The Gendered Division of Labor in Parental Caretaking:

Public ideology dictates that families take responsibility for the care of their frail and vulnerable members. Women more than men are the unpaid, informal caregivers of family members. This gendered division of labor is examined by using the U.S. Survey of Income and Program Participation. Differences between metropolitan and nonmetropolitan sons' and daughters' parental caregiving activities are examined in order to contrast areas having more traditional, conventional or conservative values with those adopting more feminist values. Results show that in addition to daughters performing the vast majority of tasks, there is a difference between the types of care provided by metropolitan and nonmetropolitan daughters. Nonmetropolitan daughters tend to perform more caregiving tasks considered to be traditional "women's work" while metropolitan daughters perform significantly more tasks considered to be nontraditional for women. The fmdings suggest that providing care is due more to socialization to gender roles than to women's supposed natural or biological tendencies for "nurturing."     

单亲母亲家庭经济现状研究

单亲母亲家庭是增长最快的生活贫困的人口群体,反映了"贫困女性化"的世界共同趋势。单亲母亲家庭贫困问题正在引起社会的普遍关注并成为研究的热点。利用天津市妇女联合会对天津市内六区非农业人口中单亲母亲的最新调查数据,用社会性别视角分析了单亲母亲的生活贫困化问题,揭示了单亲母亲家庭贫困的社会性别文化和经济根源,提出缓解和消除单亲母亲家庭贫困的社会救助对策。     

Not Ready to Make Nice: Aberrant mothers in contemporary culture

The story of motherhood in popular culture has never been a simple one. Cross-cut by race, class, and sexuality (and, importantly, marital status), interwoven with changing psychological and biological theories and fantasies, tied up with nation-building and citizenship claims, images of motherhood remain both template and signpost upon which we project our desires for kinship and care and our most vexed understandings of womanhood and femininity. This essay examines fictional motherhood in an era of real-life Octomoms and presidential candidates. We argue that a new type of mother has emerged—particularly on TV—that presents a radical departure. From the suburban mom/drug dealer of Showtime's outré series Weeds to the vapid 1960s wife of Mad Men, aberrant mothers abound in contemporary culture. But, unlike aberrant mothers of earlier eras, these mothers are by and large heroines, unapologetically non-normative in their maternal functioning. The parenting is cursory at best and often downright neglectful, behavior that has typically resulted in sure death for Hollywood mothers of earlier eras. We examine these images as a challenge to normative familialism and rigid gender ideologies.     

Interiorized Homophobia,Identity Dynamics and Gender Typization. Hypothesizing a Third Gender Role in Italian LGB Individuals

With this research, we explored the relation between (a) internalized homophobia, (b) lesbian, gay male, and bisexual (LGB) social identity statuses (along with the Marcia model), and (c) gender typization (along with Bem gender schema theory) of an Italian online LGB sample. Results show how the identity process of exploration is a risk factor in relation to internalized homophobia, whereas commitment is a protective factor. Against the authors' expectations, data indicate that androgynous, non-heterosexual individuals are mostly in a foreclosure identity status, while the typed ones are in an acquisition status and more protected against homophobia. This suggests that the androgynous social representation of homosexuality for non-heterosexual individuals is an alternative gender role more socially available to them.     

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.     

The dynamic development of gender variability

We diagram and discuss theories of gender identity development espoused by the clinical groups represented in this special issue. We contend that theories of origin relate importantly to clinical practice, and argue that the existing clinical theories are under-developed. Therefore, we develop a dynamic systems framework for gender identity development. Specifically, we suggest that critical aspects of presymbolic gender embodiment occur during infancy as part of the synchronous interplay of caregiver-infant dyads. By 18 months, a transition to symbolic representation and the beginning of an internalization of a sense of gender can be detected and consolidation is quite evident by 3 years of age. We conclude by suggesting empirical studies that could expand and test this framework. With the belief that better, more explicit developmental theory can improve clinical practice, we urge that clinicians take a dynamic developmental view of gender identity formation into account.     

Unfolding female quiet in wargames: gender bias in Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain from representation to gameplay

This article investigates the cultural mediatization of the relationship between gender and war by looking at the representation and agency of female presence in one of the most popular sagas in video games: Metal Gear Solid. We have specifically focused on the last chapter of the series, Metal Gear Solid V (MGS5) by putting under scrutiny the character of Quiet. The analysis draws upon the rich theoretical corpus of feminist film studies, with reference to two main concepts: the “visual pleasure” by Laura Mulvey and the “female voice” by Kaja Silverman. These analytic tools are employed in order to scrutinize both the visual representation and the design of the game. We argue that MGS5 is a relevant instance of a large part of gaming production that develops a war imagery characterized by (a) the exploitation of women and (b) an employment of female body as a tool to fulfill the visual pleasure of the male gaze. The figure of Quiet, with the oversexualization of her body and the deprivation of her voice, is particularly telling in this respect. Our analysis aims to identify effective solutions in order to think about more inclusive digital games able to address conflictual issues without surrendering to sexism.     

