The educational attainment of young women: Role model effects of female high school faculty

To test for the presence of role model effects of female high school faculty and professional staff on young women in high school, we estimate several models of educational attainment for young women using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. Exposure to female high school faculty and professional staff has a positive impact on the educational attainment of young women. This result, combined with our finding that female faculty and professional staff have no significant impact on the educational attainment of young men, supports a female role model hypothesis.     

From Privilege to Prevalence: Contextual Effects of Women’s Schooling on African Marital Timing

In Africa and elsewhere, educated women tend to marry later than their less-educated peers. Beyond being an attribute of individual women, education is also an aggregate phenomenon: the social meaning of a woman’s educational attainment depends on the educational attainments of her age-mates. Using data from 30 countries and 246 birth cohorts across sub-Saharan Africa, we investigate the impact of educational context (the percentage of women in a country cohort who ever attended school) on the relationship between a woman’s educational attainment and her marital timing. In contexts where access to education is prevalent, the marital timing of uneducated and highly educated women is more similar than in contexts where attending school is limited to a privileged minority. This across-country convergence is driven by uneducated women marrying later in high-education contexts, especially through lower rates of very early marriages. However, within countries over time, the marital ages of women from different educational groups tend to diverge as educational access expands. This within-country divergence is most often driven by later marriage among highly educated women, although divergence in some countries is driven by earlier marriage among women who never attended school.     

LGBTQ+ Young Adults on the Street and on Campus: Identity as a Product of Social Context

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer, and other sexual and gender minority (LGBTQ+) young adults face unique identity-related experiences based on their immersion in distinctive social contexts. The predominant framework of performing separate analyses on samples of LGBTQ+ young people by their primary social status obfuscates more holistic understandings of the role of social context. Using 46 in-depth interviews with LGBTQ+ college students and LGBTQ+ homeless young adults, we ask: How are LGBTQ+ young adults’ capacities for “doing” their gender and sexual identities shaped by their distinctive social contexts? In developing their identities, both groups of LGBTQ+ young adults navigated their social environments to seek out resources and support. Most college students described their educational contexts as conducive to helping them develop their identities, or “undo” rigid norms of gender and sexuality. Homeless young adults’ social environments, meanwhile, imposed complex barriers to self-expression that reinforced more normative expectations of “doing” gender and sexual identities.     

An Ecological Framework for Sexual Minority Women’s Health: Factors Associated With Greater Body Mass

In recent years, many studies have focused on the body of sexual minority women, particularly emphasizing their larger size. These studies rarely offer theoretically based explanations for the increased weight, nor study the potential consequences (or lack thereof) of being heavier. This article provides a brief overview of the multitude of factors that might cause or contribute to larger size of sexual minority women, using an ecological framework that elucidates upstream social determinants of health as well as individual risk factors. This model is infused with a minority stress model, which hypothesizes excess strain resulting from the stigma associated with oppressed minority identities such as woman, lesbian, bisexual, woman of color, and others. We argue that lack of attention to the upstream social determinants of health may result in individual-level victim blaming and interventions that do not address the root causes of minority stress or increased weight.     

Gender and jockography: post-feminism and resistance in female sports autobiographies

While research consistently shows news media’s devaluation of female athletes, “the jockography,” or sports autobiography, is one form of widely-consumed media through which female athletes can construct their own representation. However, there has been little consideration of the genre. This essay addresses this gap by analyzing how thirty women’s jockographies published since 1992 rhetorically construct female athletic identity and sports practice. It finds that most athletes, regardless of their sport or racial or class background, constitute their identities and participation in ways that reinforce post-feminist notions of upward mobility and heterosexual femininity while failing to confront inequalities affecting women in sport. Nevertheless, a few recent jockographies challenge normalizing discourses, asking readers to recognize differences between women and confront inequities shaping their athletic experiences.     

