Endless Interrogation

This paper takes a revisionist look at the first episode of Prime Suspect (1991–2006)—hereafter known as Prime Suspect (1)— in what was to become a cycle of dramas, conceptualised, and in the first instance, written by Lynda La Plante, based upon the female Detective Chief Inspector character, Jane Tennison. Critical attention has hitherto tended to shift away from Brunsdon's (2000) ground-breaking work on Prime Suspect (1)'s “equal opportunities discourse” toward critiques which emphasise its noir, hardboiled and literary, traditions. The paper thus seeks to rehabilitate Prime Suspect (1)'s televisual—rather than derived—lineage, in an adapted form of dramatised documentary practice. By using insights drawn from Kristevan psychoanalytic analysis I undertake an analysis of the programme in order to demonstrate how the masculine police series drama genre may be not only intervened, but is ultimately deconstructed by, the abject female body.     

Political battlefield: aggressive metaphors,gender, and power in news coverage of Canadian party leadership contests

Our study analyzed aggressive figures of speech used by the Globe and Mail to describe the personas, performances, and prospects of women and men leadership candidates for the (Progressive) Conservative Party of Canada in 1976, 1993, and 2004. We codified four distinct forms of power communicated by the aggressive metaphors—power over, power to, power with, and power as—to investigate what these battleground metaphors communicate about gender and political power. Our content analysis and discourse analysis of the phrases applied to each of the candidates revealed gendered assumptions about political leadership. All three women candidates in our study—Flora MacDonald (1976), Kim Campbell (1993), and Belinda Stronach (2004)—were discussed as formidable foes, capable of using considerable force in their efforts to win. Indeed, Campbell became Canada’s first and only woman prime minister. Yet, much of the aggressive mediation confirms the gendered mediation thesis that aggressive metaphors exclude women and reconstitute politics as masculine. Many of the combative phrases cast doubt on a woman candidate’s ability to successfully compete on the political battlefield.     

The Emergence and Persistence of Queerness: Conversing Through Visual Culture Within a Generation

ABSTRACT

In this article, the authors explore the work of becoming queer within the Millennial generation. Collaborative in nature, their investigation turns to three key popular-culture texts of the 1990s—Will & Grace, Rent, and MTV’s Spring Break—that were central to their then-emerging sense of self. Staged as an intragenerational conversation, the authors look to create space to unpack the connections, anecdotal by design, between popular texts and changing ideas of queer identity and community. Since neither author grew up within the confines of a gay ghetto—Boystown of Chicago, the Castro of San Francisco, the East Village of New York City—where they may have encountered and been enamored by the avant-garde queer subcultures so often praised in queer scholarship (for important reasons), they turn instead to experiences with popular culture that opened up lessons in becoming gay, in rural and Midwestern locales where queerness operated and emerged differently.     

The US National Intelligence Council on the Changing Geopolitical Landscape

The National Intelligence Council, a body reporting to the Director of National Intelligence, draws on expertise from within and outside the US intelligence community to assess strategic developments bearing on national security. In addition to its classified reports (notably the National Intelligence Estimates) the Council also issues unclassified versions of some of its work. In December 2004 it released a report, Mapping the Global Future, the outcome of a year‐long study known as the 2020 Project, looking at geopolitical trends in the world over the medium term. Robert L. Hutchings, the NIC's then chairman, writes in a preface that this report “offers a range of possibilities and potential discontinuities, as a way of opening our minds to developments we might otherwise miss.” It differs from a preceding NIC exercise, Global Trends 2015 (2000), in the wider range of experts consulted—preparatory workshops were conducted in a number of countries—and in the heavier store it places on formal scenario development. While the underlying scenario‐building techniques employed are not spelled out in the document (some are described elsewhere on the NIC's website), four specific “fictional scenarios” are selected to enliven the report: Davos World—illustrating “how robust economic growth, led by China and India, … could reshape the globalization process”; Pax Americana—“how US predominance may survive the radical changes to the global political landscape and serve to fashion a new and inclusive global order”; A New Caliphate—“how a global movement fueled by radical religious identity politics could constitute a challenge to Western norms and values as the foundation of the global system”; and Cycle of Fear—proliferation of weaponry and terrorism “to the point that large‐scale intrusive security measures are taken to prevent outbreaks of deadly attacks, possibly introducing an Orwellian world.” (The quotes are from the report's executive summary.) The excerpt reproduced below comprises the section of the report headed “Rising Powers: The Changing Geopolitical Landscape,” omitting text boxes and charts. The summary table appended is taken from the beginning of the document. The full report is available at http://www.cia.gov/nic/NIC_globaltrend2020.html .     

