“Even If She Learns,She Doesn’t Understand Properly”. Children’s Understandings of Illbeing and Poverty in Five Ethiopian Communities

The paper argues on the basis of data from Young Lives, an international study of childhood poverty, and an extensive review of child-centered poverty studies that experiences of relative poverty and social exclusion are as common and corrosive in contemporary Ethiopia as North America and Europe. If taken seriously, this insight could broaden the focus of child poverty reduction from nutrition and education to include the psychosocial costs of lacking the culturally-specific resources required for full participation in society. The paper makes a number of methodological points of value to researchers undertaking similar studies: firstly, poverty can be explored by asking about illbeing; secondly, children’s conceptions of poverty are profoundly social and context-specific; and thirdly, young children are just as able to address these themes as older ones.     

Why Faster,Higher, Stronger isn’t Necessarily Better—The Relations of Paralympian and Women’s Soccer Teams’ Performance to National Well-being

The present study considers how the athletic performance of minority groups relates to national subjective well-being (SWB) and life expectancy. Based on the argument that sports represent a microcosm of society and the reliable finding that national inequality is associated with reduced SWB, we hypothesized that greater opportunities for typically disadvantaged groups within sports should be positively related to national indicators of well-being. Study 1 compared the relation of success in the Paralympics versus the Olympics to national subjective well-being and life expectancy. The results supported our hypothesis. In Study 2 we conceptually replicated these results using the standings of national men’s and women’s soccer teams. Overall, it appears that the opportunities to compete in sports that nations afford to members of disadvantaged groups reflect on the health and well-being of the entire society.

“If you don’t ask … you don’t tell”: Refugee women’s perspectives on perinatal mental health screening

ProblemNational guidelines recommending mental health screening in pregnancy have not been implemented well in routine maternity care. Women of refugee background are likely to have experienced traumatic events and resettlement stressors, yet are not often identified with mental health issues in the perinatal period.BackgroundGlobally, perinatal mental health conditions affect up to 20% of women. Many difficulties in accessing mental health care in pregnancy exist for women of refugee background including stigma, and cultural and language barriers. Technology can provide an efficient and effective method to overcome some of these barriers.AimTo determine if a digital perinatal mental health screening program is feasible and acceptable for women of refugee background.MethodsThis qualitative evaluation study used focus group and semi-structured telephone interviews with refugee and migrant women from four communities. Interpreters were used with women who spoke little or no English. Data were analysed using both an inductive and deductive approach to thematic analysis.FindingsUnder the three key themes: ‘Women’s experiences of perinatal mental health screening in pregnancy’; ‘Barriers and enablers to accessing ongoing mental health care’ and ‘Improvements to the program: the development of audio versions’, women found the program feasible and acceptable.DiscussionScreening using a mobile device offered women more privacy and opened up discussions with midwives on emotional health. Improvements in service coordination and access to further mental health management for women is required.ConclusionPerinatal mental health screening is an acceptable and feasible option for women of refugee background. Integrated models of care, case management, and patient navigators are options for improvements in uptake of referral and treatment services.     

“Susie Bubble is a Sign of The Times”

This essay takes as its point of critical departure the digital stardom of Susanna Lau, aka Susie Bubble, the most recognizable and respected fashion blogger in the world, in order to consider the historical formation of success in the postmillennial digital economy. By examining Lau as an embodied sign rather than an exceptional figure of success, I am concerned with the technical, cultural, and economic forces that give shape to hegemonic notions of success and the ideal subject it produces. More specifically, I hope to demonstrate the cultural frames that structure our ways of seeing and recognizing successful individuals in the post millennium by highlighting the gendered and racial construction of the ideal Web 2.0 subject. The aim of my discussion is to show that the discursive construction of Lau's success is reflective of emerging global patterns born out of the rising significance of Asians and young women (especially young Asian women) as consumers and producers in the digital economy.     

Sequential Neighborhood Effects: The Effect of Long-Term Exposure to Concentrated Disadvantage on Children’s Reading and Math Test Scores

Prior research has suggested that children living in a disadvantaged neighborhood have lower achievement test scores, but these studies typically have not estimated causal effects that account for neighborhood choice. Recent studies used propensity score methods to account for the endogeneity of neighborhood exposures, comparing disadvantaged and nondisadvantaged neighborhoods. We develop an alternative propensity function approach in which cumulative neighborhood effects are modeled as a continuous treatment variable. This approach offers several advantages. We use our approach to examine the cumulative effects of neighborhood disadvantage on reading and math test scores in Los Angeles. Our substantive results indicate that recency of exposure to disadvantaged neighborhoods may be more important than average exposure for children’s test scores. We conclude that studies of child development should consider both average cumulative neighborhood exposure and the timing of this exposure.     