Social Work Education and the Older Woman Student

This article presents the results of a study of a group of social work graduate women students over 40. The study explored developmental issues, identified major stressors while in school, and indicated the ways that these students coped. The discussion highlights the unique responses of the midlife woman student and suggests ways that schools can work more effectively with them. Directions for future research are identified, and suggestions given for how the experiences of these older students can be used positively in their work with older women clients.     

Are You the One? China's TV Dating Shows and the Sheng Nü's Predicament

This study looks into TV dating shows in post-millennial China. These widespread shows, exemplified by Fei Cheng Wu Rao (translated, by both local and global media, as If You Are the One), open up an ongoing social forum, which, to varying extents, enables self-articulations and renegotiations of class and gender identities and gives voice to selected female participants of the media. Through the lens of critical discourse analysis, the paper focuses on analyzing the stage arrangements and hidden rules of Fei Cheng Wu Rao, female participants' self-introductions, both male and female participants' depictions of their “ideal” spouse, and the remarks of the host and the two expert commentators. The study argues that these dating shows play upon the predicament of Chinese single women, especially those labeled as “sheng nü” (“leftover women”), who strive for upward social mobility, yet are constrained within the new gender mandate of a market economy. Stigmatizing single womanhood, the dating shows also grant a glimpse of the varied ways the media and women participants play a complicit role in reducing women's potential to resist new forms of male privilege in post-socialist China.     

The relationality of maternity care: A diffractive analysis of maternity care experiences

ProblemPervasive polemics of differing approaches to and values of maternity care limit possibilities of nuanced and productive understandings of how maternity care is experienced.AimTo explore how maternity care identities (midwife, obstetrician, childbearing woman) are shaped by binarised conceptualisations of childbirth.MethodsThe diffractive analysis of data gathered in collective biography research groups.Findings and discussionMaternity care identities are not complete, pre-established entities, but rather are, ‘in the making’, remade in every maternity care encounter.ConclusionMaternity care identities are defined by their encounters with other maternity care identities, and therefore, each maternity care identity plays a role in which experiences of maternity care come into being.     

The Guardianship Experience of Women: The Relationship Between Older Wards and Their Guardians

SUMMARY

This research examined how 156 female legal caregivers responded to difficulties of being a guardian, how they derived meaning from their guardianship activities, and how the role of guardian influenced their perception of aging. The most frequent activities in which guardians engaged were visiting, providing emotional support, and to a lesser extent, giving instrumental assistance. Guardians described their emotional relationships with their wards as either “sympathetic,” “sad,” “challenged,” or “hostile.” Despite hardships associated with the duties of being a guardian, most of the women perceived benefits and expressed satisfaction from this role. Guardians reported that the relationship with their female wards shaped their perception of aging and the conception of their own aging.     

Pregnancy,Then It's “Back To Business”

This essay theorizes the contours of a post-feminist gender regime that utilizes figures such as Beyoncé in order to hail women as self-governing subjects who make the right choices with respect to career, marriage, motherhood, and the disciplining of their bodies. As a black woman, the narrative about Beyoncé's life and choices has specific implications; it positions professional black women as ideal citizens and mothers and also seeks to reconfigure and normalize representations of the black family. The body, specifically the black female body, plays an important role in attempting to transform and normalize these representations. This essay offers one of the few examinations of black women's relationship to post-feminism. Although post-feminism has been conceptualized in ways that ignore black women, I aim to demonstrate why further consideration of black women's relationship to post-feminism is needed. It is my contention that with successful black women increasingly in the public eye, what they say about feminism and how they relate to feminist politics have important implications for how all women, but especially young black women, engage in types of activism that go beyond placing value on individualism at the expense of the collective.     

