformative notions of health and disease.

Although the first AIDS cases were attributed to men having sex with men, over 70 percent of HIV infections worldwide are now estimated to occur through sex between women and men. In Men at Risk, Shari L. Dworkin uses sociological thinking (masculinity studies, feminist thought, and intersectionality) to critically evaluate public and global health programming in HIV prevention to date. She highlights how heterosexually-active men have been overlooked in behavioral HIV prevention programming both domestically and globally. The book also centrally challenges common notions of gendered vulnerability and HIV risk by meticulously detailing how and why heterosexually-active men are indeed “at risk” of HIV and AIDS. She highlights interview data collected from men who participated in a relatively new type of health programming with men known as “gender transformative.” She examines the promises and limitations of gender-transformative health programming with men by detailing how men who participate in such programs respond to being asked to change in the direction of increased gender equality in the name of health. Paying simultaneous attention to men’s voices and multi-racial feminist thought, she makes promising suggestions for the next generation of HIV prevention programming by calling for masculinities-based structural interventions that are also empowering to women.

Medicine has been personal since long before personalized medicine became popular as a concept. Health professionals have long taken into consideration individual characteristics of their patients when diagnosing, treating, and caring for them. Why has the notion of personalized medicine become so popular in the new millennium? One reason is the availability of individual-level digital data. Medicine informed by digital, quantified, and computable information about individual patients is now seen as more precise and effective than previous practice based on unstructured data, narratives, and embodied experience. Such an understanding of personalization, however, also requires a lot of work from patients. “Activated patients” are expected to contribute data and information, and participate in “unobtrusive” monitoring, to make personalized medicine a reality. At the same time as more work is required from patients, their influence over how their data and information are used is waning. This stands in a tension with the rhetoric of patient empowerment and patient participation. Bringing together empirical work and critical scholarship from medicine, public health, social and legal studies, STS, bioethics, and digital sociology, this book analyzes the challenges of personalization driven by patient work (“personalization from below”). It proposes an understanding of personalized medicine that lets technological practices serve the needs and interests of patients instead of ruling them.

Phantom limb pain is one of the most intractable and merciless pains ever known—a pain that haunts appendages that do not physically exist, often persisting with uncanny realness long after fleshy limbs have been traumatically, surgically, or congenitally lost. The very existence and “naturalness” of this pain has been instrumental in modern science's ability to create prosthetic technologies that many feel have transformative, self-actualizing, and even transcendent power. This book critically examines phantom limb pain and its relationship to prosthetic innovation, tracing the major shifts in knowledge of the causes and characteristics of the phenomenon. It exposes how the meanings of phantom limb pain have been influenced by developments in prosthetic science and ideas about the extraordinary power of these technologies to liberate and fundamentally alter the human body, mind, and spirit. The book examines the modernization of amputation and exposes how medical understanding about phantom limbs has changed from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first centuries. It interrogates the impact of advances in technology, medicine, psychology and neuroscience, as well as changes in the meaning of limb loss, popular representations of amputees, and corporeal ideology. The book questions our most deeply held ideas of what is normal, natural, and even moral about the physical human body.

In “Save My Kid,” sociologist Amanda Gengler examines how families of critically ill children navigate the US healthcare system. Not all families are equipped with resources for critically ill kids, but the toolkits that are available to them shape their approach to seeking care and negotiating the treatment process, as well as their ability to maintain some degree of emotional stability in the midst of profound distress. ”Save My Kid” uncovers the powerful role emotional goals—deeply rooted in the emotional culture around illness and medicine in the United States—can play in driving medical decisions, healthcare interactions, and the end of children’s lives if and when they come. This book draws out the often unrecognized, everyday inequalities that unfold throughout the illness experience while shedding important light on the emotional foundations on which they rest.

The face is a core feature of our physical identity. Our face is how others identify us and how we think of our “self.” Yet, human faces are also essential mechanisms for communication and as a means of eating, breathing, and seeing. Thus, facial disfigurement can endanger our fundamental notions of self and identity or even be life threatening. Because it is so difficult to conceal our faces, the disfigured face compromises appearance, status, and, perhaps, our very way of being in the world. This book examines the cultural meaning and social significance of interventions aimed at repairing faces defined as disfigured. It explores four sites in which a range of faces are “repaired”: face transplantation, facial feminization surgery, the reality show Extreme Makeover, and the international charitable organization Operation Smile. The book considers how efforts focused on repair sometimes intensify the stigma associated with disfigurement. It also considers alternative interventions and everyday practices that both challenge stigma and help those seen as disfigured negotiate outsider status. The book delves into the promise and limits of facial surgery, examining how we might understand appearance as a facet of privilege and a dimension of inequality. It argues that facial work is not simply a conglomeration of reconstructive techniques aimed at the human face, but rather, that appearance interventions are increasingly treated as lifesaving work.

