Rose Weitz

Uncertainty and the lives of persons with AIDS.

This article uses interview data to explore how 23 gay and bisexual men who had AIDS were affected by and managed uncertainty. Before diagnosis these individuals had to find ways to cope with uncertainty about their risk of contracting AIDS and about their initial symptoms. After diagnosis they had to find answers to their questions about why they contracted this disease, whether they would be able to function in the short run, whether their illness would kill them, and whether they would be allowed to live and (if death was unavoidable) to die with dignity. The data suggest that persons with AIDS respond to the uncertainties of their illness by attempting to assert as much control as possible over their lives, through such divergent strategies as seeking and avoiding knowledge about their illness.

WOMEN AND THEIR HAIR Seeking Power through Resistance and Accommodation

This article explores how women seek power through both resisting and accommodating mainstream norms for female hair and delineates the strengths and limitations of these strategies. The data help to illuminate the complex role the body plays in sustaining and challenging womens subordinate position, how accommodation and resistance lie buried in everyday activities, the limits of resistance based on the body, and why accommodation and resistance are best viewed as coexisting variables rather than as polar opposites. Finally, these data suggest the importance of defining resistance as actions that reject subordination by challenging the ideologies that support subordination.

Living with the stigma of AIDS

This article uses interview data to explore how 23 gay and bisexual men who had AIDS were affected by and managed stigma. The article describes how stigma affects the relationships of persons with AIDS to their families, friends, lovers, colleagues, and health care providers. It explores how persons with AIDS avoid or reduce stigma by concealing their illnesses, learning when and to whom they should reveal their illnesses, changing their social networks, educating others about AIDS, developing nonstigmatizing theories of illness causation, and using bravado to convince others that they are still functioning social beings.

Physician Satisfaction in a Changing Health Care Environment: The Impact of Challenges to Professional Autonomy, Authority, and Dominance

For some time, sociologists have debated whether physicians still retain dominance in the health care world, public faith in their moral and scientific authority, and the autonomy to set work conditions and make clinical decisions. Using ideas derived from this debate, we analyze the impact of changes in the health care environment on physician satisfaction. Our data come from a mailed survey of 510 Arizona physicians. Our results show that background physician attributes did not predict satisfaction, nor did most organizational attributes. However, participation in IPAs (Individual Practice Associations) predicted higher satisfaction, while payment according to a third party payers fee-for-service schedule predicted lower satisfaction. In addition, physicians were more likely to be satisfied if they wrote the orders that non-physicians had to follow, were paid what they wanted, did not need to subordinate their clinical judgment to that of non-physicians, and believed that their patients had confidence in physicians. Our conclusions discuss both theoretical and policy implications of our findings.

Images of black women among anglo college students

Previous research on popular images of women and of minority groups has looked almost solely at images of minority men and of white women. This article presents survey data on images of black women among 256 white non-Hispanic college undergraduates, using a modified Katz/Braly scale. The article explores the nature, distribution, correlates, and emotional evaluations of these images and the implications of these images for black womens lives. Images of black women differed substantially from those of American women in general. Most commonly, black women were characterized as loud, talkative, aggressive, intelligent, straightforward, and argumentative. In addition, students rated positive traits less positive and negative traits less negative when exhibited by black women than by American women in general, apparently because of their expectations for black womens behavior.

Feminist consciousness raising, self-concept, and depression

This article summarizes a study in which before and after interviews and questionnaires were administered to 73 women who had registered for feminist consciousness-raising groups in the state of Connecticut, and three groups were observed over a period of 10 to 16 weeks, in order to explore the unintended psychological benefits of participation. The results show that consciousness raising may help women to increase their sense of control and externalize their attributions of blame, and may consequently increase self-esteem and reduce depression among participants. The article concludes with a discussion relating these results to studies on race and class differences in mental health, and comparing consciousness raising to psychotherapy.

Jane Fonda, Barbara Bush and other aging bodies: Femininity and the limits of resistance

This article uses the self-representations of Jane Fonda and Barbara Bush to assess their two different approaches to aging and to explore the degree to which women are able to resist the prevailing cultural discourse which equates femininity with a youthful appearance. While Barbara Bush uses the rhetoric of “naturalness,” implying that she makes little effort with her appearance, Fonda emphasizes the work she puts into maintaining a fit body. Both frame their self-descriptions as resistance to cultural standards, but an exploration of their efforts reveals serious limits to this resistance. The conclusions discuss the possibilities for women to resist or change cultural dictates regarding the aging female body. Data come from all articles on Fonda and Bush published in women’s magazines since 1977.

The Elephant in the Room: The Invisibility of Poverty in Research on Type 2 Diabetes

Over two hundred years of anecdotal, epidemiological, and experimental evidence indicate that poverty breeds disease. This holds true for type 2 diabetes, which both in the United States and other developed nations disproportionately occurs, cripples, and kills among the poor. In this article we examine rhetorical strategies used in 30 journal articles indexed under type 2 diabetes and poverty. As we show, poverty is rarely highlighted in this literature as a causal factor. Instead, explanations for diabetes among poor people overwhelmingly emphasize features of patients—their biology, behaviors, psychology, culture, or other “risk factors”—while ignoring, reframing or neglecting the links between poverty and disease. By so doing, these discursive strategies naturalize higher rates of diabetes among poor persons, legitimize relations of domination in the larger society, and encourage only research projects, treatment practices and health and social policies that do not challenge existing social relations. We discuss the implications of these discursive practices for medical research and care, and for social and public health policies.

Barriers to acceptance of genetic counseling among primary care physicians

Abstract This research analyzed physicians’ attitudes toward and use of genetic counseling. Data were obtained through mailed questionnaires sent to all 445 general and family practitioners, pediatricians, and obstetrician‐gynecologists in private practice and involved in direct patient care in Maricopa and Pima Counties, Arizona. Results indicated strong attitudinal support for genetic counseling. Almost all respondents felt that it was a useful and necessary medical service, and most felt that it resulted in more responsible patient decisions. Actual genetic counseling by physicians was comparatively rare, however. The data suggested that the paucity of counseling may have derived from a lack of training in genetics, scarcity of patient requests, and legal naivete. Genetic counseling, amniocentesis, and abortion received the most support from younger physicians, obstetrician‐gynecologists, and those who were Jewish, less religious, and had few or no children.

Watching Brian Die: The Rhetoric and Reality of Informed Consent

Two years ago, my brother-in-law was injured in a catastrophic industrial accident, which left him with second and third degree burns over 95 percent of his body. Writing both as a family member and as a sociologist, I analyse how his doctors increased their decision-making authority at the expense of informed consent, explore why they did so, and discuss the consequences for families when informed consent is not obtained. I also discuss the difficulties of achieving informed consent when family members have conflicting views on treatment. The conclusions use this story to reflect on the problems of implementing informed consent in clinical practice and on what these problems tell us about US doctors’ continuing power and clinical autonomy.