Social class,socialization practices,and psychosomatic ailments in adolescents

The relationships among social class, socialization practices, and psychosomatic ailments have been reported by several psychological and sociological studies. However, a careful review of these studies reveals some contradictory results. In addition to inadequate sample size, these studies have been carried out on children of preschool and grade school ages. We collected data from 1518 high school aged adolescents who had unbroken families and who might be regarded as products of their families' class and socialization practices. Our findings suggest definite effects of socioeconomic status on the mental health of the developing female children. The effects of some socialization practices, such as parental dominance, restrictiveness, punishment types, and warmth, on psychosomatic incidences are further examined. Implications of the present study are discussed.Received his Ph.D. from Vanderbilt University. Major interests include sociology of mental illness and deviant behavior. Currently he is working on a book concerning the mentally ill.Received his Ph.D. from Iowa State University. Major interests include methodology and social disorganization. Current research is in social gerontology and applied statistics.     

Still sucked into the body image thing: the impact of anti-aging and health discourses on women's gendered identities

Health norms have changed over the past three decades, imposing more responsibility for health onto the individual. There are gendered implications of these changes which, when combined with increasing anti-aging pressures, have the potential to intensify the disciplinary relationship women have with their bodies. This paper, based upon interviews with 14 women, examines the impact of dominant health and anti-aging discourses on women's body practices, including exercise, makeup, clothing and diet, and ongoing construction of gendered subjectivity. Findings suggest that the women in this study are motivated to do particular body practices because of their concern with having a healthy and youthful ‘looking’ body. The women's stories reveal that anti-aging and health discourses function to reinforce normative bodily demands of femininity and consequently to intensify disciplinary control of their bodies. While the pressure to fight the appearance of aging is not new, the increasing association of aging with ill health, even illness, in conjunction with the promotion of health has implications for women's relationship with their bodies and sense of self.     

No hay ganancia en la milpa: the agrarian question,food sovereignty,and the on-farm conservation of agrobiodiversity in the Guatemalan highlands

Although they receive little recognition for their contribution, peasant farmers in the global South play a fundamental role in securing the long-term global food supply. Via their self-sufficient agricultural practices, they cultivate the crop genetic diversity that enables food crops to adapt to changing environmental conditions. In this paper I draw upon empirical data from the Guatemalan center of agricultural biodiversity to investigate the concern that market expansion will displace peasant agriculture and undermine a cornerstone of the global food supply. I find that even though peasants' livelihoods involve multiple forms of market provisioning, they also engage in a Polanyian ‘double movement’ to protect their subsistence-oriented agricultural practices from the potentially deleterious effects of markets. I also investigate the so-called ‘agrarian question’ about the effects of market expansion on the viability of peasant agriculture, finding that although new forms of market provisioning are likely exacerbating rural inequality, the income from market activities actually enables rural Guatemalans to reproduce the conditions for peasant agriculture. Ultimately, I observe that the conservation of agricultural biodiversity and, consequently, global food security are contingent upon the ‘food sovereignty’ of peasant farmers.     

Race,gender and sexuality: The oppression of multiculturalism

In this article we analyse the impact of multicultural ideology on struggles for equality in the spheres of gender, race/ethnicity and sexuality. We argue that multiculturalism has permeated theory, policy and action in these areas and that this has resulted in divisions and conflicts between movements for human rights. This has allowed an uncritical brand of multiculturalism to flourish which operates to further oppress already disadvantaged groups. We illustrate our thesis in relation to the violence committed against Black/Asian women through such cultural practices as forced arranged marriage, domestic violence and female genital mutilation. We also note the violence against gay and lesbian people which is sanctioned by some cultural and religious traditions. We conclude that failure to address fundamental questions about possible limits to cultural diversity in liberal democratic societies has implications for the continued oppression of the least powerful and the future of human rights.     