The absolutely fabulous but flawlessly customary world of female impersonators

Our editorial introduction to this volume on drag queens highlights what we believe are some of the most prominent and important themes of female impersonation in the past and today. Building on contributors' articles, a substantial body of literature on female impersonators/drag queens and the social construction of gender, and our own extensive ethnographic experiences in a multitude of drag settings, we first suggest that such individuals can be seen as symbolic representatives of the cultural ideals associated with the feminine and women and how they have changed over time. We next argue that the notion of the effeminate drag queen is more a myth than a reality with the contextual benefits many performers receive-status and power-being indicative of the hegemony of masculinity in male-dominated societies. We next explore how additional social identities, such as race, class, nation, and religion, often impact drag performances and how others interpret them. We end our introduction by offering a model that delineates what are some of the present transgressive limits and subversive possibilities of female impersonation.     

Chicks with dicks, men in dresses: what it means to be a drag queen

One of the burning questions about drag queens among both scholars and audiences is whether they are more gender-revolutionaries than gender-conservatives. Do they primarily destabilize gender and sexual categories by making visible the social basis of femininity and masculinity, heterosexuality and homosexuality? Or are they more apt to reinforce the dominant binary and hierarchical gender and sexual systems by appropriating gender displays and expressing sexual desires associated with traditional femininity and institutionalized heterosexuality? We address this question through a case study of drag queens at the 801 Cabaret in Key West, Florida. On the basis of life histories, observations of their performances, and focus groups with audience members, we examine the role of gender and sexuality in the process of becoming a drag queen and in the personal identities of drag queens. We find that transgenderism, same-sex sexuality, and theatrical performance are central to the personal identities of these drag queens, who use drag to forge personal and collective identities that are neither masculine nor feminine, but rather their own complex genders.     

Is fantasy just fantasy? An ethnography of female fanship: viewing Sex and the City

This article is an ethnographic study of Chinese female viewers’ fanship on the American TV series of Sex and the City (SATC). It focuses on the micro level of SATC fans’ consumption of and interaction with the text, trying to explore the relationship between SATC fans’ selves and their fan objects, i.e., the intrapersonal pleasures, affection, and motivations among the fans, mainly by way of collecting and analyzing Chinese SATC fans’ discourse on how they make use of this television show on China’s biggest fandom website, Douban.com. The research findings suggest that SATC is so passionately received by its female fans mainly because the type and content of the show (a feminist text) can well satisfy their social and psychological needs—they choose to engage in SATC and utilize it as a resource for their own social lives and personal identities. The fans view it mainly for the therapeutic effect and empowerment it brings to them, rather than for entertainment or scopophilia.     

Media and the Intersectional Other

This article presents the findings of an intersectional study on migrant women on German television. Besides content and textual analyses, we conducted focus groups with audiences and interviews with migrant media workers. As the representation of Others was explored through the nodes of production, consumption, and identity, a complicated intersectional practice emerged. We found the televised representations of migrant women to be dominated by (often veiled) women as signifiers of non-integration but also by instances when gendered ethnicity was used as a marketable attribute. The audiences and producers employed various distancing strategies: they criticized specific programs for blatant stereotyping as much as didactic counter-stereotyping while downplaying systemic shortfalls of the coverage. These distancing strategies were intensified by the acceptance of individualized ideologies of success and commodified logics of media production. Ultimately, class appeared as the central demarcating category. On German television a problematic class distinction was articulated through ethnic and gender difference. Female migrants were often “othered” as lower-class. This class discourse absolved middle-class viewers and media workers from engaging in the systemic struggles over female/migrant identities, thus undermining the potential for gender and migrant solidarity and for the dynamic creation of cultural citizenship as a mode of belonging.     

Teenage childbearing and cognitive development

In this paper we examine how having a child as a teen affects the cognitive development of young women as measured on standardized tests. The research in this paper makes use of the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988, a biennial survey that contains information on a cohort of young women from the time they were in the 8th grade in 1988 until, the latest wave, 1994. By observing two test scores before a woman has a child and one test score after, we can control for both the level and growth in test scores experienced prior to childbirth. The results indicate that although teenage mothers have lower cognitive test scores than their counterparts without children, the effects of childbearing itself are negligible. Received: 23 August 2000/Accepted: 02 January 2001