Oppressed Oppressor: Fighting for Queer Values While Fighting to Value Queers

When one is the victim of prejudice, one is often aware of it. When one is the perpetrator of prejudice, however, one may or may not be aware of it. This article details the author's struggle as a bisexual feminist to identify and eliminate her prejudice against transsexuals, particularly MTF (Male To Female) women.     

The Importance of Sibling Relationships in Separated Families

There is emerging substantial evidence that sibling relationships exert a powerful facilitating influence on the development of children. Siblings can provide mutual support and nurturance, role models and family structure. Children from divorcing families have to deal with a major restructuring of the family and multiple losses, but their parents are often unable to provide the support and structure the children need. Sibling bonds may meet some of these needs and reassure children of the ultimate survival of a family life. The literature is briefly reviewed and two sibships are described.     

Conditional Families and Lesbian,Gay, Bisexual,Transgender, and Queer Youth Homelessness: Gender,Sexuality, Family Instability,and Rejection

Existing research on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) youth homelessness identifies family rejection as a main pathway into homelessness for the youth. This finding, however, can depict people of color or poor people as more prejudiced than White, middle‐class families. In this 18‐month ethnographic study, the author complicates this rejection paradigm through documenting the narratives of 40 LGBTQ youth experiencing homelessness. The author examines how poverty and family instability shaped the conditions that the youth perceived as their being rejected because of their gender and sexuality. This rejection generated strained familial ties within families wherein the ties were already fragile. Likewise, the author shows how being gender expansive marked many youth's experiences of familial abuse and strain. This study proposes the concept of conditional families to capture the social processes of how poverty and family instability shape experiences of gender, sexuality, and rejection for some LGBTQ youth.     

Problem Gambling and its Impact on Families: A Literature Review

This paper offers an overview of the existing literature concerning problem gambling and families and identifies gaps in current research knowledge on this topic. Relevant theoretical perspectives are outlined and the role of familial factors in the development of problem gambling is discussed. This is followed by a focused review of the effects of problem gambling on family members, specifically the spouse, children and parents. Available treatments and therapies for family members are also reviewed. The paper concludes by identifying the limitations of existing knowledge and some directions for future research on this topic.     

The Protective Circle: Queer Fathers and Counselors

This article provides a review of the literature addressing the unique needs and experiences of queer fathers. Despite the growing number of queer fathers and families, and increasing scholarship on this topic, there is a major dearth in the counseling scholarship and practice related to queer families, or more specifically and especially, queer fatherhood. Thus, this article uses the concept of a “protective circle” to assist professional counselors to understand their vital role within a queer father and familial system. By understanding the experiences and needs of queer fathers, counselors can better conceptualize and assist this underserved and often silenced community.     

Response Time: Linear,Nonlinear, Queer

The asynchronous temporalities Gentile analyzes in her chillingly compelling article are deeply troubling to anyone concerned with gender and racial justice in the United States today. Dinshaw raises questions for further discussion that concern temporality in psychoanalytic theories of the subject and the psychically disenabling nature of temporal linearity and unidirectionality, citing queer theorist Tim Dean’s (2011) work on HIV/AIDS and temporal anxiety. She ends with a medieval narrative that offers an alternative vision that does not fetishize the fetus at the expense of the mother, as do Gentile’s disturbing examples, but rather sees the pregnant body as a site of creative asynchronicity and meaning making.     

The Shape of Queer

ABSTRACT

The rise of queer theory and activism have posed problems of identity and of goals. Queer theory has problemaiized identity, including queer identity: who or what is queer? Queer activism, on the other hand, has been fraught with those challenging sexual boundaries and those for whom “queer” is just the new name for gays and lesbians. Many of these latter activists reject earlier politics, and are in danger of returning to interest-group liberalism as a result. This paper sketches these problems and argues that wholesale rejection of lesbian-feminism and gay liberation is a mistake. The broader vision of these movements offers the possibility of articulation with other movements for change, and this possibility must be renewed and rethought.     

Queers in the Line of Fire: Goffman's Stigma Revisited

Using data from in‐depth interviews with young queer people, this article proposes revisions for four areas of Goffman's classic work, Stigma. Interviews reveal a situation between complete acceptance of queer identity and outright hostility, which I term “being in the line of fire,” and three strategies participants use to manage their identity in this situation. Unlike classical identity management, this project considers how their “double consciousness” allows them to respond to stigmatizing situations while remaining insulated from the negative appraisals of others. Instead, they orient toward educating the stigmatizer, minimizing interaction by tailoring their identity, or disengaging. I use these strategies to demonstrate that identity management theory does not properly consider possible responses to hostile reactions, the diversity of stigmatized groups, Goffman's so‐called sympathetic others, or different frames of reference on stigmatized attributes. Orienting to the point of view of the marginalized, this article demonstrates how one manages an accepted identity when one is in the line of fire.     

Language,Violence, and Queer People

Summary

The lives of queer people are too frequently filled with violence—physical attacks, social discrimination, and hate-filled verbal assaults. Language serves multiple purposes in the violence that is directed at queers. While the words themselves become instruments of psychological harm, they, in turn, are used to rationalize or justify acts of physical violence and social discrimination (Pierce, 1990). To analyze the issues regarding queer people, social discourse, and violence, this essay addresses: communication rules about queers and a formula for change in the discourse; the history of changing labels and meaning; enforcers of the dominant discourse and its rules of communication; and the role social workers should play in challenging and shaping the discourse.     

