Poland,poetry, and gender

Although women figure prominently in contemporary Polish poetry, literary criticism has not treated them as a collective phenomenon. This is due to the great diversity of poetic voices, to the lack of a strong feminist tradition in Poland, but also to the unwillingness of some women poets to be labelled as authors of “women's poetry.” The term has for a long time been burdened with dismissive and pejorative meanings. Recent attempts to define women's poetry by a number of Polish and British critics have proved unsuccessful, since the characteristics of women's poetry — the interest in everyday detail as opposed to generalization, the intermingling of the private and the political — can be applied to much postwar Polish poetry, irrespective of gender.     

urban spaces: gender,genre, mediation

After an initial period of feminist theorizing concerned with understanding patriarchy as a structure of male domination, many thinkers turned away from theorizing domination as such and focused instead on women's (constructed) subjectivity, identity, and agency. While this has fostered important insights into the formation of women's preferences, desires, and choices, this focus on subjectivity and subject formation has largely overshadowed deeper understandings of patriarchy as a structure of male domination while producing elisions between agency and freedom. In this article, I move to show how domination as a structural concept can help us to reclaim the idea of ‘patriarchy’ as a source of women's systematic oppression while freedom as non-domination, derived from early republican conceptualizations of freedom, can help us to disambiguate freedom from agency by taking as central the relative positions of actors within social and political structures. Structural freedom as non-domination is thus useful for feminist thinkers in that it gives us critical purchase on the dynamics inherent in unequal social and political relationships and can be linked clearly to the institutions and ideologies that shape and justify interactions between more powerful and less powerful groups. Further, from this point of view intersecting structures of domination can be analysed rather than intersecting identity categories, allowing us to take intersectionality into account and avoiding the need to ground feminist action on a unitary ‘category woman’. Finally, this analysis points toward the radical democratic connexion between freedom and participation in the creation of the material and symbolic structures that frame our collective lives.     

8: Competency,Relevance, and Empowerment

Children's programs should be restructured so as to provide social systems that vigorously support child and youth care rather than hinder it. Specifically, programs should be reoriented so as to promote normal growth and development, i.e., competency, particularly interpersonal competencies. Programs should be made more relevant to community, rather than institutional, living. Democratizing programs by empowering children and those who care for them will make the programs more effective and appropriate for raising and treating children and youth. Restructuring as a strategy for change is also examined.     

The Female Body,Work, and Reproduction in Deland,Cather, and Dreiser

After the turn of the century and in large part motivated by the Suffragist movement, women in America were working both to support families at home and for surplus spending money, as Nan Enstad documents. Census reports from the time reveal women working at everything from menial labor to banking and canalboat captaining (Albertine 240-49). Correspondingly, the popular literature of the early twentieth century tells the stories of working- class women in which work, instead of men, becomes the seductive force from which young women must be rescued (Hapke 6). In spite of the popularity of these dime-novels, contemporaneous works like Margaret Deland's The Iron Woman (1911) and Willa Cather's O Pioneers! (1913) also exist that show working women as executing important leadership work, instead of factory work or domestic labor, that was not typically assigned to women at the time. Furthermore, in going beyond the common turn-of-the-century tale of the oppressed factory girl, these works instead show an important and unique relationship between women and work that has yet to be considered by scholars of American literature.     

Dis-Assembly Lines: gestures,situations, and surveillances

In “Americanism and Fordism,” Antonio Gramsci offers a brief meditation on the gestural performances of assembly-line workers who, rather than become subordinate to the disciplinary flow of the machine, cultivate perfectly timed gestures that allow workers to hide in plain sight: or, in other words, to inhabit the scene of management otherwise. Rather than extend Gramsci's investment in virtuosic, masterful performances of gesture, this article considers the potentiality of gesture through Lucille Ball's and Tehching Hsieh's performances of bad timing. As different as these performances are in terms of genre and historical situation, each uses gesture as a technique to performatively divide the labor process, producing fleeting temporalities of waste within rhythms marshaled toward production and accumulation. While it tracks the effects of these itinerant gestures, this article reconsiders the oppositions between productive and reproductive work, rationality and emotionality, and work and home that sustain Gramsci's theory, as well as how the collapse of such oppositions introduces alternative historical and artistic trajectories into theories of precariousness.     

