Experimental Labour—Offshoring Clinical Trials to China

The State Food and Drug Administration of China has reported a dramatic increase in multicentre, multinational clinical trials over the past several years. This is in keeping with a growing trend towards the off-shore outsourcing of clinical trials from North America and Western Europe to ‘nontraditional locations’ such as Eastern Europe, China, and India. Within China, the post-socialist reform of health care, internal divisions of labour and the politicization of the healthcare system have all created the conditions under which contract clinical trial work is becoming an imperative both for hospitals and the growing number of working uninsured. The paper brings together a critical insight into current theories of bioeconomic innovation with new political economies of informal labour and offshoring. It argues that the clinical trial phase in the production of bioeconomic value is routinely overlooked in scholarly accounts but is key to understanding the speculative overinvestment and translational difficulties of the pharmaceutical industries today. As a way of reformulating the problem, the paper suggests that human subject experimentation would be more fruitfully reconfigured as a form of labour—experimental or clinical labour. The research hospital clinic therefore emerges as an export labour zone in ‘experimental body work.’

The Window of Ritual: Seeing the Intentions and Emotions of ‘Doing’ Gender

My goal in this paper is to revisit interaction ritual theory as a theoretical underpinning of West and Zimmerman’s ‘doing’ gender paradigm in order to develop a more nuanced understanding of what is taking place inside the interactions of men and women as they ‘do’ gender. Recent work in ritual theory, specifically the work of Bell (Ritual theory, ritual practice, 1992) and Collins (Interaction ritual chains, 2004) expands the role of the individual in the ritual process by conceptualizing ritual as a form of ‘practice’ that can be mobilized in the pursuit of emotional energy. Through the narratives of 24 married couples, I explore how domestic labor functions as an interaction ritual that is driven by ‘emotional energy’. This emotional energy shapes the localized intentions of men and women as they ‘do’ gender thus transforming gender into something that we ‘use’ as well as ‘do’. These emotions and intentions can be seen most clearly through a new ‘window’ of ritual.

Subjective Versus Objective Definitions of Homelessness: Are there Differences in Risk Factors among Heavy-Drinking Women?

Investigations with homeless populations have focused on those living on the streets or in shelters; few have examined phenomena based on respondents’ self-definitions as homeless or not. This investigation examined similarities and differences among risk factors (including mental health, substance abuse, religion/spirituality, social support, and risky sexual behaviors) using two definitions of homelessness: one where place of residence defined individuals as homeless (the ‘objective’ or traditional, definition) and another where respondents defined themselves as homeless (the ‘subjective’ definition). Data come from the baseline survey of the NIAAA-funded “Sister-to-Sister” study (n = 339) of heavy-drinking women. Subjectively defined homelessness was associated with higher rates of mental health and substance use disorders, lower rates of condom use, higher rates of trading sex for food, and less social support. Objectively defined homelessness was associated with higher rates of drinking in abandoned buildings, on the streets, and in public restrooms, more new sexual partners, and higher rates of trading sex for heroin and speedballs. Investigations failing to ask for subjective information may misattribute some factors to homelessness which may overestimate the effect of various factors on homelessness. Investigators should ask respondents to define their homelessness, or they lose an important dimension of the concept of homelessness.

How Could a Scientist Become a National Celebrity?

In Korea, scientific excellence has been perceived as one of the key elements of modern nation-building. Moreover, from the late 1990s to the early 2000s, the government represented biotechnology as the future engine of the economy. Hwang succeeded in representing himself as the hero of Korean science by appropriating the public eagerness for scientific achievement. However, he relied on nationalist rhetoric too often against criticisms, which eventually made a considerable part of the public turn skeptical about his integrity. Although various forms of techno-nationalism are still pervasive in Korea, Hwang’s scandal has given a valuable chance for reflection on the relationship of science and nationalism.

“Limiting Birth”: Birth Control in Colonial Korea (1910–1945)

This article examines birth control as practice and discourse in 1920s and 1930s Korea under Japanese colonial rule and explores links with family planning and reproductive practices in post-1945 South Korea. The control of women’s reproduction held critical implications for meanings of domesticity, marriage, sexual relations, and new womanhood. While a woman-centered position did emerge regarding birth control, the parameters of the discourse, concerns of gynecology, and the material culture of birth control ultimately tied the bodies and health of women to their biological and social roles as mothers.

