“Stress That I Don't Need”: Gender Expectations and Relationship Struggles Among the Poor

Based on 55 qualitative interviews, this article looks in depth at the ways in which gendered expectations impact heterosexual romantic relationships among low‐income and poor adults in a small, western U.S. city. It finds that contradictory understandings regarding meanings and responsibilities associated with masculinity and femininity present challenges to the formation and sustaining of committed relationships. Although men desired to be providers and heads of household with limited household responsibilities, women wanted men with traditional work ethics but egalitarian perspectives on sharing both income generation and home and family responsibilities. Participants' unrealistic and conflicting gendered relationship expectations combined with economic concerns and social problems associated with economic strain to contribute to relationship tensions and wariness toward romantic involvements.     

The Palestinian Family in Israel: Simultaneous Trends

In this article, I seek to present the spectrum of contemporary family structures in Palestinian society in Israel, focusing on those that emerge in various contexts of changes in education, employment and place of residence. To enable attention to the multiplicity of identities engendered by intersection of the positions of gender/class/nationality and to assess the family patterns that maintain them and are shaped by them, I evaluate relations between two concepts: Connectivity, as proposed by Joseph (1999) and translocational positionality conceived by Anthias (2008). The former relates to the development of a feminine identity that develops in a patriarchal gender context, while the latter refers to the constant negotiation that women conduct with the contexts of their sense of belonging and the manner in which they use various resources. Those concepts help determine whether the process that Palestinian in Israel have been undergoing are accompanied by a greater variety of family patterns.

The article will be based on a study in which I conducted semi-structured, in-depth interviews with Palestinian mothers in Israel. The data were subjected to intersectional analysis from a feminist perspective, enabling study of the group under examination families of Palestinian women –separately from its surrounding society and also revealing the various subgroups comprising this social category.     

A Grounded Theory of Sexual Minority Women and Transgender Individuals’ Social Justice Activism

Psychosocial benefits of activism include increased empowerment, social connectedness, and resilience. Yet sexual minority women (SMW) and transgender individuals with multiple oppressed statuses and identities are especially prone to oppression-based experiences, even within minority activist communities. This study sought to develop an empirical model to explain the diverse meanings of social justice activism situated in SMW and transgender individuals’ social identities, values, and experiences of oppression and privilege. Using a grounded theory design, 20 SMW and transgender individuals participated in initial, follow-up, and feedback interviews. The most frequent demographic identities were queer or bisexual, White, middle-class women with advanced degrees. The results indicated that social justice activism was intensely relational, replete with multiple benefits, yet rife with experiences of oppression from within and outside of activist communities. The empirically derived model shows the complexity of SMW and transgender individuals’ experiences, meanings, and benefits of social justice activism.     

BDSM Role Fluidity: A Mixed-Methods Approach to Investigating Switches Within Dominant/Submissive Binaries

This mixed-methods study of BDSM investigates the nuances of BDSM participants’ role identities, role frequencies, and role fluidities—shifts in identities and play across time, location, scene, and play partner. Data were gathered from 202 online surveys and 25 semistructured interviews about participants’ roles given their gender and sexual identities. These data reveal that men tend to self-identify as Dominant, Master, Top, or Sadist (DMTS) and always perform dominant roles, while women tend to self-identify as Submissive, Slave, Bottom, or Masochist (SSBM) and always perform submissive roles. Although this would seem to support the theory that BDSM reinforces gendered dominant/submissive binaries, further analyses indicate that women and queer/pansexual individuals disrupt this binary through their Switch identities and roles. Switching and queer identities, thus, offer the possibility for transforming dominant/submissive and other binaries.     

The politics of leisure and labor mobilities: discourses of tourism and transnational migration in Central Java,Indonesia

This article presents narratives and tropes of transnational tourism from a less considered perspective: rural migrant-origin villagers of Central Java. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Cilacap and Yogyakarta, I analyze how and why some former temporary labor migrants depict their typically harsh experiences in terms of tourism and leisure. Addressing the tendency in current research to approach labor migration and tourism as mutually exclusive or unrelated class categories and experiences, I consider the ways in which former migrants and non-migrant villagers evaluate or identify labor migration in terms of gender, class, religious, and ethno-national subjectivities associated with ‘tourist’ and/or ‘migrant’ categories. Popular and commercial imaginations of leisure travel and tourism importantly shape the subjectivities and positionalities of precarious labor migrants. Foregrounding the relations between tourism and labor migration reveals the multi-scalar ways in which associated discourses and infrastructures of both mutually shape and constitute global socio-economic inequalities.     

