This article examines the revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders and its claim of incorporating a “greater cultural sensitivity.” The analysis reveals that the manual conveys mixed messages as it explicitly addresses the critique of being ethnocentric and having a static notion of culture yet continues in a similar fashion when culture is applied in diagnostic criteria. The analysis also relates to current trends in psychiatric nosology that emphasize neurobiology and decontextualize distress and points to how (...) the DSM-5 risks serving as an ethnic dividing line in psychiatry by making sociocultural context relevant only for some patients. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to engage critically with feminist HIV/aids research from an ‘intersectional’ perspective. Focusing in particular on the work of Tamsin Wilton and Janet Holland et al., the article examines how ‘race’, ethnicity and class are theorized and conceptualized in this literature. Through a scrutiny of their empirical analyses, the article points to the pitfalls of a descriptive approach to ‘differences’ and problematizes Wilton's and Holland et al.'s theoretical focus on gender and sexuality. The benefit of (...) including a critical perspective on ‘race’ and ethnicity and other axes of domination is illustrated further using some empirical examples from the Swedish HIV/aids policy context. The article concludes by arguing that an intersectional perspective poses a challenge to feminist HIV/aids research that needs to be addressed in order to produce an effective sexual health policy. (shrink)

This article explores affectivity, temporality, and their interrelation in patients who contracted COVID-19 during the first wave of the pandemic in Sweden and with symptoms indicative of post-COVID-19 Condition (PCC) that remained one year after the infection. It offers a qualitative phenomenological philosophy analysis, showing how being ill with acute COVID-19 and with symptoms indicative of PCC can entail a radically altered self-world relation. We identify two examples of pre-intentional (existential) feelings: that of listlessness and that of not being able (...) to sense what is real and not real, both of which, in different ways, imply a changed self-world relation. We offer an analysis of intentional feelings: how the fear of not “returning” to one’s previous self and the hope of such a return weave together the present and the absent, as well as the past and the future, in ways that make the future appear as constricted, disquieting, or lost. We argue that a phenomenological differentiation among experiences of living with symptoms indicative of PCC—through attention to the way intentional affectivity and pre-intentional affectivity help shape the embodied self’s attunement to the world—is apt to yield a better understanding of the variations within these experiences and contribute to clinical practice. (shrink)