affective politics,debility and hearing voices: towards a feminist politics of ordinary suffering

This paper is an intervention within feminist and queer debates that have re-posed so-called negative states of being as offering productive possibilities for political practice and social transformation. What is sometimes called the politics of negative affect or analyses of political feeling has sought to de-pathologise shame, melancholy, failure, depression, anxieties and other forms of ‘feeling bad’, to open up new ways of thinking about agency, change and transformation. Ann Cvetkovich’s recent memoir explores depression as a public feeling and argues that ‘feeling bad might, in fact, be the ground for transformation’. As she suggests, the question, ‘how do I feel’ could usefully be reframed as ‘how does capitalism feel’? This performative staging of political forms of psychosocial reflexivity opens up new strategies for survival, new visions of the future, and importantly de-medicalises feeling beyond an individual expression of psychopathology. The grounds for affective politics might be found within new feminist futures that are attentive to the relations between emotion, affect, feelings and politics. This paper will be situated within these debates and the challenge of thinking about the productive possibilities of negative states of being. However, rather than focus on depression, I will turn my attention to experiences such as psychosis and temporal dissociation, based on my long-standing research with the Hearing Voices Network. In the context of discussions of disability and capability I will discuss the value of concepts such as debility, and ‘living in prognosis’, and respond to the call to think through what such states might offer for feminist and queer practice.     

Future-time perspective in adolescence: The present of things future revisited

Several theorists have suggested that the observed changes in adolescent future-time perspective are due to the emergence of formal-operations reasoning [e. g., T. J. Cottle and S. Klineberg (1974),The Present of Things Future, Free Press-Macmillan, New York; P. Fraisse (1963),The Psychology of Time, Harper & Row, New York; H. Hartmann (1958),Ego Psychology and the Problem of Adaptation, International Universities Press, New York; J. Piaget (1968),Six Psychological Studies, Vintage Book, New York]. Using a cross-sectional sample of 60 Caucasian adolescents, the present study was designed to examine this hypostatized interrelation. Data obtained through individual interviews provide only limited support for a cognitive hypothesis. As predicted, older students showed greater future extension and the more cognitively advanced students proved better able to project a set of events into the distant future. However, neither the older, nor the more cognitively advanced, students projected a greater number or a more consistent set of future events than did their respective counterparts. Moreover, analysis of the types of events projected obtained significance only for grade level. The findings are discussed from a contextualist perspective, within which consideration is given to the influence of experiential and life-span status factors.This paper is an expanded version of one presented as part of the symposium entitled, The Timing of Life Events in Adolescence, at the annual meeting of the Educational Research Association, Montreal, Canada, April 11–15, 1983. This work was completed while the author was a Clinical Research Training Fellow in Adolescence (funded by T32 MH 14668) at the Institute for Psychosomatic and Psychiatric Research and Training, Michael Reese Hospital and Medical Center, in a program also sponsored by the Department of Behavioral Science (Human Development) and Psychiatry, University of Chicago, and the Adolescent Program of the Illinois State Psychiatric Institute.Received a Ph.D. from Boston University. Research interests include cognition, self-concept, and adolescence.     

Florence and Rosamond Davenport Hill and the Development of Boarding Out in England and Australia: a study in cultural transmission

The adoption of boarding out by state children's departments across Australia is often attributed to the influence of English social reformers Florence and Rosamond Davenport Hill, whose visit to the colonies in the early 1870s coincided with a period of growing dis-ease with existing provisions for neglected children. However, after their return to Britain, they used their experience in the colonies to castigate English authorities for being too slow to adopt a similar course. This article complicates existing theories of cultural transmission in relation to ideas about child welfare. It analyses the ways in which the Davenport Hill sisters laid claim to their expert speaking position, and argues for the importance of informal networks in the development of child welfare policy in the years before the rise of transnational children's rights organisations.     

