School Climate & Sexual and Gender Minority Adolescent Mental Health

Sexual/gender minority (Sexual/gender minority people are also referred to as Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer) youth are more likely than cisgender heterosexual youth to exhibit depressive symptoms and be victimized. School climate research indicates that the presence of a Gay–Straight Alliance (a Gay–Straight Alliance or Gender-Sexuality Alliance is also referred to as a GSA and is a youth group to support sexual/gender minority youth), a supportive school climate, and seeking help from teachers are associated with more positive mental health outcomes; however, they are not typically measured together. This study uses a survey that measures all four measures of school environment with a national sample of 240 sexual/gender minority high school students ages 14–18 (mean age 15.77) where 53% of participants had a Gay–Straight Alliance in their school. The sample is 53% cisgender, 100% sexual minority and 62% white. Adjusting for demographics and presence of a Gay–Straight Alliance, fewer depressive symptoms were associated with lower help-seeking intentions for suicidal thoughts. The presence of Gay–Straight Alliance was not statistically associated with past-month help-seeking intentions or behaviors. Additionally, a more supportive school climate was associated with lower anxiety and depressive symptoms. However, the presence of a Gay–Straight Alliance was not statistically associated with anxiety or depressive symptoms. These findings suggest that a supportive school climate and supportive school personnel may be important for supporting the mental health of sexual/gender minority students.

     

Working for Change: Projectified Politics and Gender Equality

In this article I argue that the project, a governmental technology that is now widespread and accepted throughout the public sector, is not a neutral tool for implementing policy and conducting politics. Rather, my argument is that this form is intrinsically political in so far as it produces disruptions and sets boundaries for how any given task is to be performed. By mobilizing a set of optical metaphors from feminist theory of difference, I examine organizations that work for gender equality in Swedish regional development and illustrate how the governmental technology of the project reflects, refracts, and diffracts the practices associated with this work. Thus, I argue that if one wishes to understand contemporary gender-equality work, it is reasonable to consider the specific effects that are produced as it passes through the project form. The short empirical illustrations given here indicate, among other things, how the project form functions in some respects as a mirror, and reflects aspects of gender-equality work that are commonly experienced regardless of form or setting, such as encountering resistance. In other respects, the project form refracts gender-equality work, bending it into new directions so that, for instance, securing funds and coming up with new innovative project plans takes precedence over the actual work that respondents feel they should be doing. Finally, the intersection of gender-equality work and the project form also produces diffraction effects, such as the emergence of hybrid consultants. These multi-faceted figures function as evaluators, controllers, activists, and disseminators of knowledge, which makes them simultaneously important to and disdained by the respondents in this study. Thus, it is concluded that the disruptive effects of the project form should be recognized as political and studied more extensively in the future.     

Governing the Taiwanese countryside: Guanxi,power and agency

Over the past two decades, bottom-up rural development has become the prevailing approach in Taiwan. The rise of community-based projects for Foucauldian thinkers should be understood as new ways of thinking about governing social life, in which political authorities create ‘active’ rural citizens through the deployment of political technologies. Foucault's emphasis on the intimate association between power and knowledge has been taken further by actor-network theory (ANT) authors. However, ANT tells more empirical stories about the dissemination of power and the assemblage of actors. Although ANT has been readily employed in the studies of social sciences, it has been subject to severe criticism; on the one side, the death of man, on the other, the demiurgic. Echoing these comments, this paper argues that the process of translation is far more complicated than ANT authors have proposed. In the Chinese context, social interactions rely heavily on the social interaction model known as guanxi. With reference to an anthropological participant observation I conducted in a Taiwanese rural community, this paper demonstrates that guanxi practice functions as a mechanism for coping with political collective action.     

A Short-Term Longitudinal Study of Pubertal Change,Gender, and Psychological Well-Being of Mexican Early Adolescents

This study examined the role of pubertal development on depression, externalizing behavior problems, self-esteem, and body-image of 951 Mexican early adolescents. The 5th through 7th grade students were assessed at the beginning and end of the school year. The main finding of this study is that the acute experience of menarche adversely affected Mexican adolescent girls psychological well-being, most specifically in terms of depressive symptomatology. On the other hand, pubertal change in Mexican boys, as measured by voice-change, did not appear to adversely affect psychological well-being above and beyond a nonsignificant minimal and temporal readjustment and in fact had a positive effect on body-image. Results suggest that perceived maternal control, prior social–emotional adjustment, and menstrual attitudes may moderate the effects of pubertal change.     

Orwell's despair,Burdekin's hope: Gender and power in dystopia

George Orwell's 1984 bears a striking resemblance to a little-known anti-fascist dystopia, Swastika Night, that was published twelve years earlier. While the similarities between the two books are in some cases remarkable, of even greater interest is the different treatment of political domination and gender ideology in the two novels. Orwell's critique of power worship is inherently limited by his inability to perceive that preoccupations with power and domination are specifically associated with the male gender role. By contrast, Katherine Burdekin, a feminist writer who published Swastika Night using the pseudonym ‘Murray Constantine’, focuses her critique on the ‘cult of masculinity’ and the fascist dictatorship to which it can lead. Her novel is set 700 years in the future, after Hitlerism has been established in Europe as the official creed, and with it a ‘Reduction of Women’ to an animal level. This essay analyses the relationship between gender and power as understood by these two writers, one world-famous, the other forgotten.