Expanding the joys of cooking: How class shapes the emotional experience of family foodwork

The emotional experience of foodwork is often considered along a continuum, where pleasure exists in opposition to labor, and where inequalities restrict pleasure. Analyzing qualitative interviews, recall conversations and cooking observations with 34 primary cooks in families, this article explores how diverse parents experience pleasure through family foodwork. Doing so reveals five conditions facilitating pleasure: time, choice, aesthetic freedom, connection, and appreciation. It then analyzes how access to these conditions is shaped by class inequalities, while being attentive to intersections with gender and race/ethnicity. This analysis reveals how socio-economic inequalities fashion negative emotional relationships to foodwork by imposing disproportionate stressors on low-income home cooks, but do not necessarily predict cooking pleasure. Through examining intersections between the sensory and material aspects of foodwork, this article furthers theoretical understanding into how foodwork reinforces gendered, racialized, and classed oppression, while simultaneously identifying how agency and empowerment operate through cooking pleasure for low-income groups.     

The Delay of Grandparenthood: A Cohort Comparison in East and West Germany

This research explored the delay of grandparenthood in East and West Germany, investigating how the timing and life‐course context of this transition have changed across cohorts. The authors estimated the timing of passages into the grandparent role as well as demographic overlap with worker, parent, and filial roles. Data from the German Aging Survey (N = 3,628) revealed a rise of 3 months per birth cohort (1929–1958) in the median age at grandparenthood. As a result, the grandparent role decoupled almost entirely from active parenthood. Overlap with worker and filial roles was frequent and remained stable across cohorts. The findings direct attention to a neglected demographic trend that is striking in scope and precipitates change not only in the grandparent role but also in kinship structure.     

Asian Families at the Crossroads: A Meeting of East,West, Tradition,Modernity, and Gender

East Asian societies have undergone major changes in the past few decades, including substantial declines in marriage and fertility. This article introduces the special section of Asian Families in Context by sketching commonalities and variations in patterns of marriage and family behavior in this region. A discussion of relevant theoretical frameworks from the Western literature follows. The final section briefly introduces the 6 empirical studies that comprise this section and discusses their relevance for developing and refining theory relevant to understanding family change in East Asia.     

Four Decades of Trends in Attitudes Toward Family Issues in the United States: The 1960s Through the 1990s

This article examines trends in family attitudes and values across the last 4 decades of the 20th century, with particular emphasis on the past 2 decades. The article focuses on attitudes toward a wide range of family issues, including the roles of men and women, marriage, divorce, childlessness, premarital sex, extramarital sex, unmarried cohabitation, and unmarried childbearing. More generally, the article considers trends in 3 broad contemporary values: freedom; equality; and commitment to family, marriage, and children. Five data sets are used for the article: Monitoring the Future, General Social Survey, International Social Science Project, Intergenerational Panel Study of Parents and Children, and the National Survey of Families and Households. These 5 data sets reveal substantial and persistent long‐term trends toward the endorsement of gender equality in families, which may have plateaued at very high levels in recent years. There have also been important and continuing long‐term trends toward individual autonomy and tolerance toward a diversity of personal and family behaviors as reflected in increased acceptance of divorce, premarital sex, unmarried cohabitation, remaining single, and choosing to be childless. At the same time, marriage and family life remain important in the cultural ethos, with large and relatively stable fractions of young people believing that marriage and family life are important and planning marriage and the bearing and rearing of children.     

Addressing Emotional Communication in Family Relationships in the Treatment of Young People with Anorexia: A Case Study

Family‐based treatment (FBT) is an evidence‐based approach to anorexia nervosa in young people. Because it is not always successful, attention has been given to how families experience the treatment. A number of therapists have proposed possible additions to, or improvements in, the model. In successful cases relational containment may be achieved in the first phase of treatment. The treatment is often successful, but when initial goals, such as weight recovery, are not achieved, continuing to use the techniques described in the manual may become unhelpful. Sometimes therapists may need to address issues such as emotion coaching that are not specifically addressed in the FBT model. We describe a case in which the therapist addressed the family's emotional style in the first stage of treatment. This focus enabled progress to be achieved despite the adolescent's continuing difficulty in eating without parental support, and her escalating symptoms of anxiety and obsessional compulsive disorder (OCD). Therapy helped the adolescent and family understand that anorexic and OCD symptoms can be understood as a way of distracting from and managing distress. When this connection was made in therapy, the parents could help their daughter to manage distress in more adaptive ways. Parents may need help with their own difficulties in processing distress. In this case the parents needed the opportunity to resolve feelings of grief about a miscarriage in order to do so. We propose that therapy should address family difficulties with managing distress from an early stage.     

