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Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction changing bodies and masculinities in post- viagra mexico -- Chapter One mexicanness, machismo, and maturity in composite masculinities -- Chapter Two sex, relationships, and masculinities -- Chapter Three chronic illnesses as composite problems -- Chapter Four rejecting erectile dysfunction drugs -- Chapter Five medical erectile dysfunction treatment in context -- Conclusion cultural change over time in responses to erectile difficulty -- Bibliography -- Index

People may seek to embody cultural ideals of the life course through their use or rejection of medical interventions, including but not limited to anti-aging treatments. Here, I analyze this phenomenon via interviews with men engaging with two different forms of sexual health medicine in urban Mexico: erectile-dysfunction treatment and testing for sexually transmitted infections (STIs). I argue that, in contrast to the biomedical understanding of patients as individuals who change during their lives, my interlocutors understood themselves as components in broader "collective biologies" that change on a longer timeline. These are culturally-defined groups that people understand to be comprised of interrelated members whose behaviors concretely affect the group's physical and social well-being over time. In both medical arenas discussed here, men used or rejected sexual health interventions in response to local narratives about the nature of the Mexican population as a collective biology, including ideas about how it should change over time away from its roots in the colonial past. They characterized predispositions to machismo and disinterest in preventative health care as embodied inheritances that the Mexican population should reject in order to achieve health-promoting modernity in the future. My analysis describes how these interlocutors sought to live out desirably modern forms of race and gender through their medical decisions in a way that they hoped would contribute to positive, embodied change in the Mexican social body over time. These findings show that, despite the assumptions of individualism generally naturalized in anti-aging treatment and biomedicine, people may make medical decisions in an effort to aid collective change over population-level timescales.

In contrast to discourses of "successful aging" which pathologize and individualize change in later life, this case study of a retired Mexican couple highlights the pleasurable, political, and collective aspects of aging. Here, I analyze the narratives of a couple who found aging "well" fulfilling in part because it served as an intervention into societal-level problems. I argue that their activist form of aging was enabled by local cultural understandings of the Mexican populace as a biologically and socially interrelated whole. They hoped that the Mexican social body would follow a particular life course – of maturing toward modernity – and they sought to model and promote such maturation in their own later lives. This included promoting a health "culture of prevention," living out self-consciously modern forms of gender and family, and active community participation. I assert that their happiness in older age, including their ability to cope with local crises of violence and corruption, stemmed partly from their belief that the attributes and activities which enhanced their own lives simultaneously served as activist interventions into the broader populace's ills. This discussion of the context-specific ways one Mexican couple saw their efforts to live good later lives as contributing meaningfully to societal change over time highlights the need to understand aging and later life as political arenas with collective rather than merely individual import.

In contrast to discourses of "successful aging" which pathologize and individualize change in later life, this case study of a retired Mexican couple highlights the pleasurable, political, and collective aspects of aging. Here, I analyze the narratives of a couple who found aging "well" fulfilling in part because it served as an intervention into societal-level problems. I argue that their activist form of aging was enabled by local cultural understandings of the Mexican populace as a biologically and socially interrelated whole. They hoped that the Mexican social body would follow a particular life course – of maturing toward modernity – and they sought to model and promote such maturation in their own later lives. This included promoting a health "culture of prevention," living out self-consciously modern forms of gender and family, and active community participation. I assert that their happiness in older age, including their ability to cope with local crises of violence and corruption, stemmed partly from their belief that the attributes and activities which enhanced their own lives simultaneously served as activist interventions into the broader populace's ills. This discussion of the context-specific ways one Mexican couple saw their efforts to live good later lives as contributing meaningfully to societal change over time highlights the need to understand aging and later life as political arenas with collective rather than merely individual import.

