Following a decade in which the focus on HIV and AIDS has been on specific social groups, a shift in professional perceptions has resulted in a change in the images of women and HIV/AIDS. Last Served? recognizes and analyzes the trend toward more openly acknowledging and planning for women in the pandemic. Rather than enumerating the effects on women of confused or conflicting policies and representation, the book details why and how this situation occurred. The author suggests that new visibility of women cannot in itself quickly or easily change the underlying assumptions which made women simultaneously radiant figures of sexual purity, and a magnet for blame during the pandemic's first decade. Last Served? makes clear how the different ways of posing and answering questions about women and HIV are grounded in already existing ways of thinking about gender, and how these underlying preconceptions sometimes create situations whereby attempts to address the practical needs of women often result in reinforcement, or introduction of new forms of male domination. Combining detailed analysis with practical suggestions, Last Served? provides insights into the current debates about women and AIDS and suggests future directions for work to overcome discrimination, faulty planning and misrepresentation.

From physical location to payment processes to expectations of both patients and caregivers, nearly everything surrounding the contemporary medical clinic's central activity has changed since Michel Foucualt's Birth of the Clinic. Indebted to that work, but recognizing the gap between what the modern clinic hoped to be and what it has become, Rebirth of the Clinic explores medical practices that shed light on the fraught relationship between medical systems, practitioners, and patients. Combining theory, history, and ethnography, the contributors to this volume ground today's clinic in a larger scheme of power relations, identifying the cultural, political, and economic pressures that frame clinical relationships, including the instrumentalist definition of health, actuarial-based medical practices, and patient self-help movements, which simultaneously hem in and create the conditions under which agents creatively change ideas of illness and treatment. From threatened community health centers in poor African American locales to innovative nursing practices among the marginally housed citizens of Canada's poorest urban neighborhood, this volume addresses not just the who, what, where, and how of place-specific clinical practices, but also sets these local experiences against a theoretical backdrop that links them to the power of modern medicine in shaping fundamental life experiences. Contributors: Christine Ceci, U of Alberta; Lisa Diedrich, Stony Brook U; Suzanne Fraser, Monash U; John Liesch, Simon Fraser U; Jenna Loyd, CUNY; Annemarie Mol, U of Amsterdam; Mary Ellen Purkis, U of Victoria.

The past 3 decades have witnessed unprecedented integration of global information systems. From satellite-television news to the Internet, more people share information than ever before. At the same time, biomedical research teams have increased collaborations across private and public sectors, national borders (especially by involving both the first world and third world), and disciplines. These factors have resulted in an explosion of scientific information more widely accessible than research produced a generation ago. There has been considerable discussion regarding the interrelationship between global and local forces in the context of "health," a term this volume queries, rather than taking it as a clear referent. Such work has considered the benefits and drawbacks of increasing connection and interdependency (which is not always equilateral) among people and organizations that are now connected via shared systems of knowledge, transportation, communication technologies, imagined communities, and markets. To date, gender-based analysis of globalization has focused mainly on the impact of structural-adjustment policies and trade agreements. The idea that the production and distribution of scientific knowledge, in itself, fails to take into account the differential distribution of women in social, cultural, and economic space, has not been taken seriously by most critics. This volume is an attempt to open a debate on this matter. The editors, Cindy Patton and Helen Loshny of Simon Fraser University, along with other scholars, take up the question of the interrelationship between "global science" and "women's health," querying each of these four terms, while also keeping in viewspecific cases and spaces in which their vertiginous spin stabilizes to produce clarity about how the terms intersect.

The American public responded to the first cases of AIDS with fear and panic. Both policymakers and activists were concerned not only with stopping the spread of the disease, but also with guiding the public's response toward those already infected. Fatal Advice is an examination of how the nation attempted, with mixed results, to negotiate the fears and concerns brought on by the epidemic. A leading writer on the cultural politics of AIDS, Cindy Patton guides us through the thicket of mass-media productions, policy and public health enterprises, and activist projects as they sprang up to meet the challenge of the epidemic, shaping the nation's notion of what safe-sex is and who ought to know what about it. There is the official story, and then there is another, involving local groups and AIDS activists. Going back to early government and activist attempts to spread information, Patton traces a slow separation between official advice and that provided by those on the front lines in the battle against AIDS. She shows how American anxieties about teen sex played into the nation's inadequate education and protection of its young people, and chronicles the media's attempts to encourage compassion without broaching the touchy subject of sex or disrupting the notion that AIDS was a disease of social and sexual outcasts. Her overview of the relationship between shifting medical perceptions and safe-sex advice reveals why radical safe-sex educators eventually turned to sexually explicit, including pornographic, representations to spread their message-and why even these extreme tactics could not overcome the misguided national teaching on AIDS. Patton closes with a stirring manifesto, an urgent call to action for all those who do not want to see the hard lessons of AIDS education and activism wasted, or, with these lessons, the loss of so many more lives.