Being Jewish after Auschwitz: writing modernity's shame

Part I: Auschwitz and the Time of History My family dates time from the moment my father and uncle re-united in Melbourne. The last time they saw each other was in Auschwitz. It got into The Sun. People talked about it on trams. Conductors, drivers, passengers, ticket inspectors. All the trams were talking. All over Melbourne. Moreland Road. Sydney Road. St. Kilda Road. Everyone knew about us. I wave to surprised strangers at tram stops till my mother tells me to stop. My family burst out of a clamshell like Botticelli's Venus in one of the art books Leon kept in a suitcase under his bed. (Rosa Safransky, ‘History in the Kitchen’, p. 146)     

Institutionalizing economies of opposition: explaining and evaluating the success of the MST's cooperatives and agroecological repeasantization

Dominant conceptions of social movements consider their constitutive feature the disruption of order, not practices around building it. In this paper, I challenge this notion by analyzing the Landless Workers' Movement (MST)'s relatively successful efforts to institutionalize the practices of agricultural production developed by its members in cooperatives and agroecology. Through this analysis, I show that the movement's administration of a democratically managed form of agricultural production exemplifies a unique form of social movement resistance – namely, what I call self-governmental resistance. Rather than reformist or revolutionary contention, self-governmental resistance – performed by movements like the MST – redevelops state policies by vying for and often taking control over the design and implementation of agricultural production.     

Understanding Sexual Harassment a Little Better Reed and Bull Information Systems Ltd v. Stedman

This case note reviews the guidelines issued by Morison J. in the Employment Appeal Tribunal at the end of the decision in Reed and Bull Information Systems Ltd v. Stedman [1999] I.R.L.R.299. The author argues that while the judge’s decision is to be welcomed in adopting an approach more sympathetic to victims of sexual harassment, it also raises a number of problems by placing a burden on the victim to place the harasser on notice that she does not welcome his conduct. The guidelines are likely to be usefully applied in any jurisdiction that has rules forbidding sexual harassment. The author considers the guidelines from both a practical and a doctrinal angle and indicates that the right to be free from sexual harassment is one that the courts are reluctant to protect like other civil rights. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Paying for procreation: Child support arrangements in the UK

Under the present system it is a very good thing to remain happily married, I have to tell you!The authors would like to thank Martin Davey, John Murphy and the reader forFeminist Legal Studies for their comments on earlier drafts.     

Beyond Repudiation: The Affective Instrumentalisation of Feminism in Girlfriendly Spaces

As a mediated sensibility, Gill, McRobbie and Angela have argued that postfeminism is held together by an incorporation of feminist ideas, in order to position feminism as ‘past’, a positioning which contributes to the production of highly individualised subjectivities. This article highlights an emerging modality of feminine subjectivity in which feminism is affectively incorporated, but, rather than being repudiated, it is deconstructed and instrumentalised to fit within norms of girlfriendship. To draw attention to how this discussion may open a more nuanced understanding of the relations between feminist and postfeminist subjectivity, I explore a set of blogs hosted on Tumblr that are situated within ‘girlfriend’ culture. In these blogs, young women articulate humorous reactions to everyday situations based on assumptions of common, feminine experience. I suggest that girlfriendliness, as an emerging normative condition of youthful femininity, constructs an instrumental relation to feminism requiring the discerning, selective performance of traits suggesting an acceptance of certain feminist ideas. Rather than proceeding to a repudiation of feminism per a classically postfeminist sensibility, feminism is dismantled into an affective plasticity that is flexibly incorporated to show individual value, creating ‘likeable’ and resilient femininities. This article draws attention to shifts in the regulation of femininity that occurs on the plane of the affective, calling for an expanded analytical approach that more broadly problematises the instrumentalisation of feminism as a technology of subjectivity.     

Disentangling the Weight of School Dropout Predictors: A Test on Two Longitudinal Samples

The aims of this study are to identify the most powerful predictors of school dropout and to determine how stable they are over time. Two generations of White French-speaking boys and girls from 12 to 16 years old (n = 791 in 1974, n = 791 in 1985) completed a self-administered questionnaire on their psychosocial adjustment at least one year before leaving school. As expected, the analyses showed that school, family, behavioral, social, and personality variables could all predict dropping out of school in the two samples. Furthermore, these predictors were quite stable over time. However, statistical improvement measures in logistic regression analyses indicated that school experience variables (i.e., grade retention, school achievement, school commitment) were the best screening variables for potential dropouts. The contribution of other psychosocial variables, even though significant, did not improve very much the capacity to identify who will drop out of school. The discussion highlights the implications of the findings for secondary prevention and screening practices.     