ABSTRACTIn this article, I discuss people's use of medical research participation to perform and model modernity amid societal insecurity. I analyze data from interviews with heterosexual Mexican couples undertaken throughout men's multiyear participation in a human papillomavirus (HPV) study. I argue that through activities like willingly undergoing genital examination and involving wives in husbands' clinical visits, spouses used the study as a forum for performing ideals of modern gender and health, specifically companionate marriage and non‐macho masculinities emphasizing male self‐care. They also hoped to serve as role models for their children and for society at large. I discuss how specific elements of the Mexican context made fomenting social change through individual research participation seem possible: cultural narratives of the Mexican populace as a bioculturally homogenous whole; longstanding state efforts to modernize the population away from "traditional" gender and health practices; and ongoing failures of the "slippery State" to reliably provide the resources those practices required. In this context, participants framed themselves as a middle‐class vanguard and experienced sexual health research as an act of citizenship through which they hoped to spur national progress despite state failures and the persistence of antimodern gender and health attitudes. [medical research, modernity, Mexico, gender, health]

This article analyzes the rise and fall of a public health 'fact' in the US: the assertion that gay men's Viagra use is inherently recreational and increases STD risk. Extending the science studies argument that drug development and marketing entail the construction of new publics, this article shows how strategic drug marketing silences can also constitute new populations of users. It shows how Viagra marketing's silence about gay users, which facilitated legitimization of the drug as an aid for companionate heterosexuality, created a cultural space for the development of health discourse about gay men as illegitimate, recreational and risky Viagra users. Using Susan Leigh Star's concepts of 'simplification' and 'complexification', this article traces the construction and deployment of this public health fact, as well as its subsequent contestation. Using an arena analysis approach, this article demonstrates how marketing discourse and public health fact-making came together in the case of gay Viagra use to refresh long-standing and politically harmful American cultural associations between gay sex and sickness.

Mexican men of different generations, exposed to different cultural ideas about sex, manliness and marriage, often hold divergent ideas about how men's sexuality should change over the life course. Based on 250 interviews with male urology patients at an urban Mexican hospital, this article reveals differences in self-identified older and younger men's ideas of age-appropriate sexuality and pursuit of sexual health interventions. Older men frequently expected youthful promiscuity to give way to a family-focused older age and saw decreasing erectile function as a ''natural'' embodiment of this shift. Conversely, younger men who strove to be different than their once-womanizing fathers often saw decreased erectile function as a relationship-threatening medical problem appropriate for erectile dysfunction (ED) treatment. Despite the fact that ED drugs may facilitate sexual penetration that could be associated with ''macho'' sexuality, they were viewed most positively by younger study participants seeking to avoid machismo by pursuing affective marital sex.

The disability rights movement grounds material critiques of the treatment of people with disabilities in a social constructionist perspective, locating disability in the social rather than physical realm, and demedicalizing the concept of disability. However, this conceptualization is threatened by the medicalization of nonnormative erections as the biomedical pathology erectile dysfunction (ED). Although use of medical treatments for ED can have positive outcomes for individuals, the medical community's tendency to include sexual difference in the rubric of disability threatens to remedicalize that category. Furthermore, medicalized conceptions of ED often serve to refocus sexuality around phallocentric, normative sex acts and gender roles, undoing the deconstructive work of disability sex studies. Finally, although aging Western populations targeted for ED treatment represent potentially expanded bases for disability movement activism, the pathologizing of nonnormative sexuality may have the power to instead focus this group on individualistic use of medical interventions geared toward "normalcy."

