The Intersubjective Experience of the Physical Body in the Clinical Setting of Eating Disorders

This paper will illuminate one dimension of self-disclosure as it relates to the inescapable presence of the body in treatment, and the female clinician’s ability to bring her physical body into clinical discussions during an encounter with a female client with an eating disorder. Although the clinical literature on eating disorders validates that transference and countertransference issues are particularly powerful, it generally neglects the exploration of these issues specific to the body’s physical presentation. Since body dissatisfaction is increasingly normative for women today, female clinicians need to have a theoretical road map on which to rely when they encounter a shared body experience. Thus, in order to encourage discussions of the therapist’s body in clinical social work practice, the body needs to be situated in a larger theoretical framework within which it can be explained and located; this framework is object relations theory viewed through an intersubjective lens. Concepts from object relations theory will demonstrate the importance of the body in the clinical exchange by highlighting the parallel between Winnicott’s ‘good enough’ mother and the ‘good enough’ therapist’s body. When the therapist is able to judiciously invite discussions of her body into the clinical arena, the client is given the opportunity to move from object relating to object usage. A case presentation exemplifies how this conceptual framework can be applied to clinical social work practice, strengthening the relationship between knowing and doing.     

Ethnosemiotics: Some personal and theoretical reflections

The question of how individual memory fits, or more accurately, does not fit with history is at the heart of this paper on Maryse Condé’s novel Heremakhonon about Veronica Mercier, a character who was born in Guadeloupe, lived in Paris and travels to West Africa in search of an ancestry that was interrupted by slavery. Suggesting that readings that focus on Mercier as a character are limited in approach, it reads the novel as a staging of time and is attentive to the gaps between thought and speech, between memory and history, between Guadeloupe and Africa, and between women’s personal sexual pleasure and the impersonal reproductive body that interrupt the narrative. The central character’s personal quest for her African roots – for ‘niggers with ancestors’, for Africa as a singular lost object, which necessarily involves ignoring the subaltern – is nuanced by the novel’s deployment of heterogeneous time.     

“She was buried in her purple dress and her red hat and all of our members wore full ‘Red Hat Regalia’ to celebrate her life”: Dress, embodiment and older women's leisure: Reconfiguring the ageing process

There is a significant literature on women's dress and clothing, women's dress and identity, and women's dress and body image. However, the way that dress shapes the self, gives public meaning to the body, and situates it within culture—its embodiment—is understudied. Older women's voices on how dress-up in leisure contexts is linked to embodiment are absent. Using data from an online survey of the Red Hat Society®, a leisure-based social group with over 1 million members, we examined the relationship between older women's dress and embodiment. Data analysis revealed three themes: 1) Dress and embodiment, doing “dress-up”; 2) Dress and embodied subjectivity, linking the personal with the social; and, 3) Dress and perceptions of ageing, fashioning to freedom. We extend the embodiment and leisure literatures by: (a) including older women's viewpoints on dress; (b) understanding linkages between embodiment and older women's leisure; and, (c) illustrating how public displays of dress contribute to older women's development.     

Gender and Performance Capital among Local Musicians

This article extends Bourdieu’s field theory to explain how learning spaces in the Toronto folk and metal scenes create gendered access to a field-specific form of cultural capital: performance capital, or the instrumental and interpersonal skills required to perform music. Folk musicians develop performance capital in open-access spaces, such as workshops and open stages at local folk clubs, while metal musicians learn in private spaces such as garages, basements, and rented rehearsal rooms. Folk’s learning spaces are open to all aspiring musicians, while access to heavy metal’s learning spaces relies on social networks from which women are often excluded. These different processes of capital development can lead to greater or lesser opportunities for women to become cultural producers: In Toronto, women make up approximately five percent of heavy metal musicians, but almost half of practicing folk musicians.     