Risk,Compensatory, Vulnerability,and Protective Factors Influencing Mental Health in Adolescence

The aim of the study was to elucidate the relative contribution to and function of general risk factors for mental disorders as well as compensatory, vulnerability, and protective factors in a general population sample of preadolescent and adolescent students. Data were collected in a representative sample of 1,110 (10 to 17 year-old) subjects of a school-based quota sample in the Canton of Zurich, Switzerland. The factors under study were assessed using questionnaires. The Youth Self Report (YSR) was used as an indicator of emotional and behavioral abnormalities. Further questionnaires were concerned with life events, coping strategies, self-esteem, self-awareness, parental child-rearing behaviors, the school environment, and the social network. General risk factors for both sexes included increased self-awareness, avoidance behavior, perceived rejection by the parents, competitive behavior among classmates, and controlling behavior of the teachers. General compensatory factors included self-esteem and acceptance by the parents. Performance stress served as a risk factor for internalizing disorders in both sexes; for externalizing disorders it was a risk factor in girls and a vulnerability factor in boys. Active coping and peer acceptance were protective factors for internalizing disorders and peer acceptance was also a compensatory factor for externalizing disorders. In addition, some gender-specific interactions were identified.     

a snapshot of precariousness: voices,perspectives, dialogues

This collectively written article aims to offer a bird's eye view of the Italian debates about precarity in employment and life, as captured in discussions among participants in a focus group held in Milan in 2006. The chief topics that emerged from this discussion include the feminization of labour, feminist practices and methodologies, representation/participation, and guaranteed income. Here, we give as much space as possible to the diverse voices of participants and their strategies for transformation.     

Everyday life,sensuality, and body culture

The purpose of this essay is to elucidate two kinds of sensuality, a dominant one and a concealed one, both viewed in the perspective of our everyday lives. My point of departure is the assumption that the interweaving of social power, the body and sensuality is constituted at the level of everyday life, just as sensual resistance arises from this level.Proceeding from a view of women's everyday life, current contradictions, which leave room for a hitherto concealed sensuality will be outlined. In order to elucidate these contradictory trends as well as traces of another sensuality, I shall present an empirical study of women whose everyday lives were radically disrupted.Finally, recent trends in body culture will be discussed and evaluated from a feminist point of view.Thus, viewed from the perspective of sport, the purpose of this essay is to offer new approaches to the subject of sport by drawing attention away from the more conspicuous stage-settings that athletics supplies for our bodies, and focus on the less noticed stage-settings with which we are presented in our everyday life.     

Love,labour, loss: women,refugees and the servant crisis in Britain, 1933–1939

Between 1933 and 1939, around 20,000 Jewish, ‘non-Aryan’ or politically active refugee women from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia entered Britain on domestic service permits. Their immigration, mostly organised by women in the British voluntary sector, served as a moral response to the humanitarian crisis caused by Fascism in Europe, and a practical response to the ‘servant crisis’ in Britain as working-class women increasingly rejected domestic labour. This paper considers the practical and emotional relationships around domestic service and argues that the acceptance of refugee women into the metropolitan British home was conditional on the tacit expectation they could fill the vacancy left by the working classes, becoming British through their labour.     

Bullies, Gangs, Drugs, and School: Understanding the Overlap and the Role of Ethnicity and Urbanicity

Recent media attention has increased interest in behavioral, mental health, and academic correlates of involvement in bullying. Yet, there has not been much interest in investigating the co-occurrence of other health-risk behaviors, such as gang membership, weapon carrying, and substance use. The potential influence of contextual factors, such as youth ethnicity, urbanicity, and school characteristics, also has been overlooked in previous research. The current study examined different subtypes of involvement in bullying—as primarily a victim, as primarily a bully, as both a victim and bully, and no involvement—and the association with significant health-risk behaviors, including engaging in violence and substance use, as well as academic problems. The analyses use self-report data from 16,302 adolescents (50.3 % female, 62.2 % Caucasian, 37.8 % African American) enrolled in 52 high schools. A series of three-level HLM analyses revealed that bullies and bully/victims were generally at greatest of risk of being involved in violence, engaging in multiple types of substance use, and having academic problems. These findings extend prior research by emphasizing a potential link between involvement in bullying and multiple health-risk behaviors, particularly among urban and African American high school youth.     