Time use and change in academic achievement: A longitudinal follow-up

As a follow-up of the research of Smith in 1990, academic achievement results from two years later are added to the data for 1208 of the 1584 seventh and ninth graders for whom Smith studied relationships between achievement and time use. Growth in academic achievement over two years, like contemporaneous achievement, is not positively related to time spent on homework or with parents at the beginning of the period. The other findings are also in general accord with the results of the previous study, although the associations are somewhat weaker and less consistent. Growth in reading, language, and overall achievement is significantly negatively related to time spent on house-hold chores, suggesting that chores may compete with academic or other intellectual activities or may cause destructive resentment. Growth in reading achievement is significantly negatively related to time spent listening to radio and recordings, suggesting negative effects of the adolescent subculture. Growth in mathematics achievement tends to be positively associated with time spent watching television among students with parents in lower-status occupations but has a statistically significant negative association with TV time among those with higher status parents, supporting previous findings of interaction between family SES and TV viewing. The results are interpreted in terms of competition among various time uses for the time and attention of adolescents.Research for this paper was supported by the National Science Foundation under Grants SES-8507004 and SES-8920852, and by The University of South Carolina. The earlier study (Smith, 1990), which this one follows up, was also supported by the former NSF grant, but the acknowledgment was inadvertently omitted when the paper was published in the sixth issue in Volume 19 of this journal.Doctorate in sociology was granted by The University of Minnesota. Main research interests are parent-adolescent relations and influences on academic achievement.     

Introduction: Gender and power 2

The question of what might be understood as battles over the body in a society of gender equality is discussed. Women have become more like men, but at the same time their bodies appear to speak more clearly of difference. Difference between the genders has traditionally been understood in the light of the body/nature as immutable. In this study I explore where theoretical approaches that question such understandings might lead us. The production of gender is understood as produced in tandem with heterosexuality and linked to the culturally deep-structured homophobia. The body's suitability as battlefield over gender is seen in relation to its status as nature and therefore true.     

MIND THE GAP? MASCULINITY STUDIES AND CONTEMPORARY GENDER/SEXUALITY THINKING

This paper considers the location of Masculinity Studies within the Gender/Sexuality field. Such a location offers possibilities and problems for theorising and coalition, as well as for policy and curriculum development. Importantly, the three major subfields of Gender/Sexuality—Feminist, Sexuality and Masculinity Studies—are not simply commensurable bits that fit together neatly like pieces of a jigsaw. This paper concentrates upon potentially dissonant theoretical directions between the subfields with the aim of clarifying the issues at stake. The implications of this dissonance are of particular significance for the present positioning and future directions of Masculinity Studies.     

Continuity of difficult temperament in adolescence: Relations with depression,life events,family support,and substance use across a one-year period

This longitudinal study examined the continuity of temperamental difficulty among a school-based sample of middle adolescents (n=975) over a one-year period. Of the participants, 25% were classified as difficult at one or both measurement occasions and over 40% were classified as temperamentally discontinuous. Repeated measures multivariate analyses of covariance analyses identified mean differences in psychosocial functioning by temperamental continuity groups and by gender. Temperamental difficulty was associated with higher levels of depression, stressful life events, use of some substances, and lower levels of perceived family support. Gender differences were indicated for family support, depression, life events, and alcohol use.This research was supported in part by NIAAA Grant No. AA07861 awarded to Michael Windle.Received Ph.D. in human development and family studies from the Pennsylvania State University. Major research interests involve individual and family contextual influences on the etiology and development of internalizing and externalizing behaviors in childhood and adolescence.Received Ph.D. in human development and family studies from the Pennsylvania State University. Major research interests involve the identification of high-risk factors for adolescent substance use and other problem behaviors.     