Reserve labor,unreserved politics: dignified encroachments under India's national rural employment guarantee act

The rural proletariat constitute a substantial proportion of the global poor. Leading better lives is central to their political practices. In this paper, I aim to elaborate the political practices that attend to these aspirations, interrogations and contests. I examine existing approaches to studying political practices of the rural proletariat. I do this with a focus on India, where the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) is in force since 2005. I locate the program against the backdrop of neoliberal transformations in India. I then examine the ways in which the rural proletariat engage with the program, even when other opportunities in the agricultural sector are available. Based on these examinations, I argue that the practices spawned by the program are to be understood as ‘encroachments’ into the extant social customs, norms and habits of rural India. This perspective, I contend, is more fruitful than locating the rural proletariat's engagement with the NREGA as a coping strategy or a tactic of resistance against rural elites. The data which this paper draws on include official sources, in-depth interviews with workers in rural Bihar and West Bengal and ethnographic observations.     

A project for research on the peasant revolution of our time

Up to the present my work has centred on economic aspects of the peasantry. Starting from an analysis of the nature of collective farms (kolkhoz), which I found to consist of peasant agricultural units agglomerated rather than really structured, I was led to the study of peasant economy itself: its internal organisation, its specific rationality, its relations with the surrounding economy. The results of my enquiries brought home to me, on the one hand, the capacity of the peasant unit to adapt to the different economic systems in which it exists, and on the other hand, the pervasive stamp the peasantry impresses upon these systems. Accordingly, I believe it would be valuable at this point to study the consequences of the peasant imprint in the social and political as well as economic spheres, particularly in the socialist countries. Of course I myself could undertake only a small part of the research programme sketched in the following pages.     

Queer Individualization: The Transformation of Personal Life in the Early 21st Century

This article explores what happens to understandings of social change in the realm of personal life when an empirical investigation is carried out that begins from rather different ontological and epistemological premises from those that have underpinned recent debates. It draws on UK‐based research that was framed by an engagement with sociological theories of individualization, psychoanalytically informed psycho‐social studies and queer theory, and that was designed to explore the psychic and affective dimensions, and the unconventional, counter‐heteronormative practices, of contemporary personal life. The study used the free association narrative interview method to examine the practices and ethics of personal life of people living outside conventional couples. It found considerable levels of psychic conflict and emotional distress, and some mental illness, amongst the people interviewed. Many interviewees told stories of experiencing a fracturing of self as they faced lives in which they felt alone and in which they were expected to be self‐responsible. These experiences, it is suggested, can be understood as tied up with losses contingent upon processes of individualization. However, the research also found evidence of a set of interrelated, counter‐heteronormative relationship practices that served reparatively to suture the selves undone by these processes of individualization: the prioritizing of friendship, the decentring of sexual/love relationships, and the forming of non‐conventional partnerships. The article proposes the notion of queer individualization to capture this set of transformations in the organization and experience of personal life, and suggests the necessity of understanding contemporary personal life as involving both the pain of loss, and new, reparative non‐conventional connections.     

The ‘Good’ Attached Mother: An Analysis of Postmaternal and Postracial Thinking in Birth and Breastfeeding Policy in Neoliberal Britain

ABSTRACT

In the last 20 years, a new parenting philosophy has garnered increasing attention and popularity. Coined by William Sears in the early 1980s, attachment parenting (AP) proposes that secure attachment between parent and child is necessary for optimal development and therefore ‘good’ parenting. Simultaneously, neoliberalism, a socio-political context defined by market logic, has emerged as the dominant global trend. In this article, I examine the correspondence between AP, and the broader ideology of intensive mothering it expresses, and the parenting-related policies advanced by the neoliberal state. Specifically, I focus on how birth and breastfeeding policy in Britain aligns with AP, contextualising the emergence of AP and its appearance in contemporary state policy as the result of two features of neoliberalism: postmaternal and post-racial thinking. I draw attention to the experiences of black mothers and, through this lens, reveal the raced, gendered and classed dimensions of ‘good’ parenting. In my examination of these policies, I argue that postmaternal and postracial thinking have enabled the emergence of AP, an approach that individualises child-rearing and relies upon an uncritical appropriation of the so-called traditional practices of racialised women.     