Transgression,embodiment, and gendered madness: reading Homeland and Enlightened through critical disability theory

This article critically analyzes the gendering of madness on Enlightened and Homeland through the lens of feminist disability studies as it functions in relation to feminist theoretical debates about whether mental illness is a social construction designed to control unruly subjects or an embodied response to social and personal trauma. This analysis unpacks the manner in which Homeland and Enlightened represent female protagonists whose madness functions both as a site of resistance against neoliberal logics of self-sufficiency and productivity and as an embodied, experiential reality. However, in both programs, these representative strands are positioned as entirely independent of one another—resistance is limited to the workplace, while embodiment fits within the domain of home and family—and both narratives punish their protagonists for their attempts to bridge these two spheres.     

The female antihero and police power in FX’s Justified

The male antihero in the police procedural is marked by a fundamental conflict. On the one hand, his hypermasculine behavior signals that he is an independent actor with no allegiance to the state for which he works. On the other hand, his actions usually work to shore up the power of the state, which relies on his hypermasculine displays of independence to get the job done. Through this sleight of hand, audiences are encouraged to embrace the cop and loathe the system, not recognizing the fundamental complicity of the two. We argue that this formula is significantly interrupted in Season Two of Justified, when audiences are introduced to a female antihero—Mags Bennett—as powerful and trigger-happy as its main protagonist—Raylan Givens. As Mags emerges as the primary unlawful force of the show, Raylan increasingly aligns himself with the federal forces he was more at odds with in Season One. Mags strips Raylan of his antihero status, exposing him as a working stiff for the feds. The season ends with Mags’s death, but not before it presents audiences with a glimpse of an alternative order—one in which toxic masculinity gives way to matriarchal ascendance and extra-legal violence is revealed as the modus operandi of the state.     

Legacy,Policy, and Circumstance in Fertility Transition

Divergent fertility trends in the course of development are commonly ascribed to differences in state action—that is, to government policy, deliberate or inadvertent. However, fertility outcomes can also, often more persuasively, be traced to differences in cultural and institutional inheritance and in the supply and growth potential of human capital. These are materials that states and societies find themselves endowed with—in brief, their legacy. In reality, legacy and policy are interwoven: policy actions build on some legacy elements and attempt to combat others. And there is a third set of factors influencing fertility outcomes, covering distinctive features of the economic and geopolitical environment and essentially fortuitous events—together termed circumstance. Legacy and circumstance can shrink or shift the policy space, helping to explain past failures in policy achievement. These broad considerations are the basis for a sketch of East Asian/sub‐Saharan African contrasts in fertility transition over the last 50 years. The sketch points to missing avenues of policy action in the African case in seeking to overcome legacy obstacles.     

Frailty selection in bivariate survival models: A cautionary note

One problem that researchers face in analyzing the survival times of groups of related individuals is selecting how the distribution of frailty—an unobserved (or not adequately observed) random factor— should be specified. Several distributions have received attention—for instance, the gamma distribution and a nonparametric N‐point, discrete probability distribution. Researchers have selected these distributions more for mathematical convenience than for their ability to represent biological, social, or economic reality, and the implications of choosing one functional representation of frailty over alternative choices have not been studied extensively. In particular, researchers have paid little attention to the type of association that exists among survival times of individuals in a group or between those of a pair under specific frailty distributions. This research paper explores the association among survival times under gamma, inverse Gaussian, nonparametric N‐point, and Poisson distributions. It shows that the pattern and strength of this association depends on how the distribution of frailty is specified.     

Environmental bottlenecks in children’s genetic potential for adult socio-economic attainments: Evidence from a health shock

This paper explores gene–environment interactions—interactions between family environments and children’s genetic predispositions—in determining educational attainment. The central question is whether poor childhood family environments reduce children’s ability to leverage their genetic gifts to achieve high levels of educational attainment—are there important ‘bottlenecks’ for poor children? The multigenerational information and genetic data contained in the United States’ Health and Retirement Study are used to separate two mechanisms for intergenerational transmission of socio-economic status: genetic endowments and family environments. Using parental in utero exposure to the 1918–19 influenza pandemic as a source of quasi-experimental variation in family environments (that did not affect children’s genetic endowments), I estimate interactions between parental investments and children’s genetic potential. The main finding suggests that girls with high genetic potential whose fathers were exposed to influenza face reduced educational attainments—a gene–environment interaction—but there is no similar effect for boys.     

