This article analyzes the rise and fall of a public health ‘fact’ in the US: the assertion that gay men’s Viagra use is inherently recreational and increases STD risk. Extending the science studies argument that drug development and marketing entail the construction of new publics, this article shows how strategic drug marketing silences can also constitute new populations of users. It shows how Viagra marketing’s silence about gay users, which facilitated legitimization of the drug as an aid for companionate heterosexuality, (...) created a cultural space for the development of health discourse about gay men as illegitimate, recreational and risky Viagra users. Using Susan Leigh Star’s concepts of ‘simplification’ and ‘complexification’, this article traces the construction and deployment of this public health fact, as well as its subsequent contestation. Using an arena analysis approach, this article demonstrates how marketing discourse and public health fact-making came together in the case of gay Viagra use to refresh long-standing and politically harmful American cultural associations between gay sex and sickness. (shrink)

This article is about the ways in which representations of users’ bodies mediate in the designers’ configuration of anti-fertility vaccines and their future users. Anti-fertility vaccines are a novel and not yet available method to regulate fertility. The researchers involved claim that anti-fertility vaccines can be developed for both men and women. But in the material and political specificities of the research contexts, representations of male bodies as users have disappeared, and most research involves the development of a method to (...) be used by women. Anti-fertility vaccines therefore provide an opportunity to study when the sex of future users is deemed relevant by the researchers. This article explores how the fact that most anti-fertility vaccines are developed for female users can be explained without resorting to biological or cultural determinism. How much room for maneuver did the researchers have in defining the vaccines and their users? (shrink)

Food irradiation has been acommercially viable postharvest technology fornearly 50 years (the actual idea of usingionizing radiation to extend the shelf-life offoods is over a century old), yet it has beenused only occasionally and sporadically.Interviews with reporters and the sources theyused at a Louisiana newspaper and a Floridanewspaper uncovered three cultural spherespresent in the debate over this post harvesttechnology – food, science/technology, andjournalism. Each of these spheres were pointsof contention for reporters and sources, andthis has had an affect on the (...) adoption of thetechnology among those involved in the foodindustry. Interviews with both reporters andthe individuals they relied on as sourceselucidate how different issues encompassedwithin different cultural spheres have beenlinked to this post harvest technology, andhave been used to help shape this debate. Thesecultural spheres offer various groups power tocontrol relations with reporters, though thatpower can be usurped by others, including thereporters themselves. Interviews with reportersand their sourses may help us understand howthe values attached to cultural spheres aremobilized by various groups to make sense of acontroversial topic, and how those groups gainentrance to public arenas and are then able tomaintain their presence. (shrink)

Breast reconstruction is an everyday, apparently nonviolent, even benevolent, remaking of the normal, and the reasons for why reconstruction is motivated and legitimate are uncontroversial and widely accepted. In this article the author will, through Donna Haraway's way of conceptualizing discourses, analyze what she calls “stories without significance.” The author has mapped the stories and interpretations of women undergoing reconstruction, stories that are not becoming part of the monovocal discourse of breast reconstruction. Thus, she focuses on the things said that (...) are not assigned significance, the silences and impossibilities. The article is also an effort to account for some of the invisible work that goes into the process of breast reconstruction in dialogue with the feminist field of science and technology studies. This to explore the making of the normal in a medical practice and reflect on how modest interventions could be made. (shrink)

This article explores the reasons women of diverse class, racial ethnic, national, and religious backgrounds give for their decisions not to accept an amniocentesis or, having accepted one, not to pursue an abortion after diagnosis of serious fetal disability. The narratives of refusers reveal conflicts and tensions between the universalizing rationality of biomedical interventions into pregnancy and the wider heterogeneous social frame work to which women respond in their decision-making processes.