White pregnant bodies on the Australian beach: a visual discourse analysis of family photographs

In this paper, I discuss a group of photographs that feature a place intrinsically related with Australian women’s photographic memories of pregnancy – the beach. Building on feminist interdisciplinary studies of family photography, I argue that family photographs of pregnancy contribute to alternative ways of knowing and interpreting the Australian beach landscape and the entangled social relations and interactions within these spaces. Data are drawn from a set of 34 pregnancy photographs that were taken at the beach in [Tasmania] between 1945 and 2013 and collected as part of a larger, ongoing mixed methods research project involving the analysis of 236 Australian family photographs of pregnancy. In this paper, I conduct a visual discourse analysis of three categories of beach pregnancy images including (1) the family holiday photograph, (2) the bikini photograph and (3) the ‘natural’ pregnant body/landscape photograph to enable a more precise account of how personal and cultural memories of the Australian beach intersect. In the concluding discussion, I suggest that the beach is a critical site for deepening sociological and feminist understandings of the production and expression of pregnant identities and Australian national identity.     

Feeding Mothers’ Love: Stories of Breastfeeding and Mothering in Urban China

ABSTRACT

By analysing narratives of infant feeding, this article explores how emotions are involved in the making of maternal subjectivity. The article is based on interviews with 21 Chinese middle-class mothers of small infants living in Beijing and their stories of how breastfeeding connects to intimacy and love. By merging post-structural approaches of subjectivity with affect theory, the article shows how the emotional dimension of breastfeeding promotes an ideal of mothers as primary caregivers. It finds that this ideal is challenged by practices of multiple caregiving in the mothers’ everyday lives. By exploring the performativity of emotions, the article adds another sociological perspective beyond those concerned with medical discourses of feeding infants. Also, as emotions have been neglected in much social research on Chinese mothering, it contributes to new sociological knowledge about mothering in China.     

Autonomy as a disposition to non-domination in the work of Mary Wollstonecraft

ABSTRACT

In this paper I argue that there is a notion of autonomy which can be extrapolated from Wollstonecraft’s work: central to this notion is the need for us all to adopt a disposition to non-domination.Thus, an individual is autonomous when she is not dominated but also, how she behaves towards others is significant, for she is only truly autonomous if she does not dominate others. I argue that such a disposition can be read in Wollstonecraft as something which cuts across the public/private divide. It is based on the notion that individuals are always capable of being rational in both of these spheres. There must be a disposition to non-domination because Wollstonecraft demonstrates how domination is corrupting, and when this disposition is lost we find ourselves faced with myriad concerns from slavery to multiple forms of social oppression. Domination creates relations of dependency. It is arbitrary and contingent and makes us relate to each other with a marked lack of compassion. Instead, Wollstonecraft stresses we have a duty to treat others as equals and key to this duty is the need to not dominate others. Finally, I highlight how Wollstonecraft suggests such a disposition is to be gained through education.     

‘she found a way,left the child’: ‘child-shifting’ as the plantation's affects and love's paradox in Donna Hemans’ <Emphasis Type="Italic">River Woman</Emphasis>

This article proposes a situated reading of maternal love, loss and lovelessness in Donna Hemans’ novel River Woman, locating her text in relation to other contemporary Caribbean women writers and to the early fiction of Toni Morrison. I argue that the complex affects that her representation of ‘child-shifting’ produces, can be articulated both in relation to literary texts that re-imagine historical and contemporary practices leaving a child in order to save her, and in the context of the plantation, where ruptured ties at the level of community and culture continue to be reproduced in the personal, emotional and family spheres. I use the concept of marronage, developed in the work of Glissant and Depestre, to define strategies of survival that necessitated actual and imaginative flight or escape, to contextualise the complex affects of the plantation that are repeated and reproduced in the novel's present—the late twentieth-century Caribbean.     