“Nobody Don’t Really Know What That Mean”: Understandings of “Queer” among Urban LGBTQ Young People of Color

ABSTRACT

Drawing from in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 40 urban LGBTQ young people of color, I explore their uses, understandings, and meanings of “queer.” With several notable exceptions—those who at least occasionally self-identified as queer—most of the young people avoided using the term altogether. Although the majority expressed confusion about what “queer” meant, many understood it to be somehow related to sexuality or being gay, but considered it potentially insulting. I discuss the relevance of these findings for work in queer fields, where research participants may not explicitly identify as queer or make use of the word.     

The Internetization of International Migration

The Internet has revolutionized our economies, societies, and everyday lives. Many social phenomena are no longer the same as they were in the pre‐Internet era: they have been “Internetized.” We define the Internetization of international migration, and we investigate it by exploring the links between the Internet and migration outcomes all along the migration path, from migration intentions to actual migration. Our analyses leverage a number of sources, both at the micro‐ and the macro‐level, including the Gallup World Poll, the Arab Barometer, data from the International Telecommunication Union, the Italian population register, and unique register data from a migrant reception center in Southern Italy. We also distinguish between economic migrants—those who leave their country of origin with the aim of seeking better economic opportunities elsewhere—and political migrants—those who are forced to leave their countries of origin for political or conflict‐related reasons. Our findings point to a consistently positive relationship between the diffusion of the Internet, migration intentions, and migration behaviors, supporting the idea that the Internet is not necessarily a driving force of migration per se, but rather an enabling “supportive agent.” These associations are particularly relevant for economic migrants, at least for migration intentions. Further analyses underscore the importance of the Internet in providing a key informational channel which helps to define clearer migration trajectories.     

Striving for Prestige in Samoa: A Comparison of Men,Women, and Fa’afafine

ABSTRACT

In numerous non-Western cultures around the world, a small but meaningful proportion of individuals occupy alternative gender categories beyond the man/woman binary. A substantial body of past research has shown that feminine, same-sex attracted males in Samoa—a nonbinary gender known as fa’afafine—are more altruistic toward their nieces and nephews than are Samoan men and women. The present study examined the degree to which these kin-directed altruistic tendencies of fa’afafine are motivated by striving for prestige, and hence demonstrating value, within their family. Results showed that cisgender men and women do not differ in the degree to which they seek familial recognition of their altruistic behavior toward nieces and nephews. However, compared to men, fa’afafine sought significantly more acknowledgment of this altruism. These results illustrate one proximate cognitive mechanism for the elevated kin-directed altruism of fa’afafine and highlight the importance of the sociocultural context in which these motivations develop.     

Gender Monstrosity

Deadgirl (2008) is based around a group of male teens discovering and claiming ownership of a bound female zombie, using her as a sex slave. This narrative premise raises numerous tensions that are particularly amplified by using a zombie as the film's central victim. The Deadgirl is sexually passive yet monstrous, reifying the horrors associated with the female body in patriarchal discourses. She is objectified on the basis of her gender, and this has led many reviewers to dismiss the film as misogynistic torture porn. However, the conditions under which masculinity is formed here—where adolescent males become “men” by enacting sexual violence—are as problematic as the specter of the female zombie. Deadgirl is clearly horrific and provocative: in this article I seek to probe implications arising from the film's gender conflicts.     

The Cinematic Quiet Girl from The Breakfast Club to the Badlands

This essay is intended to counteract the omission of the quiet girl from critical media thought and to recuperate her for film history and feminism. The quiet girl is a visible presence across numerous films and genres, from heartfelt melodramas like Corrina, Corrina to gruesome horrors like Carrie. Within these diverse texts, the quiet girl represents a consistent threat to authority. She keeps her thoughts to herself and, as such, just beyond the reach of other's surveillance, delineation and control. Her silences unravel the self-certainty of others and deny them access and closure. But, the threat the quiet girl poses is always in danger of being contained via her transformation into a more outgoing—that is, more knowable—version of herself. If all else fails, the quiet girl risks banishment or death. One text that circumvents the containment of the quiet girl, however, is Badlands. In Badlands, the girl protagonist's increasing silence over the course of the film coincides with her increasing freedom from male rule, suggesting the potential that silence holds for girls and feminism.     

