Pharmaceutical Intimacy: Sex,Death, and Methamphetamine

ABSTRACT

In this article, I draw from ethnographic work conducted among residents of an “in-house” drug and alcohol treatment center in Baltimore, Maryland, to discuss the relationships born of pharmaceutical (ab)use. By looking in close detail at the autobiographical accounts of one man in treatment for addiction to methamphetamine, I attempt to chart the way life and death are at times brought into close proximity, and at others wedged firmly apart, by such things as love and avoidance. My concern is with the ethics of care that emerge through the so-called “small events” in everyday relations; that so often define a life or a relationship as falling under the category “normal” or “pathological.” I ask how such things as the known demands placed on the body by the need to maintain or avoid relations, whether pharmaceutically mediated or not, come to bear on the decision to “let die” or the resurgence of moral worlds. I end by discussing the different aspects of relatedness revealed by the dependencies and alliances formed by the kinship between pharmaceuticals and humans.

In compliance with current ethical research standards, the names of all informants have been changed to assure their anonymity.     

Beyond Home: Forging the Domestic in Shared Housing

ABSTRACT

This article examines how connections between intimacy and the realm of the domestic are propelled by conditions of shared residence. Informed by research among low-income families in Buenos Aires who organize to attain collectively owned housing, I depict how the propinquity provided by common social activism and co-residence creates both a political and an affective community. The groups in question organize their cohabitation and everyday life according to a set of explicit and collectively sanctioned rules and regulations concerning distribution and uses of space, maintenance, etc. However, living together also implies embracing a myriad of norms regarding aspects of intimacy and the body—particularly those related to sexuality—which, although alluded to by written rules, can only gain voice in the more nuanced, semi-public idioms of gossip and rumor. The article explores these assertions by considering several instances where rules and gossip intersected in deliberations about (im)proper attire in common areas, and the making of decisions about kinship and care. I describe the emotional undertones that emerge around these issues—such as jealousy, modesty, or suspicion—in order to examine how they articulate a domestic domain.

These reflections are based on extended interviews. In order to preserve my informants' anonymity I used pseudonyms in all cases.     

“No Place Like Home?”

Abstract

The concept of “home” is subject to individual interpretations; a “home” may be conceived of as a physical space, such as a building/house, a geographical space such as a street, a town or a community, or a place where meaningful social relationships and/or kinship are fostered. Consider, then, what would happen to our understandings of “home” if seen from the perspectives of young people that are “home-less” and estranged from their families and kin groups, sometimes due to their sexual orientation. This article presents results from a research project conducted together with Kentish homelessness charity Porchlight. The aim of the research is to formulate an understanding of the lived realities of homeless LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) youth (ages 16–25). Young people who identify as LGB or T are often victims of hate crime, bullying, harassment, violence, oppression, discrimination, and social exclusion in the home, in schools, and in the community at large. In many cases, these factors can contribute to alienation from the family home and subsequently result in homelessness. Here, I look specifically at how young people experience home and homelessness in relation to kin and social relationships, and drawing from anthropological literature on “the house”, “home”, kinship and “liminality”, I consider how these concepts can better inform our understanding of LGBT youth homelessness.     

Margaret Atwood’s Straddling Environmentalism

Abstract

“Margaret Atwood’s Straddling Environmentalism” asks why Atwood crosses the Canada-US border in her dystopian fiction. It takes Atwood’s 2004 comments that The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) partly grew out of her ‘irritation when people say “it can’t happen here”’ and her claim that she decided to set the novel in Cambridge, Massachusetts as being related to that irritation—’”It can’t happen here,” she explained, “should be placed in the most extreme ‘here”’—as a prompt. Focusing on Oryx and Crake (2003), this article argues that one of Atwood’s motivations for crossing the Canada-US border in this novel is to provoke us to develop what Giovanna Di Chiro has termed ‘a scale-crossing environmental consciousness.’ Oryx and Crake challenges us to think about environmentalism in relation to local, embodied experiences as well as on a global, transnational scale.     

“Live Social Work”: How to Bring Life Back into Social Work

Abstract

In this article I discuss how professional social work can entail critical, reflexive work. This is accomplished by adapting the concept of “live sociology”. It is mainly an exploratory article, trying to raise suggestions that can be adopted and be further developed. I argue that people coming into contact with contemporary social work are sometimes reduced to being “dead” objects, as they are pinned down into static categories. The demand for developing evidence-based social work risks substantiating this tendency even further. In contrast, I claim that social work needs to move away from these kinds of explanations and instead turn towards developing “live social work”; that is to say, social work where everyday life, agency, and what people do in what context needs to be the focus, not what people are.     