A Time for Silence: William Lloyd Garrison and the “Woman Question” at the 1840 World Anti-Slavery Convention

The World Anti-Slavery Convention of 1840 is remembered most as the event that inspired Lucretia Coffin Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton to organize the Seneca Falls Women’s Rights Convention. Few scholars, however, have analyzed the debate proceedings that ultimately resulted in women’s exclusion from the convention. An analysis of the convention proceedings questions Wendell Phillips’ strategy of speaking on behalf of the women, arguing instead that William Lloyd Garrison’s strategy of silence was the more rhetorically astute response to the exclusion of women. Garrison’s silent protest not only attracted more attention to the women’s rights cause, but also inspired women to speak on their own behalf.

“I Can Provide for My Children”: Korean Immigrant Women’s Changing Perspectives on Work Outside the Home

Whether immigrant women’s introduction to paid labor empowers them with greater autonomy or exacerbates their oppression has been debated variously in the scholarship on gender and migration. In this paper, the author examines Korean immigrant women’s perspectives on work outside the home after migration. Based on in-depth interview data, the paper emphasizes Korean women’s own interpretations of work and motherhood, and highlights the ways in which they define and redefine work in relation to other aspects of their post-migration experiences. The analysis finds that income producing work is not empowering in and of itself, but contingent upon other post-migration challenges such as economic downward mobility and women’s changed roles as working mothers. Furthermore, women’s perception of work fluctuates over time. The findings suggest that paid work should not be simply interpreted as an empowering change, but the linkage between work and other aspects of immigrant women’s post-migration realities needs to be more closely examined.

Knowledge, Embodiment, Skill and Risk: Anthropological Perspectives on Women’s Everyday Technologies in Rural Northern China

Knowledge organisation, embodiment of knowledge and knowledge representation are important issues for an anthropology of technology, which seeks to explore the ways in which people find and shape everyday solutions to social and technical challenges. This article discusses the impact of skill and of risk prevention on women’s decision-making, as well as on the domestication and appropriation of new technologies. Particular attention is paid to non-synchronicity as a retarding factor and to the obsolescence of skills as a critical moment in the transformation of socio-technical systems in twentieth century rural northern China as elsewhere.

“Grace Is Deceitful and Beauty Is Vain”: How Hassidic Women Cope with the Requirement of Shaving One’s Head and Wearing a Black Kerchief

Women’s modesty norms are often perceived as governing women’s bodies and as patriarchal oppression. This study challenges these perspectives, offering a deeper, multi-dimensional picture showing that the reality of the women’s life is much more complicated. The article chose to discuss aspects of modesty among women of one of the most extreme Jewish ultra-Orthodox groups, and in particular, to investigate how they experience an extremely demanding requirement—shaving off the hair on their head upon marriage and covering their head with a black kerchief. The findings show that there are a variety of voices among the women, ranging from the view that these practices are desirable, through the view that they empower the women, to the view that they damage one’s attractiveness and are quite painful.

Rethinking Women and Their Bodies in the Age of Biotechnology: Feminist Commentaries on the Hwang Affair

Many Korean women felt strongly positive about donating their eggs for Hwang Woo Suk’s research, in spite of the fact that Hwang was accused of fraud. It is said that there is a kind of unique ‘egg donation culture’ among Korean women, which urged them to donate their eggs for his research. However, positing such a Korean ‘egg donation culture’ does not seem to give a sufficient explanation of why so many Korean women were seemingly willing to provide their own eggs for Hwang’s research. Instead, we suggest that egg donation issues in the Hwang affair can be interpreted under the paradoxical context, in which Korean women are situated in the age of biotechnology. On the one hand, the invisibility of women as subjects in the public sphere led to their lack of social control over ova trafficking and made it possible for a huge number of eggs to be supplied secretly for Hwang’s team. The patriarchal structure of family, the myth of economic growth, and the restricted activities of feminist organizations are possible contributors to the invisibility of Korean women. On the other hand, in the practices of bodily technologies such as cosmetic surgery and reproductive technologies, Korean women have been highly visible. With the help of those technological instruments, women have been empowered to own their own bodies and to have them at their disposal. We argue that these dualistic realities of women as egg owners can explain the egg donation culture among Korean women in the Hwang affair.

