Expanding Statistical Frontiers in Sexual Science: Taxometric,Invariance, and Equivalence Testing

Sexual scientists must choose from among myriad methodological and analytical approaches when investigating their research questions. How can scholars learn whether sexualities are discrete or continuous? How is sexuality constructed? And to what extent are sexuality-related groups similar to or different from one another? Though commonplace, quantitative attempts at addressing these research questions require users to possess an increasingly deep repertoire of statistical knowledge and programming skills. Recently developed open-source software offers powerful yet accessible capacity to researchers wishing to perform strong quantitative tests. Taking advantage of these new statistical opportunities will require sexual scientists to become familiar with new analyses, including taxometric analysis, tests of measurement variability and differential item functioning, and equivalence testing. In the current article, I discuss each of these analyses, providing conceptual and historical overviews. I also address common misunderstandings for each analysis that may discourage researchers from implementing them. Finally, I describe current best practices when using each analysis, providing reproducible coding examples and interpretations along the way, in an attempt to reduce barriers to the uptake of these analyses. By aspiring to explore these new statistical frontiers in sexual science, sexuality researchers will be better positioned to test their substantive theories of interest.     

Women's self‐defense and sexual assault resistance: The state of the field

Public attention to sexual assault has increased dramatically over the last decade, spurring questions about how it can be prevented. One approach that has received scant attention is women's self‐defense training (sometimes known as sexual assault resistance training). This neglect is curious because empowerment‐based women's self‐defense (ESD) training is so far the only approach that has produced substantively significant decreases in victimization rates. In this article, I review the research evidence on women's self‐defense training. Does resisting a sexual assault affect the outcome of sexual violence? Does self‐defense training further reduce women's risk of violence? What are the other consequences of self‐defense training? How does self‐defense work for different groups of women—for example, those who have survived prior victimizations? Are the critiques of women's self‐defense training valid? Finally, what do we still need to learn about women's self‐defense? Overall, I argue that this evidence presents a compelling case that women's self‐defense training should be central to any efforts to prevent sexual violence.     

Police interviews with vulnerable people alleging sexual assault: Probing inconsistency and questioning conduct

Reporting sexual assault to the authorities is fraught with difficulties, and these are compounded when the complainant is hindered by an intellectual disability (ID). In a study of 19 U.K. police interviews with complainants with ID alleging sexual assault and rape, we found that most interviewing officers on occasion pursued lines of questioning which not only probed inconsistencies (which is mandated by their guidelines), but implicitly questioned complainants’ conduct (which is not). We detail two main conversational practices which imply disbelief and disapproval of the complainants’ accounts and behaviour, and whose pragmatic entailments may pose problems for complainants with ID. Such practices probably emerge from interviewers’ foreshadowing of the challenges likely to be made in court by defence counsel. As a policy recommendation, we suggest providing early explanation for the motivation for such questioning, and avoiding certain question formats (especially how come you did X? and why didn't you do Y?).     

Youth Organizing,Identity-Support,and Youth Development Agencies as Avenues for Involvement

SUMMARY

What are the differences in outcomes among youth organizing and other efforts to involve young people at the community level?

This paper examines differences in developmental outcomes among youth organizing, identity-support, and traditional youth development agencies, with the finding that there are significant differences in outcomes such as civic activism and identity development. It reports that youth organizing agencies show higher levels of youth leadership, decision making, and community involvement in comparison with other agencies, and concludes that deliberate approaches to staffing and decision-making can influence youth outcomes.     

Foreclosing Fluidity at the Intersection of Gender and Sexual Normativities

Binary gender and sexuality are socially constructed, but they structure thought at such a deep level that even those critical of sexism and homophobia can unwittingly reproduce them, with consequences felt most profoundly by those whose gender/sexual identity defy binary logic. This article outlines a generic pattern in the reproduction of inequality we call foreclosing fluidity, the symbolic or material removal of fluid possibilities from sexual and gender experience and categorization. Based on 115 responses from people who are both sexually and gender fluid and a reading of existing sociologies of gender and sexualities from a fluid standpoint, we demonstrate how lesbian/gay/straight, cisgender, and transgender women and men—regardless of intentions—may foreclose fluidity by mobilizing cisnormative, transnormative, heteronormative, and/or homonormative beliefs and practices. Examining patterns of foreclosing fluidity may provide insight into (1) the further incorporation of fluid people and standpoints into symbolic interactionism, and (2) the reproduction and persistence of sexual and gender inequalities.     

Will It Be Silence and Violence or Safety and Prevention for the Next Generation of Gay Youth?

Rates of unprotected anal intercourse and HIV infection are alarmingly high among young gay males. This second wave of infection indicates that traditional models for AIDS education are not working. AIDS educators need to rethink HIV-prevention efforts. Studies consistently find a high level of knowledge about HIV transmission and high levels of commitment to safer sex among gay males, but what accounts for the breakdown between safer sex intentions and practices among them? This article employs social constructionist and queer theoretical assertions that sexuality is socially and culturally produced in complicated and pluralist ways. The analysis examines how risky sexual situations shape young gay males' sexualities by exploring two examples selected to represent, alternatively, models of safer sexual and unsafe sexual trajectories. Implications for HIV prevention practices and policies are discussed.     