Personal Narratives, Social Justice, and the Law

North American writer Joan Didion’s eloquent testimonial speaks to the significance of storytelling in our lives. Personal storiesmake our lives meaningful. Part of this is because our stories, wittingly or not, become the means through which we fashion our identities for listeners. Or, as scholars from many disciplines have argued, identity and selfhoodare narrative accomplishments. In this formulation, an individual constructs a sense of self by telling stories or “personal narratives,” which describe “the evolution of an individual life over time and in social context” (Maynes et al. in Telling stories: the use of personal narratives in the social sciences and in history. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 2008, 2). While personal narratives contain unique autobiographical elements, the logics of storytelling and the values and beliefs of a particular time and place also influence the kinds of stories people tell. As feminist historian Mary Jo Maynes and her coauthors argue: “The stories that people tell about their lives are never simply individual, but are told in historically specific times and settings and draw on the rules and models in circulation that govern how story elements link together in narrative logics” (2008, 2). Put another way, even the most idiosyncratic story is always in some way social: what narrators decide to tell is often guided by the expectations of audiences (real or imagined); the conventions of various genres (such as life history or autobiography); as well as the broader cultural narratives located in particular historical times and places. In this light, personal narratives at once provide evidence of a storyteller’s viewpoint and experiences as well as the social and cultural milieu in which they live.     

Deepening,and repairing,the metabolic rift

This paper critically assesses the metabolic rift as a social, ecological, and historical concept describing the disruption of natural cycles and processes and ruptures in material human-nature relations under capitalism. As a social concept, the metabolic rift presumes that metabolism is understood in relation to the labour process. This conception, however, privileges the organisation of labour to the exclusion of the practice of labour, which we argue challenges its utility for analysing contemporary socio-environmental crises. As an ecological concept, the metabolic rift is based on outmoded understandings of (agro) ecosystems and inadequately describes relations and interactions between labour and ecological processes. Historically, the metabolic rift is integral to debates about the definitions and relations of capitalism, industrialism, and modernity as historical concepts. At the same time, it gives rise to an epistemic rift, insofar as the separation of the natural and social worlds comes to be expressed in social thought and critical theory, which have one-sidedly focused on the social. We argue that a reunification of the social and the ecological, in historical practice and in historical thought, is the key to repairing the metabolic rift, both conceptually and practically. The food sovereignty movement in this respect is exemplary.     

Segregation,regulation, and the gendering of space at the University of Wales,Bangor, 1884–1907

ABSTRACT

In 1892, the Senate of the University College of North Wales in Bangor conducted an enquiry into the behaviour of Frances Hughes, Lady Principal of the women’s hall of residence, for defamatory remarks she had made about one of her students. Her accusations instigated a scandal that rocked the provincial college to its core, led to two separate libel lawsuits, and was even mentioned in the House of Lords. Using the ‘Bangor College Scandal’ as a case study, this article explores how student life in the new civic universities of the late-nineteenth century was shaped by regulation and supervision, as university authorities sought to avoid controversy through limiting mixed-gender interaction. It will argue that this control was often manifested in spatial terms, enabled by the deliberate design and arrangement of university spaces.     

Perceived Social Support among Bullies,Victims, and Bully-Victims

Research indicates that social support plays a protective role among adolescents, but little research has explicitly evaluated its function among youth involved in bullying. Accordingly, this study examined relations among social support, bully/victim status, and psychological distress in a sample of 784 ethnically diverse youth. We assessed differences in perceived social support across bully/victim subtypes, and evaluated peer and maternal social support as protective factors among victims, bullies, and bully-victims. Youth were classified as uninvolved (61.6%), as bullies (14.3%), as victims (12.5%), and as bully-victims (11.6%). Uninvolved youth reported the most peer and maternal social support and the least anxiety/depression. Multivariate analyses revealed that there was a significant interaction between bully/victim groups and peer social support. Specifically, bullies, victims, and bully-victims who reported moderate peer social support also indicated the least anxiety/depression. Results highlight the importance of encouraging youth to develop and effectively use peer support networks as part of bullying intervention programs.

Life Satisfaction in Early Adolescence: Personal,Neighborhood, School,Family, and Peer Influences

Drawing from an ecological assets framework as well as research and theory on positive youth development, this study examined the relationship of early adolescents’ satisfaction with life to trait optimism and assets representing the social contexts in which early adolescents spend most of their time. Self-reports of satisfaction with life, optimism, and ecological assets in the school (school connectedness), neighborhood (perceived neighborhood support), family (perceived parental support), and peer group (positive peer relationships) were assessed in a sample of 1,402 4th to 7th graders (47% female) from 25 public elementary schools. Multilevel modeling (MLM) was conducted to analyze the variability in life satisfaction both at the individual and the school level. As hypothesized, adding optimism and the dimensions representing the ecology of early adolescence to the model significantly reduced the variability in life satisfaction at both levels of analysis. Both personal (optimism) and all of the ecological assets significantly and positively predicted early adolescents’ life satisfaction. The results suggest the theoretical and practical utility of an assets approach for understanding life satisfaction in early adolescence.     