Frontmatter -- CONTENTS -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: Medical Anthropology at the Intersections -- PART I. HISTORIES -- ONE Grafting Together Medical Anthropology, Feminism, and Technoscience -- TWO Getting at Anthropology through Medical History -- THREE Making Peasants Protestant and Other Projects -- PART II. QUERIES -- FOUR That Obscure Object of Global Health -- FIVE Medical Anthropology and Mental Health -- SIX From Genetics to Postgenomics and the Discovery of the New Social Body -- PART III. ACTIVISM -- SEVEN Anthropology and the Study of Disability Worlds -- EIGHT Medical Anthropology and Public Policy -- NINE Critical Intersections and Engagements -- Notes -- References -- Contributors -- Index

The technological capacity to transform biology - repairing, reshaping and replacing body parts, chemicals and functions - is now part of our lives. Humanity is confronted with a variety of affordable and non-invasive 'enhancement technologies': anti-ageing medicine, aesthetic surgery, cognitive and sexual enhancers, lifestyle drugs, prosthetics and hormone supplements. This collection focuses on why people find these practices so seductive and provides ethnographic insights into people's motives and aspirations as they embrace or reject enhancement technologies, which are closely entangled with negotiations over gender, class, age, nationality and ethnicity

Frontmatter -- CONTENTS -- Preface -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: Successful Aging as a Twenty-first- Century Obsession / Lamb, Sarah / Robbins-Ruszkowski, Jessica / Corwin, Anna I. -- PART I. Gender, Sexuality, and the Allure of Anti-Aging -- 1. Successful Aging, Ageism, and the Maintenance of Age and Gender Relations / Calasanti, Toni / King, Neal -- 2. Opting In or Opting Out? North American Women Share Strategies for Aging Successfully with (and without) Cosmetic Intervention / Brooks, Abigail T. -- 3. Aging Out: Ageism, Heterosexism, and Racism among Aging African American Lesbians and Gay Men / Woody, Imani -- 4. Erectile Dysfunction as Successful Aging in Mexico / Wentzell, Emily -- PART II. Ideals of Independence, Interdependence, and Intimate Sociality in Later Life -- 5. Beyond Independence: Older Chicagoans Living Valued Lives / Buch, Elana D. -- 6. Growing Old with God: An Alternative Vision of Successful Aging among Catholic Nuns / Corwin, Anna I. -- 7. Aspiring to Activity: Universities of the Third Age, Gardening, and Other Forms of Living in Postsocialist Poland / Robbins-Ruszkowski, Jessica -- 8. Should Old Acquaintance Be Forgot? Friendship in the Face of Dementia / Taylor, Janelle S. -- PART III. National Policies and Everyday Practices: Individual and Collective Projects of Aging Well -- 9. Getting Old and Keeping Going: The Motivation Technologies of Active Aging in Denmark / Lassen, Aske Juul / Pernille Jespersen, Astrid -- 10. Foolish Vitality: Humor, Risk, and Success in Japan / Danely, Jason -- 11. Nurturing Life in Contemporary Beijing / Farquhar, Judith / Zhang, Qicheng -- 12. Depreciating Age, Disintegrating Ties: On Being Old in a Century of Declining Elderhood in Kenya / Mcintosh, Janet -- PART IV. Medicine, Morality, and Self: Lessons from Life's Ends -- 13. Successful Selves? Heroic Tales of Alzheimer's Disease and Personhood in Brazil / Leibing, Annette -- 14. Comfortable Aging: Lessons for Living from Eighty-five and Beyond / Loe, Meika -- 15. Ageless Aging or Meaningful Decline? Aspirations of Aging and Dying in the United States and India / Lamb, Sarah -- Epilogue: Successful Aging and Desired Interdependence / Reynolds Whyte, Susan -- Notes on Contributors -- Index

Rapid population aging, once associated with only a select group of modern industrialized nations, has now become a topic of increasing global concern. This volume reframes aging on a global scale by illustrating the multiple ways it is embedded within individual, social, and cultural life courses. It presents a broad range of ethnographic work, introducing a variety of conceptual and methodological approaches to studying life-course transitions in conjunction with broader sociocultural transformations. Through detailed accounts, in such diverse settings as nursing homes in Sri Lanka, a factory in Massachusetts, cemeteries in Japan and clinics in Mexico, the authors explore not simply our understandings of growing older, but the interweaving of individual maturity and intergenerational relationships, social and economic institutions, and intimate experiences of gender, identity, and the body