Cindy Patton

Bio: Cindy Patton is an academic researcher from Simon Fraser University. The author has contributed to research in topics: Acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) & Human rights. The author has an hindex of 11, co-authored 19 publications receiving 638 citations.

Fatal Advice: How Safe-Sex Education Went Wrong

Abstract: The American public responded to the first cases of AIDS with fear and panic. Both policymakers and activists were concerned not only with stopping the spread of the disease, but also with guiding the public’s response toward those already infected. Fatal Advice is an examination of how the nation attempted, with mixed results, to negotiate the fears and concerns brought on by the epidemic. A leading writer on the cultural politics of AIDS, Cindy Patton guides us through the thicket of mass-media productions, policy and public health enterprises, and activist projects as they sprang up to meet the challenge of the epidemic, shaping the nation’s notion of what safe-sex is and who ought to know what about it. There is the official story, and then there is another, involving local groups and AIDS activists. Going back to early government and activist attempts to spread information, Patton traces a slow separation between official advice and that provided by those on the front lines in the battle against AIDS. She shows how American anxieties about teen sex played into the nation’s inadequate education and protection of its young people, and chronicles the media’s attempts to encourage compassion without broaching the touchy subject of sex or disrupting the notion that AIDS was a disease of social and sexual outcasts. Her overview of the relationship between shifting medical perceptions and safe-sex advice reveals why radical safe-sex educators eventually turned to sexually explicit, including pornographic, representations to spread their message—and why even these extreme tactics could not overcome the misguided national teaching on AIDS. Patton closes with a stirring manifesto, an urgent call to action for all those who do not want to see the hard lessons of AIDS education and activism wasted, or, with these lessons, the loss of so many more lives.

Last Served?: Gendering the HIV Pandemic

Abstract: Following a decade in which the focus on HIV and AIDS has been on specific social groups, a shift in professional perceptions has resulted in a change in the images of women and HIV/AIDS. "Last Served?" recognizes and analyzes the trend toward more openly acknowledging and planning for women in the pandemic. Rather than enumerating the effects on women of confused or conflicting policies and representation, the book details why and how this situation occurred.; The author suggests that new visibility of women cannot in itself quickly or easily change the underlying assumptions which made women simultaneously radiant figures of sexual purity, and a magnet for blame during the pandemic's first decade.; "Last Served?" makes clear how the different ways of posing and answering questions about women and HIV are grounded in already existing ways of thinking about gender, and how these underlying preconceptions sometimes create situations whereby attempts to address the practical needs of women often result in reinforcement, or introduction of new forms of male domination.; Combining detailed analysis with practical suggestions, "Last Served?" provides insights into the current debates about women and AIDS and suggests future directions for work to overcome discrimination, faulty planning and misrepresentation.

Rights Language and HIV Treatment: Universal Care or Population Control?

Abstract: Over the past three decades, the World Health Organization has negotiated a global consensus among activists, governments, and the pharmaceutical industry with regard to the human rights of persons with AIDS, and those at highest risk of contracting HIV. More recently, epidemiologic modelers have proposed a “treatment as prevention” in which strategies like safe sex and harm reduction are considered unnecessary because mass HIV testing and aggressive maintenance of individual with HIV are believed sufficient to drive down population level viral load, thereby decreasing the individual odds of encounter a person with infectious HIV. This article considers the historical evolution of the human rights approach to HIV, and analyzes the loss in rights and dignity that may accrue from a shift toward a population-level approach to prevention.

Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? Thinking from Women's Lives

Abstract: Introduction - after the science question in feminism. Part 1 Science: feminism confronts the sciences how the women's movement benefits science - two views why \"physics\" is a bad model for physics. Part 2 Epistemology: what is feminist epistemology \"strong objectivity\" and socially situated knowledge feminist epistemology in and after the enlightenment. Part 3 \"Others\": \"...and race?\" - the science question in global feminism common histories, common destinies - science in the first and third worlds \"real science\" thinking from the perspective of lesbian lives reinventing ourselves as other Conclusion - what is a feminist science.

Invisible colleges : diffusion of knowledge in scientific communities

Abstract: No wonder you activities are, reading will be always needed. It is not only to fulfil the duties that you need to finish in deadline time. Reading will encourage your mind and thoughts. Of course, reading will greatly develop your experiences about everything. Reading invisible colleges diffusion of knowledge in scientific communities is also a way as one of the collective books that gives many advantages. The advantages are not only for you, but for the other peoples with those meaningful benefits.

The trouble with "MSM" and "WSW": erasure of the sexual-minority person in public health discourse.

Abstract: Men who have sex with men (MSM) and women who have sex with women (WSW) are purportedly neutral terms commonly used in public health discourse. However, they are problematic because they obscure social dimensions of sexuality; undermine the self-labeling of lesbian, gay, and bisexual people; and do not sufficiently describe variations in sexual behavior.MSM and WSW often imply a lack of lesbian or gay identity and an absence of community, networks, and relationships in which same-gender pairings mean more than merely sexual behavior. Overuse of the terms MSM and WSW adds to a history of scientific labeling of sexual minorities that reflects, and inadvertently advances, heterosexist notions.Public health professionals should adopt more nuanced and culturally relevant language in discussing members of sexual-minority groups.