Latin America and the Postwar Era

Trying out a “Beyond the Bubble” assessment in a social studies methods classroom revealed that the assessment worked much better than any multiple choice item while retaining great ease in marking. However, as discussion of the item showed, the rubrics for the item apply the “sourcing” heuristic so literally that it loses some power. Specifically, any answer from the 19th century is automatically wrong since students are asked to think about a 20th century poster and play. Yet the authors of the play about John Brown, writing in 1930, were indeed thinking about John Brown. Answers that methods students gave that combined an item from the 19th and 20th century demonstrated considerable historical thinking.     

性别焦虑:对当代少女题材电影的女性主义解读

当代影响较大的四部少女题材电影——《十三岁的少女》、《成人仪式》、《成长教育》、《裂缝》揭示了一个共同的主题:建构女性性别身份的焦虑。作为由童年期向成人期过渡的特殊阶段,少女身心的急剧变化,使她们的自我性别意识开始觉醒,并通过对身体的展示及面具的伪装来模仿和凸显女性气质,试图操演和建构女性自我的性别身份,由此产生的一系列矛盾、困惑和自我觉悟,冲击着成长这个永恒的话题。性别冲突是人类的基本冲突之一,女性要为证明自身存在的意义而作抗争。对于初涉人世的少女来说,以主动的姿态确认自我,接纳自我是走上社会舞台的第一步。     

Review Essay: Making Citizens,Making Gender: The Importance of National Context

Sociological Forum -     

Body Exchanges: Material Culture,Gender and Stereotypes in the Making

In the line of recent works on the relationship between body and gender, this article examines the bodily investment of gender construction. Grounded in an ethnographic fieldwork, it focuses on the ways in which gender relations in North America are constructed through the manipulation of objects, via body exchanges. It shows that physicality cannot simply be taken as a given on which genders are imposed. It is used to maintain sexual differences in a normative fashion. In attempting to understand this economy of body exchanges, this article calls for a broadening of our understanding of gender stereotypes. In doing this, it challenges the idea that changes of consciousness may not have reached the level of practices. It reveals instead that people are not fooled. They may even engage into these relations with a certain degree of irony.     

Gender and the Public Sphere: Alternative Forms of Integration in Nineteenth-Century America

This paper intends to evaluate two competing models of multicultural integration in stratified societies: the multiple publics model of Nancy Fraser and the fragmented public sphere model of Jeffrey Alexander. Fraser and Alexander disagree on whether or not claims to a general common good or common humanity are democratically legitimate in light of systemic inequality. Fraser rejects the idea that cultural integration can be democratic in conditions of social inequality, while Alexander accepts it and tries to explain how it may be realized. In order to address this debate, I analyze the cultural foundations of the female-led, maternally themed social movements of nineteenth-century America. The language of these movements supports Alexander's position over Fraser's, though it also suggests that Alexander is mistaken in the specifics of his cultural theory of a general and democratic common good. While Alexander's model of integration is structured uniquely by what he and Philip Smith have called the discourse of civil society, the evidence suggests a distinctly alternative, equally democratic code at play in this case, which I have labeled a discourse of affection and compassion.     

Gender and the Economics of the Sentimental Market in Nineteenth-Century America

This essay explores the cultural history of nineteenth-centurybusiness failure as based on textual analysis of five hundred"begging letters" from strangers who sought assistance fromJohn D. Rockefeller between the Panics of 1873 and 1893. Failurewas an economic crisis as well as an identity crisis that strippedmen of their opportunities to achieve normative ideals suchas independence and family breadwinning. Sandage analyzes beggingletters as an epistolary genre, a mode of surveillance, anda declaration of "the political economy of the Forgotten Man."Businessmen and their wives reinscribed masculine selfhood byconceiving market relations as an inseparable mixture of bothgift and commodity exchange, an amalgam of sentiment and economicrationality. Begging letters illuminate the persistence of informaleconomies—a black market in alms conceived in oppositionto the bureaucratic surveillance of "scientific charity." Byshowing how beggars preferred the language of commodity exchangeto that of gift or charity, Sandage analyzes masculinity asa transactional status, wherein esteem depended on being adjudgedworthy to buy, sell, borrow, and repay. By creating an informaleconomy, failed men and their wives deployed sentiment as aform of capital to buy back manly self-respect and to reacquirethe resources and credentials necessary for striving in theformal, commodity market.     

Review Essay: Mascaras: Gender Performance and Sexuality in Latin America

Qualitative Sociology -     

International Migration and Gender in Latin America: A Comparative Analysis

We review census data to assess the standing of five Latin American nations on a gender continuum ranging from patriarchal to matrifocal. We show that Mexico and Costa Rica lie close to one another with a highly patriarchal system of gender relations whereas Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic are similar in having a matrifocal system. Puerto Rico occupies a middle position, blending characteristics of both systems. These differences yield different patterns of female relative to male migration. Female householders in the two patriarchal settings displayed low rates of out-migration compared with males, whereas in the two matrifocal countries the ratio of female to male migration was much higher, in some case exceeding their male counterparts. Multivariate analyses showed that in patriarchal societies, a formal or informal union with a male dramatically lowers the odds of female out-migration, whereas in matrifocal societies marriage and cohabitation have no real effect. The most important determinants of female migration from patriarchal settings are the migrant status of the husband or partner, having relatives in the United States, and the possession of legal documents. In matrifocal settings, however, female migration is less related to the possession of documents, partner's migrant status, or having relatives in the United States and more strongly related to the woman's own migratory experience. Whereas the process of cumulative causation appears to be driven largely by men in patriarchal societies, it is women who dominate the process in matrifocal settings.     

