This article interrogates the modes by which cultural constructions of male contraceptive use emerge in Costa Rica by analyzing men's narratives of vasectomy. Drawing on ethnographic research data, I examine men's contraceptive decision making and perspectives on vasectomy and specify the ways they work through their vasectomy to rearticulate the relationship between masculinity and contraceptive responsibility and tensions in an emerging Costa Rican social modernity. Following Oudshoorn's (2003) analysis on male contraceptive research, this article highlights contraceptive technologies and men's narratives of these technologies as key sites for examining gender politics in contemporary societies and the materialization of new social orders. In the discussion, I argue that the men's narratives examined here potentiate creation of an "alternative technosociality" (Oudshoorn 2003) in Costa Rica, in which men taking contraceptive responsibility does not constitute performing a subordinate masculinity, but simply another way of acting as men.

Most eastern US hospitals distributed formula sample packs to new mothers at hospital discharge, contrary to recommendations from the major medical organizations, but the practice is changing significantly.

Over the last two decades, the use of empowerment approaches to help reduce health-related vulnerabilities and violence among female sex workers has increasingly informed global health efforts directed at HIV/STD prevention. The empowerment approach to sex worker health rejects both abolitionist and narrowly conceived clinical approaches in favor of strategies that promote commercial sex as valid work, strengthen sex workers' agency, reinforce female sexual autonomy, and support rights-based framing. A significant outcome of the empowerment approach to integrating health, social, and legal strategies has been the creation of numerous sex worker associations and NGOs, which advocate for collective mobilization and community-based HIV/STD prevention programs among sex workers. Despite numerous studies examining the v profession or income-generating strategy that adult women in various stages of their lives perform, the lack of research and theorization about these aspects of female sex workers' lives, I suggest, has prevented a broader research and programmatic response both to common risks such as HIV/STDs and violence, and to work-related health problems and occupational conditions that older sex workers may consider more important in their dayto-day lives. My research shows that a "structural approach" to sex work, which highlights the underlying social, historical, political, and economic forces that encourage and foster the economic exploitation, stigmatization, and negative health outcomes of women (and men) who sell sex, would benefit from adding a feminist anthropological perspective on aging. In this view, aging is a critical social structural inequality that society uses to devalue women's status and which women often experience as stigmatizing and/or shameful. In Costa Rica, where recent reporting has suggested an increase in the number of older women in the local sex industry, studying women's experiences of and responses to growing old in the sex trade reveals not only the longterm impacts of neoliberal reform polices, but also how gendered discourses about aging, increasing familial caregiving responsibilities, and growing inequality and economic pressure, together, conspire to limit older women sex workers' employment opportunities and put them at greater risk of violence, discrimination, psychological distress, sexual assault, substance abuse, poverty, and HIV/STDs.