Oaxaca is internationally renowned for its marketplaces and archaeological sites where tourists can buy inexpensive folk art, including replicas of archaeological treasures. Archaeologists, art historians, and museum professionals sometimes discredit this trade in “fakes” that occasionally make their way to the auction block as antiquities. Others argue that these souvenirs represent a long cultural tradition of woodcarving or clay sculpting and are “genuine” artifacts of artisanal practices that have been passed from generation to generation, allowing community members to preserve their cultural practices and make a living. Exploring the intriguing question of authenticity and its relationship to cultural forms in Oaxaca and throughout southern Mexico, Between Art and Artifact confronts an important issue that has implications well beyond the commercial realm.

Demonstrating that identity politics lies at the heart of the controversy, Ronda Brulotte provides a nuanced inquiry into what it means to present “authentic” cultural production in a state where indigenous ethnicity is part of an awkward social and racial classification system. Emphasizing the world-famous woodcarvers of Arrazola and the replica purveyors who come from the same community, Brulotte presents the ironies of an ideology that extols regional identity but shuns its artifacts as “forgeries.” Her work makes us question the authority of archaeological discourse in the face of local communities who may often see things differently. A departure from the dialogue that seeks to prove or disprove “authenticity,” Between Art and Artifact reveals itself as a commentary on the arguments themselves, and what the controversy can teach us about our shifting definitions of authority and authorship.

Throughout the 1970s and ’80s, women argued that unless they gained access to information about their own bodies, there would be no equality. In Bodies of Knowledge, Wendy Kline considers the ways in which ordinary women worked to position the female body at the center of women’s liberation.

As Kline shows, the struggle to attain this knowledge unified women but also divided them—according to race, class, sexuality, or level of professionalization. Each of the five chapters of Bodies of Knowledge examines a distinct moment or setting of the women’s movement in order to give life to the ideas, expectations, and pitfalls encountered by the advocates of women’s health: the making of Our Bodies, Ourselves (1973); the conflicts surrounding the training and practice of women’s pelvic exams; the emergence of abortion as a feminist issue; the battles over contraceptive regulation at the 1983 Depo-Provera FDA hearings; and the rise of the profession of midwifery. Including an epilogue that considers the experiences of the daughters of 1970s feminists, Bodies of Knowledge is an important contribution to the study of the bodies—that marked the lives—of feminism’s second wave.

The home pregnancy test is a technology that can be purchased in drug stores, gas stations, and online, and the results are often casually posted to social media. But, as sociologist and attorney Joan Robinson argues, no technology is as simple as it appears. In Whose Hands traces this test from its origin story in a lab to its day-to-day existence in the hands of users, showing that mundane technologies matter, especially when they are used as tools of surveillance and self-surveillance. The book is the result of Robinson's fourteen-year exploration of the social life of the home pregnancy test, and it describes the breadth and beauty of people's messy reproductive lives today. Based on archival and legal research as well as interviews with home pregnancy test users, it shows how even those technologies that we use because they're convenient can be tools of shame, surveillance, and control. 

In this book, award-winning medical sociologist Joan Robinson examines the passage of this device from the hands of medical professionals to the hands of lay people and asks, has the pregnancy test delivered on its initial promise to give women knowledge, information, and control? Since the Women’s Health Movement, it has become second-nature to think of reproductive health tools in the hands of doctors as oppressive and in the hands of women as liberating, but how does an examination of the home pregnancy test challenge these assumptions? Robinson argues that putting the informational power of pregnancy into a mobile diagnostic technology and making it available over the counter may have made many women's lives easier, but it did not change the nature of women's subordination. Instead, in many cases, it cemented it. TheHome Pregnancy Test provides a new way of understanding the consequences, both intended and unintended, of technologies being introduced to users. Technologies are not neutral objects, either in their origins in a lab or in their deployment in our world. The pregnancy test was shaped by the social context in which it was conceived, and its delivery has had far-reaching consequences on women's lives.

Men were increasingly taking over medical duties--especially surrounding childbirth--usually left to women and, as their medical knowledge increased, they became aware of bodies and behaviors--both male and female--that transgressed gender norms. The anxieties about men who acted in ways seen as increasingly womanly (from acting effeminately to participating in homosexual activity) played out in the character of pregnant Juan Rana.

Then, Velasco turns to Hollywood and asks if we might not use the lessons of Juan Rana to help explain why contemporary America is also fascinated by the idea of male pregnancy--think Arnold Schwarzenegger in Junior--and our increasing anxiety over the changing face of masculinity in our own culture.

Pompadour’s Medium challenges our understanding of eighteenth-century media culture by examining not only the top-down transmission of paintings through prints, but also the multi-directional and often materially assertive translation of images into luxury media, such as engraved gems, porcelain, and tapestry. It recovers the centrality of these reproductive media to the artist-patron relationship between Madame de Pompadour and François Boucher, revealing the cultural significance of their collaborations. “.”