Becoming a Marriage, Family and Child Counselor: Notes from a Chicano

Becoming a licensed Marriage, Family and Child Counselor (MFCC) in California is presented from a Chicano's perspective based on the author's own training. He reports that 1) there is a need for Chicanos trained extensively in marriage and family counseling to serve the large Mexican American population; 2) MFCC is a growing profession yet few Chicanos are entering it; 3) few Chicano professionals are involved in the training, teaching and supervision of marriage and family counselors; and 4) the state licensing board and the two marriage and family counselors' associations do not identify minority counselors nor those who provide Spanish speaking services .     

Self-selection,earnings and Chicano migration: differences between return and onward migrants

"The purpose of this article is to extend the empirical literature on Chicano return migration by examining earnings differentials between return and onward Chicano migrants. Our approach reflects the complexity of estimating such effects in terms of selectivity biases and the interaction between individual and locational attributes. We use data derived from the public use microdata sample (PUMS) of the 1990 U.S. census. After controlling for migration and labor force self-selection, results indicate that Chicano return migrants are not negatively self-selected. Chicano return migrants have smaller earnings profiles largely due to the negative effects of living in areas with higher concentrations of co-ethnics. Apparently, return migrants, at least in the short run, are willing to accept lower earnings for the nonpecuniary benefits of living in the Southwest."     

Converging on food sovereignty: transnational peasant activism,pluriversality and counter-hegemony

ABSTRACT

This paper contributes to debates on left-wing convergence by reflecting on the convergence of a diverse transnational peasant movement around a value of and demand for food sovereignty. It reads convergence on food sovereignty through the idea of pluriversality developed by decolonial theorists. In so doing, it argues, first, that a politics of pluriversality has been key in fostering convergence on food sovereignty. Second, it suggests that convergence on food sovereignty highlights possibilities for convergence at a theoretical level across hitherto opposed decolonial and counter-hegemonic positions.     

The Meaning of Queer Home

Abstract

This article positions two proto-queer texts together in order to demonstrate how the development of American “queer subjectivity” arose as a discernible discursive and embodied notion related to “home.” Written before the arrival of the queer category, Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (The Crossing Press, Freedom, CA, 1982) and Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues (Alyson Press, Los Angeles, CA, 2003, original work published 1993) concentrate upon the home as a site conditioned by twin concerns that would become central to queer politics: “the home” as narrative metaphor and homes as real-world shelters. Queering the home stretches and scrambles the home category (“dyke bar as home,” “Black lesbian sisterhood as home,” “body as home”) while insisting upon self-defined, material structures of protection and comfort for queers. The article performs a “reading through skin” of queer scholarship and of sociological data. It argues that these queer-emergent texts helped establish notions of “queer home” via exploring metaphoric and empirical axes related to domestic space.     

The Power of Ritual in a Chicano Community

This paper explores the meaning of the symbols embedded within the quinceañera, a fifteen-year-old Chicana's birthday party. The ceremony in Chicago includes both a religious and secular component and has become more extensive in the urban U.S. than it has been in rural Mexico. Three positions are advanced: (1) The ceremony is an adaptation to the economic and social marginality of Chicanos in a U.S. city, (2) the ceremony is a transitional cultural phenomenon as it implied the need to maintain ''Mexicanness'' when they are becoming more Anglo, and (3) the ceremony represents urbanized traditionalism emphasizing continuities with the past despite social changes. It is argued that the third hypothesis has more validity. The ceremony serves to promote the separate identity of Chicanos in an increasingly complex society and the richness and power of the symbols permit the construction of different meanings by the different audiences: the adult men, the adult women, and the youth.     

Interventions for Internationally Adopted Children and Families: A Review of the Literature

Internationally adopted (IA) children are at increased risk for health-related, developmental, and behavioral difficulties. This article reviews the literature on various interventions currently used with IA populations; including health-related interventions provided by medical specialists, preparation programs provided by adoption agencies and other social service organizations, treatments for attachment and behavioral disorders, psychoeducational services, programs designed to improve children’s care prior to adoption, and parent-based initiatives. Surprisingly, very little systematic information exists regarding the effectiveness of interventions designed to prevent and remediate these difficulties in IA children. Recommendations for future research activity and for best practice approaches to intervention are discussed.     

Moral Judgment in Chicano,Black, and White Young Adults

Abstract

The present research examines whether there is moral judgment differentiation among Chicano, black, and white young adults. Regression results indicate age, ethnicity, and social class as the best predictors of moral judgment. It is concluded that perhaps morality is located more in the structure of society than it is in the structure of human cognition.     

Homo-Pages and Queer Sites: Studying the Construction and Representation of Queer Identities on the World Wide Web

This essay introduces the reader both to the varieties of representations of queers currently available on US Web servers and to the kinds of critical questions that scholars and activists can ask about such representations. As such, the author surveys, summarizes, and analyzes both pertinent Websites and scholarly writing about queer representation, identity, community, and social agency. Ultimately, the author concludes that analyzing queer self-representation on the Web is a significant scholarly undertaking in that it can help us understand better (1) how queers use, represent themselves, and are represented on the Web, and (2) what such representations might mean for our understanding of ourselves, our cultures, and our future both locally and globally.