Closet and Cabinet: Clutter as Cosmology

ABSTRACT

In Central Slovakia, homes “grow” and get cluttered with age. Cabinets and closets are used to house this profusion of possessions. However, their very role as containers for precious and meaningful objects—such as expensive cut glass or family heirlooms—gives them a poetic and symbolic weight that belies their modest appearance. Based on anthropological fieldwork, this article investigates how practices of collection, storage, and display of particular genres of domestic objects create spaces of intimacy in the home that work to perpetuate a sense of family history amongst middle-aged Slovaks in and around the provincial town of Banská Bystrica. Inspired by the historiography of Walter Benjamin, as well as his biographical writings, the focus of the study lies on the relation between memory and material culture in the home. Rather than relying on narratives of consumption and aesthetic choice recently popular amongst anthropologists studying domestic decor, it forms an attempt to reengage with literature that looks to the home as a site for the poetic imagination in order to grasp sentiments that are rarely verbalized.     

When Bourgeois Utopias Meet Gentrification: Community and Diversity in a New Urbanist Neighborhood*

Abstract

Scholars have recently begun to explore how social and politically liberal gentrifiers make sense of the classed and racial inequalities linked to gentrification. In this article I ask how residents of one new urbanist “bourgeois utopia”—the Mueller Development in Austin, Texas—experience and give meaning to their neighborhood in a context of gentrification. Drawing on 31 in-depth interviews I explain how new urbanism has reimagined and marketed “diversity” and “community” to middle-class and wealthy consumers and provides these to affluent people as neighborhood amenities. I show how residents draw on diversity ideology and multicultural capital to neutralize what they see as their neighborhood’s role in gentrification. In doing so this article adds to our theoretical understanding of how contemporary urban development exploits pursuits for the social good as rhetorical tools to assuage privileged guilt while promoting profitable enterprises.     

The Wish to Know/The Wish Not to Know: Curiosity and the Primal Scene

ABSTRACT

This article explores the developmental experience of curiosity and how it relates to the primal scene. Bion’s concepts of K and –K, alpha function, and containment are used to think about the wish to know and the wish not to know (or to “titrate” knowing). Clinical vignettes trace the experience of curiosity as it plays out in the analytic relationship, and they illustrate instances when thinking becomes confused and boundaries collapse in response to “too much” information. Curiosity, when worked through, may become an analytic object, a vehicle for intimacy, and a possible third position between K and –K, one that leads the way toward creativity and play.     

“I’ve changed my mind; I don’t want to go home”

Abstract

This article considers the motif of porosity and its opposite, impenetrability, in relation to the home or places where we feel at home. It discusses ambiguities in how the physical boundaries of the home—but also of the perceived human subject—are portrayed in the technology-pervaded world of the dystopian science fiction narrative Total Recall. Tracing the story from the 1966 novel by Philip K. Dick, through the 1990 film to the recent remake (2012), allows for a consideration of the changes in our understanding of how the boundaries between the home and its other are culturally conceived and what happens when the integrity of these boundaries are put into question. Despite their differences, we argue that all three narratives use the built structures of walls and the imagery of the container as a way of portraying the basic conflict of an outer world that tries to take possession of the protagonist’s inner life. Tracing narrative shifts, we suggest, can become a vehicle for understanding the ongoing negotiation of boundaries of the “self,” the human body, the home and even the city, and the implications these cultural negotiations have across the period from 1966 to 2012.     

Complex Worker: Self-Concept and Boundary-Work Among the Solo Self-Employed

Abstract

This article proposes to examine the self-concept of members of an occupational category referred to as the “solo self-employed”—women and men who work alone and do not employ other workers. Our findings reveal that although the solo self-employed themselves do not make clear phenomenological use of the solo-self-employed category, they do speak similarly about their occupational independence, albeit without group awareness. The self-concept of the solo self-employed is mainly based on boundary work in relation to two well-known cultural-occupational categories: “employed workers” and “businesspeople.” Solo-employed workers prefer to distance themselves from these two categories and define themselves through negative comparisons between themselves and the two preceding categories. The Discussion section proposes perceiving solo self-employment as a social category that constructs an alternative self in relation to the selves associated with popular cultural-occupational scenarios.     

Questioning the Phallus: Jacques Lacan and Judith Butler

ABSTRACT

This article engages with the relationship between Lacanian psychoanalytic theory and poststructuralist gender theory by comparing and contrasting the questioning of the symbolic phallus (function) undertaken by Jacques Lacan and Judith Butler. The debate takes place through Lacan’s 1958 paper “The Signification of the Phallus,” to which Butler responded critically in Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter, published in 1990 and 1993, respectively. Lacan explains that the symbolic phallic function is the “anchor”’ from and around which the symbolic works and ties the discussion to the question of sexual difference by explaining that men and women are positioned differently in relation to it. Butler charges that Lacan’s schema is heteronormative—because it is limited to the male/female schema—and patriarchal because within that heteronormative framework it affirms the masculine perspective. Rather than follow the usual route taken by recent Lacanian scholarship on this issue and focus on Lacan’s later works, especially Seminar XX on female sexuality, I appeal to the contents of two works written in the same year (1958) as “The Signification of the Phallus”—Seminar V and “Guiding Remarks for a Convention on Female Sexuality”—to offer a qualified defense of Lacan that accepts that his early framework is heteronormative but questions the patriarchal charge by showing that within these pre-Seminar XX texts he explicitly works to undermine that logic.     