Psychological predictors of eating pathology in older adult women

Eating pathology is generally considered to affect females during adolescence and early adulthood. However, in recent years, there has been an increased recognition that disordered eating occurs in middle-aged and elderly women and that the presentation is similar to that of eating disorders in younger women. In the research presented here, results of an Internet survey of older adult women (N = 245; aged 60–90 years) indicate that the factors significantly associated with eating pathology—perfectionism, depression, and sociocultural pressures to be thin—closely parallel those reported for both younger and middle-aged women.     

Pierre Bourdieu on Marriage Strategies

Societies, virtually by definition, are in the business of social reproduction. They maintain institutional forms and cultural patterns more or less intact, though not of course unchanged, as their individual members age and die and the young are acculturated and assume adult roles. Social reproduction also takes place at the family level—through the social and biological processes entailed in family succession— but there the outcomes owe much more to fortuity, to the luck of the draw. Nonetheless, families become adept at doing the best they can with whatever hands they are dealt—if need be bending the rules, hedging, bluffing, and coercing. How they do so is highly contingent on each society's circumstances and cultural repertoires, but traditionally marriage decisions offered the principal opportunities and held the major potential risks. The case study of family marriage strategies in a village of the French Pyrenees by Pierre Bourdieu, excerpted below, gives an exceptionally lucid and illuminating dissection of this domain of life—as it had persisted perhaps for centuries and into the 1950s and 1960s. Pierre Bourdieu was born in 1930 in a Béarn village of the Atlantic Pyrenees like that described. He held an appointment at the University of Algiers in the 1950s, during the years of colonial conflict leading up to independence, and his early research was on Algeria. From 1964 he taught at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales and later also at the Collège de France as professor of sociology (succeeding Raymond Aron), and became one of France's most prominent public intellectuals—exercising an influence that would be virtually unknown among English‐speaking sociologists. His major interests, in some respects prefigured in the present study, concerned aspects of cultural reproduction, particularly how educational systems reproduce class and privilege. His major works include Distinction (1979), The Logic of Practice (1980), and The Rules of Art (1992). He died in January 2002 at the age of 71. The case study excerpted below was published as “Les stratégies matrimoniales dans le système de reproduction,”Annales: Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations (Paris), vol. 27, no. 4/5 (1972). The translation, by Elborg Forster, appeared in Family and Society: Selections from the Annales, edited by Robert Forster and Orest Ranum. © 1976 by The Johns Hopkins University Press. Reprinted with permission of The Johns Hopkins University Press. The excerpt is from pp. 122, 124–125, and 132–141.     

Getting Disciplined: What’s Trans* About Queer Studies Now?

ABSTRACT

This essay maps the epistemological terrain trans* studies may face as it is widely incorporated into queer studies programs, often housed within women’s studies departments. Over the past two decades, queer studies and women’s studies have rapidly professionalized, producing new modes of disciplinary power that may seek to either include or cite trans* studies, often without fully welcoming its specific material and political investments. Under such conditions, trans* studies may find itself heard largely as a but—an epistemic blockage, a distraction from proper objects, a hindrance to customary methods—that must be disciplined.     

Intergenerational Coresidence in Developing Countries

Newly available census microdata from IPUMS‐International are used to assess trends in intergenerational coresidence in 15 developing countries. Contrary to expectations, we find no general decline in intergenerational coresidence over the past several decades. There have been, however, significant changes in the configuration of intergenerational coresidence. Families in which a member of the older generation is household head—a configuration consistent with traditional patriarchal forms in which the older generation retains authority—are becoming more common in most of the countries. Intergenerational families headed by a member of the younger generation—the configuration one would expect if intergenerational coresidence were motivated by a need for old‐age support—are on the decline in most of the countries. Multivariate analysis reveals that intergenerational families headed by the older generation are positively associated with measures of economic development. These findings are at variance with widely accepted social theory. We hypothesize that housing shortages, economic stress in the younger generation, and old‐age pensions may contribute to the change. More broadly, in some developing countries rising incomes may have allowed more people to achieve their preferred family structure of intergenerational coresidence following traditional family forms.     

Public Bodies

This paper seeks to critically examine the capacity for the internet, as a revitalized public sphere, to adequately represent women. I present the argument that the public space of the internet limits the capacity for female vocality by overcoding—in the Deleuzo–Guattarian sense of despotic, unifying, and totalizing processes of representation (Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 41. London: Athlone Press)—the female body images it solicits as aesthetic objects to be judged and consumed. I focus on forms of online polling to suggest that public judgments are powerful discursive mechanisms for the regulation and containment of the female body in public space.