From Orgasms to Organizations: Maslow,Women’s Sexuality and the Gendered Foundations of the Needs Hierarchy

One of the most enduring theories in management is Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, in that its basic concepts, such as the needs for self–esteem and self–actualization, are accepted without question. This adoption of Maslow’s theory has generally occurred without an examination of its empirical basis, which was his own 1930s’ study of the relationship between self–esteem and sexual behaviour in young college women. In this article, we locate Maslow’s study of women’s sexuality in the sexological research of his time, and contrast it with a study undertaken by Katharine Davis in 1929. These two studies present very divergent pictures of women’s sexuality. We argue that Maslow’s portrayal, which is subsequently embedded in the needs hierarchy, has implications for our understanding of dominance and subordination in organizations, because implicit in Maslow’s portrayal is an assertion of the naturalness of female submission and the eroticization of male dominance.     

Feminist Readings on Abu Ghraib: Introduction

This article examines feminist responses to mainstream media coverage of female terrorists in West Germany during 1977. Women in left-wing terrorist groups like the Red Army Faction (RAF) and ‘Movement 2. June’ (‘Bewegung 2. Juni’) inspired a gendered discourse reflecting a cultural unease about women participating in political violence, in which the media propagated notions that posited female terrorists as ‘unnatural’ women. This analysis demonstrates how different ‘Alltagstheorien’ (everyday or common sense theories) on female terrorists we find in West German media publications in the 1970s and 1980s served as a springboard for West German feminist activists to examine arguments about violence as legitimate means in their own political communities. This essay begins by briefly outlining key feminist positions on political violence that have made invisible the complex debates taking place in the 1970s. The second part of the essay uses images of female terrorists circulated by the West German media, such as the newsmagazine Der Spiegel (The Mirror), to contextualize the ‘Alltagstheorien’ the magazine propagated in an article covering RAF actions in 1977. The third and main part of the essay then examines the responses this and other articles elicited from contemporaneous feminist movement publications.     

Negotiating Emancipation

The idea of the public sphere is integral to the scholarship and practice of Women in Development. Unlike the private sphere, it is constructed as that space in society that provides enabling conditions for women’s emancipation. With the advent of neoliberal development and the consequent re-organization of relationships between individuals, states and markets, traditional views on the public sphere are beginning

to falter. There is a growing need to investigate the usefulness of the notion of the contemporary public sphere for women’s emancipation. This article unpacks the construct of the public sphere: the spaces it refers to, the peculiarity of its ideologies and the constructions of women’s emancipation. It reviews two bodies of scholarship, western feminist political theory and gender critiques of neo-liberal development, and

examines the recent theoretical debates on women’s political identity within the public sphere. The article highlights that emancipation of women (their political identities) in the time of neo-liberalism is a complex interplay of gender constructions within and between states, markets and civil societies.     

The politics of gender in the UN Security Council resolutions on women,peace and security

Women’s groups have worked diligently to place gender and women’s vulnerability on the transnational security agenda. This article departs from the idea that negotiating and codifying gender and women’s vulnerability in terms of security represent a challenge to mainstream security contexts. By contrasting the UN Security Council resolutions on women, peace and security with feminist theory, this article aims to analyze what is considered to be threatened when women’s vulnerability is negotiated. The article identifies two approaches to the gender/security nexus: gendering security, which involves introducing ideas regarding gender-sensitive policies and equal representation, and securitizing gender, which proceeds by locating rape and sexual violence in the context of war regulations. We demonstrate that, although these measures are encouraged with reference to women’s vulnerability, they serve to legitimize war and the male soldier and both approaches depoliticize gender relations.     

Transparent and Mysterious: On Collecting,the Photograph and Tomio Seike

In this article, the author puts theories about aesthetics, vision and looking into practice when considering Tomio Seike’s Untitled #3 (1995). The photograph’s subject (a bare arm, languidly stretched over a piece of furniture) draws the viewer to an initial assumption: that the photograph is of a nude woman. However, other visual clues in the photograph complicate that assumption, and help explain why, as a collector, the author was drawn to it and remains captivated by the image. Untitled #3 is part of an artistic conversation not only with other photographs in Seike’s oeuvre, but also with other artists (Japanese and non‐Japanese) who focus on the body. Seike’s work is both a part of the tradition which produced masters such as Imogen Cunningham in the West and Nobuyoshi Araki in the East, and a quiet rebellion against that same tradition. The intimate, lushly toned, contemplative work invites the viewer into a way of seeing influenced by the Japanese concept of matsuri, the balance between noise and stillness. By considering these seemingly disparate elements, the author untangles at least part of the mystery which makes up the meaning of Tomio Seike’s Untitled #3, and illustrates why, in the words of Susan Sontag, photographic messages are both “transparent and mysterious”.

