Punishment and pleasure: women, food and the imprisoned body1

Food assumes enormous importance in prison: for many prisoners it conditions their life in custody and, in many respects, is symbolic of the prison experience. This article explores the complex relationship between gender, food and imprisonment through an analysis of data obtained from in‐depth interviews and group discussions conducted in three women's prisons in England. The findings indicate that, in prison, where control is taken away as the prisoner and her body become the objects of external forces, food is experienced not only as part of the disciplinary machinery, but also as a powerful source of pleasure, resistance and rebellion. The implications of such findings for health promotion in the prison context are discussed. Here, the pleasures and consolations of food may well constitute a redefinition of what it is to be healthy in this context, one that challenges the dominant meaning constructed in current health promotional discourse.     

‘People take for granted that you know how to dance Salsa and Merengue’: transnational diasporas,visual discourses and racialized knowledge in Sweden's contemporary Latin music boom

In recent years US-based Latin culture has gained worldwide popularity through artists such as Jennifer Lopez, Shakira and Ricky Martin. Taking the national context as an emerging vantage point from which to consider globalization processes, this article explores the growing popularity of ‘Latin music’ as a specific contemporary expression of global popular culture and its impact on young Latina women's everyday lives and identity work in Sweden. Based on interviews and focus group discussions with 29 high school young Latina women between 14–20 years of age, born and/or brought up in Sweden, the article examines how musical arenas and their appeal to hybrid identities are construed in contemporary articulations of commodity cultures and representations. In the particular context of Sweden, the article looks at how young Latina women negotiate popular representations of latinidad through an intentional and unintentional embodiment of these images. It is argued that while visual discourses and representations of popular culture tend to fix young women in preconceived ideas of ethnicity, race and gender, the young women themselves find a myriad of ways of reconstructing stereotyping ideas and creating diasporic links with other Latino/a diasporas, especially in the United States.     

Goffman's sociology: An inspiring resource for developing public relations theory

This article introduces key concepts in Erving Goffman's sociology, which are advocated to be important to our understanding of social interaction and the study of interpersonal relationships with internal and external publics. The concepts of impression management, framing, footing and face have bearing upon essential notions in public relations: relationships, identification and image. Thus, it is predicted that development of these concepts in public relations research will deepen our understanding of communication processes that have important implications for the relation of publics in public relations.     

Disclosure and Relationship Satisfaction in Families

The present study developed a theoretical framework for understanding the social mechanisms underlying disclosure and its link with relationship satisfaction in a full family design. A study among 262 intact families, consisting of 2 children and 2 adults and involving 1,048 individuals, applied the social relations model. Results showed that disclosure was more important to satisfaction in horizontal relationships than vertical ones. Further, relationship‐specific disclosure was more important to satisfaction than dispositional disclosure. These results have implications for the examination of relationship regulation and maintenance in (non)voluntary relationships and the development of psychosocial problems in parent‐ child relationships.     

The value of the aggregate data approach in meta-analysis with time-to-event outcomes

Collecting individual patient data has been described as the 'gold standard' for undertaking meta-analysis. If studies involve time-to-event outcomes, conducting a meta-analysis based on aggregate data can be problematical. Two meta-analyses of randomized controlled trials with time-to-event outcomes are used to illustrate the practicality and value of several proposed methods to obtain summary statistic estimates. In the first example the results suggest that further effort should be made to find unpublished trials. In the second example the use of aggregate data for trials where no individual patient data have been supplied allows the totality of evidence to be assessed and indicates previously unrecognized heterogeneity.     

Perceptions of variation and change in German and Swedish address1

German and Swedish speakers diverge in contemporary address practice. The Swedish T form has become unmarked, with V limited to very specific situations. Apart from some specific T or V contexts, German now has coexistent systems, one with T, the other with V as the unmarked form, with different speakers or networks preferring one or the other. In an ongoing project, focus groups and participant observation in Austria, (eastern and western) Germany and Sweden and with Swedish speakers in Finland have identified factors and contexts determining degree of social distance and hence address choice. First name use is more marked than T use in Swedish but the two are closely linked in German. National variation is more substantial in Swedish than in German. In both languages there is some reversal of liberalization and distaste for imposition of the address form.     

When Injustice Gets Old: A Systematic Review of Trans Aging

A lack of knowledge regarding the needs and experiences of trans and gender-nonconforming older adults contributes to and perpetuates the experiences of marginalization associated with being trans. Mitigating the conditions of marginalization—including those that are compounded by age—requires the production of trans aging knowledge. It was with the intent to produce such knowledge that this systematic review was undertaken. In so doing, five medical databases, eight social science databases, and two gray literature databases were searched. These included the following: CINAHL (1942–), Medline (1942–), Health Services/Technology Assessment Texts, Web of Science, EMBASE (1947–), Sociological Abstracts (1952), Social Services Abstracts (1806–), Gender Studies Database (1972–), LGBT Life with Full Text, Ageline (1978–), PsycINFO (1806–), Scopus, ERIC, The New York Academy of Medicine Grey Literature Report, and Dissertations & Theses: Full Text. A total of 436 titles and abstracts were independently reviewed. Of these, 106 full-text articles were retrieved; 34 met the inclusion criteria and were reviewed. The following themes were identified: 1. the methodological challenges associated with conducting research with trans and gender nonconforming older adults;

2. violence and abuse among trans and gender nonconforming older adults;

3. discriminatory policies and practices in health and mental health care;

4. the lack of appropriate HIV/AIDS education, prevention, and treatment strategies for trans and gender nonconforming older adults;

5. obstacles in education, employment, government systems, and housing; and

6. the lack of adequate social support networks.

Gaps in the literature, recommendations for future research, and implications for policy and practice were also identified.