Spousal Communication,Power, and Contraceptive Use in Burkina Faso,West Africa

Abstract

In most developing countries, despite increased knowledge and approval of family planning, contraceptive use is still low. Lack of spousal communication was identified as an important explanatory factor in the low level contraceptive use by spouses. This study describes the pathways of influence between spousal communication, power, and contraceptive use in Burkina Faso, West Africaa high fertility country with low prevalence of contraceptive use. The Burkina Faso society is patriarchal in which husbands have control over sexual and fertility matters and they extend authority over their wives on these issues and, therefore, the power dimension of the spousal communication model needs clarification. The data source for this paper was the 2003 Burkina Faso Demographic and Health Survey. From the individual recode file, married respondents were selected for inclusion in the sample (n = 9,537) and for analysis. The independent variables were spousal communication and relative power. The dependent variables were contraceptive use and the effects of age, education, number of living children, wealth, and marriage types were adjusted for. Results show that education, wealth, place of residence, and religion are some of the correlates of inter-spousal communication about contraceptive use. Additionally, the data have revealed that spousal communication and marital power were important and significant predictors of contraceptive use, with relative marital power being the Stronger predictor of the two.     

The humanitarian road to Nagorno-Karabakh: media,morality and infrastructural promise in the Armenian diaspora

The Armenia Fund Telethon is an annual media event broadcast from Los Angeles that calls on all Armenians to give donations for humanitarian aid and infrastructure projects in Armenia and the unrecognised Nagorno-Karabakh Republic. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork during the 2013 and 2014 editions dedicated to the new Vardenis–Martakert highway connecting the two territories, this article examines the transnational ritual sphere through which de facto state formation in Nagorno-Karabakh is transformed from a political issue into a humanitarian question for diaspora households worldwide. While the new road facilitates mobility, its participatory materialisation appeals to distant addressees with the promise of helping Karabakh Armenians stay put and strengthening Armenian claims on de jure Azerbaijani territories. Challenging scholarly accounts of the Armenian diaspora as past-centred, subjective and symbolic, the Telethon’s humanitarian governance constructs Nagorno-Karabakh as materially diasporic and subjectivities in Los Angeles as objectively tied to the present-day conflict in the South Caucasus.     

Running the Gauntlet: Women's Use of Emotion Management Techniques in the Abortion Experience

Women who have abortions are caught in the crossfire of a heated ideological battle. The prochoice contention is that most women feel relieved after terminating an unwanted pregnancy. The antiabortion camp asserts killing an unborn child psychologically scars the mother. Drawing on in‐depth interviews with forty women who have terminated a pregnancy, this study examines how the clashing emotion culture of abortion politics shapes women's feelings about abortion. Findings indicate that women use behavioral and cognitive techniques in an attempt to transform unpleasant physiological reactions, inappropriate expressive gestures, and problematic emotional labels. As they run the gauntlet, women also strategically dodge or deliberately approach hazardous situational cues (e.g., abortion debate rhetoric and demonstrators, pictures of fetal development and the ultrasound, and babies and pregnant women) to achieve a feeling state that is consistent with their ideology.     

Why emotion work matters: sex,gender, and the division of household labor

Attempting to explain why biological sex remains the primary predictor of household labor allocation, gender theorists have suggested that husbands and wives perform family work in ways that facilitate culturally appropriate constructions of gender. To date, however, researchers have yet to consider the theoretical and empirical significance of emotion work in their studies of the gendered division of household labor. Using survey data from 335 employed, married parents, I examine the relative influence of economic resources, time constraints, gender ideology, sex, and gender on the performance of housework, child care, and emotion work. Results indicate that gender construction, not sex, predicts the performance of emotion work and that this performance reflects a key difference in men's and women's gendered constructions of self.     