The collapse of the World Trade Center shattered windows across the street in Battery Park City, throwing the neighborhood into darkness and smothering homes in debris. Residents fled. In the months and years after they returned, they worked to restore their community. Until September 11, Battery Park City had been a secluded, wealthy enclave just west of Wall Street, one with all the opulence of the surrounding corporate headquarters yet with a gated, suburban feel. After the towers fell it became the most visible neighborhood in New York City. This book examines both the struggles and shortcomings of one of the city's wealthiest neighborhoods. In doing so, it discovers the vibrant exclusivity that makes Battery Park City an unmatched place to live for the few who can gain entry. Focusing on both the global forces that shape local landscapes and the exclusion that segregates American urban development, the book shows the tensions at work as the neighborhood's residents mobilized to influence reconstruction plans. The book reveals previously unseen conflicts over the redevelopment of Lower Manhattan, providing a new understanding of the ongoing, reciprocal relationship between social conflicts and the spaces they both inhabit and create.

What was it like to live as a transgender person in a media environment before Caitlin Jenner, Orange Is the New Black, Transparent, and the current transgender reality TV boom? Struggling for Ordinary answers this question by examining the role of media and technology in the everyday lives of transgender people before what some call the “transgender tipping point” in popular culture. It offers a snapshot of how transgender individuals made their way toward identity and a sense of ordinary life by integrating available media into their emotional, cognitive, and everyday experiences. Informed by in-depth interviews and participant observation with transgender communities over the course of four years, the book offers a careful and richly detailed account of transgender media use and world-making. It explores how media and technology operate as arbiters of possibilities, how they franchise what is and is not possible. Struggling for Ordinary shows how transgender people turn to both old and new technologies to cultivate an understanding of their identities and to achieve the common inclusions and routine affordances of everyday life from which they are often excluded. The book also looks at the emotional and affective toll media use takes on transgender individuals, along with their resilience in the face of media disempowerment. Finally, the book complicates the queer/normal binary—recognizing the ways transgender and queer everyday life is “queerly ordinary,” a hybrid of sameness and difference, assimilation and resistance, and ordinariness and queerness.

The collected essays in To Fix or to Heal examine the persistence of reductionistic approaches to medicine and public health. Despite widespread discontent with such approaches and good reasons to turn toward a more “holistic” model, an individualistic and mechanistic approach has survived decades of criticism. Indeed, reductionistic forces have grown stronger since the classic critiques of the 1960s and 70s. Besides describing the persistence of this approach in various spheres, and showing why it is so problematic, the book offers an account for why reductionism has persisted, and why more richly human models have not gained much traction. The reasons include the moral appeal of reductionism (whose apparent value neutrality is in itself a powerful source of authority for defining value); the larger “rationalist dream” of technological mastery, a dream as old as the Scientific Revolution; the growing valuation of “health”; and the focus on individual responsibility as a seemingly non-coercive means of intervention and control. To Fix or Heal also identifies avenues of criticism that could be furthered if medical practice, bioethics, and public health were more faithful to their original goals.

In 1980, young, healthy women in the United States suddenly began to get sick and even die. The unexpected link to these deaths was superabsorbent tampons. Thousands of women used them during their menstrual periods, signaling the potential for a large-scale outbreak. Toxic Shock: A Social History traces the emergence of this new illness of toxic shock syndrome (TSS) and its relationship to tampon technology. This multifaceted history engages microbiology, design and innovation, journalism and mass communication, product liability, and federal policy and regulation. The broad scope captures the various approaches that contributed to defining meaning about the emergent illness. Vostral argues that tampon-related TSS was a paradigm shift in the way that illness manifests. No longer was an infection necessarily the origin of disease, or a faulty product the direct cause of injury. Together, a new pathway to an illness formed, in which a supposedly inert tampon became interactive, and a bacterium once in equilibrium grew dominant and produced toxins. Toxic Shock: A Social History makes a case for understanding tampon-related TSS as the result of biocatalytic activity between technology and bacterium. Moreover, though women were the primary consumers of tampons, the bacterium became the unintended users. This unusual disease process challenged standard approaches to public health, required women to evaluate technological risk, and currently serves as a harbinger about other internal medical devices used and worn within the human body.