The recalcitrance of distance: exploring the infrastructures of sending in migrants’ lives

This paper puts the spatiality of migration, and more specifically post-migration connections, centre stage. It explores the distances confronted by migrants as they stay connected with their pre-migration lives, recognising that these distances are recalcitrant, asymmetrically governed spaces. Indeed, migrants can be understood as experts in the navigation of international space and ‘the tyranny of distance’. Inspired by recent work on urban and translocal infrastructures and taking the empirical example of migration infrastructures in the lives of Poles and Zimbabweans in the UK, looking particularly at the materiality and logistics of sending things back, this paper builds new discussions about migration which take the spatial, physical and grounded elements of migration and translocalism more seriously.     

“Fruits,” “Fags,” and “Dykes”: The Portrayal of Gay/Lesbian Identity in “Nance” Jokes of the ’50s and ’60s

ABSTRACT

What is humorous and how it is interpreted very much depends on the norms and values of a culture at a particular point in time, the characteristics of who is telling jokes, and the makeup of the audience. This article presents archival material and an analysis of an outsider's jokes about gays and lesbians. These were told to primarily heterosexual audiences by a heterosexual comic. They reveal the assumptions Americans held about gays and lesbians throughout the 1950s, 1960s, and a few years into the mid-1970s, when most of these jokes were compiled. Although generalizations about gay/lesbian humor in that period cannot be made from one person's private collection of nearly 1,000 jokes, they do reveal several clear patterns: Much of the humor about male homosexuality is used to debase men and their masculinity, by making them passive, feminine, or weak, except for their hypersexuality. The women are also depicted in the jokes as sexually eager, especially to give oral sex to possibly straight women or acting in the male insertor role. Rarely were the gay/lesbian jokes focused on political issues of discrimination, oppression, or romantic relationships.     

The quiver is full: metonymy and affiliation in 19 Kids and Counting’s depiction of pregnancy loss in advanced maternal age

Abstract

This investigation into the cultural dynamics of gendered, aging bodies attends to a mediated representation of what contemporary biomedicine defines as pregnancy in “advanced maternal age” (AMA). We offer a feminist rhetorical analysis of an episode of TLC’s 19 Kids and Counting entitled “A Duggar Loss,” where 45-year-old matriarch Michelle Duggar experiences pregnancy loss. In the episode, age is reconfigured in discussions of AMA pregnancy through a metonymic substitution and slippage of risk discourses, pre-natal self-care, and technological interaction. Moreover, “A Duggar Loss” mobilizes strategies of expansive affiliation around and through reproductive choice, which appears to align with feminist principles of reproductive autonomy despite the family’s ties to the Quiverfull Movement. This work contributes to feminist studies of aging bodies by suggesting that representations of advanced maternal age pregnancy remain a central, yet undertheorized subject in formulating powerful trans-ideological affiliations that can undermine progressive reproductive politics.     

The Gender of “Energy”: Language,Social Theory,and Cultural Change in Women’s Lands in the United States

Within women’s intentional communities, women use the phrase women’s energy to describe certain social interactions, a sense of community, and ideas about how gender is done or performed. For example, energy can express both difference in communication style between men and women and male dominance in social situations. During my fieldwork in these communities, I explored how this phrase suggests a reference to a precultural female body, but it is also sometimes used to explicitly reject biological reasons for gender difference. The term is easily understandable to a wide range of women from varying class backgrounds and encompasses both the unconscious side of social interactions and a possibility for future change.     

The sexual politics of veggies: Beyoncé’s “commodity veg*ism”

This article explores the way vegan and vegetarian diets have been articulated within neo-liberal post-feminist culture. While these diets have an important role for vegetarian eco-feminists, as signs of resistance against the patriarchal and capitalist exploitative system, in post-feminism they have become sexy and business oriented. This shift is analyzed through the case study of Beyoncé’s involvement with the commercial enterprise “22 days,” a dietary regime that involves the elimination of any animal product for 22 days. Our argument is that while eco-feminists have embraced vegetarian and vegan regimes as ethical and political choices, post-feminism depoliticizes and deradicalizes them. In this way, they become part of an individualistic project that emphasizes empowerment and meritocracy; choice, agency, and responsibilization; and the focus on a healthy, sexy body. Ultimately, the post-feminist articulation of vegan diets promotes a form of “commodity veg*ism,” that is not only devoid of any critical force, but also reproduces existing patterns of discrimination and inequality. We use the term veg*ism to indicate the fluid uptake of vegan and vegetarian diets, whereby the avoidance of animal products relies more on an individual than on ethical and/or political choice.     

The undying ideologies of race and gender: the zombie apocalypse in Telltale’s The Walking Dead: Season One

Telltale Games’ narrative-based The Walking Dead: Season One portrays Lee Everett, an African American male, fighting through the zombie apocalypse. In addition to providing an intriguing character, the game pushes back against racial stereotypes frequently seen and further establishes a zone of oppositional politics. In addition to race, TWD: Season One’s gender ideologies also open up spaces of counterhegemonic politics, specifically through its presentation of abortion. Overall, the seemingly “undying” ideologies of race and gender are reconfigured and questioned in the space of the zombie apocalypse, providing alternative visions of identity politics.     