Beyond “Just Saying No”

Summary

How can women deal with unwanted sexual advances from male dating partners in ways that are effective and that, at least initially, take the men's feelings into account? In Study 1,354 under graduate men watched videotapes in which a woman either did or did not openly communicate early during a date that she did not want to do more than kiss. Open communication decreased men's ratings of how much she wanted petting and intercourse, how likely they would be to attempt these behaviors with her, and how “led on” they would feel if they attempted these behaviors and she refused. In Study 2, 424 undergraduate men were presented with 28 responses women could make to a man's sexual advances. They rated each on its effectiveness in getting them to stop their advances and its effect on the relationship. Women can use this information when responding to unwanted sexual advances, taking into account the relative importance of stopping the advance and maintaining the relationship.     

Insurrectional Arts: Restoring a Politics and Ethics of Attention

Abstract

This chapter is inspired by contrasting passages in two stories. The first is in Jamaica Kincaid's story, ‘The Embassy of Cambodia'. Her narrator, who is following a transversality between two forms of atrocity: those practiced by states, as in the case of Cambodia's Khmer Rouge exterminism and that inflicted on abused migrant domestic workers from third world countries. The narrator notes that people in her village are too distracted to heed peoples’ afflictions: ‘The fact is if we followed the history of every little country in this world?…?we would have no space left in which to live our own lives or to apply ourselves to necessary tasks?…?’. In contrast, in Daniel Alarcon's story, ‘Collectors', a seasoned convict is explaining to his new cell mate how to survive by reading signs as you watch the men in the prison yard:

Did they have their arms at their sides, or crossed in front of them? How widely did they open their mouths when they talked? Could you see their teeth were their eyes moving quickly, side to side? Or slowly, as if taking in every detail?     

Remembrance: the Essop brothers,formative realism and contemporary African photography

Remembrance is the title of group of photographic artworks by Hasan and Husain Essop. Made in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, the artworks picture people and places, buildings and landscapes. At first look, the action within the frames is straightforward. The photographs present ancient and modern religious sites in digitally produced, staged scenarios. However, there is an unseen complexity to these composite images that are made of hundreds of individual still shots, shot one section at a time and then meticulously stitched together. One impact of these contemporary artworks is their ability to show the powerful impact of global Islamic culture. Dynamics of place and belonging, the picturesque and landscape, slavery, religion and race are offered to view by means of these images. I offer formative realism as a conceptual framework to think with and against these pictures made by photographic means. I will say something about the concept and context of formative realism, discuss principal features and propose a way of seeing. The central questions are these: what do the Essops’ pictures show us about Islam in South Africa and beyond? How does this seeing matter to the ongoing activity of race, racism and “Othering” now? How does any of this matter to the dynamics of contemporary visual art in South Africa?     

Conference report: Sixth annual meeting of the international visual sociology association visual studies workshop,July 15, 16, 17, 1988

How does the visual construction process of news influence the resulting cultural images? In this study of Time magazine's creation of a 1990 documentary, “The Palestinians, A Long, Bloody Road to Nationhood,” I first look at possible meanings in the printed photographs, and then explore how Time's institutional processes of story conceptualization, photo assignment, editing, and layout each create parameters for meaning. The discussion shows how Time editors ultimately construct their product using visual affect as an assumed first level of meaning.     

Black Lives/White Backgrounds: Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric and Critical Race Theory

How do you criticise a hierarchical racial formation that is rendered nearly invisible by its colour (white) and positioning (background) in the contemporary, so-called colour-blind or post-racial US? The reading of Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric that this essay will undertake seeks to offer a response to this question utilising some key insights from Critical Race Theory (CRT). As they are understood here, both CRT and Citizen offer counter-stories by ‘call[ing] out’ to what you ‘don’t see’, specifically to America’s racial formations so as to promote colour-consciousness and an anti-racist critique. Beginning with a discussion of the relationship between literary and legal narratives, followed by two sections on Rankine’s rhetorical strategies, this essay ends by closely reading her texts about Trayvon Martin, who was murdered on 26 February 2012.     

Becoming Resilient: Overturning Common Sense — Part 1

How might we engage with the concept resilience in a world obsessed with the measurement and cataloguing of deficits and virtues alike; with predicting outcomes, producing certainty and the reification of stable identity? This article is based on a plenary address presented to the Australian Family Therapy Conference in 2009 and takes Deleuze's paraphrase of the 17th century philosopher, Spinoza as a point of departure from common sense views of identity. Can resilience be possessed by some as a personal quality enhancing their coping skills or might resilience be a vital aspect of living which passes through us? Perhaps resilience bounces back towards us and enables the unsettling of dogmatic beliefs and a stable sense of identity Enquiry might then shift from the moral; What kind of person am I? How should I live? towards an ethical position of wonder; What else might there be? What might I be capable of?This article invites an ethical exploration of desire, its capture and of resistance and explores the politics of identity; illustrated with men's journeys of struggle with violence, sexuality and belonging and the discovery of ethics and generous forms of love in the face of adversity.     

