Technoscience - Tapa blanda

This special issue of Social Text critically engages contemporary theory, shifting the question of "what matters" from an epistemological domain to an ontological one. Essays enter into debates over evolutionary theory and the potential effects of those debates on bodies and sexuality; examine South Asian racial formation, in which intense policing slides discipline into control, yet yields immeasurable "monstrous crossbreeds"; trace pharmaceutical governance in the control of AIDS in Brazil; and ask how political art commands or develops the capacity for attention, if not critique, in terms of the control exerted by dominant media cultures.

Patricia Ticineto Clough is Professor of Sociology and Women??'s Studies at the Graduate Center and Queens College of the City University of New York. She is the author of Autoaffection: Unconscious Thought in the Age of Teletechnology; The End(s) of Ethnography: From Realism to Social Criticism; and Feminist Thought: Desire, Power and Academic Discourse. Jean Halley is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Wagner College in New York City. She is the author of The Boundaries of Touch: Social Power, Parenting, and Adult-Child Intimacy (forthcoming).

Jasbir K. Puar is Associate Professor of Women??'s and Gender Studies at Rutgers University.

Joao Biehl is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University. He is the author of "Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment "(UC Press) and "Will to Live: AIDS Therapies and the Politics of Survival." His website is www.joaobiehl.net. Byron Good is Professor of Medical Anthropology in the Departments of Social Medicine and Anthropology at Harvard University. He is the author of "Medicine, Rationality and Experience: An Anthropological Perspective" and co-editor of several volumes, including "Culture and Depression" (UC Press). Arthur Kleinman is Professor and Chair of Anthropology at Harvard University. He is the author of several books, including "Patients and Healers in the Context of Culture"; "Writing at the Margin: Discourse Between Anthropology and Medicine" (both from UC Press); and, most recently, "What Really Matters: Living a Moral Life amidst Uncertainty and Danger." Among his coedited volumes are "Social Suffering "(UC Press) and "Global Pharmaceuticals."

Amy Villarejo is Associate Professor in the Department of Theater, Film, and Dance at Cornell University. She is coauthor of Queen Christina and coeditor of Keyframes: Popular Film and Cultural Studies.