The Differing Values of Multigeneration and First‐Generation Farmers: Their Influence on the Structure of Agriculture at the Rural‐Urban Interface

Recognizing the inherent pressures on farm families and farmland, USDA has been developing policies and programs that simultaneously attempt to retain existing farm families on the landscape, recruit new farmers, and create lasting economic opportunities rooted in agriculture. In this article we argue that to date there has been an overemphasis on economic and structural approaches and a systematic discounting of the way individual farmer and farm household motivations can differ as they relate to the farm household life cycle, enterprise growth, adaptation, and reproduction. We use a sociological lens to qualitatively and quantitatively examine the social differences between multigeneration and first‐generation farmers at the rural‐urban interface by exploring how economic and noneconomic values influence succession plans and enterprise structure. We find that the answers to these questions are complex, layered, and not static, as farm households cycle through the life course. We describe how the differences between young and old multigeneration and first‐generation farmers can influence the structure of agriculture at the rural‐urban interface, and conclude with some practical policy recommendations.     

Sexual Prejudice Among Barbadian University Students

The level of sexual prejudice on university campuses has implications for the health and well-being of gay and lesbian students, and research on sexual prejudice in the Eastern Caribbean is extremely limited. This study assesses the individual attitudes of 251 Barbadian students toward lesbian and gay people using two psychometric inventories. It also examines differences in attitudes as a function of demographic variables including gender, religiosity, and personal acquaintance with lesbian or gay people. The Barbadian students evidenced diverse attitudes, with the average student displaying a moderate amount of sexual prejudice toward lesbian and gay people. Religiosity predicted more negative attitudes toward both lesbians and gay men. Being male predicted more sexual prejudice against gay men, but not against lesbians. Finally, personal acquaintance with a gay or lesbian person did not have a statistically significant relationship with sexual prejudice. This study is among the first of its kind and may serve as a guide to other researchers seeking to further explore attitudes toward lesbian and gay people among Eastern Caribbean students or among Barbadians in general.     

Incorporating Information from Neuroscience and Endocrinology Regarding Sexual Orientation into Social Work Education

ABSTRACT

The brains of heterosexual males and heterosexual females are different. Moreover, the brains of gay men are similar to those in heterosexual females, whereas the brains of lesbians are similar to those in heterosexual males. Gender-atypical features in gays and lesbians are not limited to brain structures but extend to other physical features (auditory function, finger print patterns, relative size of index and ring fingers) and interest patterns and behaviors. The research supporting these postulates is reviewed. The gestational processes that might explain the differences in brain structure and function corresponding with sexual orientation are reviewed. A discussion of the physiological bases for the expression of gender-related traits and a discussion of factors contributing to sexual identity are provided. Throughout the article, alternative ways to think about gender are suggested. The importance of integrating the information presented in this article into the curriculum of social work education is explained.     

Bringing nations in: Some methodological and conceptual issues in connecting feminisms with nationhood and nationalisms

The recent explosion of case studies about women's involvements in national projects reveals considerable diversity ranging from hostility and alienation, to affiliation or participation. Feminist analysis is just starting to explore the causes and effects of such diversity, however, since a single, common relationship usually was theorized between ‘gender’ and ‘nation’. This article addresses some methodological and conceptual issues concerning the systematic comparison of these diverse relationships. It is argued that comparison is required to explain ‘linkages between ideologies, religions and conflicts’ from a gendered perspective and to incorporate the wide variety of women's experiences regarding national projects.

Especially significant in this diversity is that, while national projects in ‘the West’ are rarely a site for women's liberation and most ‘western’ feminists are alienated from nationalism, globally women are more often mobilized by national projects than any other form of politics (Bystydzienski 1992). Moreover, some women's movements affiliate with national projects with positive outcomes. To understand how women's diverse involvements in national projects affect domestic and international conflicts, we need to identify factors producing this diversity in gender/nation relationships. The article reports on a ‘test’ of six hypotheses concerning three modal cases drawn from a larger project eventually concerning thirty countries.     

