Making foreign women the mother of our nation: the exclusion and assimilation of immigrant women in Taiwan

Citizenship awarding is politicised. Conceiving female marriage migration as a national threat, Taiwan's citizenship legislation is consciously designed and purposefully utilised to achieve exclusion and assimilation. Driven by a nationalistic impetus, it shows how Taiwan imagines itself as a modern, prosperous and homogenous nation and projects upon the immigrant outsiders as a threat to its self-identity. Examined through immigrant women's lived experiences, this citizenship legislation is biased by gender, class and ethnicity. The implementation of the legislation is not only an example of symbolic politics but also banal nationalism realised at grassroots level in the private domain. Immigrant women's lived experiences show that exclusion and assimilation stemmed from banal nationalism is not just an operation of symbolic politics but is also enmeshed with their everyday life.     

Elder Abuse and Oppression: Voices of Marginalized Elders

The voices of elderly people from marginalized groups are rarely solicited, and the relationship between elder maltreatment and belonging to an oppressed group has not been adequately investigated. This article reviews the literature on oppression and elder abuse and describes findings from the secondary analysis of data from focus group discussions on elder abuse held with marginalized older adults and (quasi)professionals caring for them in two Canadian cities. Participants identified that increased vulnerability to elder abuse was related to oppression experienced as a consequence of ageism, sexism, ableism/ disability, racism, heterosexism/homophobia, classism, and various intersecting types of oppression.     

Queering Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services: The Subversion of Heteronormativity in Practice

This article explores the exercise of heterosexist‐infused power relations within a Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS) inpatient unit in the UK. The ways in which heterosexism may wield its power within CAMHS in conjunction with the support of sexism, adultism, classism and sanism are discussed. That is, this article contributes to the understanding and subverting of heteronormativity in practice. With this focus in mind, other forms of intersecting oppressions are detailed to highlight the role they play in both controlling young people and teaching them about the workings of patriarchy and social norms. The aim of the article is to contribute to the disruption of the heteronormativity inherent in the arrangements within CAMHS and the dominant normative practice that produces multiple subjectivities in this setting.     

Experiencing Inequality: Memoirs,Hardship, and Working-Class Roots

Thirty-two literary memoirs constitute the database for this research on how economic deprivation and classism affected the early lives of gifted writers who grew up in poor and working-class families. All the memoirists experienced material deprivation, ranging from severe hunger to insufficient funds for college. Many encountered discrimination based on their lower-class status, attitudinal barriers to intellectual development and upward mobility, and deficits in public school education. Institutional support came from extracurricular activities, public libraries, religious participation, and government funding. The mental health practitioner’s respect is likely to have special potency for clients undermined by past experiences of inequality and classism.     

Reproducing Inequality in Sociology

This essay discusses some mechanisms reproducing inequality in the discipline of sociology. I argue that credit for communally produced ideas accrues to individual and that the discipline is governed by a kind of “racial contract” partially governing which ideas and individuals are included. As a discipline centrally concerned with inequality and stratification, I argue sociologists should employ greater reflexivity when thinking about how disciplinary practices reproduce structures we typically critique in other contexts.