Looking for Lela Simone: Singin’ in the Rain and microhistories of women’s sound work behind the scenes and below-the-line in Classical Hollywood Cinema

ABSTRACT

Despite her contribution to some of classical Hollywood’s most renowned musicals, the largely unknown Lela Simone exemplifies one of Hollywood’s ‘anonymous movie workers’ (Leo Rosten) working in the shadows of film history. As music co-ordinator for MGM’s Arthur Freed Unit (1944–1957), Simone’s exacting technical supervision of sound and music recording and post-production ensured films such as The Pirate (1948), On the Town (1949), An American in Paris (1951), Singin’ in the Rain (1952) and Gigi (1958) achieved perfect synchronisation and polished production values. Drawing on archival sources this article engages with the methodological and conceptual challenges of making visible the labour of women, like Simone, working below-the-line in technical roles. Taking Simone’s work on sound and music in the iconic ‘Singin’ in the Rain’ number as a case study, the article illustrates how a micro-historical focus can bring a previously invisible realm of women’s labour, and agency, into view.     

Life Cycle,Labour Remuneration,and Gender Inequality in a Chinese Agrarian Collective

Conventional wisdom about gender inequality and labour remuneration on agrarian collectives in rural China has emphasized various discriminatory practices against women. Using a life cycle approach, this article examines instead the way in which men and women possess changing patterns of and opportunities for work at different stages of their lives. Drawing on economic and demographic data from an agrarian collective in East China, gender differentiation is scrutinized in terms of how work assignment, labour remuneration and work attendance rates were transformed over time. A number of other factors – the persistence of pre-revolutionary patriarchal ideology, as well as government policies on population control and work incentives – that influenced the way in which peasant households deployed labour on the agrarian collective during the 1970s also had a gendered impact on work remuneration.     

Small Gestures and Acts of Grace: An Interview with Germaine Koh

Knitwork is an 80-metre long work generated by unraveling cast-off garments, and reknitting them into a wide blanket. The piece is visually rich: bands of bright colours, softer shades and painterly mixes. The artist Germaine Koh, who lives and works in Canada, conceived the piece in February 1992 as a life-long project. It has since been shown in galleries across North America, Australia and, most recently, in 2002, at the British Museum in London, where it cascaded down marble steps in the Great Court. Knitwork is reminiscent of the work of feminist artists of the 1970s (such as Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro in the United States, or the Feministo group in Britain), work that commented on the devaluation of both domestic labour and craft, particularly with regard to textiles, traditionally associated with women. Although Koh intends this reading, Knitwork is one of a series of-what might be described as-conceptual art projects that she has exhibited over the last decade. These focus on the ways in which we invest time and effort in seemingly mundane activities, what Koh describes as 'the weighty psychic accretion of everyday habits and mundane debris'. By using commonplace objects, abstracting them or changing their context, she aims to stimulate reflection about how we interact, and the tokens or gestures we use. Sometimes Koh knits alone, privately; and, at other times, publicly, when the piece is on exhibition, transforming it from object to performance. By 1998 the piece had 'consumed' more than 260 garments and was over 60 metres long. By 2002 it had grown to 80 metres, including nearly 300 garments, and weighing 400 pounds. Koh describes Knitwork as a comical object, somewhere between the sublime and the ridiculous. Yet, because it has both its past and future written into it, it contains a certain melancholy. It is a measurement of a life, its output, and also its duration, each stitch a record of a decision, and of a moment in time.     

Gettin’ Down Home With the Neelys: gastro-porn and televisual performances of gender,race, and sexuality

This article illuminates how performances of gender, race, and sexuality are integrated with representations of food and food performance in contemporary American cooking television. Interrogating the intersections of food, gender, race, sexuality, and performance, this essay explores how the cable-television show, Down Home with the Neelys, depicts a nouveau gastro-porn anchored in the perceived pornographic level of blackness itself. The author reveals the ways that food and performances of food become a medium of gendering and racialization employed by American popular media. Through the lens of reality television, shows like Down Home (re)produce a certain type of black heterosexuality and gendered enactments of domesticity and space, while challenging dominant televisual reflections of black love and labor. The author argues that the Neelys self-consciously employ a vernacular aesthetic performative of “down home” (a uniquely classed, temporally–spatially situated, and sexualized blackness) to exploit the phenomenon of gastro-porn in a highly lucrative performance that signals the entangled artifice of gender, race, and sexuality. More than offering culinary expertise and education, such cooking instruction reveals the pedagogy of gender, race, and sexuality as visual lessons of a complex and contradictory authenticity. This essay reveals television cooking shows as critical sites for considering the domestic laboring of gendered and racialized sexualities. In particular, shows like Down Home evince the ways that race continues to be rendered in visual terms and the enduring edibility of blackness.     