Adolescent autonomy,parent-adolescent conflict,and parental well-being

The present study examines whether parents' reports of well-being are related to the level of parent-adolescent conflict in the family and their youngsters' level of emotional autonomy. The sample is composed of 129 intact families with a first-born child between the ages of 10 and 15. Measures included parents' reports of midlife identity concerns, self-esteem, life satisfaction, psychological symptoms, and parent-adolescent conflict, as well as youngsters' reports of emotional autonomy vis-à-vis parents. Findings indicate that (1) parents' experience of midlife identity concerns is positively related to the level of emotional autonomy reported by same-sex children; (2) mothers', but not fathers', well-being is negatively related to the intensity of parent-adolescent conflict; and (3) socioeconomic status moderates the relation between parental well-being and parent-adolescent relations. These results are discussed in terms of psychoanalytic and parental stress perspectives on parental well-being during the adolescent years.The work described herein has been conducted during the second author's tenure as a Faculty Scholar under the William T. Grant Foundation's Program in the Mental Health of Children and is supported as well by a grant to the second author from the Graduate School of the University of Wisconsin.Received Ph. D. in Child and Family Studies from University of Wisconsin-Madison. Major research interests are in the psychological well-being of parents with adolescent children.Received Ph.D. in Human Development and Family Studies from Cornell University. Major research interests are in social relations during adolescence.     

Single,straight, wants kids: media framing of single,heterosexual fatherhood via assisted reproduction

The new reproductive technologies have made possible various postmodern family forms. I highlight an emerging form that has received little attention: single fathers by choice (SFCs), created by single men using egg donation and surrogacy. I focus on heterosexual SFCs, which have been largely ignored in the scholarly literature even as gay and lesbian parenthood have increasingly become topics of feminist inquiry. This type of fatherhood raises several important questions for gender and family scholars about the ‘traditional’ family, the relationship between masculinity and fatherhood, and men’s own desires for parenthood without a female partner. I analyze US media framing to explore cultural sense-making of SFCs. While media framing cannot tell us about men’s lived experiences as intentional single fathers, it does point to larger discourses that potentially impact these men as they engage in non-normative fathering. I identify three core themes within the media frames: (1) viewing men and women as similar, but ultimately different, (2) addressing the tension between bachelorhood and fatherhood, and (3) representing the gender of paternal desire in multiple, conflicting ways. Overall, I argue that further investigations of SFCs can illuminate issues about men’s desires for children and agency in becoming fathers.     

Attachment,individuation, and risk of suicide in late adolescence

Security of attachment and level of individuation from parents and peers was examined among 126 undergraduates, 42 with a history of suicidality, 42 who were currently depressed with no history of suicidality, and 42 normal controls. Suicidality was defined as history of serious suicidal ideation or suicide attempt. As predicted, students with a history of suicidality exhibited both the lowest security of attachment as well as the least degree of individuation in their current relationships with parents. In contrast, they were similar to depressed and control students on security of peer attachment and level of individuation from peers. Students with a history of suicidality rated their parents and mother as emotionally absent in childhood to a significantly higher degree than depressed and normal controls. This effect was independent of depression but not from gender. History of suicidality is more strongly associated with family instability than with parental divorce. Absence of parents as emotionally available attachment figures at a time when such availability is critical heightens adolescents' vulnerability to suicide.This research is based on the author's doctoral dissertation in clinical psychology, Boston University. The author was previously Clinical Fellow in Psychology, Beth Israel Hospital, Harvard Medical School.Major interests include attachment, suicidality, and adolescent family relationships.     

Periodicals by,for, and about women in Britain

Periodicals in general are an underrated resource for researchers, and this is especially true of women's periodicals. For present purposes these can be divided into three categories: commercial, organisational, and feminist. Commercial women's magazines first emerged at the turn of the eighteenth century, and have been increasingly concerned with the domestication of women and with fashionable dress. They have come to be almost entirely controlled by advertising interests. Organisational periodicals frequently demonstrate a tension between the organisation and the women within it, which tends to be resolved to the women's disadvantage. Feminist periodicals first began to appear in the mid-nineteenth century, since when they have undergone various vicissitudes, but at present they appear to be flourishing as never before. The Fawcett Library has been stocking as many women's periodicals as it can, but runs into difficulties of space and categories. Although satisfactory lists of women's periodicals have been appearing, the important task of article-indexing has scarcely begun.