The Voice on the Bridge: Taiwan’s Regulatory Engagement with Global Pharmaceuticals 橋上之聲: 全球醫藥法規中的臺灣處遇

This paper analyzes Taiwan’s engagement with the standardization of pharmaceutical clinical trials at the turn of this century. Unlike approaches that treat local encounters with globalization as either reluctant acceptance or lasting resistance, this study calls attention to a complicated process of negotiation, the conceptual gap between the illusion of a unified world and the reality of persistently divided nation-states. To address this gap, an ethnographic investigation is required. Two concepts, “bridging” and “voicing” (fasheng), are introduced in order to capture Taiwan’s unstable status, what I term “the voice on the bridge,” in this process. Bridging emerged as a technical concept for evaluating pharmaceutical drugs’ possible differential ethnic effects. But it also reflects the ambiguous reality of a world in which each state is an islet connected to others by imaginary bridges. Fasheng (“voicing”) has to do with Taiwan’s long-held desire for world recognition as a state. This paper is an ethnography of globalization and the state that traces how Taiwan created a regulatory resolution through the idea of bridging and how this “voice” was articulated through various social strategies. It explores not only the complexity of interactions in the technical field of regulatory science, but also argues that looking at such entanglements of science and society makes it possible to move beyond simple interpretations of globalization.

Symbolic Appropriation of the Internet: Modernity, Peasant Bodies, and the Image of Familial Intimacy in China’s Nongjiale Tourism Online Advertisements

The peasantry is probably the last social category that researchers of technology and society readily associate with the use of high technologies such as the Internet. But in China recently, tens of thousands of peasant entrepreneurs, engaged in a unique form of rural tourism popularly called nongjiale (delights in farm guesthouses), have adopted the Internet as a medium for advertising their farm guesthouses. This paper is an anthropological study of how Chinese peasant entrepreneurs’ adoption of the Internet is engrained in the broader material and symbolic orders of contemporary Chinese society. By exploring the way in which the Chinese peasants are idiosyncratically involved with the Internet, it also questions whether STS (Science, Technology, and Society) concepts such as users and non-users, developed essentially within Euro-American contexts, are adequate to explain the symbolic appropriations of high-tech in pursuit of modernity in China today.

Invisible Mothers: Parenting by Homeless Women Separated from Their Children

Though surveys repeatedly demonstrate that most women who are homeless alone have minor children living apart from them, there is little information on the circumstances of their separations or whether and how they remain involved with their children. Analysis of data from in-depth interviews with mothers, relatives caring for their children, and shelter and child welfare staff highlights a tension between perspectives and aspirations of mothers and the agendas and social processes through which institutional systems manage the family life of women marginalized by homelessness and disability. Though women’s agency is evident in their efforts to maintain parenting roles, without facilitating resources and supportive structures, agency is often reduced to unpalatable choices among constraining alternatives. We consider how service systems might mitigate barriers to mothering as well as broader changes needed to genuinely support women’s aspirations for themselves and their families.

Female Status and Infant and Child Homicide Victimization in Rural and Urban Counties in the U.S.

Studies consistently show that female labor force participation is a correlate of infant and child homicide victimization. Research and theory supports the notion that as women’s economic status improves, children are safer. Yet few existing studies make use of feminist perspectives to explain child homicide. Further, homicide studies have focused heavily on urban areas leaving a lacuna of understanding in the literature regarding rural areas. This study explores the connection between absolute and relative female economic status and infant and child homicide victimization in both rural and urban U.S. counties. Results show that absolute female economic status is positively associated with infant and child homicide in urban areas, but not in rural areas. I argue that in rural areas, stronger collective sentiment and less differentiation diminishes the effect of women’s status on child homicide. While rural areas are characterized by harsh economic realities, these realities are nevertheless shared among men and women, decentering the link between child victimization and women status.