In this article, we argue that the interest being taken by governments in establishing innovative learning environments in schools relies on a conception of space as a largely neutral arena. In consequence, relations of space and power inherent in the infrastructural shift to ILEs tend to drop from view. Adopting an assemblage approach to investigating learning environments, and exploring ILEs as they are playing out in Australian schools, we strive to surface what drops from view. Taking ILEs to be sociomaterial (...) assemblages, we work with empirical material and trace how they assemble and reassemble. The account is less concerned with what works in ILEs; rather, its focus is on their ‘workings’ as assemblages of relations and most particularly, affective relations. Thus, we explore two affective encounters involving school leaders, teachers and students showing the ways in which they position and are positioned within ILEs. The argument is made that the assemblage approach which is non-deterministic and relational affords new ways of understanding what ILEs are and how they work and who they work for. And, that attending to affective practice brings into view the micropolitics through which infrastructural shifts and infrastructural policy-making are made. (shrink)

This article seeks to locate the body and embodiment more centrally among the concerns of actor-network theory by exploring working bodies. Using a newly introduced national system of vocational training as an exemplary case, it explores the tension between representations of skilled human bodies—‘competencies’—as given to trainers and the ways in which these representations are incorporated into their everyday practice. Vocational training has had a long struggle with the apparent separability of subject and object—between what can be felt and experienced (...) as distinct from what can be stated, measured, and expressed in words. The argument is made that paying attention to bodies in vocational training can shed light on this struggle. Paying attention to bodies in networks can also strengthen network analyses. Like texts and other forms of materiality, ‘the body’ is not singular but multiple. Furthermore, body politics constitutes an important actor-network them e. (shrink)

New pharmacological therapies, often dubbed `lifestyle drugs', demonstrate the enactment of yet another interface between technologies and bodies that promises a re-fashioning of the body with transformative, life-enhancing results. This article analyzes the emergence of one lifestyle drug, Viagra, from a technoscience studies perspective, conceptualizing Viagra as a new medical technology of the body. Through an analysis of promotional materials for Viagra, we argue that this pharmaceutical device performs ideological work through its discursive scripts that serves to reinforce and augment (...) dominant cultural narratives in relation to material bodies, particularly those of hegemonic masculinity and male (and female) sexuality. We conclude that Viagra carries the potential to reify and reinforce these dominant and hegemonic narratives, while at the same time, through ensuring an open market for heterogeneous users, it provides spaces for alternatives to these normative ideals and assumptions. (shrink)

This study presents situational analysis as a suitable framework for the development of qualitatively-oriented interdisciplinary research in the social sciences. The article argues that even though interdisciplinary research is considered a coveted form of research practice, it is not particularly well developed in the social sciences. This is partly due to institutional barriers, but also because the majority of disciplines lack a suitable theoretical and methodological framework capable of unifying a variety of theoretical bases and primarily methodological processes. Situational analysis, (...) which is based on the work of second generation grounded theorists, is ideal for this purpose, as it offers a frame for theoretical, epistemological, empirical and methodological interdisciplinarity. (shrink)

Technology- and product-oriented movements are mobilizations of civil society organizations that generally include alliances with private-sector firms, for which the target of social change is support for an alternative technology and/or product, as well as the policies with which they are associated. TPMs generally involve “private-sector symbiosis,” that is, a mixture of advocacy organizations/networks and private-sector firms. Case studies of nutritional therapeutics, wind energy, and open-source software are used to explore the tendency for large corporations in established industries to incorporate (...) the products and technologies advocated by the TPM. As the incorporation process proceeds, the alternative technologies undergo design transformations that make them more compatible with existing products and technological systems. As the technological/product field undergoes diversification, “object conflicts” erupt over a range of design possibilities, from those advocated by the more social movement–oriented organizations to those advocated by the established industries. (shrink)

In the sociology of science and sociology of scientific knowledge, the decline of functionalism during the 1970s opened the field to a wide range of theoretical possibilities. However, a Marxist-influenced alternative to functionalism, interests analysis, quickly disappeared, and feminist-multicultural frameworks failed to achieved a dominant position in the field. Instead, functionalism was replaced by a variety of agency-based frameworks that focused on constructive or performative processes. The shift in the sociology of science from Mertonian functionalism to the poststrong program, agency-based (...) sociology of scientific knowledge has parallels with the broader shift in political ideologies from social liberalism to neoliberalism. The argument is made in a way that is cognizant of the criticisms raised against interests analysis and avoids the ?short circuit? of class imputation. Instead, the approach defends the potential for a more integrated approach to the structure-agency-meaning triangle in STS via the use of field sociology. (shrink)