The mommy wars: on the home front and waged abroad

Anne-Marie Slaughter’s Atlantic article “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,” published in 2012, generated huge response, well beyond what already has become typical in the intensifying mommy wars in the United States. It also drew considerable attention globally. Within one week of publication, Slaughter’s “lament” attracted a million readers. Slaughter’s explanation of why she quit her high powered job, and then Yahoo’s choice of the then-pregnant Marissa Mayer as its new chief executive, provoked another round of mommy wars. The research reported here on how journalists dealt with the controversy compares the US, with its tradition of heated controversy over working mothers and neoliberal opposition to structural supports for families, and Israel, where attention to Slaughter was somewhat surprising, given the presumption in Israel that mothers will work outside the home. Journalistic discourse in both countries tended to frame the work–home conflict as a women’s issue, to be addressed by women journalists, and not men. Moreover, writers tended to address the issue anecdotally, in terms of personal experience but ignoring structural issues and structural solutions and ignoring how solutions for middle-class professional women or women at the “center” may not work for other kinds of women.     

Incomplete Resistance

The purpose of this essay is to examine the contradictions between narrative and filmic technique that result in conflicting messages in Karim Aïnouz's film O Céu de Suely. Although the film demonstrates the hardship and isolation that drive its northeastern Brazilian protagonist to raffle herself in order to buy a bus ticket out of town, it simultaneously sensualizes and encourages the audience to take pleasure in the female body by displaying it erotically. I call this tension between message and form incomplete resistance. The questions of how prostitution relates to patriarchy and the success of the protagonist's scheme in selling sex while refusing the label of prostitute are central to this analysis.     

“Sober encounters”: the neoliberal logics of human rights documentary and Indian feminist documentary filmmakers

“Sober encounters” examines the market-defined encounters between Indian feminist documentary filmmakers and global humanitarian and media commissioning and funding agencies. Drawing from interviews conducted with Indian filmmakers, the essay looks closely at the seemingly sober aesthetic and ethical imperatives of these agencies and their impact on the production and distribution of rights-based feminist documentary film in India. Further, I present the figure of the “transient subject” and posit that it is one apprehended by market-friendly representational regimes to legitimate a neoliberal rights discourse. I argue for a deeper examination of these representational regimes and their attempts to de-radicalize the visual cultures of women’s rights.     

Selfish,Vengeful, and Full of Spite: The representations of women who have abortions on Turkish television

This article analyses the portrayal of women who have abortions in four recent Turkish television series, Gümü?, A?k-? Memnu, Han?m?n Çiftli?i, and Öyle Bir Geçer Zaman ki, all of which appeared between 2005 and 2011. It is clear from the varying storylines of these melodramas that the depiction of women who have abortions on Turkish television is decidedly negative. The women who have abortions are seen as defying cultural expectations to place motherhood before all else. They are portrayed as cheating on their husbands, having sex outside of marriage, and prioritizing career over marriage and family. The negative portrayal of women who have abortions in Turkish soap operas perpetuates the discourse on Republican womanhood, which prescribes motherhood as women's national duty and as being at the core of their identity.     

Argumentum ad misericordiam: the cultural politics of victim media

This article discusses the widespread use of victim tropes in contemporary Anglo-American culture by using cultural theory to analyse key social media memes circulating on Facebook in 2015. Since the growth of social media, victim stories have been proliferating; victim narratives are rhetorical, they are designed to elicit pity and shame the perpetrator. They are deployed to stimulate political debate and activism, often to appeal to an all-purpose humanitarianism. Victimology has its origins in Law and Criminology, but this paper opens up the field more broadly to think about the cultural politics of victimhood, to consider how the victim-figure can be appropriated by/for different purposes, particularly racial and gender politics, including in the case of Rachel Dolezal. In formulating an ethical response to the lived experience of victims, we need to consider the different kinds of critical intimacies elicited by such media.     

Being Transgender: The Experience of Transgender Identity Development

This article is based on a grounded theory analysis of interviews with transgender-identified people from different regions of the United States. Participants held a variety of gender identities under the transgender rubric (e.g., crossdresser, transman, transwoman, butch lesbian). Interviews explored the participants’ experiences in arriving at their gender identity. This article presents three clusters of findings related to the common processes of transgender identity development. This process was made possible by accessibility of transgender narratives that injected hope into what was a childhood replete with criticism and scrutiny. Ultimately, participants came to their identities through balancing a desire for authenticity with demands of necessity—meaning that they weighed their internal gender experience with considerations about their available resources, coping skills, and the consequences of gender transitions. The implications of these findings are considered in terms of their contribution to gender theory, research, and clinical support for transgender clients.     

