| Although little is known about the particular social and global consequences of condoms as integral to everyday life, condoms have been increasingly used to reduce population growth, prevent “unwanted” pregnancies, increase reproductive rights, and control medical epidemics. This dissertation examines how institutions and social groups negotiate, through condom commodities, issues of power relations and social inequalities involving race, gender, class, sexuality, and nation-states. The research documents the social connections of power and inequalities in (1) condom production and industrial change, (2) international condom distribution through family planning and HIV/AIDS projects, and (3) condom advocacy in community-oriented campaigns. Particularly, I analyze how condoms have come to matter, since the 1960s, in lived cultural and economic experiences as well as in the globalizing struggles against racial, sexual, and gender divisions.; This research interweaves historical, ethnographic, and quantitative data from: media reports, corporate briefings, and government surveys about condom manufacturers; publications and bilateral agreements involving the U.S. Agency for International Development and their condom distribution activities; historical and recent documents from 11 organizations in Bangkok, Manila, New Delhi, and San Francisco; and 29 semi-structured interviews with government officials and individuals from nonprofit groups and community organizations.; The major findings are condom-related institutions: (1) treat social categories of consumers, “risk” groups, patients, and social service clients as passive, unthinking, and misinformed, (2) foster a diffuse network of noncommercial organizations that supports for-profit condom manufacturers, and (3) attempt to make social transformation by changing individual behavior and reforming themselves to address the “social problems” of medical epidemics and population growth. Simultaneously, these prevailing liberal institutional practices foster the widening of inequalities around gender, sexuality, class, race-ethnicity, and nation-states, by failing to surpass the economic framings of social problems and by failing to consider complex social identities in connections with economic frames.; Consequently, this research offers a theory and analysis of social connections, arguing that condoms have come to epitomize the contradictions of modernity. That is, despite contemporary institutional attempts to ameliorate societal inequalities, such attempts have led to an increase in the social, global, and economic inequalities of gender, race, and sexuality. |