Homing blogs as ambivalent spaces for feminine agency

This article discusses a form of lifestyle blogging where women blog about their homes and everyday lives. In these homing blogs, self-representations are characteristically spatially demarcated within the private sphere of the home. As these repeated representations of women in their homes take place in the public space of the internet, homing blogs work towards naturalizing the home as a women’s sphere. Written and commented on mostly by other women, homing blogs represent a feminine form of self-expression and communication that functions as a discursive expression of ongoing social, economic, and cultural changes in affluent Western societies. In this article, Finnish versions of these homing blogs are analysed in the cultural and political context of contemporary Finland, and discussed as a form of intimate publics that reverses the gender politics of other historical, semi-public spaces for the exercise of women’s agency, such as the salon.     

Producing mobility: visual narratives of the rural migrant worker in Chinese television

This paper employs literatures of mobility to explore the ways which rural migrant workers in China are represented publicly via television drama. Through an analysis of the popular serial Mingong, the paper examines the underlying politics of contemporary migration in China through three themes: the territorialisation of rural and urban spaces; the embodiment of boundaries via corporeal practices and subjectivities; and the politicisation of rural migrant desires. This analysis demonstrates the significance of television in crafting discursive understandings of mobility and migrants that are suffused with contemporary governmentalities of generating but also managing and excluding migration.     

Gender differences in the experience of loneliness in U.S. Chinese older adults

This study aimed to explore the gender differences in the experiences of loneliness in the U.S. Chinese older population. The data were drawn from the PINE study, a population-based study of U.S. Chinese adults aged 60 years and older. The Revised–University of California at Los Angeles Loneliness Scale (R-UCLA) was used to measure loneliness. Overall, older Chinese women (28.3%) had a higher rate of loneliness than older men (23.3%, p < .001). In particular, women were more likely to sometimes or often experience a lack of companionship than men (22.9% vs. 17.3%, p < .001). Older women living with fewer people, with lower health status, poorer quality of life, and worsening health changes over the past year were more likely than men to experience any loneliness. This study indicates that gender differences exist in the prevalence, symptoms, and correlates of loneliness. Longitudinal studies should be undertaken to understand gender differences in risk factors and outcomes of loneliness.     

Video gaming in adolescence: factors associated with leisure time use

The geographies of the current generation of young people are markedly distinct from previous generations by virtue of their access to a virtual playground. The vast majority of young people now engage in video gaming as a leisure activity. Drawing on findings from the 2009/2010 WHO Health Behaviour in School-aged Children study this paper set out to investigate the factors that might be associated with higher levels of video gaming. Information was collected from 4404 school students aged 11, 13 and 15 years, using anonymised self-completed questionnaires. Higher usage was defined as game play exceeding two hours a day. Separate analyses were conducted for boys and girls. For both genders higher levels of game playing was associated with early adolescence, opposite sex friends and minimal parental mediation. Bullying and going to bed hungry were associated with higher usage for boys only, while life satisfaction and family activities were linked to girls’ game playing only. Parents were identified as effective mediators of young people’s video game usage. The study identified gendered motivations for higher levels of game play, suggesting different interventions for boys and girls may be required in order for young people to create a balanced approach to video gaming.     

Diasporic youth identities of uncertainty and hope: second-generation Albanian experiences of transnational mobility in an era of economic crisis in Greece

This paper explores various dimensions of ‘gender’ and ‘mobility’ among immigrant youth from a transnational perspective in an era of economic crisis. The extent and parameters of continuity, contestation and change in migrant youth identities are analysed and we suggest that neither gender nor identity are stable categories but are embedded in sociocultural particularities both in the country of residence (Greece) but also in the country of origin (Albania). Through in-depth interviews with 52 participants, all second-generation Albanian immigrants in Greece born to two Albanian parents, the paper addresses youth identification in relation to gendered representations of belonging. The narrative accounts that we have selected and analysed reflect the emotional challenges, constraints and creativity of Albanian youth.