If photographs are messages, the message is both transparent and mysterious. (Sontag 1999 Sontag, S. 1999. On Photography, New York: Anchor Books.  [Google Scholar], p. 111)     

A Grounded Theory Model of the Ideal Business Image for Women

Recent changes in women's business identities present an opportunity to explore the social meanings conveyed by dress in a specific and changing context. Using a grounded theory approach, interview data from twenty-four business women were analyzed for recurrent themes. These women felt they could choose from a variety of dress images in order to express appropriate or socially acceptable meanings, including credibility and competence in business. A dynamic, multi-dimensional model of the meanings comprising an “ideal” image for business women is proposed. These meanings include conservatism, fashion, masculinity, femininity/sexuality, creativity, and conformity. The meanings are conceptualized as approximately opposing forces causing tensions, thus requiring conscious balancing by business women. Each meaning has an extreme which can endanger the credibility of the wearer. The balance of meanings is mediated by several contextual factors.     

Body Movement Is Associated With Orgasm During Vaginal Intercourse in Women

Very few studies have investigated the relationship between women’s ability to experience an orgasm during vaginal intercourse and specific stimulation techniques. We examined two common techniques during vaginal intercourse both with and without simultaneous external clitoral stimulation: (1) body movement, in particular back-and-forth swinging movements of the pelvis and trunk; and (2) precise rubbing of the clitoris with an immobilized body. Structural equation modeling was used to compare the effects of the two stimulation techniques on women’s orgasm frequency (N = 1,239). As hypothesized, the frequency of orgasm during vaginal intercourse with simultaneous clitoral stimulation was positively associated with a preference for body movement during arousal. Body movement, as opposed to body immobilization, was also associated with a higher frequency of orgasm during vaginal intercourse without simultaneous clitoral stimulation. We conclude that body movement is associated with more orgasms during vaginal intercourse, whereas precise rubbing of the clitoris with an immobilized body is not associated with more orgasms. Teaching women to move their pelvis and trunk in a swinging back-and-forth movement during vaginal intercourse might therefore facilitate reaching an orgasm, whereas encouraging them to self-stimulate the clitoris might be less helpful if done with an immobilized body.     

Intermarriages Between Western Women and Palestinian Men: Multidirectional Adaptation Processes

This article addresses cultural adaptation of Western‐Palestinian intermarried couples. Using in‐depth interviews, information was gathered from 16 participants, 7 Western women and 9 Palestinian men, living in Palestinian cities in the West Bank. Adaptation strategies are typified by the extent to which each spouse embraces the partner's culture. The data suggest that intermarriage engenders a multidirectional adaptation process. Patriarchy and East‐West power relations affect mainly the women, having to face marginalization on the basis of their gender and their foreignness. The men undergo a double process of cultural adaptation: to the Western culture and to their native culture after their return. Both the husbands’ extended family and the Israeli‐Palestinian conflict were found to affect both partners’ adaptation.     

Teaching & Learning Guide for ‘The Conflictual Model of Analysis in Studies on the Media Representation of Islam and Muslims: A Critical Review’

‘The Conflictual Model of Analysis in Studies on the Media Representation of Islam and Muslims: A Critical Review’ was published in Sociology Compass 9/5 (2015) pp. 321–335, DOI: 10.1111/soc4.12264 . This Teaching and Learning Guide is designed to accompany this article. In brief, the article examined the extent to which various studies on the media representation of Islam and Muslims use the conflictual model analysis that underpins theoretical frameworks, such as Orientalism, Clash of Civilisations, Cultural Racism and Islamophobia. It argued that in the context of a complex multicultural society, conflictual model of analysis is inadequate because it simply employs a binary way of thinking as clearly indicated in ‘the West versus Islam’ paradigm. In response to the inadequacy of this model of analysis, the article proposed an adoption of an alternative dialogical model of analysis in the light of the political theory of recognition. This guide provides useful information regarding the use of this article for teaching and learning purposes. It includes recommendation of readings, online resources, sample syllabus, focus questions and project idea.     