Workfare Oz-Style

Summary

Traditional approaches to the promotion of welfare have disappeared in Australia, replaced by a new institutional order represented by welfare-cum-workfare. This has impacted on social work—both as a collective entity and as a set of practices. This paper maps the shift to workfare in Australia and examines its impacts on and implications for social work. We briefly discuss the Australian model of social protection, illustrating our own brand of “exceptionalism,” and lay out what we have termed “Workfare Oz-style.” Drawing upon neo-institutional theory, we review and analyze two key contexts where “Workfare Oz-style” is operationalized—the Job Network and Centrelink. Some tentative conclusions are given and the dimensions of a research agenda, which will put any emerging propositions to empirical test, are proposed.     

“Backstage Autonomy”: Religious-Zionist State Widows in Second Marriages Manage Competing Expectations

ABSTRACT

The article examines the coping mechanisms of state widows belonging to Israel’s Religious-Zionist sector, whose husbands died at an early age either during military service or in terrorist attacks. While the national bereaved community’s collective unconscious expects the widows to dedicate their lives to institutionalized commemoration of their dead husband, Jewish tradition expects them to remarry to rehabilitate their family and children. The widows who were studied seemed to manage the competing expectations successfully: they remarried and maintained a happy family life while entrusting commemoration to the bereaved parents, who are still part of their extended family. The findings point to successful manipulation of the patriarchy of both communities to which they belong, achieving individualization that offers freedom in the private sphere—what we call “Backstage Autonomy”—while perpetuating hegemony on the public level on the Front Stage.     

Spirituality as a Form of Functional Diversity: Activating Unconventional Family Strengths

SUMMARY

Increasing attention is being given to the role of spirituality in understanding family process. Concerns often focus on the type of clientele for whom spirituality may be of importance, the role of spiritual beliefs in helping to sustain family problems and the sometimes conflicting dynamics between religious identification and spiritual awareness. Assumptions about “what needs to change” dominate literature regarding interventions within spiritual belief systems. This article suggests that consideration for what needs to stay the same also has significant implications for effective practice. If “what needs to stay the same” is inherent in unconventional family strengths we are called to see what may not otherwise be apparent when using traditional ways of knowing. Spirituality emerges from a well-spring of deep culture that is reflected in roles, rules and patterns integral to family life and family survival.     

Reprise

This article attempts to offer a rebuttal to some of the criticisms advanced by the authors of the three rejoinders to my article “Black Polygamous Family Formation.” It focuses on the nature, meaning, and conceptualization of a polygamous pratice whereby a legally married man takes on a second consensual mate, begins a second family, and lives with it in coexistence with the first family. Both African and African-American patterns are explored to see what the fundamental differences or similarities are between these two patterns of plural marriages—or what I call “polygynous relationships.”     

Abstract

Abstract

Edmunds M W: Structure and nurse practitioner performance. The Nurse Practitioner 4: (3)42, May/June 1979

Are you a “new” nurse practitioner (NP) returning to your “old” practice setting? Are you a staff nurse, physician, receptionist in the “old” setting, wondering how to cope with this “new” nurse? This article is a MUST.

Simply and clearly, Ms. Edmunds illustrates the ingredients necessary to facilitate successful role transition.

Structural aspects requiring consideration are drawn from A. Donabedian and include:

1. adequacy of physical structure, facilities and equipment—office, exam room and equipment, telephone;

2. staff qualifications and organization-different mixes and levels of staff and/or reallocation of functions may be required;

3. fiscal arrangements—economic contributions to the practice should be recognized financially;

4. administrative, organization and/or programatic structures need to be reevaluated. Daily routine, patient assignment, collaboration-consultation time, development of new modes of health care delivery are examples.

Problems that may prove to be barriers to the role transition must be assessed and defined. Solutions potentiated should include attending to the structural aspects of the practice milieu. Ms. Edmunds offers valuable suggestions to avert or resolve “reentry” problems.     

Making environmental sociology sociological

Three basic sociological distinctions—viewing the environment as home or place of sustenance, separation of home and workplace, and “thing” work versus “people” work—are used to illuminate such sociological concerns as environmental degradation as a social problem, social specialization and pollution, and the demographic profiles of environmentally concerned people.     

Housework,Housewives, and Domestic Workers

ABSTRACT

This article sets established historical narratives of a mid-twentieth-century turn to privacy, new domestic identities, and new ways of thinking about housework into a broader history of domestic service. I argue that the new forms of domesticity were only ever partially and unevenly established in middle-class households. Domestic service emerges as a tenacious institution, which continued to be influential in the organization of middle-class or privileged homes throughout the mid- to late twentieth century. Middle-class women were exhorted to manage their homes without servants, and were offered the consolation of greater privacy and intimacy within their homes, as well as the dignity and emotional rewards of a housewife identity. But few found that this made the prospect of being “servantless” attractive. I will therefore examine the failures of the “servantless” home and the “strange survival” of domestic service in twentieth-century Britain.