“Everything I Didn't Want to Know I Learned in Lit Class”: Sex, Sexual Orientation, and Student Identity

If discussing sexuality with college students is difficult, discussing sexual orientation often seems impossible. However, given the prejudice and societal violence against lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and transgendered persons, students need to understand the harmful effects of homophobia and heterosexism. This article offers a review of the literature on teaching about sexual identity, nonthreatening strategies for effecting change, and suggestions about fiction and poetry that might be used in the classroom to raise awareness. Secondary sources provide additional techniques and resources.     

What I Saw and Heard in the Qiang Village

The Qiang nationqlity has a population of 198,2,52 (according to the 1991 census statistics), who mainly inhabit Maowen, Wenchuan, Lixian and Beichuan counties in Aba Tibet and Qiang Nationalities Autonomous Prefecture of Sichuan Province. The Qiang is one of the oldest nationalities in China. It is said that the Qiang nationality was a main tribal race of the Xia Dynasty. The ancient Qiang nationality was an important part of the Huaxia nationality, the predecessor of the Han nationality. In a long historical process, they moved from areas in the northwest and the     

My Grandma and I

GRANDMA is an old house—an old tree that I grew up with. Although my grandmother is a typical rural woman with bound feet, she has a man's name—Liu Hongqing. Women from her era usually did not have their own names, but she has one and it sounds so good, because her family was rich when she was born. Her father ran a large dyehouse and all her uncles had businesses in Qingdao or Yantai. But Liu Hongqing's lot in life would be different. At the age of 16, the casting of a horoscope dictated that she marry a local blacksmith, Ni Runtai. From that point on, she lived in     

The Mirror and I

The following is the speech presented by Liu Xin, who won First Prize in this year's English-Speaking Union International Public Speaking Competition.     

Queers,Bullying and Schools: Am I Safe Here?

SUMMARY

This article reports on interviews conducted with students and educators in various Toronto-area high schools in an attempt to gauge how and to what extent so-called “formal” law (laws, policies, regulations) interacts with other, sometimes, competing normative orders, such as gender codes, sexuality, race, religion, in the educational setting. This approach is necessary to understand how anti-harassment and anti-homophobia policies are complicated by these other regulating influences.     

The Ditan Park and I

DITAN PARK (Temple of Earth) is near my home, or I live near Ditan Park. Whichever way you look at it, it seems that the park and I are destined to be close to one another. The park has been there for more than 400 years before and my family has been living near the park ever since my grandmother moved to Beijing with my father. Even though my family has moved several times over the past five     

I’m not playing: gamification,mental illness,and neoliberal subjectivity

ABSTRACT

For many researchers, medical professionals, and politicians, the gamification of mental health treatment is a possibly innovative and efficient means to utilise the popularity of gaming in order to help combat the ever-growing global rates of mental illness. Despite this optimism, critics of gamification point to this trend as an extension of neoliberal governance, warning that gamification only encourages the further quantification and control of life under metrics of utility, productivity, and competitiveness. Accordingly, this article critically examines the politics of gamifying mental healthcare, and the broader question of the link between play and mental health. By engaging with the works of Donald W. Winnicott, and a host of contemporary critical and cultural theorists, this article attempts to open up a space for considering the value of play and games for sufferers of mental illness, that resist the strictures of the neoliberal governance of play.     

Population removal,displacement, and divestment in South Africa∗

In the past twenty years several million Africans have been removed or displaced from the ‘White’ areas to the ‘homelands’. Others have found themselves in the ‘homelands’ by virtue of changed borders between the ‘homelands’ and the rest of South Africa. But all three categories lose on transfer to the ‘homelands’ whatever rights to ‘White’ area residence and employment they might have enjoyed under the pass laws. Transferring people to the ‘homelands’ not only often curtails their access to the labour market; it also adds to the financial burdens of the ‘homeland’ administrations, who find themselves having to provide extra schools, health services, and other facilities. Some of the ‘homelands’ are poorer in terms of public funds than are countries like Lesotho. The financial apartheid that is entailed in the ‘homelands’ policy, which includes classifying public funds supplied to the ‘homeland’ administrations as ‘foreign aid,’ is one of the most insidious forms of racial discrimination in South Africa. Under the stricter enforcement of the pass laws that has come about following the recommendations of the Riekert Commission, people in the ‘homelands’ are having their access to the mainstream economy reduced. Displacing Africans to the ‘homelands’ enables the government to ‘export’ part of South Africa's unemployment problem. One of the chief motives behind the refurbished industrial decentralisation programme announced by the Prime Minister on 31st March 1982 is to promote the policy of influx control. It remains to be seen whether the refurbished programme makes a material contribution to the creation of additional jobs in the ‘homelands’. The action of the authorities in deporting people from Cape Town to the Transkeiin August 1981 under laws governing aliens testifies to continued determination to deflect black urbanisation from the ‘White’ areas to the ‘homelands’. But it is doubtful whether the ‘homelands’ have the space to accommodate people displaced from ‘White’ areas as well as their own natural population increase. Pressures from farmers in the ‘White’ areas for erecting fences between these areas and the ‘homelands’ testifies to growing tensions on the internal borders of South Africa as the ‘homelands’ reach bursting point.     

Who Am I? And What Makes Me Hot and Bothered? Notes on Identity,Sexuality, Enigma,and Desire

ABSTRACT

This article explores the links among identity, sexuality, enigma, and desire in my work with 22-year-old Andrew as he explores his homosexuality. Sexuality is discussed as a developmental and relational construction simultaneously biological and social, inventive and defensive. Elaborating these vertices of sexuality in the treatment opened space to discuss Andrew’s sexual experience and fantasy. In this vein, the article questions the tendency to put aside frank discussion of sex in analytic practice and proposes case vignettes useful for clinically elaborating intimate fantasies rooted in the shared narration of patient and analyst as between psychoanalyst/writer and reader. In doing so, we turn from concrete definitions and explanations of sexuality that risk getting bogged down in details and use narrative to facilitate the uncanny experience of “finding” sexuality in clinical work.     

