My gay Antonia: the politics of Willa Cather's lesbianism

Although Willa Cather's lesbianism has recently been publicly acknowledged, her personal and artistic political decisions about the revelation of her sexual preference have not been explored. Most critics who acknowledge Cather's homosexuality see no traces in her fiction of what Lillian Faderman calls "same-sex love." Because of the political consequences of writing openly about lesbianism in the time that Cather came of age, according to Faderman, "perhaps she felt the need to be more reticent about love between women than even some of her patently heterosexual contemporaries because she bore a burden of guilt for what came to be labeled perversion." While it would certainly have been possible for Cather to live a discreet lesbian life without showing traces of her sexuality in her writing, it is more likely that her sexual preferences are present in her works, particularly in her most autobiographical book, My Antonia, in the character who represents Cather, Jim Burden. The "emptiness where the strongest emotion might have been expected," the relationship between Antonia and Jim, is more understandable when we realize that both Jim Burden and Antonia Shimerda were imagined by Cather as homosexuals whose deep friendship was based on mutual understanding of their oddness in the heterosexual world of 1918.     

"Mummies and babies" and friends and lovers in Lesotho

This paper examines an institutionalized friendship among adolescent girls and young women in southern Africa. Lesotho's economy is based on migrant male labor which leaves the women dependent on male earnings or subsistence from the land, and also creates unstable marital relations. Young girls in the modern schools develop close relationships, called "mummy-baby," with slightly older girls. Sexual intimacy is an important aspect of these relationships. Mummy-baby relationships not only provide emotional support prior to marriage, but also a network of support for married and unmarried women in new towns or schools, either replacing or accompanying heterosexual bonds.     

Identity conflict or adaptive flexibility? Bisexuality reconsidered

A definition of bisexuality is offered, followed by a discussion of two opposing models of bisexual functioning: the "conflict model," which views bisexuality as problematic, stemming from identity conflict and confusion that marks a transitional stage to a homosexual orientation; and the "flexibility model," which views bisexuality as the coexistence of heteroeroticism and homoeroticism, as the successful integration of homosexual and heterosexual identities into a dual sexual orientation. The Kinsey data are reviewed in an effort to determine the incidence of bisexuality in the U.S. population. Finally, specific clinical and empirical studies investigating bisexual subjects are reviewed in light of the two models.     

留守会导致亲子关系疏离吗?——来自CEPS的经验证据

基于中国教育追踪调查(CEPS)基线调查数据,本文采用IV-ordered Probit模型探讨了留守对农村儿童与父母之间亲子关系的影响及其异质性。研究发现:第一,相对于非留守儿童而言,留守儿童认为与父亲、母亲关系"很亲近"的概率分别低11.7%、16.0%;第二,母外留守导致儿童与父亲、母亲关系"很亲近"的概率低26.7%、40.6%;第三,双外留守对儿童与父母双方的关系均具有显著的负效应,留守儿童与父亲、母亲关系"很亲近"的概率分别降低了14.7%、15.8%。笔者认为应进一步强化家庭监护主体责任,充分发挥学校教育的重要作用,同时也要调动社会各方面的力量,为留守儿童的健康发展创造良好的外部环境。本文对揭示家庭内部的人际关系、完善青少年人格个性的培养具有直接意义,也对进一步促进新型城镇化背景下的"城乡一体化"发展策略以及公共服务均等化具有间接意义。     

The Toronto Lesbian Family Study

Twenty-seven lesbian mothers completed standardized tools chosen to assess current functioning, followed by a video-taped interview. Verbal children were also interviewed. Questions involved perceptions of the mothers' and children's experiences of being homosexual or being raised by homosexual parents, knowledge and fantasies about the donor/father, feelings regarding the role of fathers, parents' experiences of being fathered, legal issues, and development. All mothers were strongly lesbian identified and most were completely "out." All but one mother planned to or had told their children. All mothers planned to reveal donor information at an appropriate age. Many, especially parents of boys, had concerns about lack of a male role model, but none felt this would negatively affect the child's development. Mothers were open to having their child ask questions and even seek out the donor when older. Thirty-one percent of mothers reported a positive relationship with their own father, 42% a father who was present but unavailable or punitive and 27% a completely absent father for large parts of their childhood. Couples divided parenting work based on individual strengths and interests, work schedules and demands. Only two of the couples felt that one of them played a role typical of a father. An aggregate score was compiled for each mother based on the number of negative outcomes in the standardized tools. The mean number of negative outcomes for the mothers was 3.15 (SD = 1.85). Of the six women with 5 or more negative outcomes on the scales, three were single parents and one had lost her partner when her child was two months old. On the CESD, three mothers showed depression levels that were high. The Internal External scale showed 42% of mothers to have an external locus of control. Three mothers scored negatively on the Family Assessment Device. Ninety-two percent of women showed moderate to high self-esteem on the Rosenberg Self-Esteem scale, and the Parenting Stress Index found only 4 women showing enough stress to warrant follow-up. Mothers who reported very negative early experiences of coming out were more likely to report current depressive symptoms (p = .03). All but one child living in two-mother homes identified both mothers as part of their family. Our initial impression is that these are primarily strong families with a variety of parenting skills, stressors and philosophies.     