The affordance of compassion for animals: a filmic exploration of industrial linear rhythms

ABSTRACT

Compassion is an emotion that could be useful for improving the lives of animals within the intensive and factory farming system (IFFS). Rhythms that exist within this system play a role in making compassion difficult to realize, which formulates the research question: How do the rhythms of the IFFS shape the affordance of compassion for animals? Drawing on a cultural mode of analysis informed by Henri Lefebvre’s work on rhythms, this paper explored the rhythms of three films that focus on the treatment of animals in this system: Meat; Our Daily Bread and Never Let Me Go. Industrial linear rhythms seem to compromise the compassion offered to animals in the IFFS by manipulating the cyclical rhythms of animals and animalized bodies from birth, through life and at death. Compassion for animals and animalized bodies in the IFFS, this paper concludes, is often provided in a piecemeal and localized manner.     

For good and country: nationalism and the diffusion of humanitarianism in the late nineteenth century

Despite the growing interest in transnational fields and their influence on national-level dynamics, existing literature has not yet addressed the processes involved in creating such fields in the first place. This article provides insight into the complexities involved in national–transnational interactions amidst national and transnational field formation. It examines the nascent transnational humanitarian field of the late nineteenth century through the work of the emerging Red Cross Movement in the 1860s–1890s, drawing primarily on the archive of the International Committee of the Red Cross. The findings show that National Red Cross (NRC) societies employed a discourse drawn from a transnational cultural arena in order to gain central positioning in their national fields and to convince other parties of their necessity. Conversely, NRCs used nationalism as a form of symbolic capital in establishing themselves in their national fields, seemingly at odds with their cosmopolitan aspirations. Thus, by contrast to the ideal-typical representation of global humanitarianism as non-national, these findings suggest that nationalism and impartial humanitarianism are historically intertwined. More broadly, the article argues that national-level field dynamics as well as nationalism play important roles in the creation of transnational fields, even when field actors present themselves as acting for universal causes.     

Social movements and biopolitical states: A study of humanitarian aid in Cape Town 2008

In May of 2008, a wave of xenophobic violence erupted in South Africa resulting in the displacement of thousands of ‘refugees’ who ended up in government-established ‘safety camps’. Due to the lack of an adequate response by government and the United Nations, the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), a South African AIDS activist organisation, began providing relief to the displaced population. In this paper, we are interested in investigating the ‘biopolitical technologies’ used by the TAC in their response to this crisis. We argue that the TAC's approach to providing humanitarian aid to refugees in Cape Town drew on both the organisation's own archive and repertoire of activist techniques and practices and the biopolitical toolkit deployed by international agencies such as the United Nations High Commission for Refugees. The outcome of this cross-fertilisation, we argue, was a hybrid assemblage of tactics and techniques that did not conform to the characterisation of humanitarian aid as simply another kind of bureaucratic antipolitics. The case study draws attention to the ways in which the TAC sought to ‘empower’ refugees and non-nationals as well as pressure and leverage the South African state into responding to the crisis, and thereby fulfil its pastoral role as ‘the watchful shepherd’ and the protector of human life.     

The Real Crisis at the Mexico-U.S. Border: A Humanitarian and Not an Immigration Emergency

Misguided U.S. policies since 1980 have created a large undocumented population within the United States. Border militarization curtailed circular undocumented migration from Mexico, and Cold War politics precluded the acceptance of refugees from Central America fleeing violence and economic turmoil unleashed by America’s intervention in the region. Although undocumented migration from Mexico has ended, resources devoted to border apprehensions and internal deportations continue to rise, pushing an ever larger number of Central Americans into an immigrant detention system that is ill-equipped to handle them. Although the Trump administration portrays the situation as an immigration crisis, what is really unfolding along the border and within the United States is an unprecedented humanitarian cross that in so many ways is one of our own making.     