Monstrous schoolteachers: women educators in popular cultural texts

From the drooling Mrs Green in the children’s picture book, The Teacher from the Black Lagoon to the best scarer of all time, Dean Hardscrabble from Monsters University, monstrous female teachers leap out from around the corners and under the desks of popular imaginings of school. In this paper, I focus on the figure of the female monster teacher in popular cultural texts and media produced for and/or consumed by North American youth, including picture books, television, film, and other cultural texts. Although these monster teacher narratives are produced for children and youth, they also work as a form of popular pedagogy for adults. The stakes of these representations are many, including the misogynistic representation of women in power as monstrous, the devaluing of teaching as “women’s work” or “child care,” and, the figuring of boys as “in crisis” in relationship to a predominately female workforce. I argue that, the female monster educator in popular cultural texts offers a corporeal curriculum that seeks to discipline the body of the teacher and to obfuscate the radical potential of teachers as professional women.     

The Body as a Site of Gender-Related Distress: Ethical Considerations for Gender Variant Youth in Clinical Settings

ABSTRACT

The present article maps out understandings about embodied distress among gender-nonconforming youth. Feminist bioethics and queer-inflected clinical perspectives are used to inform thinking about ethical, nonpathologizing health care in the case of gender-related distress. Specific attention is directed at self-harming among gender variant and trans youth. This is contextualized in relation to the role that self-harm plays for some LGBT youth, where it may be seen as a rite of passage or as reasonable and inevitable way of coping. The particular complexities of self-harm among trans youth seeking clinical intervention are examined. Queer bioethics is proposed as potentially facilitating productive uncertainty with regard to the diverse imagined futures of gender variant and trans youth.     

Making E.T. Perfectly Queer

In the wake of E.T.'s 1982 debut, film critics Marina Heung and Vivian Sobchack established that the enduring appeal of E.T. inheres in the dissolution of the nuclear heterosexual family over the latter half of the twentieth century and the film's “fairy tale” stand-in for the “mythology of family relations” that Dana Cloud terms “conservative familialism.” As Carl Plantinga puts it, E.T. offers a “virtual solution … to [a] traumatic problem.” Despite this, however, E.T. remains for many an inconsolable tragedy. Approaching E.T. from the perspective of the queer child who grows “more sideways than up,” in the real absence of a fairy tale solution to the traumatic problem of conservative familialism, I here seek to identify and celebrate E.T.'s “complex range of queerness” that has until now remained largely closeted.     

The Witch and the Warrior

This study used frame analysis to explore gendered frames and archetypes in the news coverage of two mass shootings, in which both suspects were White, middle-class university professors: Amy Bishop at the University of Alabama and George Zinkhan at the University of Georgia. Three people were killed in each of the shootings, but the amount of coverage on Bishop exceeded by about four times the amount of news about Zinkhan—a difference whose magnitude can hardly be explained only by the circumstances of the shootings. Although the female professor committed murder in a professional setting, due to dissatisfaction with a career outcome, the coverage focused on her personal life and alleged psychological instability, in line with the archetype of the “Female Monster.” By contrast, the coverage of Zinkhan's crime, committed in highly personal circumstances—the murder of his wife and two men at a picnic—fit a patriarchal, Othello-like archetype of a man embroiled in a crime of passion, and focused mostly on his successful career, lacking an investigation of past abusive behavior that may have preceded the murder. The news coverage serves to exemplify the societal discourse on women and men who kill.     

Between a Rock and a Slippery Slope: Negotiating the Intersections of Religion and Sexuality on Network Television's The Book of Daniel

This article analyzes the television series The Book of Daniel, a program that shows in full relief the ways that current discourses of religion and sexuality converge to produce a particular type of gay subject. This subject, primarily male, might be understood as bound through an innate identity and commitment to the sanctity and reproduction of heteronormative institutions such as the church and state, which renders him assimilable into the social order. As homosexuality, per se, is no longer “outside” the normative order, the program constructs an unstable, nonbinary, and nonheteronormative other who is best understood as queer.     

The Blunt Cutting-Edge: The Construction of Sexuality in the Bengali Feminist Magazine Sananda

This article focuses on the construction of one's relation to pornography in contemporary media by examining agony columns of young adult women's magazines. The analytical approach employed is a “close reading” from the perspective of queer theory, purposing both to “queer” the portrayals of heterosexuality and to critically review representations of non-heterosexuality. The focus is especially on the role of affects and emotions in moving subjects “toward” and “away” from porn and producing conceptions of gender and sexuality. On the one hand, the positive affects of excitement and interest are associated with men in the data corpus, whereas the negative affects of disgust and upset are usually connected to women. On the other hand, affects are absent when discussing queerness. The study thus offers an application of Ahmed's notion of the productive role of emotions both in expanding the idea of productivity from constituting ethnicity to establishing gender and sexuality and also in directing attention to the absence of affects or emotions in constituting norms.     

正式照料抑或非正式照料:照料模式对高龄老人临终照料成本的影响

本文基于2014～2018年中国老年人健康影响因素跟踪调查数据(CLHLS),尝试探究了机构照料、社会照料和家庭照料3种照料模式对我国高龄老人临终照料费用和天数的影响.结果发现,家庭照料和社会照料均与较高的临终照料费用与临终照料天数显著相关,但机构照料仅与较高的临终照料天数显著相关.此外,临终老人的照料依赖程度对于不同...