Sexuality attitudes: the impact of trauma

This study examines the relationship between traumatic events and attitudes toward sexuality. Our results show that suffering trauma is related to more accepting attitudes concerning sexuality. Generally, people who suffer negative events, many of which are traumatic, are more likely to see both pornography and having a homosexual friend or family member as acceptable. Traumatic events that are sex-related or related to other physical assault proved to be most significant in the prediction of sexuality attitudes for women only. The results are specified by gender: Trauma predicts attitudes toward pornography for women but not for men, and traumatic events are associated with attitudes concerning homosexuality for women. These results are discussed in light of the previous research, and suggestions for future research made.     

The impact of cumulative trauma in infancy: Some treatment techniques

Children who have had major disruptions and traumas in early developmental phases come to the attention of child mental health specialists frequently. These children present a complex and often puzzling picture due to the early deficits. Without skilled intervention further development will be hampered. Particular focus is placed on the individuation process in the first two years of life and its impact on early development of affects and object relations. Theoretical considerations and specific intervention techniques applying this model are delineated in two case reports.     

The impact of income inequality on values and attitudes

Scholars in several social science disciplines scholars have argued from their respective disciplinary perspectives that income inequality has a considerable impact on economic and social performance of a nation. This essay investigates the possible impact of income inequality on 290 values and attitudes in forty industrial nations from an economic perspective. The results show that inequality has a significant impact on values and attitudes especially concerning religion and the family.     

The impact of gender on gambling attitudes and behavior

Researchers have often attributed the consistent relation of gender and gambling behavior to gender role socialization. If they are correct, gender should affect different sets of gambling attitudes in a manner consistent with at least three aspects of gender role socialization: a double standard of morality, a guardian of the hearth role for women, and a dualism of orientations. A survey measuring gambling attitudes and behavior was sent to a sample of residents in North Dakota after legalization of several games of chance (e.g., blackjack). Gender affects behavior but only some of the specified attitudes. These mixed results may reflect changes in gender role socialization and the increasing legalization of gambling.     

Worries of the poor: The impact of financial burden on the risk attitudes of micro-entrepreneurs

We randomly expose the owners of small retail businesses in Vietnam to scenarios that trigger financial worries and study the effect of this intervention on risk attitudes using an incentive-compatible elicitation method. We find that entrepreneurs exposed to financial worries behave less risk-averse than those assigned to a placebo treatment. This effect is stronger for owners of shops which are smaller and those less exposed to large income shocks in their everyday business. We further show that the effect of financial worries on risk attitudes is not explained by changes in the cognitive functioning of the treated. The findings are consistent with previous results from laboratory experiments with students in developed countries. As such, the paper provides evidence for the external validity of these findings in the context of micro-entrepreneurship in a developing country and points to financial worries as one understudied psychological channel for the effect of material deprivation on decision-making.     

The Failure of Sexuality Education

Summary

Even “comprehensive” sexuality education has failed to reach its potential in that it cannot convincingly demonstrate its effectiveness in facilitating behavioral change. Commitment to a comprehensive, sex-positive perspective is proposed as one important component in creating behavioral outcomes that balance the reduction of hurt with the enhancement of pleasure. Until sexuality educators become comfortable and committed to emphasizing the pleasure dimension of sexual experience” the legitimate impact of sexuality education may be compromised in the eyes of students.     

Individual Differences in the Effects of Mood on Sexuality: The Revised Mood and Sexuality Questionnaire (MSQ-R)

Previous research using the Mood and Sexuality Questionnaire (MSQ) has revealed substantial variability in how negative mood impacts sexual response and behavior. However, the MSQ does not address differences between desire for solo or partnered sexual activity, examine the effects of sexual activity on mood, or assess the effects of positive mood. This article presents the development and factor structure of the Revised Mood and Sexuality Questionnaire (MSQ-R). An exploratory factor analysis in a sample of heterosexual men, homosexual men, and heterosexual women (N = 1,983) produced eight factors. Considerable variability was found in how moods influence sexual desire and arousal, in the effects of mood on sexual behavior, and in the reciprocal effects of sexual activity on mood. Among other findings, heterosexual women were less likely than heterosexual men and homosexual men to experience increased sexual desire and arousal when anxious or stressed, whereas homosexual men and heterosexual women were less likely than heterosexual men to experience increased desire when sad or depressed. Heterosexual men and heterosexual women were more likely than homosexual men to report increased desire when in a positive mood. Intercorrelations and correlations with various sexual behaviors varied by group. Limitations and implications of the findings are discussed.     