Divorce in Early America: Origins and Patterns in Three North Central States*

The recent increase in American divorce rates has aroused a great deal of media publicity, popular discussion, and social science research. Several recent works have begun to reexamine the origins, trends, and implications of divorce in American history. This paper presents systematic data concerning the extent of divorce in three North Central states for the 1810–60 period. The findings establish the incidence of mass divorce for a considerable period prior to official divorce statistics. Major patterns are analyzed and compared to late 19th-century data from the first governmental studies of divorce for the 1870–1900 decades. While some urban-rural differences are found, changing laws and norms played the principal role in the increase in divorce rates during the 1800s. The final part of the paper discusses the implications of these findings for understanding marital disruption in social-historical perspective.     

Decision Making Clusters in Retirement Savings: Gender Differences Dominate

This study explored the impact of demographic factors on individuals’ investment choice decisions in retirement savings funds. Analysis found identifiable member clusters across a large and diverse sample of almost 150,000 transactions. Results suggested that gender and risk are the most dominant factors with women showing a strong tendency to make lower risk investment choices. If this behavioural tendency is not addressed through education it will accentuate the hurdles women already face in accumulating adequate saving for retirement.     

Gender and Compulsory Sterilization Programs in America: 1907–1950

Current scholarship on compulsory sterilization and gender focuses almost exclusively on women as the targets of these programs. As Philip Reilly (1991:98) indicates, however, there occurred a "dramatic change" in the gender of those targeted for compulsory sterilizations in America. Prior to 1928 men were more likely to be sterilized, but, after 1928, women became far more likely to be sterilized. I use this shift as a focal point in examining the changing role of gender. First, I show the ways in which rationales for sterilization differed by gender. Then, turning to analyze the shift, I argue that the medical and legal professions criticized the rationales for male sterilization, yet these professions and others tended to be more supportive of female sterilization, imagining sterilization to have many advantages for society and women. Superintendents, simultaneously responding to external pressure and shaping sterilization to meet their own interests, transformed sterilization into a program which focused largely upon women.     

The Production of Distinctions: Class,Gender, and Taste Work in the Lifestyle Management Industry

Drawing on participant observation and interviews, this paper analyzes the paid labor of lifestyle production. In particular, I look at jobs in the lifestyle management industry that involve making consumption-related aesthetic choices with and for clients. This is taste work, and workers are taste brokers, who mediate between clients and markets, between clients and other people, and between clients and their own desires. Taste brokers shape not only clients’ consumption decisions but also their class performances and dispositions. I argue that taste brokers also reproduce legitimate social differences in three ways: by fostering distinctions between “good” and “bad” taste; by reinforcing the association between particular tastes and particular class positions; and by casting women as both better at and responsible for making aesthetic decisions.     

The Boat Girl in the Photo

The Little Boat Girl THIS picture was taken at dusk, onestormy day, half a century ago. On April 21, 1949, one million soldiersof the Chinese People's Liberation Army, alongmore than 500-kilometers of riverbank, quicklybroke through the thousand-Li line of defence,which had been painstakingly built up by theKuomintang, and forced the Changjiang River. At dusk on April 22, boatmen from Yangzhong,an island in the Changjiang River, hurried to thebank to row the follow-up units across. Despitearduous weather, the boatmen's skill in fightingagainst wind and waves was considerable and, inthe soft lights of sunset, the rows of old woodenboats appeared to be flying on the ChangjiangRiver. A most impressive scene. Among the officers waiting on the riverbank tobe ferried across was one tall soldier, deeplyabsorbed in the sight of a young girl, not far away,     

Re-inscribing Gender in New Modes of Medical Expertise: The Investigator-Coordinator Relationship in the Clinical Trials Industry

This article analyses the ways in which research coordinators forge professional identities in the highly gendered organizational context of the clinic. Drawing upon qualitative research on the organization of the clinical trials industry (that is, the private sector, for profit auxiliary companies that support pharmaceutical drug studies), this article explores the relationships between predominantly male physician-investigators and female research coordinators and the constitution of medical expertise in pharmaceutical drug development. One finding is that coordinators actively seek to establish relationships with investigators that mirror traditional doctor-nurse relationships, in which the feminized role is subordinated and devalued. Another finding is that the coordinators do, in fact, have profound research expertise that is frequently greater than that of the investigators. The coordinators develop expertise on pharmaceutical products and diseases through their observations of the patterns that occur in patient-participants' responses to investigational drugs. The article argues, however, that the nature of the relationships between coordinators and investigators renders invisible the coordinators' expertise. In this context, gender acts as a persistent social structure shaping both coordinators' and investigators' perceptions of who can be recognized as having authority and power in the workplace.     

The Polish Parliament and the Making of Politics through Abortion: Nation,Gender and Democracy in the 1996 Liberalization Amendment Debate

The collapse of communism across East Central Europe was marked by a renewal of debates around reproduction, with abortion debates surfacing in Romania, Germany and Poland. Reproductive politics and more specifically abortion debates typically come to the forefront in times of crisis or societal transformation. Struggles over women's reproductive rights in Poland, as evidenced by continuing debate around the legal status of abortion, are in this postcommunist context intimately related to and bound up with ongoing symbolic and concrete re-definitions of Polish nationhood, identity and citizenship. Focusing on the connections between discourses of Polish nationhood, gender and democracy, this article offers a detailed and critical engagement with debate in the Sejm (the lower chamber of the Polish parliament) during the second reading of the 1996 liberalization of abortion amendment. Using a discourse analysis methodology, the article argues that abortion is a symbolic issue through which anxieties about postcommunist reform are raised, nationalist pasts and futures are imagined and through which political projects are articulated.