theorizing ‘African’ female genital cutting and ‘Western’ body modifications: a critique of the continuum and analogue approaches

Making links between different embodied cultural practices has become increasingly common within the feminist literature on multiculturalism and cultural difference as a means to counter racism and cultural essentialism. The cross-cultural comparison most commonly made in this context is that between ‘African’ practices of female genital cutting (FGC) and ‘western’ body modifications. In this article, I analyse some of the ways in which FGC and other body-altering procedures (such as cosmetic surgery, intersex operations and 19th century American clitoridectomies) are compared within this feminist literature. I identify two main strategies of linking such practices, which I have termed the ‘continuum’ and ‘analogue’ approaches. The continuum approach is employed to imagine FGC alongside other body-altering procedures within a single ‘continuum’, ‘spectrum’ or ‘range’ of cross-cultural body modifications. The analogue approach is used to set up FGC and other body-altering practices as analogous through highlighting cross-cultural similarities, but does not explicitly conceive of them as forming a single continuum. Two key critiques of the continuum and analogue approaches are presented. First, because these models privilege gender and sexuality, they tend to efface the operation of other axes of embodied differentiation, namely race, cultural difference and nation. As such, the continuum and analogue approaches often reproduce problematic relationships between race and gender while failing to address the implicit and problematic role which race, cultural difference and nation continue to play in such models. This erasure of these axes, I contend, is linked to the construction of a ‘western’ empathetic gaze, which is my second key critique. The desire on the part of theorists working in the West to establish cross-cultural ‘empathy’ through models that stress similarity and solidarity conceals the continuing operation of geo-political relations of power and privilege.     

The Role of Body Image in Women's Mental Health

This article was inspired by the Body Image Summit on 21 June 2000 in London at which a panel, headed by Tessa Jowell, Minister for Women, led a discussion among representatives of the media and British fashion industry. The aims of the Summit were to consider the effects of advertising images on teenage girls and women and to develop a consensus from within these industries to incorporate a social and ethical awareness in their promotional activities. A negative reaction to this forum was the main result. In this article I offer both a sociological and psychoanalytically based discussion of the problem of body image for women. I also consider how society and women themselves could begin to counteract the pernicious effects of being sold unrealistically thin, ideal images of womanhood continually perpetrated by consumerism.     

Pain,pleasure and bridal beauty: mapping postfeminist bridal perfection

Despite renewed media attention on the wedding, and the emphasis that this pays to bridal performance, feminist analysis of wedding culture has made few inroads. Accounts are needed that understand women's experience of the wedding day, the narrative of becoming the bride, and the way this takes place against a backdrop of postfeminist ambivalence, where traditional wedding practices are re-fashioned through discourses of (consumer) choice and empowerment. In this article, we draw on qualitative data collected with five married women from the Netherlands, who spoke to us about their wedding day and their experience of being/becoming brides. We show how retraditionalisation shapes a new romaticisation of wedding day storytelling, constructed through transformation and the experience of beauty. In analysing these narratives, we show how postfeminist bridal perfection comes to anchor the subjective and affective power of ‘the wedding’ in contemporary culture.     

On Drugs: The Production Of Queer Filipino America Through Intimate Acts Of Belonging

With the highest recorded cases of HIV/AIDS among Asian/Pacific Islanders in the United States, queer Filipino Americans register as “toxic subjects” within epidemiological discourse. Yet, at what point do state-sanctioned norms of “abstinence only” and intimacy fail to deal with queer communities' lived practices? In this article, I address the tensions between public health discourse's framing of HIV/AIDS transmission within queer Filipino America and the actual experiences of this community on recreational drugs. Though the severity of HIV/AIDS experience within the queer Filipino American community is not to be underplayed, a reparative reading of these drug trips provide us with a productive notion of toxicity and alternative configurations of belonging, intimacy, and community-building. Through anecdotes and interviews, this article gestures towards how we can begin to think of queer Filipino American drug trips as community productions.     