Women in the world of work: Past,present, and future

Women have not been usually credited with much Utopian writing, but in fact a number of women writers have projected societies which seek to improve the condition of their sex. This paper examines three eighteenth century English women writers's ideas of feminist utopias: Mary Astell's A Serious Proposal, Sarah Robinson Scott's Millenium Hall, and Clara Reeve's Plans of Education. It discusses their ideas on the rationale and organization of communities of women and how these communities could extend their benefits to society as a whole. It will also discuss the limitations of the thinking of these women for the reform of society especially in regard to woman's place.     

Orientations to the future: A comparison of adolescents in Australia and Singapore

Using an event-listing approach, this study examined the personal and societal future orientations of 15-year-old males and females in Singapore and Sydney. Three aspects were examined: content, affect, and time span. Overall, the study found that adolescents perceived their personal and societal features in separate noninterlocking planes, seeing more pleasant, proximal, personal futures, and more unpleasant, distal, societal futures, especially in relation to nuclear war and political problems. Demographic and personal construct variables influenced this general pattern of future orientation.Ph.D., social psychology, La Trobe University. Research interests: adolescence, education and social policy.Ph.D., education, Sydney University. Research interests: adolescence, psychometrics, and statistics.     

The intergenerational transmission of running away: Childhood experiences of the parents of runaways

Research into the etiology of running away has long provided evidence for the influence of family factors such as abuse, parent-child conflict, and child stress on an adolescent's decision to leave home. This paper offers evidence for the possibility that running away may be deeply entrenched in patterns of family interaction that extend across generations. Using data from the National Incidence Study of Missing, Abducted, Runaway, and Throwaway Children (NISMART), the influence of parents' own childhood experiences with running away on the behaviors of their children is illustrated. The importance of examining the influence of such intergenerational transmission factors, separate and in addition to more traditional predictors of running away, is demonstrated.This research was supported in part by funds from the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention under Contract No. 91-JN-CX-0005. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the meetings of the American Society of Criminology in New Orleans, Louisiana, November 1992.Received a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of New Hampshire. Present research interests are in the area of criminal victimization of children.Received a doctoral degree in sociology from the University of New Hampshire. Current research interests focus on missing and abducted children.     

Plain tales from the rice trade: Indications of vertical integration in foodgrain markets in Bangladesh

Through a series of case studies of the interactions between foodgrain traders and between traders and producers, this article questions the widespread belief that foodgrain markets in Bangladesh are characterised by low trading margins, no vertical integration and a general competitive health. The article indicates that merchant's capital plays two key roles in the market (i) in some areas of the country, the provision of merchant's credit deprives the poor producer of access to the market price for his or her output; (ii) working capital extended to subordinate traders may also enable a small group of large traders to influence prices. Further case studies of the interaction between traders and the state food distribution system indicate ways in which the private market may be able to frustrate or limit policies intended to regulate its operation. These insights suggest that the domination of merchant's capital may be one factor explaining low levels of productivity in the Bangladesh countryside. They also raise questions about the consequences of policies intended to increase the role of private trade in the economy.     

Sex and the civil partnership act: the future of (non) conjugality?

This article considers the transgressive and transformative possibilities in the sexual silences of the U.K.’s Civil Partnership Act 2004. The absence of a consummation requirement and adultery as a specific ground of dissolution do open up some possibilities but are not unproblematic. These issues are explored in the context of the England and Wales Law Commission’s apparent ‘return’ to a conjugal model in its forthcoming consultation on cohabitation. It is concluded that though the Act may open up possibilities for expanding the legal recognition of relationships beyond those that are sexual, this raises concerns about the further privatisation of care as well as increased state intervention in relationships. Instead, I argue that the purpose and function of relationship recognition should be deconstructed and separated from ideology and romantic mythology about what families and relationships are and should be. If it does wed itself so closely to the conjugal marriage model in the consultation document, the Law Commission will miss a valuable opportunity to ask important questions about the purpose and function of relationship recognition.