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AIDS has been a devastating plague in much of sub-Saharan Africa, but the long-term implications for gender and sexuality are just emerging. This book tackles this issue head-on and examines how AIDS has altered the ways in which masculinity is lived in Uganda—a country known as Africa’s great AIDS success story. Based on over a decade of ethnographic research in an urban slum community called Bwaise, this book reveals the persistence of masculine privilege in the age of AIDS and the implications such privilege has for combating AIDS across the African continent.

Beautyscapes explores the rapidly developing global phenomenon of international medical travel, focusing specifically on patient-consumers seeking cosmetic surgery outside their home country and on those who enable them to access treatment abroad, including key figures such as surgeons and facilitators. Documenting the complex and sometimes fraught journeys of those who travel for treatment abroad, as well as the nature and power relations of the transnational IMT industry, this is the first book to focus specifically on cosmetic surgery tourism. A rich and theoretically sophisticated ethnography, Beautyscapes draws on key themes in studies of globalisation and mobility, such as gender and class, neoliberalism, social media, assemblage, conviviality and care, to explain the nature and growing popularity of cosmetic surgery tourism. The book challenges myths about vain and ill-informed travellers seeking surgery from ‘cowboy’ foreign doctors, yet also demonstrates the difficulties and dilemmas that medical tourists – especially cosmetic surgery tourists – face. Vividly illustrated with ethnographic material and with the voices of those directly involved in cosmetic surgery tourism, Beautyscapes is based on a large research project exploring cosmetic surgery journeys from Australia and China to East Asia and from the UK to Europe and North Africa.

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 Politics of Metabolism analyses the racial ideas that underpin the metabolic syndrome as a new biomedical construction that aims to transform how contemporary medicine understands and treats metabolic health problems. It explains how metabolism serves as a site for the kind of society that simultaneously manufactures health problems and their remedies, deploys race as a way of concealing inequality, and constructs powerful ideas like metabolic syndrome to sever the relationship between body and society.

This book provides a history of the American natural and health foods industry and its leadership in the social movement oriented to spreading a natural foods way of life. The natural foods case is used to consider the broader question of what possibilities open up and what limits emerge when private enterprise is involved in movements advocating for broad-based social and cultural change. Beginning with the first American natural foods advocates in the early nineteenth century, and continuing to the early twenty-first century, this history shows how the leadership of the natural foods industry was central to transforming natural foods consumption from a culturally marginal activity associated with religious minorities, immigrants, the elderly, and the infirm, to a hip lifestyle associated with the young, the fit, and the affluent. In the process, industry helped lead the natural foods movement away from an emphasis on asceticism and simple living, and towards a valuation of indulgence and material comforts. The book argues that instead of acting as a singularly eradicalizing force, the natural and health foods industry reinforced the natural foods movement's often radical rejection of medical expertise. The natural foods case demonstrates that business interests promote a flexible approach to cultural meanings and symbols, which undermines cultural authority and catalyzes cultural change.

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.

Care has been struggled for, resisted and celebrated. The failure to care in ‘care services’ has been seen as a human rights problem and evidence of malaise in contemporary society. But care has also been implicated in the oppression of disabled people and demoted in favour of choice in health and social care services. In this wide- ranging book Marian Barnes argues for care as an essential value in private lives and public policies. She considers the importance of care to well-being and social justice and applies insights from feminist care ethics to care work, and care within personal relationships. She also looks at ‘stranger relationships’, how we relate to the places in which we live, and the way in which public deliberation about social policy takes place. This book will be vital reading for all those wanting to apply relational understandings of humanity to social policy and practice.

