In public health and the social sciences, there is growing recognition of the role that social context plays in determining health. Frequently, social relations of inequality are among the most important features of social context identified in this work, and emphasis is placed on identifying and addressing these inequalities in order to improve health. Within the field of HIV/AIDS prevention as well, researchers have begun to look beyond individuals for an understanding of the structural causes of HIV-related risk. This research (...) demands that greater attention be paid to the social mechanisms and contextual factors that lead to HIV risk. Among these factors are law and social policy, which form a part of the context in which risk-taking occurs and which can promote both HIV transmission and prevention. On the one hand, laws limiting access to sterile injection equipment have contributed to HIV-related risk behavioxs among injection drug users. (shrink)

When passed, the Equal Pay Act and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act established two distinct views of employment discrimination and two different enforcement structures—one aimed at sex and the other at race discrimination. To explain this bifurcated approach to employment discrimination, it is necessary to examine not only social class but also gender and race relations. Sex and race discrimination bills addressed some of the problems of postwar capitalism in the United States. At the same time, however, the (...) bifurcated discrimination policy enforced women's dependence on men in families. But it did this differently for white men than it did for men of color. (shrink)

In this study, we elaborate connections among gender, structure, and practice to suggest how social structural relations shape social sexual practice and, in the process, reshape gender relations. Using survey data from a study of a community mobilization intervention, we investigate the connection between institutional arrangements and condom use practice in sexual encounters with commercial clients and intimate partners among 410 women engaged in sex trade in a semiurban town in southern India. Multinomial logistic regression analysis uncovers the effects of (...) 16 measures of gendered structural relations in three contexts—livelihood resources, household circumstances, and community mobilization intervention priorities. We compare women who practice either consistent or inconsistent condom use with both clients and partners with a reference group of women who practice consistent condom use with clients but not with partners. Results reveal the importance of household and community relations for consistent safer sex practice over and above the organization of sex trade. Our analysis advances gender theory in two interrelated ways: We contribute to gender theorizing in the implementation of health interventions, and to gender change more generally by thinking through possibilities emerging from recursive influences between reordered institutional configurations and altered expectations in interaction. (shrink)

This article analyzes U.S. court cases involving reproductive technologies in terms of their implications for reproductive choice, mothers' versus fathers' rights, definitions and evaluations of parenting, and the nuclear family structure. The analysis reveals that the courts have tended not to recognize how social conditions shape women's reproductive choices, to promote fathers' rights more than mothers' rights, to ignore the social relationships that constitute childbearing and child rearing and value men's over women's biological contribution to these processes, to reflect certain (...) assumptions about the proper roles of mothers and fathers, and to privilege the nuclear family. The implications of developing reproductive technology policy for an understanding of the relationships among gender, reproductive technologies, and the state are considered, and recommendations for the equitable regulation of these technologies are offered. (shrink)