Decontextualizing disability in the crime mystery genre: the case of the invisible handicap

The depiction of physical impairments in popular culture reflects as well as shapes public attitudes towards persons with disabilities. Scholars have begun to document images of disabilities (the 'what') in venues such as literary fiction, motion pictures, advertisements, and television programming but there has been less attention directed toward exploring the techniques through which images are delivered (the 'how'). In this paper we explore how the story telling devices of disability—in-dialogue versus disability-in-action and the endowment of characters with compensating characteristics are employed in one segment of popular culture—literary fiction, one genre within this class—the detective novel, and one type of physical impairment—the deaf detective. Our findings suggest that the use of these devices is historically rooted and how they transform handicaps and disabilities into physical impairments thus decontextualizing what is essentially a social issue into one that is ascribed to individuals.     

Menstrual time: The sociocognitive mapping of “the menstrual cycle”

Despite the many angles from which the biological phenomenon now known as “the menstrual cycle” has been addressed, no work explicitly focuses on how social groups actually draw lines around and mentally partition these complex biological processes into discrete temporal units. This paper examines not the meaning of “the menstrual cycle,” per se, but hegemonic Western culture's intersubjective notions of how to carve up this inherently unstructured phenomenon in the first place. Although sociologists of cognition have still to consider this sociomental structuring of “the menstrual cycle” as a case of mental cartography, and sociologists of time have still to consider “menstrual time” as a case of sociotemporality, I conclude that the mental mapping out of what constitutes the elements of this rhythm is a highly social act with serious implications for women's lives.     

Population planning and change in Singapore

Population planning in Singapore has always been linked to economic planning. Lacking natural resources on an island 536 sq. kms. in size, the physical carrying capacity was not large so that the government had to resort to careful economic planning to overcome this constraint. The “stop at 2” population policy of 1965–87 was designed to support the economic plans to improve the quality of life of the people. Restraint of population growth was promoted as a necessary move serving the common good of Singaporeans as the country struggled in her early years of independence to build a nation. By 1983, however, Singapore switched from being antinatal to being pronatal. The environmental determinism school that influenced population planning gave way to environmental possibilism in which man is the main agent determining his own actions in the population-environment relationship. Technology has allowed the leadership of Singapore to make use of the global economy as its hinterland. By concentrating on the high-end service sector, such as mercantile banking or currency markets, Singapore has used the new information age of computers to take advantage of the changing world market. The “quality” population required to do this job is missing, thus the “have 3 or more if you can afford it” policy.     

Female domestic violence offenders: their attachment security, trauma symptoms, and personality organization

Unlike male domestic violence offenders, female domestic violence offenders have traditionally been overlooked in research and theory, despite the fact that females also have high rates of domestic violence perpetration. Towards the aim of extending extant research on male and female pepetrators of domestic violence, we examined attachment style, trauma symptoms, and personality organization in 33 female offenders receiving mandated treatment for domestic violence. These offenders were compared to 32 nonoffending women receiving psychological treatment. The Experiences in Close Relationships Revised (ECR-Revised) was used to examine adult attachment, the Trauma Symptom Inventory (TSI) was used to examine trauma symptomology, and finally, the Millon Clinical Multiaxial Inventory III (MCMI-III) was used to examine cluster B personality traits. Analyses indicated that female domestic violence offenders reported less attachment security, more trauma-related symptoms, and more personality psychopathology (Antisocial, Borderline, and Dependent Subscales) than did nonoffender clinical comparison women.     

Representational Projects and Interacting Forms of Knowledge

This paper focuses on the concept of the reified and consensual universes in the theory of social representations, and the relationship between them. Having examined the different ways in which Moscovici discusses this concept, and the different ways in which these discussions have been interpreted, I will suggest that many of the criticisms levelled at this facet of social representations theory appear somewhat misplaced. However, it does seem that some aspects of the concept of the consensual and the reified universes are rather under-developed within the theory as a whole. It will be suggested that the recent addition of the notion of the representational project to the theory of social representations goes some way towards addressing some of these emergent issues, most notably with regards to the relationship between knowledges from different spheres. As an example, the area of representations of health and illness will be considered: drawing on work that takes the perspective of the sociology of scientific knowledge, it will be suggested that the theory of social representations needs to make the possibility of a bi-directional relationship between knowledge from the fields of scientific and common sense understanding more explicit.