The number of elderly and disabled Americans in need of home health care is increasing annually, even as the pool of people — almost always women — willing to do this job gets smaller and smaller. This book takes readers inside the reality of home health care by following the lives of women training and working as home health aides in the South Bronx. The book examines home health care in detail, focusing on the women who tend to our elderly and disabled loved ones and how we fail to value their work. They are paid minimum wage so that we might be absent, getting on with our own lives. The book calls for a rethinking of home health care and explains why changes are urgent: the current system offers neither a good way to live nor a good way to die. By improving the job of home health aide, we can reduce income inequality and create a pool of qualified, competent home health care providers who would contribute to the well-being of us all. The book also serves as a guide into the world of our home health care system. Nearly 50 million US families look after an elderly or disabled loved one. The book explains the issues and choices they face. It explores the narratives, histories, and people behind home health care in the United States, examining how we might improve the lives of both those who receive care and those who provide it.

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.

There is constant pressure on hospitals to improve health care delivery and increase cost effectiveness. New initiatives are the order of the day in the dramatically different health care systems of the United States and Great Britain. Often these efforts are not successful. This book analyzes the successes and failures of efforts to improve hospitals and explains what factors make it likely that the implementation of reforms will be rewarded by positive transformation in a particular institution's day-to-day operation. The book's in-depth qualitative case studies of both top-down initiatives and changes first suggested by staff on the front lines of care point clearly to the importance of all hospital workers in effecting change and even influencing national policy. The book illuminates the critical role of workers, managers, and unions in enabling or constraining changes in policies and procedures and ensuring their implementation. It spotlights an Anglo-American model of hospital care and work organization, even while these countries retain their differences in access and payment. Entrenched professional roles, hierarchical workplace organization, and the sometimes-detached view of policymakers all shape the prospects for change in hospitals. The book provides important examples of how the dedication and imagination of the people who work in hospitals can make all the difference when it comes to providing quality health care even in a challenging economic environment.

For a generation, an intense debate has been waged over the expanding number of people who are diagnosed with a mental disorder and treated with prescription drugs such as Prozac and Adderall. One side, the psychiatric, sees progress. People suffering from mental illness are finally getting the treatment they need. The other side challenges the psychiatric perspective and the medicalization and treatment of common personality traits and forms of distress as mental disorders. Neither side has much to say about how people themselves explain their suffering and or envision a resolution. Chemically Imbalanced, based on interviews, explores this sense-making among people dealing with experiences of loss, disappointment, and underachievement. At the heart of distress is a gap between experience and valued standards and ideals of selfhood, and confusion over why things are not going as they should. People are in a predicament, and the book explores how many take up diagnostic categories, biological explanations, and pharmaceuticals as social objects and narratives to make sense of their situation and ameliorate it. These efforts reveal that a quiet but profound revolution in consciousness is underway. Ways of conceiving of suffering in terms of the mind, interpersonal experience, and social circumstances are being replaced with a thin and mechanistic language of the body/brain. The appeal of this “neurobiological imaginary,” the book argues, is not its explanatory power but in what it promises people they can be in our fluid and depthless culture. Despite the vaunted freedom, the imaginary has troubling and entrapping consequences.

This book illustrates the continuing challenges as well as the new paradoxes linked to childbirth in South Asia. It brings together anthropologists and sociologists working in different contexts (at the hospital, within the community) and in a variety of settings (rural, urban) in India, Nepal, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. While women in Western countries have pressed for more home deliveries, and for the mitigation of some of the effects of the male appropriation and over-medicalized experience of motherhood, most developing countries are promoting institutionalized deliveries and stigmatizing poor women who deliver at home. In addition, new information technologies are being pressed into service; for example, to identify high-risk mothers and to offer them advice through social media. Such an evolution is particularly salient in South Asia where childbirth has long been an issue, not only for the colonial government, which sometimes used women’s poor health to justify imperialist interests, but also for independent successor states, who have implemented decisive schemes within the last decade, after being long accused of neglecting women’s healthcare. Despite the increased attention being paid to maternal and child health, and the steady rise in institutional deliveries in South Asia, progress on reducing maternal and infant mortality has been slow and halting, with significant disparities across regions and social groups. Far from withering away, traditional birth attendants have seen a resurgence, in part due to the demeaning conditions offered to poor, low-caste, rural women in formal health settings. With this backdrop, the authors explore the ethical and social implications of the changes being introduced in the technologies and social arrangements of childbirth in South Asia.

