Medical Research for Hire: Gender and the Privatization of Clinical Trials.

This paper will focus on emerging cultures of clinical trials by analyzing the relationships that are produced between physicians and their research staff and between research staff and patients who volunteer for studies. Central to this analysis will be attention to the production of gender relationships within the clinical trials industry, particularly in terms of two conceptual threads: idiocy and altruism. Drawing upon fieldwork in the southwestern United States, this paper will explore how these themes surface in the narratives of physicians and research staff. These informant narratives will dramatize the ways in which patriarchy and medical paternalism continue to thrive, but also have changed, within new manifestations of medical and pharmaceutical cultures. Moreover, this examination of gender and the clinical trials industry demonstrates that power operates simultaneously through organizational structures ? institutional power ? and through individuals ? biopower. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]