Reimagining Yentl While Revisiting Feminism in the Light of Relational Approaches to Gender and Sex

This article is an imaginative endeavor based upon the short story “Yentl the Yeshiva Boy” written by Isaac Bashevis Singer (1982). In taking creative license and entering Yentl's world, a new voice and narrative emerges for her and the major characters in the story. Using psychoanalytic relational theories on multiple self-states and postmodern gender and sexuality perspectives, this article undertakes fleshing out the characters and the motives of Bashevis Singer in writing the story. From each character's point of view we learn more of Yentl's subjectivity, her multiply oriented desires from multiple self-states, and expand Singer's story from its original linear course. In Singer's work, Yentl is a two dimensional girl possessing the “soul of a man,” which would mean in the 19th-century Poland Jewish shtetl world that she longs to study Torah/Talmud in a yeshiva. From this paradoxical premise the story eventually ends with Yentl surrendering all claim to the male world of study and then vanishing from the story altogether. This article plays off of this original premise—a male soul within the body of a female—but, instead of seeing this as a binary kind of conflict that must be resolved, that one must be masculine or feminine, girl or boy, heterosexual or homosexual, now will allow for the multiplicity of selves, wishes, and desires of Yentl, a postmodern woman living in a premodernity world.

“Truth itself is often concealed in such a way that the harder you look for it, the harder it is to find.” (Singer, 1982 ——— . ( 1982 ). The Collected Stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer . New York , NY : Farrar, Straus and Giroux . [Google Scholar], p. 169)     

Household Composition and Poverty among Female‐Headed Households with Children: Differences by Race and Residence*

Abstract We examine race and residential variation in the prevalence of female‐headed households with children and how household composition is associated with several key economic well‐being outcomes using data from the 2000 5% Public Use Microdata Sample of the U.S. Census. Special attention is paid to cohabiting female‐headed households with children and those that are headed by a single grandmother caring for at least one grandchild, because these are becoming more common living arrangements among female‐headed households with children. We find that in 2000: (1) cohabiting and grandmother female‐headed households with children comprised over one‐fourth of all female‐headed households with children, (2) household poverty is highest for female‐headed households with children that do not have other adult household earners, (3) earned income from other household members lifts many cohabiting and grandparental female‐headed households out of poverty, as does retirement and Social Security income for grandmother headed households, and (4) poverty is highest among racial/ethnic minorities and for female‐headed households with children in nonmetro compared to central cities and suburban areas.     

Explaining Mothers' Ambivalence Toward Their Adult Children

Interest in applying the concept of ambivalence to the study of intergenerational relations has increased in recent years. However, few empirical studies of this issue have been conducted. Using data from a study of 189 mothers aged 60 and over, the authors examine sources of ambivalence regarding the quality of their relationships with adult children. They hypothesized that adult children's failure to achieve and maintain normative adult statuses and financial independence and mother's developmental stage will predict ambivalent assessments of the relationship. Regression analyses supported these hypotheses and also revealed that the variables predicting ambivalence differed from those that predicted closeness and interpersonal stress.     

What Difference Does Difference Make? Position and Privilege in the Field

Feminist standpoint theorists contend that the researcher's positionality affects all aspects of the research process—from the articulation of a research question to the analysis and presentation of the data. They argue that this influence becomes problematic when researchers occupying privileged positions in society elect to study those who are marginalized on the basis of race, class, and gender. In this article, we examine and compare the backstages of two distinct, cross-racial, ethnographic projects in order to understand how and to what extent the researcher's positionality shapes the structure and substance of the research study. We discover that the influence of racial privilege (and other components of researcher identity) on the research process is subtle and complex. It is apparent in the assumptions and narratives the researcher uses to make sense of her experiences in the field as well as in the relationship between the researcher and her respondents. We consider the implications of this in terms of the integrity of the ethnographies we produced, as well as for feminist research more generally.     

Regional differences in gender—role attitudes: Variations by gender and race

In this paper, we use data from the General Social Survey (1985–1998) to examine the effects of region on gender-role attitudes, focusing on variations across time by gender and race. Regional differences in gender-role attitudes persisted into the 1990s for white men and women, with southern whites holding more traditional attitudes than those held by whites in other parts of the country. For white men and women and for black men, the effect of region changed little between the 1980s and 1990s. However, for black women, region was a prominent factor affecting their gender-role attitudes in the 1980s, but by the 1990s its effect had diminished considerably.