Eastern Sociological Society Presidential Address: Globalizing Gender Issues: Many Voices,Different Choices1

Why are the important gender inequality issues different in various countries around the world? This question is answered using a comparative perspective on extant research about gender inequalities in the regions of the world. Just as there is diversity among individual women, based on their intersecting axes of age, race, ethnicity, class, marital status, sexual orientation, religion, or other characteristics, I argue that there is diversity across countries in their gender inequalities based on intersecting axes of transnational, regional, cross‐cutting, and unique national issues that structure gendered or feminist concerns within any country. Global and regional dynamics are the interrelated foundations on which broad gender inequalities are built. Major transnational dynamics include neoliberal economics, migration, and violence, while regional patterns include nation building and gendered inequalities in education and property ownership. On the other hand, unique national trajectories and cross‐cutting themes, found in a few nations in each region, add much greater variation to those basic inequalities. Some of those cross‐cutting themes are problems generated by health status and health services, the relationship of religion to the state, and war or militarism.     

中国性别传播研究论纲

新中国建设60年，妇女在政策、法律、社会组织和经济发展等方面的地位都有很大提高，但在就业、教育、医疗等方面也有诸多不足。相对于西方媒介的“象征性歼灭”，中国的性别传播研究更应当关注“实质性歼灭”也即堕产女婴这一类实质而严重的社会问题。中国古代的性别哲学理念．是我们从事性别传播研究的一个尚未得到充分开掘的巨大宝藏。它所蕴含的阴阳同体、共生。并相互转化的辩证思想，可以帮助我们更多元地面对现代性的复杂世界。从而逐步创设和建构起我们自身体系性的中国性别传播研究。     

When the Learning Disabled Go to College

Abstract

During the last decade, federal laws have provided for remedial education in elementary and secondary schools for students with learning disabilities, preparing large numbers of them for college. Federal law also mandates helping learning-disabled students with their needs once they matriculate. Declining numbers of high school graduates in the aftermath of the baby boom have made more colleges open their doors to these students. The disabilities, and the accommodations they require, arrive in college with the rest of a student's baggage, demanding attention. Colleges and universities have chosen a variety of approaches, from specific remedial programs and individual accomodations according to need to more general programs. Some colleges pretend these disabilities do not exist and seem oblivious to their presence on campus. Learning disabilities can have an impact in every class and lecture hall and can contribute to unhappiness and the college's attrition rate. On the other hand, responsive and responsible programs provide students with the resources for the same education, honors, and opportunities as their nondisabled peers.     

War and security,women and gender: an overview of the issues

This article addresses the gender division of war and the significance of men and masculinity in processes of militarisation. Three phases of the continuum of war are considered. In periods of war-readiness, societies see a diversion of spending from social provision to the armed forces, accompanied by an increase in patriarchal ideology and authority. The actual waging of wars calls for the delivery of extreme but disciplined violence, and combat training shapes masculinity to this purpose. Armed conflict often involves a massive sexual assault on women. Women have recently intervened internationally to argue that if peace is to be more than a mere cessation of hostilities, ‘security’ must be redefined to mean the satisfaction of human needs, including comprehensive safety for women. Women's peace movements, worldwide, are theorising that gender power relations are significant among the causes of war, and transformative change in how we ‘live’ gender can be a significnt resource for peace.     

Doing Gender Well and Differently in Dirty Work: The Case of Exotic Dancing

This article explores how a group of exotic dancers do gender and manage the stigma associated with their work and identities. We draw upon stigma management strategies from the dirty work literature and illuminate the doing of gender in these strategies. We also contribute to the debate that gender can be done well and differently through simultaneous, multiple enactments of femininity and masculinity. We consider the experiences of 21 exotic dancers working in a chain of UK exotic dancing clubs and conclude that in order to be good at their job, exotic dancers are expected to do gender well, that is, perform exaggerated expressions of femininity. However, we also theorize that for some dirty workers, specifically exotic dancers as sex workers, doing gender well will not be enough to reposition bad girls (bad, dirty work) into good girls (good, clean work). Finally, we propose that doing gender well will have different consequences in different types of work, thereby extending our findings to other dirty work occupations and organizations in general.     