Arbiters,Entrepreneurs, and the Shaping of Business School Reputations1

How are organizational reputations established? Expanding on recent work that emphasizes the construction of reputations rather than their cultural content, we explore how forces in the organizational environment define organizational reputation. Specifically, we demonstrate how two types of mediators—reputational arbiters and reputational entrepreneurs—influence the development of reputations by organizing and managing the information on which reputations are built. Buttressing our theoretical claims with 30 interviews of business school administrators, we find that these mediators play a central role in determining organizational reputations by engaging in three processes of information manipulation: synthesis, selection, and simplification. In addition to specifying the key role that the manipulation of information by outsiders plays in the development of reputation, this approach suggests the importance of the interrelationships among these mediators in the determination of reputational standing.     

Build Your Own Pension: Framing Pension Reform and Choice in Newspapers

Recent pension reforms in Norway mean that old-age pensions to a greater extent are a function of adaptations made and decisions made throughout the lifetime. How much you work, who you work for, when you retire, and how you invest will influence your standard of living as an old-age pensioner. This article investigates one important source of information about retirement and pension, namely service journalism in main national newspapers. How is the issue of pension framed in these articles? And what kind of advice is presented by which kind of actors? Findings indicate that service journalism is dominated by pension industry sources, and old-age pension is framed as a function of individual investment choices rather than as citizens’ rights.     

Heteronormative bodies,queer futures: toward a theory of interpersonal panopticism

This essay examines the policing of sexual bodies via interactive online technologies. We draw from scholarly discourses regarding surveillance, queer theory, and affect to construct what we call interpersonal panopticism. Interpersonal panopticism serves as a theoretical account of the fluid nature of watching and being watched in relationships, especially in consideration of how intimate relationships and sexualities are surveilled and controlled in a digital era. To articulate the utility and potentials of this theoretical approach, we offer five cultural propositions that serve as a basis for interpersonal panopticism. Collectively these propositions illustrate the utility and potentials of unpacking the interplay of surveillance, heteronormativity, and affect through an interpersonal panoptic lens.     

What is Sexual Satisfaction? Thematic Analysis of Lay People's Definitions

Sexual satisfaction is an important indicator of sexual health and is strongly associated with relationship satisfaction. However, research exploring lay definitions of sexual satisfaction has been scarce. We present thematic analysis of written responses of 449 women and 311 men to the question “How would you define sexual satisfaction?” The participants were heterosexual individuals with a mean age of 36.05 years (SD = 8.34) involved in a committed exclusive relationship. In this exploratory study, two main themes were identified: personal sexual well-being and dyadic processes. The first theme focuses on the positive aspects of individual sexual experience, such as pleasure, positive feelings, arousal, sexual openness, and orgasm. The second theme emphasizes relational dimensions, such as mutuality, romance, expression of feelings, creativity, acting out desires, and frequency of sexual activity. Our results highlight that mutual pleasure is a crucial component of sexual satisfaction and that sexual satisfaction derives from positive sexual experiences and not from the absence of conflict or dysfunction. The findings support definitions and models of sexual satisfaction that focus on positive sexual outcomes and the use of measures that incorporate items linked to personal and dyadic sexual rewards for both men and women.     

Dreams of time,times of dreams: Stories of creation from roleplaying game sessions

“Space – The Final Frontier” Star Trek

Roleplaying games (RPGs) are an activity in which a group of people (called the players) creates and roleplays characters in a world devised by one other participant, called the Game Master, who describes the results of their actions as well as the actions themselves of everything and everybody else in this created world. The malleability of this world, coupled with the RPGs’ social aspect, parallels the socially constructed reality which usually surrounds us. In this paper I collect a series of impressions from a few roleplaying sessions during which different groups of players attempted to construct new realities. In this sense, I examine the shared creation of reality out of empty space, exploring the potential inherent in roleplaying as a metaphor for organizing. I look for non-standard view-points on organizing which emerge from these sessions, and examine the process itself, not trying to pinpoint any regularities, but rather seeking the unusual and the sublime.

In the beginning, there was Wolf

And then there was Pig

And Wolf was a natural enemy of Pig

And it was good

And so our story begins

Mucky Pup “Little Pigs”     

INTIMACY,QUEERNESS, RACE

‘What do we see when we look at ourselves?’ asked South African visual activist/artist Zanele Muholi in her 2006 photographic collection Only Half the Picture. The question, a deeply challenging introspection, required black women in particular to reflect on the ways in which history has made us not look at ourselves, but be looked at. The images Muholi presented were viewed as both troubling and liberating. This article, using a queer framework, is concerned with recoding the ways in which black women's bodies and female sexuality have been represented in post-colonial contexts. Using Zanele Muholi's photography, the article opens possibilities for claiming an erotic position for the black female's ‘queer’ body. This is further complicated by racial dynamics. The article argues that such representations work against painful colonial histories of black female torture while also desexualizing the black female.