They are all ‘doing gender’ but are they are all passing? A case study of the appropriation of a sociological concept1

The concept of ‘doing gender’ was placed on the sociological agenda by West and Zimmerman . In their seminal paper published in 1987, they provided a systematic theory of gender as a routine and ongoing process and outlined a distinctly ethnomethodological approach to investigating how gender is enacted, understood and rendered accountable. West and Zimmerman's notion of ‘doing gender’ has subsequently become a central concept in many fields of sociological research, however, upon closer examination although many authors claim to be using the concept – in effect to be doing‘doing gender’– the concept's intellectual roots in ethnomethodology are not always recognised or reflected: in short not all are passing. The purpose of our study is to explore the career trajectory of this concept and to systematically assess the manner in which ‘doing’ has been employed. From a review of 226 journal articles, books, dissertations and association papers, we provide an overview of the uses of this construct and examine the ways in which ‘doing gender’ has been assimilated into current theoretical and methodological practice.     

The Scrutinized Priest: Women in the Church of England Negotiating Professional and Sacred Clothing Regimes

This article examines the integration of women priests in the Church of England through the lens of dress. Clothing is a salient dynamic in occupational cultures, particularly in relation to the regulation of gendered bodies. Women's ordination to the priesthood was only sanctioned in 1992. Complex clothing regimes are negotiated, for ordination bestows upon the priest certain clothing rights and responsibilities. However, such attire has traditionally been associated only with the male body, creating tension in relation to women's appropriation of this sacred and professional dress. Based on in‐depth interviews with 17 Anglican clergy women, this article will focus both on the scrutiny the women experienced in relation to their clothing choices, as well as the relationship the women themselves negotiated with their clothes. It will be argued that as representatives of both a sacred and professional domain, clothing had to be carefully managed by clergy. Dress functioned as a key test in women's integration into the organization, often operating as a constraining and exclusionary mechanism.     

Bitch,slut, skank,cunt: patterned resistance to women’s visibility in digital publics

Resistance to women’s public voice and visibility via street harassment and workplace sexual harassment have long constrained women’s use of and comfort in physical public spaces; this gender-based resistance now extends into digital arenas. Women face extreme hostility in the form of digital sexism in discussion rooms, comment sections, gaming communities, and on social media platforms. Reflecting on two years of in-depth interviews with women who have been on the receiving end of gender-based digital abuse (n?=?38), conversations with industry professionals working in content moderation and digital safety, the extant literature, and news stories about digital attacks against women, I offer a lens to think through the prominent patterns in digital sexism, showing (1) that aggressors draw upon three overlapping strategies – intimidating, shaming, and discrediting – to limit women’s impact in digital publics, (2) the way femininity and femaleness are used to undermine women’s contributions, and (3) men call attention to women’s physicality as a way to pull gender – and the male advantage that comes with it – to the fore in digital exchanges. Finally, I argue that when digital sexism succeeds in pressing women out of digital spaces, constrains the topics they address publicly, or limits the ways they address them, we must consider the democratic costs of gender-based harassment, in addition to the personal ones.     

Valdemar’s Abjection: Poe,Kristeva, Masculinity,and Victim-Monsters

This article explores intersections between Edgar Allan Poe’s 1845 tale “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” and Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (1982). Highly influential, Kristeva’s work illuminates Poe’s depiction of a man mesmerized on the point of death, his vibrating tongue the only indication of life. In his liminal condition between life and death, Valdemar transforms into a spectacle witnessed over time by a male group whose members remain intimately tied to yet always distant and aloof from him. As a spectacle of body horror, Valdemar evokes many of the attributes of Kristevan abjection theory, especially the fluids and waste materials associated with the maternal body. Challenging the maternal focus of abjection theory and its reception, I track the ways in which Poe’s tale locates abject affect in the fears of the male body and in the male group’s relationship to the expulsed, isolate male. Another antebellum author, the health reformer Sylvester Graham, provides a striking point of comparison in his focus on the young male onanist. Through Kristeva’s and Poe’s works, I develop a theory of the victim-monster, a being whose suffering initially incites sympathy but ultimately repels the spectator; the victim becomes monstrous, his or her suffering the true site of a horror that must be transcended to ensure the survival of the spectator. The victim-monster of Poe’s tale intersects with the figure of the grotesque and anti-Semitic caricature.     