Shy but Getting By? An Examination of the Complex Links Among Shyness,Coping, and Socioemotional Functioning in Childhood

The purpose of the current study was to test a conceptual model of the mediated and moderated associations among shyness, coping strategies, and socioemotional functioning in middle childhood. Participants were 358 children (177 boys) aged 9–13 years (M = 10.16 years, SD =.95). Children completed self‐report assessments of shyness, coping style in response to a social stressor, internalizing problems, and peer difficulties. Among the results, shyness was positively associated with internalizing symptoms and negatively related to perceptions of peer difficulties. However, both of these associations were partially mediated by internalizing coping styles. Moreover, problem‐solving coping moderated these mediated pathways: among children who reported higher levels of problem‐solving coping, the associations between internalizing coping and outcomes were attenuated. Several gender differences also emerged, suggesting that problem‐solving coping may be particularly useful for shy boys. Results are discussed in terms of the complex but potentially critical role of coping in shy children's socioemotional functioning.     

Is Domestic Violence a Gender Issue,or a Human Issue?

Abstract

Domestic violence, like all violence, is a human issue. It is not merely a gender issue. Classifying spousal and partner violence as a women's issue, rather than a human issue, is erroneous. In domestic relations, women are as inclined as men to engage in physically abusive acts. Yet most reports appearing in the popular press, and in scholarly journals, have framed the issue as essentially a masculine form of assaultive behavior, thereby imbedding into the national consciousness a false and inaccurate view of the problem. This article presents the results of selected empirical studies that contradict the popular view of domestic violence, briefly focuses on the phenomenon as it relates to race, offers several elucidating case accounts, and suggests that the popular view of domestic violence not only contributes to men's increasing legal and social defenselessness, it also leads to social policies that obstruct efforts to address the problem of domestic violence successfully.     

Book Reviews

Critical appraisal of research studies forms a central role within the application and uptake of evidence‐based approaches within health and social care. While there are established checklists for evaluating quantitative research, this is not the case for qualitative research. This article outlines the process of developing an evaluative tool for qualitative studies, reflecting the uniqueness of the associated paradigm, and illustrates its use by reference to three qualitative research papers appraised within a systematic review of community‐based rehabilitation services. At its centre are concerns with the context of the study and the way the data are collected and analysed. Use of such an evaluative template opens the way for the quality of qualitative research to be judged in a systematic manner and for qualitative research to take its rightful place within debates over what works, where, when and how within health and social care policy and practice.     

The sociolinguistics of exogamy: Dialect acquisition in a Zhuang village

Adult dialect acquisition is typically studied in relatively idiosyncratic situations where adults happen to move to another community. But how does dialect acquisition play out in indigenous minority societies that have systemic adult migration due to exogamy? Do the in‐married spouses acquire the local variety? Why or why not? How much do they acquire? We investigated an indigenous Zhuang community in southern China. Sociophonetic analyses of in‐married women and local villagers show that the in‐married women acquired the local variety in most respects but not in aspirated consonants. To the limits of their phonological ability as adult learners, the wives followed the local sociolinguistic norm: they acquired the husbands’ variety. By contrast, in societies experiencing greater external cross‐cultural contact, exogamous women sometimes use their liminal status to challenge such gendered sociolinguistic expectations. Comparing the present study with outcomes in different societies, we lay the foundation for a typology of the sociolinguistics of exogamy. In this way, we help expand the study of language and gender toward new horizons and under‐represented social settings.     

On Sabır and Agency

This article focuses on the pious practice of sab?r (patience) within the context of the weaving neighborhoods in Konya, Turkey. Through an ethnographic analysis of the everyday politics of the practice of sab?r, which is central to labor relations, this article adds to and complicates feminist analyses of labor politics and the economy by highlighting the interconnected nature of ethical religious practice and labor politics. Additionally, I argue for the need to go beyond the question of whether women have or lack agency as subjects in feminist analyses of labor politics and relationships, and instead point out the need for the empirical examination of specific, contextually-bound practical conditions through and within which women cultivate various forms of ethical action and subjectivities. In pointing out the importance of a project that analyzes operations of power with a keen awareness of context, this essay presents an ethnographically grounded discussion of pious practice within the context of Konya's weaving neighborhoods, underscoring the effects of the coexistence of exploitation and empowerment on the construction of women weavers’ selfhoods.