The History of Chinese Medicine in the People’s Republic of China and its Globalization

This introductory article provides an overview over the history of Chinese medicine, as it evolved in the People’s Republic of China over the last 60 years. In particular, it highlights how Traditional Chinese Medicine (zhongyi), as invented in the 1950s during a period of nationalism marked by idealism and pride in China’s ancient philosophy and cultural heritage, has evolved into a medicine that thrives on the contemporary global health market in a neoliberal climate. This latter form of Chinese medicine, which the author, in accordance with its Chinese promoters, calls zhongyiyao “Chinese medicine and pharmacotherapy,” has led to a further materialization of the once scholarly medical currents of Chinese medicine. However, as this volume will show, the globalization of Chinese medicine should not merely be considered in respect of those aspects that are being sold in those niches of society that offer a cure for bodily ailments but also in respect of those that—in accordance with the way Cartesian dualism has divided health care—are increasingly consumed as aspects of preventive medicine, namely taijiquan, and qigong.

Life After Experiences of Infertility Treatment: Akirameru—The First Step for Empowering

Although there is some awareness of how women in infertility treatment have suffered physically and psychologically, it is a little known fact that there is a limit to the “cures” that can be achieved even with assisted reproductive technologies. Here, I describe how the existence of ART affects women’s decision making about their lives. Through life histories of women who underwent infertility treatment, I explore the factors which cause their suffering and conflict—that they cannot give up on having children even though they want to give up—as follows: (1) The models of their ideal family which have been formed throughout their lives is ‘ordinary’ family; (2) they experienced the alienation from their own bodies in infertility treatment; (3) they are afraid that they deviate from the community norm because of infertility; (4) their narrative shows their suffering from infertility is caused by tense relationship in family and community. These factors make women in infertility belittle themselves. Through their life histories, I conclude that they need to be empowered if they want to akirameru (give up) having children after prolonged infertility treatment. To paraphrase, a woman who suffers from infertility and infertility treatment is empowered when she becomes unafraid to deviated from cultural norms.

Gendered Careers in Post-Soviet Society: Views on Professional Qualifications in Surgery and Pediatrics

This study examines the medical profession in post-Soviet society, where women have been in the majority of the physicians for almost seven decades. It examines pediatricians’ and surgeons’ definitions of the professional skills and qualities needed for “good” work. Lithuania is used as a case study. Thirty-six semi-structured interviews were conducted in 2005 with male and female surgeons and pediatricians in Lithuania. The results show that the gender composition of the specialty—surgery being a male-dominated and pediatrics a female-dominated specialty—tended to influence the way that physicians perceived the qualities needed for good work. For surgeons, male-gendered qualities were prerequisites for being a good surgeon: physical strength and being in control. Female surgeons added a female-gendered quality—empathy and compassion—that made them good surgeons. A good pediatrician had a holistic and empathic approach and an ability to communicate, which were seen as female-gendered skills. Male pediatricians experienced otherness in this specialty but did not, as women surgeons did, offer a counter discourse in order to legitimate themselves as being as skilled as women.

Gender and Mathematics Achievement in China and the United States

This study examines the relationship between gender and mathematics achievement among students in China and the United States, with an emphasis on the gender gap among mathematically talented students. The results show that in neither the US nor China are there gender differences in eighth grade math-achievement test scores. In China, there are no gender differences in mean college entrance examination math scores among high-school seniors, while in America, the mean SAT-Math score among male high-school seniors has been consistently higher than those of their female counterparts. In both the US and China, there are gender differences among the top math performers on college entrance examinations; boys are over-represented. The Chinese national mathematics curriculum, well-trained teachers, beliefs by students and their parents that academic achievement is more a product of effort than of natural ability, a gender-neutral parental expectation for children’s education, and generous family spending on the education of girls are suggested as possible factors underlying the comparable performance of the Chinese female and male students. The sorting system at Chinese secondary school level and a cultural stereotype favoring boys in mathematics are suggested as possible contributors to the math-achievement gender gap found among the top Chinese high school seniors.

The State of American Boyhood

The existence of a “boy crisis” in the United States is a topic of public policy debate. This study examines the state of American boyhood, using not only the commonly reviewed indicators of school achievement but also mental health, premature death, injury, delinquency, and arrests. Boys are in trouble in many areas: low rates of literacy, low grades and engagement in school, high dropout from school, and dramatically higher rates of placement in special education, suicide, premature death, injuries, and arrests. Girls, however, suffer from other problems, especially depression, suicidal ideation and attempts, and eating disorders, and are less likely to achieve at the very highest levels in mathematics and science. This study argues that both boys and girls suffer from characteristic problems, but the issues affecting boys are serious and neglected.