Blood ties and strong ties: a two-way linkage? Some non-trivial implications of the care workers market in a Mediterranean region

Taking their cue from a seeming dissonance between the theory of commodification and exploitation of migrant care workers and the case study of the outsourced self proposed by Hochschild, the author speculates whether or not the family–caregiver relationship may be equal and inclusive. The argument is unraveled by posing another question en route: what specific ‘catalysts’ can trigger ‘high-intensity affective relationships’? Elster defines 'essentially byproduct' the result of a process lacking any direct and conscious link between outcome and intention, and requiring the relaxation of the control of reason in order to be fulfilled. The author mixes significant theoretical results coming both from the relational Palo Alto School and from history of families studies, concluding that an equal and inclusive relationship may be like an Elster’s ‘essentially byproduct’ of a market relationship , when a high-intensity affective relation acts as a ‘catalyst’. The frame suggested in this article seems consistent with recent constructionist reinterpretations of the idea of kinship, which take shape and evolve through ‘everyday experiences’. Kinship thus shifts towards a more complex undefined category, that of Karsten’s relatedness. Speaking of which, the author argues some logical reasons suggesting a generalized adoption of the term only with great care and caution.     

“Our Artistic Home”: Adolescent Girls and Domestic Interiors in the Girl’s Own Paper

Abstract

By zooming in on the Girl’s Own Paper (GOP), this essay demonstrates how the production and dissemination of shared domestic cultures are directed at adolescent girls through esthetic practices of furnishing and decorating the home. The essay aims to contextualize the role of household art in the relationship between female adolescence and bourgeois domestic interiors in fin de siècle Britain. The relationship reveals three important aspects of domestic cultures: household art, do-it-yourself crafts, and material collecting. First, the GOP advises adolescent girls to read and interpret the language of household art through selection and placing, which, in turn, facilitates the construction of the textuality of interior furnishings. The GOP’s esthetic theory, an integral part of educating and improving girls’ taste, functions to enhance their room-layout skills and also construct their architectural identities. Second, adolescent girls are credited with the active role of young home-makers in the GOP. The practice of amateur upholstery shapes female youth’s artistic self-expression and manifests their autonomous control over the making of home-crafted objects. And thirdly, the act of collecting furniture pieces and decorative items functions to address the various components of a room alongside contemporary social concerns about good taste. The accumulation of artifacts allows girls to achieve a sense of materiality and ownership contained within the domestic sphere. Home decoration in general provides a focal point for understanding how the familial space becomes the site of adolescent girls’ artistic labor and household elegancies.     

'Estrogen-filled worlds': fathers as primary caregivers and embodiment

Within the wide body of scholarship on gender work and caring, sub‐strands of research have grown tremendously in the past decade, including largely separate studies on fatherhood and embodiment. Drawing on a qualitative research project with Canadian fathers who self‐identify as primary caregivers of their children, this article focuses on recovering largely invisible links between theoretical and empirical understandings of fatherhood, caring and embodiment. The article builds on the work of key sociologists of the body as well as the work of Goffman and Merleau‐Ponty. Specifically, Merleau‐Ponty's concept of ‘body subjects’ and Goffman's work on the ‘moral’ quality of bodily movements through public spaces are utilized as lenses for understanding fathers' narratives of caring, particularly how men speak about their movements with children through what several fathers refer to as “estrogen‐filled” worlds. As caring for others involves forming social networks and relations, embodiment can matter in the spaces between men, between male and female caregivers, and between men and the children of others. This article argues that through the changing stages of caring for children, male embodiment constantly shifts in the weight of its salience in the identities and practices of fathers and caregiving.