Girls’ “New Femininity” Refusals and “Good Girl” Recuperations in Soap Talk

The “new femininities” produced in postfeminist media confront girls with complex and challenging subjectivities that reach into the spaces where girls engage in their own productions of self. Feminist scholarship has interrogated and critiqued the “girl” produced in postfeminist popular culture texts, highlighting her internal contradictions and often problematic re/production within the heterosexual matrix. Yet, despite an intensified focus on girls featured in popular culture, the ways that girls themselves make sense of the “girl” in contemporary femininity texts has been relatively neglected. Viewing girls' sense-making of femininity in popular culture texts as crucial in the process of their subjectivity or self-production, in this paper we examine pre-teen girls' negotiations of femininity through their talk about Scarlett, a main teen girl character in a New Zealand soap drama. Our analyses and discussion focus on girls' management of the contradictory and regulatory productions of femininity in the text, in particular the often classed conditions under which girls recuperate the “good girl” discourse to refuse the regulatory femininities inside the heterosexual matrix. We suggest that an absence of empowering discourses outside of postfeminism's sexual empowerment limits girls' resources for critiquing and challenging regulatory femininities, “new” and “traditional.”     

Making Christabel: sexual transgression and its implications in Coleridge's "Christabel"

Even among critics who recognize the role of lesbianism in "Christabel," none consider the implications of lesbianism for the characters. Many readers describe Geraldine as a kind of supernatural power, a demon. But Geraldine's identity is far from clear, and we don't need to explain away the lesbian sexuality as demonically-inspired in order to understand the dynamics of the text. The poem accounts for its characters' interactions on what is a more visceral and less fantastic level, the implications of a lesbian act in the world of "Christabel." In "Making Christabel," I consider the protagonist's social and psychological stresses in terms of an encounter with lesbian sexuality in order to understand the poem's ambiguities: Geraldine's guilt, Christabel's pleasure, the manipulation of gender roles, and the dynamics between Christabel, Geraldine, and Sir Leoline. To this end, I look at how the "unnatural" sexuality between Christabel and Geraldine is marked by a reversal of gender expectations. Sexual transgression is suggested not simply by two women heading off to share one bed, but by the manipulation of gender roles on their way to and within the bedroom. I also read the homosocial bond be tween Sir Leoline and Sir Roland in Part II as a foil. The knights offer the two women a concrete representation of their transgression from the existing power structure. They suggest not only the extent of the two women's deviance from the patriarchy, but a way to reassume an orthodox social role.     

Son Preference and Children’s Housework: The Case of India

We use a nationally representative survey of Indian households (NFHS-3) to conduct the first study that analyzes whether son preference is associated with girls bearing a larger burden of housework than boys. Housework is a non-negligible part of child labor in which around 60 % of children in our sample are engaged. The preference for male offspring is measured by a mother’s ideal proportion of sons among her offspring. We show that when the ideal proportion increases from 0 to 1, the gap in the time spent on weekly housework for an average girl compared to that of a boy increases by 2.5 h. We conduct several robustness analyses. First, we estimate the main model separately by caste, religion, and family size. Second, we use a two-stage model to look at participation into housework (as well as other types of work) in addition to hours. Third, we use mother’s fertility intentions as an alternative measure of son preference. The analysis confirms that stated differences in male preference translate in de facto differences in girl’s treatment.     

Two Japanese variants of the absolute transvestite film

This essay compares two Japanese transvestite films from different generations-Black Lizard of 1968 and Summer Vacation 1999 of 1988. While Western transvestite conventions are usually exploited only to climactically reinforce heterosexual coupling, what binds these two films is their divergent tradition of what I call "permanent transvestism." That is, the films employ a cross-dressing which occurs extra-diegetically, is unnecessary to the plot, and which an audience may or may not be aware of depending on their geo-historical position. However, it is this non-Western tradition of cross-dressing that nevertheless imparts an aestheticization of sexual desire beyond fixed categories of "gay," "lesbian," or even our conventional ideas of transsexualism.     