Women,work, and family in the Czech Republic—and comparisons with the West

What are the work-family experiences of Czech women, and to what extent are there similarities and differences with women in the West? Drawing on a cross-national survey and other findings, this paper points out that unlike the extensive part-time employment of many Western European women, most Czech women in the post-Communist era have continued to combine full-time employment with family roles. Maternity and parental leaves, kindergartens, and other policies have been important supports. It is argued that employment and economic independence remain important to Czech women, and although gender differentiation in women's domestic activities and men's preponderance in upper-level jobs in the economy and government is recognized, Western attributions of patriarchy have been resisted. Since family life is highly valued, many have seen women as advantaged in their greater family involvement and integration of both family and employment roles. Rather than opposition between men and women, Czechs generally point to partnership and overall social equality. During Communism Czechs learned that ‘time at work’ does not equal productivity, and women practiced an informal flextime to aid work-family integration. This ‘self-management’ of work time and of work and family activities is cited as a component of Czech women‘s sense of efficacy and gender equality. An interesting question for the post-Communist success of Czech women and work organizations is whether women's interest in self-management will be met by the support of managers and of workplace cultures and structures.     

“As a Divorcee,I Am a Better Father”: Work and Parenting Among Divorced Men in Israel

The article presents the emotional and cognitive experiences of divorced fathers in Israel faced with the need to balance work and family. The analysis is based on in-depth interviews with 22 divorced fathers. The main finding of the study is that divorced fathers face a more intense family–work conflict, which they did not have to contend with as married fathers. Many interviewees reported a shift in the perceived importance of work in their lives. Divorced fathers described their parenting experience as enhanced in comparison to prior married life; many of them felt that after the divorce they became better fathers.     

Do I look Jewish in this? A phenomenological approach to intercorporeality and racism

Racialised interactions inform the corporeal memory of both racists and their victims. This translates in bodily styles which reproduce alienated intercorporeal exchanges. The racial abjection of the victims is embedded at the somatic level in a racialised corporeal schema which obtains even when victims are not a priori visibly different to an external observer. The damaging intercorporeal dynamics of racialised abjection resist critical deconstruction. This explains the unwitting reproduction of racism even by those who consciously repudiate it and the difficulties of explaining to non-victims the enduring – and damaging- effects of those crucial moments when ‘the glance of the other brings about a break in embodiment’.     

“I am a Worker-Professional”: Teachers and their Classes in Puerto Rico

This article examines economic and cultural capital in the lives of public school teachers in Puerto Rico across the last half of the twentieth century to examine the processes through which their class relations have formed and reformed with shifts in Puerto Rican political and economic conditions from the early days of United States rule through neoliberal school reforms of the 1990s. It traces the historical development of the “teacher class” as a female-identified, poorly paid, professional workforce, and examines the impact of class and gender ideologies in this process.     

Who lives and dies on death row? Race, ethnicity, and post-sentence outcomes in Texas

A substantial body of research has explored the extent to which the race of offenders and victims influences who receives a death sentence for capital crimes. Little is known about how race and ethnicity might pattern death-row outcomes. Drawing upon evidence from male offenders sentenced to death in Texas during the years 1974 through 2009, we extend recent research by examining whether the race and ethnicity of offenders and victims and a number of offender, victim, and crime attributes influence the likelihood of executions and sentence relief (whereby prisoners leave death row). Cox regression analyses are used in conjunction with a multiple-imputation method for handling a modest amount of missing data. The results show that cases involving minorities—with black or Latino offenders or victims—have lower hazards of execution than cases in which both offenders and victims are white. Victim and offender race and ethnicity have little to no independent effect upon the hazard of sentence relief.     

“I Am Tired But If I Don't Try to Have Sex,My Wife Will Think I've Been Fooling around in the City”: Work,Migration, and Sex Among Vietnamese Migrant Laborers

Mostly operating from a risk and risk-reduction paradigm, existing research on migrants in Vietnam tends to conceptualize sex and risky sexual behaviors as isolated life domains. This study begins to develop a contextually rich understanding of migrants’ sex lives by examining the relationships among sex, work, and the constant pendulum-like migrating movements of 23 Vietnamese married migrants in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City. Using data from in-depth interviews, it was found that most participants had no sex in the city; this was followed by visits to the home village, where they had sex with their spouses as often as possible to make up for the “long drought” in the city. Within this sexual schema, sex came secondary, and even peripherally, to migrants’ working lives; thus, exhaustion from work was cited by migrants as the overwhelming factor leading to their sexual problems. This study suggests that migrants’ intimate lives are more strongly linked to their working lives than has previously been recognized, and that their sexual behaviors should be viewed in tandem with the hardships of their working lives.     

Mom,I Understand You

To celebrate Mother's Day, the editors of Society Weekly(published by People's Daily) invited their readers to write and submit "A Sentence for Mother." This activity, which was co-sponsored by the "Program of Happiness," garnered quite an emotional response. Among the contributions we received were several from the 21 students of Class Three, Grade Two of the high school affiliated with the Beijing Institute of Clothing Technology. "Mother, you are a towering tree and I am your shadow. "—ZHANG YE "Mother, you are an umbrella, and we are the children under it. You are the pod, and we are the peas."—XU JING