This book focuses on the experiences and perspectives of children and young people who care for a parent with HIV in the global North and South. Drawing on in-depth qualitative research from the UK and Tanzania, it presents a unique insight into the similarities and differences in children' and parents' experiences across diverse socio-economic, cultural, and welfare contexts. The book makes a significant contribution to the growing research evidence on children and young people with caring responsibilities (‘young carers’) and the impacts of HIV and AIDS on families globally. It examines caring relationships within families affected by HIV and AIDS; the outcomes of caregiving; children‘s and families’ resilience; the factors influencing whether children become involved in care work; and local and global policy responses. The book also provides insight into the perspectives of parents living with HIV and service providers working with families.

To cut costs and maximize profits, hospitals in the United States and many other countries are outsourcing such tasks as cleaning and food preparation to private contractors. To examine this transformation in the healthcare industry, this book looks at the consequences of outsourcing from two perspectives: its impact on patient safety and its role in increasing socioeconomic inequality. The book argues that outsourcing has been disastrous for the cleanliness of hospitals—leading to an increased risk of hospital-acquired infections, a leading cause of severe illness and death—as well as for the effective delivery of other hospital services and the workers themselves. Interviews with the low-wage workers who keep hospitals running uncover claims of exposure to near-constant risk of injury and illness. Many report serious concerns about the quality of the work due to understaffing, high turnover, poor training and experience, inadequate cleaning supplies, and on-the-job injuries. The book also presents policy recommendations for improving patient safety by reducing the risk of hospital-acquired infection and ameliorating the work conditions and quality of life of hospital support workers. It makes the case that hospital outsourcing exemplifies the trend towards “low-road” service-sector jobs that threatens to undermine society's social health, as well as the physical health and well-being of patients in health care settings globally.

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.

Americans come together to fight diseases. For over 100 years, they have asked their neighbors to contribute to disease campaigns and supported health policies that target one disease at a time. Common Enemies asks why disease campaigns are the battles Americans can agree to fight, why some diseases attract more attention than others, and how fighting one disease at a time changes how Americans distribute charitable dollars, prioritize policies, and promote health. Drawing on the first comprehensive data on thousands of organizations targeting hundreds of diseases over decades, the author shows that disease campaigns proliferate due to the perception of health as a universal goal, the appeal of narrowly targeted campaigns, and the strategic avoidance of controversy. They funnel vast sums of money and attention to a few favored diseases, and they prioritize awareness campaigns and medical research over preventing disease and ensuring access to healthcare. It’s easy to imagine more efficient ways to promote collective well-being. Yet the same forces that limit the potential of individual disease campaigns to improve health also stimulate the vast outpouring of money and attention. Rather than displacing attention to other problems, disease campaigns build up the capacity to address them.

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.

Delivering babies was merely one aspect of the broad role of African American midwives in the twentieth-century South. Yet little has been written about the type of care they provided, or how midwifery and maternity care evolved under the increasing presence of local and federal health care structures. Using evidence from nursing, medical, and public health journals of the era; primary sources from state and county departments of health; and personal accounts from varied practitioners, Delivered by Midwives: African American Midwifery in the Twentieth-Century South provides a new perspective on the childbirth experience of African American women and their maternity care providers during the twentieth century. Moving beyond the usual racial dichotomy, the monograph exposes a more complex shift in childbirth culture to reveal the changing expectations and agency of African American women in their rejection of a two-tier maternity care system, and their demands to be part of an inclusive, desegregated society. This book identifies valuable aspects of a maternity care model that were discarded in the name of progress. Today concern about maternal mortality and persistent racial disparities have forced a reassessment of maternity care and elements of the long-abandoned care model are being reincorporated into modern practice, answering current health care dilemmas by heeding lessons from the past.