Promoting Daily Well-being in Adolescents using mHealth

Adolescents are at increased risk for developing mental health problems. The Grow It! app is an mHealth intervention aimed at preventing mental health problems through improving coping by cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT)-inspired challenges as well as self-monitoring of emotions through Experience Sampling Methods (ESM). Yet, little is known about daily changes in well-being and coping during a stressful period, like the COVID-19 pandemic. The current study aimed to elucidate daily changes in positive and negative affect, and adaptive coping, and to better understand the within-person’s mechanisms of the Grow It! app. The sample consisted of 12–25-year old Dutch adolescents in two independent cohorts (cohort 1: N?=?476, Mage?=?16.24, 76.1% female, 88.7% Dutch; cohort 2: N?=?814, Mage?=?18.45, 82.8% female, 97.2% Dutch). ESM were used to measure daily positive and negative affect and coping (cohort 1: 42 days, 210 assessments per person; cohort 2: 21 days, 105 assessments). The results showed that, on average, adolescents decreased in daily positive affect and adaptive coping, and increased in their experienced negative affect. A positive relation between adaptive coping and positive affect was found, although independent of the CBT-based challenges. Latent class analysis identified two heterogeneous trajectories for both positive and negative affect, indicating that the majority of participants with low to moderate-risk on developing mental health problems were likely to benefit from the Grow It! app.

     

A Longitudinal Study of Self-Awareness and Depressed Mood in Adolescence

The relationship between longitudinal variations of self-awareness and depressed mood in 479 adolescents was examined across four waves of data collection over a seven-year period. Self-awareness was significantly associated with depressed mood, and this association was strongest during midadoles-cence. Regression analyses of changes of depressed mood over time suggest mutual influence between self-awareness and depressed mood. Stressful life events, such as pubescent changes and the relationship with significant others, explained variations in self-awareness. Different influences of these life events were important at varying stages of adolescence.     

Stability and Change in Positive Development During Young Adulthood

Calls have been made for a greater focus on successful development and how positive functioning can be conceptualized in theory and empirical research. Drawing on a large Australian community sample (N = 890; 61.7% female), this article examines the structure and stability of positive development at two time points during young adulthood. Previously, we developed and empirically tested a model of positive development at 19–20 years comprised of five first-order constructs (civic action and engagement, trust and tolerance of others, trust in authorities and organisations, social competence, and life satisfaction) and a second-order positive development construct. In the current study, we replicated this model at 23–24 years and found that it was again a good fit for the data, and was equally applicable for young men and women. Hence, positive development can be conceptualized according to five important dimensions at both ages. While variable-oriented tests suggested continuity in levels of positive development, person-oriented analyses revealed four distinct patterns of positive development over time—two reflecting stability (stable high [34.5%] and stable very low [11.6%]) and two characterized by change (low/average increasing [30.4%] and average decreasing [23.5%]). There were significant differences in the gender composition of these groups, with young women overrepresented in the more favourable groups. Thus, despite mean level stability, positive development is characterized by change for many young people, suggesting the importance of identifying factors that support young people’s capacity for positive functioning over this transitional period. The current findings contribute to our understanding of the nature and course of positive development over this important period.     

Surpassing the word: Aileen Wuornos

This article explores the dynamics of Richard Move's drag performance of the late Martha Graham. Drag dance is remarkably self-aware as historiography, and it employs a rhetoric of bodies becoming other bodies: channeling, paying homage, re-embodying, reliving, being possessed. This article argues that drag dance has a historical project for dance history; specifically, that drag bodies can become a new medium through which aesthetic/kinetic histories are transmitted. In the case of Richard Move, the exaggeration and excess of the ageing Martha Graham become modalities that align with the ‘wrongness’ of his body. This is drag dance as a strategy of re-embodiment after the original body has been lost, and Richard Move presents his performance as a ‘haunting,’ much like the feeling Martha Graham describes as the result of a dancer's “first death,” when she watches someone else dance a role she had originated. Ballets like Graham's Lamentation and Cave of the Heart give Move the opportunity to portray Graham's struggle to continue to dance after this “first death,” using drag as a strategy to show up the eerie perfection of voice against the hollowness of the ageing dancer's body. Combining vaudeville and séance, moving from the restless gay “underworld” of the Meatpacking District to the right to presume himself the heir to the mother of modern dance, Richard Move first embodies and then moves beyond Susan Sontag's camp “etc etc” of Graham's self-performance.