Alternative Domesticities

Abstract

This special issue responds to a growing body of literature at the nexus of studies on queer/sexuality and home/domesticity. It builds on this existing research that seeks to destabilize the heteronormative ideology of home and domesticity, while also opening up this important space—and its constituent practices—for a plurality of identity formations and subjective experiences. Additionally, it addresses calls from lesbian, gay, and queer studies to shift our attention from public spaces and community places to the domestic. This special issue introduction speaks to continuing investigations of how different groups of people seek to creatively construct intimate relations across time, space, and place. Towards this end, the five articles in this special issue are introduced in the context of their contribution to a cross-disciplinary approach to alternative domesticities.     

Reading the Queer Domestic Aesthetic Discourse

Abstract

The stereotype of the gay man as arbiter of domestic style and design is widely recognized. Robin Williams humorously referenced this in a joke: “We had gay burglars the other night,” he notes, “They broke in and rearranged the furniture.” What remains unclear is the ways in which stereotypes relate to the lives of ordinary people and the homes they inhabit. This article brings together the idiosyncrasies of queer design that circulate at a number of levels in a mainly transatlantic discourse—thanks to the help of mass media, television programs, and a niche of scholarly literature—with a study of ordinary homes belonging to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) lives in a global city. It is argued that this wider queer aesthetic penetrates everyday space and shapes homes in complicated ways; there is a tension between these two domains. The empirical research draws from in-depth semi-structured interviews with Londoners gathered as part of a larger project on sexual minority identity at home in London, UK. Looking to these domestic case studies allows for a spatialized reading that challenges celebrated and exclusive interiors. Offering a timely and distinct architectural approach looking to the everyday users of ordinary domestic space aims to modestly move in another direction towards a model of diversity, opening up queer domesticity and sexual minority identity to multiple representations.     

The Backroom Effect in Retail Operations

Traditional inventory models fail to take into account the dynamics between the retail sales floor and the backroom, commonly used by retailers for extra storage. When a replenishment order for a given item arrives at a retail store, it may not fit on the allocated shelf space, making backroom storage necessary. In this article, we introduce the backroom effect (BRE) as a consequence of misalignment of case pack size, shelf space, and reorder point. This misalignment results from the fragmented nature of inventory policy decision making in the retail industry and affects basic trade‐offs in inventory models. We specify conditions under which the BRE exists, quantify the expected amount of backroom inventory, derive an optimal short‐term inventory policy, and assess the impact of the BRE on the optimal inventory policy and total costs. Our results indicate that ignoring the BRE leads to artificially high reorder points and higher total costs. The paper concludes with a discussion of theoretical and managerial implications.     

Family configuration and adolescent sexual attitudes and behavior

Several measures of family configuration, derived from the number, age, and sex of siblings and the number of parents, were related to adolescent sexual attitudes and behavior in a sample of 836 high school-aged teenagers from two Western states. Zero-order correlations showed that sexual intercourseexperience was less common among adolescents who lived with both parents and also among those who had younger siblings. Similarly, the zero-order correlations showed least permissiveattitudes among adolescents who had more siblings, especially younger siblings, and among those who lived with both parents. Controlling for adolescents' age, sex, race, religion, church attendance, and parents' educational attainment, however, essentially eliminated the relationships between family configuration variables and sexual attitudes and behavior. Only parents' marital structure, reflecting whether adolescents lived with both original parents or not, continued to be weakly related to adolescents' sexual attitudes and behvior.     

Judgmental Forecasting: Cognitive Reflection and Decision Speed

This research analyzes how individual differences affect performance in judgmental time‐series forecasting. Decision makers with the ability to balance intuitive judgment with cognitive deliberation, as measured by the cognitive reflection test, tend to have lower forecast errors. This relationship holds when controlling for intelligence. Furthermore, forecast errors increase for very fast or very slow decisions. We provide evidence that forecast performance can be improved by manipulating decision speed.     

Testing for center effects on survival and competing risks outcomes using pseudo-value regression

In multi-center studies, the presence of a cluster effect leads to correlation among outcomes within a center and requires different techniques to handle such correlation. Testing for a cluster effect can serve as a pre-screening step to help guide the researcher towards the appropriate analysis. With time to event data, score tests have been proposed which test for the presence of a center effect on the hazard function. However, sometimes researchers are interested in directly modeling other quantities such as survival probabilities or cumulative incidence at a fixed time. We propose a test for the presence of a center effect acting directly on the quantity of interest using pseudo-value regression, and derive the asymptotic properties of our proposed test statistic. We examine the performance of our proposed test through simulation studies in both survival and competing risks settings. The proposed test may be more powerful than tests based on the hazard function in settings where the center effect is time-varying. We illustrate the test using a multicenter registry study of survival and competing risks outcomes after hematopoietic cell transplantation.

     

Investigating important interactions between water and food security for child health in Burkina Faso

Failures in either water systems or food systems, or a combination of system failures, could provide the underlying explanation for continued high levels of malnutrition in many regions. We focus on child health and offer the first spatially explicit analysis of the interaction between water source and food insecurity on children’s health in Burkina Faso, an African nation that continues to struggle with poor children’s health. We combine data from the 2010 Demographic and Health Survey, a small USAID water quality survey collected from community wells, and remotely sensed imagery. Results suggest that, in a few cases, reliable and clean water sources are positively correlated to children’s linear growth and weight gain, although in many regions, the interaction with community-level food production is critical to understanding health outcomes. The results also suggest that maternal health and nutrition during pregnancy and breastfeeding are foundational to the healthy development of young children. In all, the findings provide evidence of the importance of multi-sectoral interventions targeted at improving children’s health.