“The decline of the size of the domestic group in England”

This paper examines the relationship between the number of partnerships ever engaged in and fertility, as measured by the average number of live births. It was found that the larger the number of partnerships in which a woman had been engaged the higher is her fertility. This relationship between partnerships and fertility remains even when such variables as present age, age at first partnership, age at first pregnancy, time lost between unions, time spent in partnerships, time since entry into the first partnership, type of sexual union at first pregnancy, present type of sexual union, and current use or non-use of contraceptives are controlled by cross tabulation. Correlation analysis also bears out the positive relationship between partnerships and fertility. The data for this study came from a sample survey of 4,199 women of lower, and lower middle, socio-economic status who were interviewed in 1971 on the island of Barbados. The authors have confidence in the reliability and validity of their data and hence in their findings and conclusions.

The authors believe that their findings contradict the previously established positive relationship between patterns of stability of sexual unions and fertility in English-speaking Caribbean societies. They conclude that the relationship was either not rigorously examined in the past or else has undergone changes as these societies modernize economically and socially.     

The “smart” body politics of Lena Dunham’s Girls

Since its 2012 debut Girls has received an extraordinary amount of attention and criticism from both academic circles and popular culture critics. It has been critiqued for its depiction of female nudity and its portrayal of female sexual subjecthood. At the center of these debates is how author–star Lena Dunham’s body is positioned and utilized aesthetically and politically. This essay examines the brand of body politics and mode of female sexual subjecthood that the series creates and performs. In order to track how Girls produces this body politics and female sexual subjecthood I position it in relation to earlier feminist television series and indie cinema. This essay argues that Girls’ particular brand of body politics and the mode of female sexual subjecthood it depicts is characterized by emotional intimacy, irony and reflexivity. Furthermore I contend that Girls’ gender politics is enabled by the series’ utilization of a low-key aesthetic and the “smart” tendency, more commonly discussed in relation to American indie cinema.     

“The Freak of Nature”: On Erich Fromm’s Vindication of Binomial Sexuality and the Potentials of the “Homosexual Deviation”

As a Freudian revisionist and neo-Marxist, Erich Fromm (1900–1980) lessened the import of sexuality in the individual psyche but stressed the role played by the sex differential in the distribution of power throughout history and in the post-patriarchal form of matriarchy he envisioned. Seeking to reinforce the male/female divide and heteronormativity, Fromm outlined a “New Science of Man” that readily ignored not only the challenges posed to binary sexuality by post-Darwinian critical sexologies, but also the same-sex complexities evinced by key figures of his own cultural pantheon. Regardless of his declared pursuits, however, Fromm at times expressed insights suitable to undermine the cogency of his most cherished sexual convictions. As a tool for uncovering “indubitable commonsensical axioms” as sources of alienation, Fromm’s conception of “idology” challenges his own sanction of sexual binarity and heterosexuality, thus facilitating an understanding of the individual’s sexual difference as a unique modulation of male/female intermediariness.     

“Talking Back”: The poetry of Suheir Hammad

This paper examines how Suheir Hammad's poetry “talks back” (bell hooks) to dominant gendered discourses. My central argument is that Hammad's influential poetry is constitutive of a discourse of resistance. This paper posits resistance as being counter-hegemonic. It demonstrates how these representations signify a re-articulation of identity and a call for a redistribution of symbolic power. On the basis of a textual analysis of Hammad's poetry, supplemented with an individual interview with the artist involved, some discursive tactics emerge as interventions. From articulating her reactions to the September 11 attacks to her more recent mediated involvement with the uprisings commonly referred to as the “Arab Spring,” such interventions are always subjected to co-optation. Nonetheless, they propelled her into the public sphere, thereby affording opportunities to present creative works that point to stronger possibilities for Middle Eastern womanhood.     

“Old Sodom” and “Dear Dad”: Vanbrugh's Celebration of the Sodomitical Subject in The Relapse

Although the sodomitical discourse of the early-eighteenth century was fraught with competing ideologies and significations, this did not preclude the formation and expression of a sodomitical identity founded upon male same-sex desire. Orvis takes the case of Coupler, the sodomite staged in Sir John Vanbrugh's play The Relapse; or, Virtue in Danger (perf. 1696; pub. 1697). Vanbrugh's portrayal of this unabashed, unapologetic sodomite—a sodomite, moreover, who is accepted by the dramatis personae of the play he inhabits—suggests not only that the possibility of a sodomitical desiring subject was widely acknowledged by the theatergoing public of early-eighteenth-century England, but also, and perhaps more importantly, that sodomites were not always understood as monstrous Others against which normative identities were constructed.