Environmental chemicals accumulate in all human bodies and have the potential to affect the health of men and women, adults, and children. This article advances “precautionary consumption”—the effort to mediate personal exposure to environmental chemicals through vigilant consumption—as a new empirical site for understanding the intersections between maternal embodiment and contemporary motherhood as a consumer project. Using in-depth interviews, I explore how a group of 25 mothers employ precautionary consumption to mediate their children’s exposure to chemicals found in food, consumer (...) products, and the home. Most of the mothers in the study situate their children’s chemical “burdens” within their own bodies and undertake the labor of precautionary consumption as part of a larger and commodity-based motherhood project. In actively expanding the sphere of responsible motherhood to include managing children’s body burdens, these mothers navigate multiple and overlapping contexts that hold women accountable for children’s futures and value the agency of the proactive consumer. Yet, as the sphere of responsible mothering expands, women without financial resources, time, and family stability are pushed to the margins of normative motherhood. (shrink)

Double standards are widespread throughout biomedicine, especially in research on reproductive health. One of the clearest cases of double standards involves the feminine gendering of reproductive responsibility for contraception and the continued lack of highly effective, reversible methods for cisgender men. While the biomedical establishment accepts diversity and inclusion as important social values for clinical trials, their continued use of inequitable standards undermines their ability to challenge unfair social hierarchies by developing male contraception. Thus, the gender/sex bias present in contraceptive (...) research raises the “New Demarcation Problem”: If we accept that values can and will play important roles in science, how can we nevertheless distinguish positive influences of values from more corrosive bias? I argue that biomedical researchers ought to aim their clinical trials at equity and utilize methodologies that actually achieve that aim. More specifically, I contend that we can avoid the problem of double standards by gender/sex in contraceptive research by utilizing more equitable standards. My demarcation strategy captures dynamic interplay between values and their effects, with direct policy implications for institutions conducting, funding, and evaluating clinical trials. For male contraceptive trials, this involves shifting risk assessment from an individual model to a shared model for sexual partners. (shrink)

This article analyzes efforts to govern men’s reproduction in postwar India’s population control program from 1960 to 1977. It argues that the Indian state’s unconventional emphasis on men was linked to a gendered strand of social scientific research known as family planning communications and its investments in reframing reproductive control in behavioral terms. Communication scientists’ goal to understand the role of mass communications in shaping “reproductive decision-making” dovetailed with prevailing cultural ideologies of masculinity that readily associated men with economic rationality (...) and calculative reasoning. Consequently, scientists cast Indian men as indispensable targets of behavioral interventions into reproduction due to their ostensible status as familial and social “decision-makers.” This reframing prompted Indian family planning officials to create novel interventions into men’s reproductive bodies and beliefs, exhorting them to use contraception and desire fewer children. The study thus offers new approaches for theorizing how men become framed as legitimate subjects of reproductive control. (shrink)