From first daughter to first lady to first woman president: Park Geun-Hye’s path to the South Korean presidency

This paper examines the role of gender and familial ties in Park Geun-Hye’s political trajectory to become the first female president of South Korea. Even though her entry into politics was heavily indebted to her kinship ties to her father Park Jung-Hee, an authoritarian leader who led South Korea from 1963 to 1979, she has consolidated her position within the party and among Korean voters as a viable, competent politician over the last fifteen years. Analyzing Korean news reports, campaign pamphlets, and her autobiography, this study reveals that Park used stereotypes of women as problem solvers in difficult times to open doors for her political entry. During the presidential campaign in 2012, Park was adept at stressing her positive “feminine” traits, overcoming the perceived weaknesses of female politicians by emphasizing her long political credentials and strengths in diplomacy and national security issues. Park presented herself as the embodiment of both change and experience through her campaign slogan “the well-prepared female president” and the public reacted favorably to the appeal.     

Queering the spinsters: single middle-class women in Norway, 1880-1920

Constituting what may be called "a community of spinsters," Norwegian middle-class unmarried woman played an important role in undermining and destabilizing the heterosexual cultural matrix during the period 1880-1920. In their anti-sexuality, self-sufficiency and hatred of men the spinsters challenged the heteronormativity of the period, and their queerness still presents a challenge to the harmony-oriented, heteromormative Norwegian women's history.     

Population growth with variable family size

"The Sharpe-Lotka continuous time deterministic model of population growth is developed to take account of some possible forms of mother-daughter fertility association....Model specific results relating the intergenerational fertility effect to the long term population growth rate and magnitude are established. The quantitative implications of the theory are illustrated by a consideration of a general bilinear form of A and in this context numerical results illustrating the finite time growth and also the long term distribution of fertility levels in the stable female population are obtained. In particular, it is shown that different fertility specific subpopulations can coexist indefinitely."     

Eastern Visayas: profile of the region's volunteer outreach worker

Volunteer outreach workers in Eastern Visayas (Region 8) who tend to remain in the Philippine Population Program are able to plan for the welfare of the family, are seriously concerned about the welfare of the community, are traditional in their beliefs about family decision making, are moderately innovative, and are relatively dissatisfied with community life. The research report submitted to the regional office of the Commission on Population (Popcom) by the Regional Research Center for Population, Leyte State College, indicated that Popcom recognizes the importance of community based fieldworkers in the delivery of its services. The study was conducted in line with efforts to improve the system of recruiting volunteer workers and to develop a more effective service delivery scheme. The researchers randomly selected a representative sample of volunteer workers--265 active and 86 inactive--from the provinces of Leyte, Southern Leyte, Eastern Samar, Western Samar and Northern Samar, the subprovince of Biliran, and the cities of Tacloban, Ormoc, and Calbayog. The active volunteer worker of Eastern Visayas is female, between 36-40 years old, married, and the mother of 3-5 children. She also considers the size of her family to be "just right." The volunteer worker believes the father is the prinicipal decision maker in the family and that parents should always be consulted on matters concerning their children. The inactive volunteer worker is also female, in the same age bracket, married, and with 3-5 children, and she also does not want to have additional children. She is more innovative and more receptive to change than the active volunteer worker. She is more satisfied with community life, is modern in her beliefs as to who is the authority in the family, and believes that children also should have a part in making family decisions. Mobility in terms of residence is an important factor in the decision of the volunteer worker to remain in or drop out of the program.     

Becoming Pregnant

This article considers the implications of the presence of Juno's pregnant girl body in the film Juno (2007). The narrative follows the high school student Juno's pregnancy, her decision to have the baby adopted, and its birth as she attempts to determine her feelings for her friend Bleeker. As a pregnant girl, Juno persists in a state of liminality and disrupts linear ideas of becoming: becoming woman, becoming mother, becoming feminist. Having considered contemporary discourses of pregnancy, I explore Juno's representation of the pregnant body as both abject and humorous, recognising the restrictions upon girls' sexuality and moments in which they are contested. I then move to consider Juno in relation to discourses of risk and responsibility, acknowledging the ways in which the film simultaneously perpetuates and critiques the presumption that teenagers make bad parents. I argue that analysing the juncture of girl and pregnancy represented in Juno enables a move beyond simplistic expectations of “normal” feminine girlhood to recognise it as complex and messy.     

