The Many Faces of RU486
Tales of Situated Knowledges and Technological Contestations
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 5337529 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Adele E Clarke (0000-0002-6440-0308, University of California, San Francisco), Adele Clarke (University of California, San Francisco), Theresa Montini (University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa) |
| Year | 1993 |
| Volume | 18 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 42-78 |
| Publication date | 1993-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Science Technology & Human Values (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0162-2439 • E-ISSN: 1552-8251 |
| Publisher | SAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1177/016224399301800104 |
| PMID | 11652075 |
| OpenAlex | W2155672255 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 121 |
| References cited | 54 |
In the highly contentious abortion arena, the new oral abortifacient technology RU486 is one among many actors. This article offers an arena analysis of the heterogeneous constructions of RU486 by various actors, including scientists, pharmaceutical compa nies, medical groups, antiabortion groups, women's health movement groups, and others who have produced situated knowledges. Conceptually, we find not only that the identity of the nonhuman actor-RU486 -is unstable and multiple but also that, in practice, there are other (previously invisible) implicated actors-the downstream users and consumers of the technology. If we try to follow all the actors, we find a fuller and more historicized arena, and, ironically, we too can be construed as implicated actors in it
Abortion · Aesthetics · Biology · Political science · Situated · Sociology · Ethics in Clinical Research · Gender Studies
Inside the Politics of Technology
Social Worlds, Actor-Networks and Controversy
(Un)Boxing the Monster
Genes as drugs
The practice of medical technology
We Must Not Allow a Contraception Gap
The Three Faces of PMS
Women's Health Research
Moral Orgasm and Productive Sex
Modern Symbolic Interaction Theory and Health
Moral Science and the Management of “Sexual Revolution” in Russia
Family Planning, Human Nature, and the Ethical Subject of Sex in Urban Greece
“Ordinary” Sex, Prostitutes, and Middle-Class Wives
Sexuality, the State, and the Runaway Wives of Highlands Papua, Indonesia
Situated Knowledge, Feminist and Science and Technology Studies Perspectives
Inside the Politics of Technology
Here and Everywhere
Not in my body
Food irradiation in the news
A Pill in the Lifeworld of Women in Burkina Faso
Revisiting higher vocational education within metropolis
The Universities’ Transformation Thesis Revisited
Making energy cultures visible with situational analysis
In memoriam Adele E. Clarke (1945–2024)
Transnational abortion pill flows and the political geography of abortion in Ireland
Working things out”
The turn towards prevention – moral narratives and the vascularization of Alzheimer’s disease
Personal genomics and individual identities
Revolutionary pills? Feminist abortion, pharmaceuticalization, and reproductive governance
Reflections on the reproductive sciences in agriculture in the UK and US, ca. 1900–2000
The Role of Users in the Social Shaping of Environmental Technologies
Ultrasonic Discourse
The IUD in Me
Situational Analysis of Power in Participatory Action Research
Marketing Models
Social imaginary and dilemmas of policy practice
Pragmatic Objectivity and the Standardization of Engineered Tissues
Transgenes and Transgressions
Manufacturing Desire
Enacting biosocial complexity
Need to know vs. need to share
From Auntie to Disco
The Kothi Wars
Globalizing the Facts of Life
Uses and Pleasures
Patient-Centered Development? Comparing Japanese and Other Gynecological Examination Tables and Practices
Reconceiving masculinity and ‘men as partners’ for ICPD Beyond 2014
Understanding the routinised inclusion of race, socioeconomic status and sex in epidemiology
Regenerating movements
Introduction
Diagnostic dissonance and negotiations of biomedicalisation
Bentham, Deleuze and Beyond
Scientification and Social Control
Listening for connections
Social Worlds
Re/assembling ‘innovative’ learning environments
Models of Cloning, Models for the Zoo
Human Tissue and ‘the Public’
Figuring the ‘cynical scientist’ in British animal science
Oestrogen receptors and breast cancer
In whose pockets? How small Danish patient organisations balance legitimacy, representation and dependency in collaboration with public sector medical researchers and the life science industry
Introduction to national cultures of animals, care and science
L’avortement médicamenteux
Masculinity and emotion in Mexican men's understandings of erectile dysfunction aetiology and treatment
Opioid overdose reversals using naloxone in New York City by people who use opioids
Matters-of-concern’ associated with discontinuation of long-acting injectable buprenorphine
Policy matters
Mifepristona (RU486)
Making sense of professional identities
Preparing Students for Competent Scientific Practice
Legal geographies of medication abortion in the USA
Policy problems, publics, and the power of definition
Languages of Sex and Aids in Nepal
Biomedicalization
Shaping a Food Safety Debate
The Versatile “Caveat” Section of an Epidemiology Paper
Situational analysis as a framework for interdisciplinary research in the social sciences
Reflections on an Inclusive Boundary Worker
Calibrating Translational Cancer Research
Making Kin with Adele
Of Bridges, Translations, and Practical Necessities
"Constructing "High-Risk Women
Epilogue
Refusing Prenatal Diagnosis
Making the Right Tools for the Job With Adele Clarke
Stories without Significance in the Discourse of Breast Reconstruction
Configuring the User as Everybody
At the Margins of Humanity
Representing Users' Bodies
Negotiating Conception
(Actor-net) Working Bodies and Representations
Technology- and Product-Oriented Movements
Working Practices of the Menopause Clinic
Potency in All the Right Places
Contesting contraceptive innovation-Reinventing the script
Imagining value, imagining users
Right tool," wrong "job
Climacteric hormone therapy in medical and lay texts in Finland from 1955 to 1992
Audience, consequence, and journal selection in toxic-exposure epidemiology
Contending visions in the evolution of genetic medicine
The politics of women's liberation
Selling Science
Science in action
Health care politics
Negotiations
The Women's Health Movement
The woman in the body
The Pro-Choice Movement
On Methods, Ontologies, and Representation in the Sociology of Science
Black Feminist Thought
Outsiders
The Politics of Therapeutic Evaluation
The Social Construction of Facts and Artefacts
Simplification in Scientific Work
Induced Abortion
Who's a Captive? Who's a Victim? Response to Collins's Method Talk
Users' perspectives on contraceptive technology and delivery systems highlighting some feminist issues
Creating Sociological Awareness
Population Control Politics
From Private Vice to Public Virtue
Situated Actions and Vocabularies of Motive
Rigid Politics and Technological Flexibility
Captives and Victims
Captives of Controversy
Power, Technology and the Phenomenology of Conventions
Technology is Society Made Durable
From Private Vice to Public Virtue. The Birth Control Movement and American Society Since 1830
Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation
Situated Knowledges
The Sociological Eye
Controversy and the Development of Reproductive Sciences
Creating and Controlling a Medical Market
Whose Side Are We On
| Unique citing works | 121 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 3,78 |
| Citation span | 1994 - 2025 (32) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | Yes |
| Citation types | Neutral: 113 |