Domestic Work and the Wage Penalty for Motherhood in West Germany

Previous research suggests that household tasks prohibit women from unfolding their full earning potential by depleting their work effort and limiting their time flexibility. The present study investigated whether this relationship can explain the wage gap between mothers and nonmothers in West Germany. The empirical analysis applied fixed‐effects models and used self‐reported information on time use and earnings as well as monthly family and work histories from the German Socio‐Economic Panel (1985–2007, N = 1,810; Wagner, Frick, & Schupp, 2007 ). The findings revealed that variation in reported time spent on child care and housework on a typical weekday explains part of the motherhood wage penalty, in particular for mothers of very young children. Furthermore, housework time incurred a significant wage penalty, but only for mothers. The authors concluded that policies designed to lighten women's domestic workload may aid mothers in following rewarding careers.     

The Evolution of Fathering Research in the 21st Century: Persistent Challenges,New Directions

Since the last decade review of the fathering literature in 2000, scholars across numerous disciplines such as demography, family studies, medicine, nursing, law, psychology, social work, and sociology have continued to produce a steady stream of work on fathering and father–child relationships. This literature is reviewed selectively with a focus on key developments, persistent challenges, and critical directions for future research. Significant developments include greater availability of large and nationally representative datasets to study fathers; expansion and evaluation of U.S. federal policy regarding fathers; thoughtful consideration of conceptualization and measurement of fathers' parenting; growth in research on coparenting, maternal gatekeeping, and fathering; increased attention to issues of diversity in fathering; and awareness of the effects of fathering on men's development. Persistent challenges and critical new directions in fathering research include full and routine inclusion of fathers in research on parenting, improved assessment and appropriate data analysis, adherence to evidence-based portrayals of fathers' roles in children's development, generation and use of scientific evidence to guide policy-making, and sustained attention to diversity and fatherhood. These should be priority areas of focus as fathering research proceeds into the next decades of the 21st century.     

Violent continuities: telling stories of one sexual minority life in the African Great Lakes region

This article examines the multi-layered continuities of violence experienced, navigated and narrated by those in the Great Lakes region from the perspective of one life. Drawing on the unfolding life stories of Alex, a sexual minority refugee in Uganda, it focuses upon the complex predicament of persecution and marginalisation of the region’s sexual minorities, as they navigate protracted political conflict, displacement and wider intersecting forms and sources of violence. This article aims to draw attention back to the lived realities of violence as they are interpreted and articulated through time and space in situated acts of speaking. An ethnographic life stories approach compels us to consider the agency of those who navigate complex constellations of intersecting and multiple forms of violence woven through the fabric of everyday life, the social topographies within which people navigate and the wider sociocultural, political and legal dimensions within which they live.     

‘Now,We Have the Same Rights as Men to Keep Our Jobs’: Gendered Perceptions of Opportunity and Obstacles in a Mexican Workplace

Drawing on extensive qualitative data at a Mexican‐owned multinational corporation, this case study investigates professional employees’ perceptions of changes to a prohibitive work policy requiring women to quit working upon marriage and having children. Employees believed the policy change meant working women were valued employees, but how this translated into opportunity highlighted distinct views of the types of positions professional women could occupy at the company, reinforcing sex‐segregated job allocation. Whereas women's narratives pointed to cultural resistance, men's narratives attributed the dearth of women in higher level positions to their lack of professionalism and commitment to work. The work policy change only guaranteed the right for women to work as the company modernized to fit the neoliberal demands of the global marketplace. Now women faced the challenge of turning that right into career advancement in a traditionally masculine‐defined company. I argue that even with the policy change, gendered discourses on women in professional occupations constructed and maintained gender inequities in the workplace. This study contributes to the scholarly discussion on gendered discourses within the context of global restructuring by showing how mechanisms at work maintain gender inequity in the workplace.     

The Family Strengths in Greece Then and Now

Abstract

Family has a long historical course in Greece. The turbulent periods of Hellenic history and the fluctuations of the political, social and economic life have influenced Hellenic family strengths. Nevertheless, there have been some basic elements on which the family has been based and acquired a continuous stability and homogeneity. These features are: religion, language, a rich cultural heritage, tradition and customs. Roles in the family are strongly influenced by the above, though they have been readjusted and redefined in contemporary society.