Multiple femininities in two Russian women’s magazines, 1970s–1990s

In both the late Soviet and post-Soviet periods, femininity and beauty were traits often attributed to the ideal working mother portrayed and promoted in state media. But with greater exposure to global beauty ideals in the post-communist era, the sexualized and beautified female body acquired a social value that was independent of its role in the reproductive process. In this paper, I analyse changes in the way care for the female body was represented in two Russian women’s magazines Rabotnitsa and Krest’yanka (1970s–1990s). Over this period, the ideal of the working mother figures less prominently and there is an increasing focus on the ways that women-consumers ought to work on their individual body-projects. This might appear to be a radical change. But by analysing the representations of women more carefully, I show that the move towards the privatization of the body project was already under way in the late Soviet period, but only for some categories of women. That is, non-Slavic women of various ages could be working mothers, but individual consumption was a realm reserved for their Slavic countrywomen.     

networks of violence in the production of young women’s trajectories and subjectivities

This paper focuses on the deployment and interdependence of different expressions of gendered and classed violence in shaping the choices, trajectories and subjectivities of young women on vocational beauty therapy courses. It takes as its premise the understanding that, far from simply being an aberrant expression of interpersonal or intergroup aggression, violence is embedded in social life in multiple and complex ways, reverberating through women’s lives to reproduce disadvantage and subordination. The paper draws on theoretical and empirical investigations of the interrelationships between structural, direct and symbolic expressions of violence and asks what this literature can offer in challenging normative, often individualised, conceptions of violence. Drawing on an ethnographic case study of National Vocational Qualification (NVQ) beauty therapy courses and the young women undertaking them, I explore the accounts of students and their tutors on becoming and being ‘beauty girls’. I consider what these accounts might tell us about how forms of symbolic and interpersonal violence intersect with, reproduce and legitimise the violence involved in unequal and unjust socio-economic structures. I argue that the ways in which different forms of violence mutually reinforce each other at a micro-level produce an embodied ‘sense of limits’ that ultimately reproduces the structural violence of gendered and classed inequalities. The examples given illustrate both a ‘chronology of violence’ in young women’s lives, and the way in which those lives can be understood, at least in part, as embedded in and shaped by networks of violence. Finally, I briefly consider examples of dissent and resistance, the conditions under which they might be possible and the ways in which, through the interplay of different forms of violence, they might also be curtailed.     

‘they’re talkin’ bout a revolution’: feminism,anarchism and the politics of social change in the global justice movement

Despite the proliferation of works on the ‘global justice movement’ (GJM) in recent years, surprisingly little has been written on the intersections between feminist and anarchist strands within this ‘movement of movements’. In an effort to rectify this gap in the literature, this article seeks to explore in what ways and to what extent anarchist and feminist renditions of revolution, within the context of the GJM, are conceptually compatible and thereby potentially politically reinforcing. In order to ascertain the degree of convergence between these two radical projects, in the first part of the article I examine what each camp is fighting for and against and whether their struggles for social justice are ideologically consonant. In the second part, I turn my attention to the types of practices being enacted and defended by these two activist constituencies and ask how they see their respective revolutions being brought about. What notions of social change are at work here and are their political practices, and the different temporalities sustaining them, reconcilable? After arguing in the first two parts of this article that anarchism and feminism are more compatible than is often acknowledged and that the considerable synergies between feminist notions of social justice and social change and anarchist conceptions of revolution merit far more attention than they currently receive, I end the piece by reflecting on some of the points of tension that still militate against merging their respective political imaginaries. I do so in an attempt to identify what I see as the conditions of possibility for a more integrated, mutually collaborative feminist anarchist revolutionary politics.