劳动力市场“去管制化”与“知识失业”

文章从劳动力市场"去管制化"出发,提出对中国"知识失业"现象的解释。理论模型发现,随着劳动力流动和工资"去管制化",受教育人口不断增加,与之伴随的则是"知识失业"的出现和增加。但当劳动力市场进一步"去管制化",知识失业率在增加到一定程度后开始下降。因此,"知识失业"是劳动力市场"去管制化"的结果,"知识失业"的出现在一定程度上是暂时的、阶段性的,继续推进劳动力市场改革,"知识失业"现象就会减少甚至消弭。微观数据实证分析证实,劳动力流动"去管制化"和工资"去管制化"都是2002年样本劳动力市场出现"知识失业"的原因,2009年样本劳动力流动"去管制化"仍是"知识失业"出现的重要原因,但工资"去管制化"效应不再显著。     

Joint custody law and mothers’ labor market outcomes: evidence from the USA

This paper studies the economic implications for mothers of the changes in child custody law from maternal preference to joint custody using the 1960–2000 Census Public Use Micro Sample (IPUMS). Variation in the timing of the joint custody reform across states provides a natural experimental framework to study the causal effect of shared custody on mothers’ economic outcomes. The results show that only single mothers experience a decrease in earnings as a consequence of the adoption of the joint custody law, exposing them to a higher risk of poverty. The paper discusses a possible explanation for these findings, namely that the higher child support payment the mother receives from the non-custodial father in case of joint custody might discourage her from looking for high paid jobs or investing in her career.     

应用型金融职业人才“订单式”培养的模式探析

区域金融的发展与振兴关键在于金融人力资源的质与量,应用型金融人才是金融人力资源的基础,而"订单式"人才培养模式是加快发展应用型金融人才、生成金融人力资源的一条捷径。目前,区域金融人才在"订单式"人才培养方面由于种种原因受到了限制,普遍陷入萎缩与停滞不前的困境。在应用型金融人才培养这一特殊领域内,要不断融入创新、创优、创业的理念,进而使"订单式"人才培养模式实现突围和跨越。     

Effects of social contact with homosexuals on heterosexual Turkish university students' attitudes towards homosexuality

The purpose of the study was to investigate the effects of social interaction with homosexuals on attitudes toward homosexuality in a sample of heterosexual Turkish university students. Hudson and Ricketts' 25-item scale was translated from English into Turkish and used to measure students' attitudes toward homosexuality. Findings, in general, suggested that exposure to and contact with homosexuals resulted in more positive attitudes toward homosexuality. Performed factor analysis demonstrated that there were three factors for the scale. The factors were labelled as "Social interaction with homosexuals," "Probable family ties with homosexuals," and "Tendency to be a homosexual." Subjects' negative attitudes toward homosexuality increased on the last two factors, which were about having a homosexual child or sibling, and being comfortable with being attracted to a homosexual. Results were discussed in terms of prejudice and intergroup contact.     

To write "like a woman": transformations of identity in the work of Willa Cather

Willa Cather's early life resembles one of the histories in Jonathan Katz's Gay American History. Her cross-dressing, invention of a male pseudonym, and details of behavior, together with her love for two women in her adulthood, Isabelle McClung and Edith Lewis, make it clear that Cather was a lesbian. Defensive about One of Ours, Cather nonetheless wrote much of her fiction in a male persona--A Lost Lady, The Professor's House, "Tom Outland's Story," Death Comes to the Archbishop, O Pioneers!, My Antonia, and One of Ours, as well as numerous short stories. Much of the fictional material in these works is curiously inconsistent with the male persona, but instead resembles lesbian experiences: the inaccessibility (to the narrator) of women who are nonetheless accessible to other men, absolute heartbreak at the untouchability of the women rather than anger or guilt or the search for sexual release elsewhere, and the women's intimacy with the men involved, as in One of Ours or O Pioneers!, without any suggestion of sexual involvement or explicit sexual history. Lesbian isolation, in adolescence at any rate, produces such situations; Carson McCullers's and some of May Sarton's work are cases in point. Speaking in masquerade, Cather is capable of describing lesbian experience with a fullness and unconsciousness which is now impossible. Innocence gave way to guilty self-consciousness, and that to politically conscious rebellion. The gain is in honesty, but Cather's record of lesbian experience, under whatever disguise, is nonetheless irreplaceable.