Utilizing rich ethnographic accounts and first-person narratives, the contributors to this work examine how ordinary people are responding to the complexities of living in today's world. Among the issues discussed are counseling, surrogate motherhood, the abortion debate, and cultural and economic domination in Jamaica and on the U.S.-Mexican border.

Introduction - Louise Lamphere, Patricia Zavella, Helena Ragoné Part I: The Power of Representation: Gendered Ethnography in Practice 1. How Native is a Native Anthropologist Kirin Narayan 2. Feministic Insider Dilemmas: Constructing Ethnic Identity with Chicana Informants - Patricia Zavella 3. Carne, Carnales and the Carnivalesque: Bakhtinian Batos, Disorder, and Narrative Discourses - José Limón Part II 4. The Egg and the Sperm: How Science has Constructed a Romance Based on Stereotypical Women's Roles - Emily Martin 5. Making Sense of Missed Conceptions - Sarah Franklin 6. Surrogates, Fathers, and Adoptive Mothers - Helena Ragoné 7. Constructing Aminocentesis: Maternal and Medical Discourses - Raynna Rapp 8. The World Made Flesh: The Disembodiment of Gender in the Abortion Debate - Faye Ginsburg 9. Agency and Constraint: Sterilization and Reproductive Freedom Among Puerto Rican Women in New York City - Iris Lopez Part III: Constructing Family: Creating Household and Community 10. Reinventing the South in Upscaling Downtown - Brett Williams 11. This Permanent Roommate - Ellen Lewin 12. In the Beginning He Wouldn't Lift Even a Spoon: The Division of Household Labor - Beatriz Pesquera 13. The Meanings of Macho: Changing Mexican Male Identities - Matthew Gutmann 14. Holding Hands - Carol Stack PartIV: Consciousness, transformation, and Resistance at Work 15. Invisibility, Consciousness of the Other, Resentiment - Judith Rollins 16. A Maid by Any Other Name: The Transformation of Dirty Work by Central American Immigrants - Leslie Salzinger 17. Chicanas in White-Collar Jobs: You Have to Prove Yourself More - Denise Segura 18. Knock 'em Dead: Work on the Killfloor of a Modern Beefpacking Plant - Donald D. Stull 19. Women's Resistance in the Sunbelt: Anglos and Hispanas Respond to Managerial Control - Louise Lamphere and Patricia Zavella 20. Spirits of Resistance - Aihwa Ong Part V: Colonizing Gender and Sexuality: Representation and Practice 21. Making Empire Respectable: The Politics of Race and sexual Morality in 20th-Century Colonial Cultures - Ann Stoler 22. The Emperor's Old Clothes: Fashioning the Colonial Subject - Jean Comaroff 23. Mudwomen and Whitemen - A Meditation on Pueblo Potteries and the Politics of Representation - Barbara Babcock 24. Warriors or Soldiers?: Masculinity and Ritual Transvestism in the Liberian Civil War - Mary Moran 25. The Gendered Politics and Violence of Structural Adjustment: A View from Jamaica - Faye V. Harrison 26. The Mirror of Exploitation - Devon G. Peña Index