The term medicalisation is considered in the light of an empirical study on menstruation as discussed in medical advisory columns. The focus is on how the medical profession responds to young women's questions about their maturing bodies. The questions are seldom of a medical nature; rather, they are concerned with normality and coping with menstruation in everyday life. The doctors' response is clear: the patient need not worry, the medical profession is both willing and able to take over the responsibility for, and control over, the body. The medicalisation of menstruation that can be found in advisory columns strengthens the position of the medical establishment as the legitimate authority on the body. Nevertheless, the letters sent to the magazines do not lend support to the idea of medicalisation as an endeavor pursued by the medical profession alone. The letters are also a means whereby young women try to establish standards for proper female gender behaviour in an area where lay society remains silent.

We explore a range of projections that, we argue, are increasingly characterising much applied research on and popular representations of HIV/AIDS, gender and embodiment in Africa. Showing how the image of the victim is being challenged by a growing emphasis on agency, we identify continuities between these approaches. It is argued that both the insistence on victimisation and the celebration of agency naturalise neo-liberal ideas about the autonomous individual. Our paper reflects on our work on the South African Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), focusing on how we have confronted issues such as research design, reflexivity, methodology and ethics. We also show how TAC activists have redefined entrenched ideas about agency and victimisation. In developing a language and politics of activism that radically unsettles conventional understandings of embodied acts in the context of the HIV epidemic, TAC raises challenges for research, writing and media representations of embodiment and social marginalisation in African contexts.

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This chapter discusses personal experiences of being an academic during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic in a Northern European university city. In this context, the COVID-19 restrictions and public health policies affected every single aspect of sociality even if, to the date of writing, an actual epidemic did not accelerate in this society. The article discusses the experience of the government implementing a range of restrictions since mid-March 2020, which were surprisingly successful in halting the epidemic, yet with profound social consequences, also affecting the content of academic scholarship. Three interconnected themes will be discussed: Social isolation and academic motivation; feminist politics of knowledge production and epistemological considerations; and vulnerability, loss, and imposed social distancing connected to microbial co-existence and safety/privilege as a loss.

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