This article describes the work of negotiating and reinterpreting "standard" protocols and criteria at the level of local practice, using the example of the procurement of human cadaver organs for transplantation. The tension between efforts to starulardize and globalize biomedical science, on the one hand, and fitting these efforts into everyday practices and understandings of practitioners, on the other, results in new constructions of medical knowledge about bodies and persons.

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)