Beginning by reading a 1992 feminist appropriation of Michelangelo's Creation of Adam – in a cartoon in which the finger of a nude Adamic woman touches a computer keyboard, while the god-like VDT screen shows a disembodied fetus – ‘Virtual Speculum’ argues for a broader conception of ‘new reproductive technologies’ in order to foreground justice and freedom projects for differently situated women in the New World Order. Broadly conceptualized reproductive practices must be central to social theory in general, and to (...) technoscience studies in particular. Tying together the politics of self help and women's health movements in the United States in the 1970s with positions on reproductive freedom articulated within the Legal Defense and Educational Fund of the NAACP in the 1990s, the paper examines recent work in feminist science studies in several disciplinary and activist locations. Statistical analysis and ethnography emerge as critical feminist technologies for producing convincing representations of the reproduction of inequality. Untangling the semiotic and political–economic dialectics of invisibility and hypervisibility, ‘Virtual Speculum’ concludes by linking the well-surveyed amniotic fluid of on-screen fetuses and the off-frame diarrhea of uncounted and underfed infants in regimes of flexible accumulation and structural adjustment. (shrink)

Although there are many possible ways of understanding menopause, it is the notion of menopause as hormone deficiency that currently dominates. How is it that this account remains prevalent rather than some alternative understanding of menopause? This question is explored through the employment of a framework informed by both actor network theory and symbolic interactionist studies. The author exploits the common ground shared by these two conceptual approaches to analyze how practices generate and reify particular kinds of knowledge about menopause. (...) The analysis is situated within Australian menopause clinics and explores several key contemporary practices of these clinics to show how the particular understanding of menopause as hormone deficiency is generated and stabilized. The study stresses the knowledge/practice nexus and emphasizes that meanings are not given in advance but are generated through practices. In particular, the focus is on the interactions of the social and the material entities of menopause clinics and how through these interactions the understanding of menopause as hormone deficiency is produced. (shrink)

Recently, two prescription drugs have become salient to breast cancer prevention. With the advent of these drugs, referred to as “chemoprevention,” a mandate has emerged to classify certain women as high risk for breast cancer to determine a group of legitimate users of the drugs. This article examines the development and standardization of the model used to create such a group of high-risk women. The author argues that while the model remains uncertain and controversial, it has become the standard tool (...) for the many jobs associated with legitimizing chemoprevention use in the United States. It has become the assumed standard—shaping practices, identities, and definitions—through its organizational embeddedness in the multiple practices and public images of chemoprevention despite its uncertainty and widespread critique. (shrink)

Based on an original ethnographic study of a translational cancer research institute in the United States, we propose calibration as a process that makes interdisciplinary collaboration without consensus possible. Calibration refers to ongoing, day-to-day negotiation and alignment of personal identities, disciplinary commitments, and research group customs that occur during face-to-face group deliberations around everyday research concerns. Calibration provides a mechanism that explains how collaboration without consensus is possible. Crucially, it does not presuppose that interdisciplinary collaboration either indicates or causes the (...) blurring or softening of disciplinary boundaries. We argue that at the microsociological level it may be disciplinary robustness, rather than synthesis, that contributes to interdisciplinary innovation. (shrink)

This article offers a comparative analysis of experimental fetal surgery and fetal tissue research. The author argues that fetuses are positioned differently across each set of practices, with significant implications for actors in these domains. By empirically charting the ways in which humanity is or is not attributed to fetal work objects, the author's argument challenges contemporary debates in science studies that tend to conceptualize human and nonhuman in dualistic terms. This analysis instead shows the heterogeneous attribution of these categories, (...) as well as the spaces, margins, and positions, which constitute them as distinct. (shrink)

This paper provides a brief comparative overview of the development of the reproductive sciences especially in agriculture in the UK and the US. It begins with the establishment by F. H. A. Marshall in 1910 of the boundaries that framed the reproductive sciences as distinct from genetics and embryology. It then examines how and where the reproductive sciences were taken up in agricultural research settings, focusing on the differential development of US and UK institutions. The reproductive sciences were also pursued (...) in medical and biological settings, and I discuss how the intersections among all three allowed the circulation of both ideas and scientists’ careers. Across the twentieth century, scientific leadership in the reproductive sciences alternated between the UK and US, and these patterns are elucidated. I conclude with thoughts on future research that might emphasize the elaboration of industrialization processes in agriculture and new capacities to transform both reproductive processes and their products—life itself—as biopower comes to be more ambitiously understood as extending across all species. (shrink)