Sexuality and the Second Slavery: Figuring Sexuality in Racialized Labor Formations

From the seventeenth to the late nineteenth century, sexuality was a key factor in the reorganization of New World slavery through the period described as the Second Slavery. With the early nineteenth century bans on the transatlantic slave trade initiated by the United States and the British Empire, there was a corresponding transition from prior plantation economies focused on US Upper South tobacco and Caribbean sugar islands toward more differentiated forms of labor based on hiring out in domestic services, manufacture, and the expansion into new frontiers of accumulation in the New South of the Mississippi Delta, Cuba, and Brazil. This qualitative change and expansion of New World slavery carried gendered understandings based on the sexuality and reproductive capabilities of enslaved people. Using Tomich's conception of the Second Slavery, I incorporate an analysis that demonstrates how conceptions of sexuality were integral to racializing and gendering processes of subordination that reveal the heterogeneity of the historical and economic moment.     

Beyond Sexuality,Beyond Perversion: The Annihilated Last Scream

Starting with an ancient, dark story from the Babylonian Talmud, the paper proposes that beyond severe sexual perversion lies—buried, silenced, annihilated—an infant’s last scream. This is explored in the theoretical-clinical psychoanalytic writing on the last scream, early breakdown, madness, and catastrophe and illustrated through a detailed account of an analysis with a severely fetishistic-masochistic patient. In this long and difficult analysis, the cessation of perverse practices led to an extreme collapse into breakdown, profound devastation, emptiness, psychic death, and suicidal despair. Working within this collapse in analysis enabled the deep reason for the patient’s breakdown in early life to unfold. And most important, it engendered the crucial possibility of reliving the patient’s unbearable breakdown, deadness, and last scream—this time patient-with-analyst t(w)ogether—and experientially coming through it differently. Yet it still remains without an ending of love.     

An Incitement to Discourse: Sociology and The History of Sexuality

Sociological Forum -     

The impact of a hospital based educational program on adolescent attitudes toward drinking and driving.

The High Risk Adolescent Trauma Prevention Program is situated in a teaching hospital setting, where adolescents who are considered to be high risk-takers tour a shock trauma unit. Results from a pretest-posttest longitudinal evaluation design with 351 adolescent participants indicated marked changes in participants attitudes toward driving after drinking, riding with someone who has been drinking and preventing a friend from driving after drinking. These changes in attitudes are still evident, though with some decline in magnitude, after twelve months.     

The psychoanalytic structure of trauma: Spellbound

This essay engages in a close analysis of two films, Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945) and Ang Lee’s Hulk (2003), in order to examine their approaches to trauma, especially in relation to the psychoanalytic notion of Nachträglichkeit (“afterwardsness”). A complex notion of afterwardsness is proposed whereby it is predicated on a relationship between two events, but where the importance of afterwardsness is not seen to lie in the nature of the events but rather on what determines the relationship between the two events. This determining relation thus leads to a notion of the structure of trauma and the argument that the crucial factor in a psychoanalytic approach to trauma lies not in an uncovering of traumatic events, but rather on the structure that retrospectively makes events traumatic.     

The Civilizing Process and The History of Sexuality: Comparing Norbert Elias and Michel Foucault

Theory and Society -     

Repronormativity and the Reproduction of the Nation-State: The State and Sexuality Collide

ABSTRACT

This article seeks to explain the consistent margins between popular support for same-sex marriage and same-sex adoption/parenting. I posit that the paradigm of repronormativity explains these differences, in permitting only “legitimate,” state-sanctioned, heteronormative reproduction. Through three case studies—Poland's strict abortion policies, France's law against lesbians utilizing artificial reproduction technologies, and Sweden's history of sterilizing trans individuals—I will demonstrate how not only does repronormativity select and enforce an inside/outside, in-group(s)/out-group(s) binary and legitimize only certain reproduction, it also tethers female sexuality to reproduction and creates an inevitability of reproduction.