Friendship and Attachment Among Heterosexual and Sexual-Minority Youths: Does the Gender of Your Friend Matter?

One-hundered and sixty-eight sexual-minority and heterosexual youths aged 15–24 completed questionnaires to assess gender and sexual orientation differences in the percentage of same-gender peers in youths' friendship networks, the gender of their best friends, and their degree of attachment to these friends. Most youths had predominantly same-gender peer networks and same-gender best friends. Notable gender differences emerged among sexual minorities. Female sexual-minority youths reported heightened participation in close same-gender friendships, whereas sexual-minority male youths showed the opposite pattern. Unlike all other groups, male sexual-minority youths had more cross-gender than same-gender friends and were more attached to their best friends than were heterosexual males. They were also less attached to their romantic partners than were heterosexual males. It is suggested that male sexual-minority youths might become highly attached to friends to compensate for low expectations of intimacy with male romantic partners. Cultural factors contributing to these gender differences in sexual-minority youths' experiences are discussed.     

The first life of Mary Wollstonecraft: Godwin’s perplexing Memoirs

ABSTRACT

The following paper was given at the MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT: LIFE WORK AND LEGACY conference held on 8 March 2017 to celebrate International Women’s Day. It was hosted by the Centre for Gender Studies of the University of Hull as part of the Hull City of Culture 2017 programme.     

Mary Wollstonecraft and Jane Austen: 'Rape' and 'Love' as (Feminist) Social Realism and Romance

Mary Wollstonecraft's argument for female reason in the Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) remains an iconic text for thinking through the his-torical struggle between claims to 'equality' and 'difference' for women. Wollstonecraft herslf embodies the antinomy within European Enlightenment thought exposed by simply being female . Jane Austen's writing career, following on from Wollstonecraft's death, offers a quite distinct mode of writing reason for women in her narrative work. While Wollstonecraft's narratives and theoretical arguments can be shown to raise as textual symptoms the deep struggle between female-embodied subjectivity and Enlightenment reason, Austen sublimates her own magnificent claims to reason in writing itself. Wollstonecraft's novels subsume narrative form to analytical content, dramatizing the sufferings of the female subject of Enlightenment 'patriarchy'. Both her principal characters, Mary and Maria, are as good as dead by the end of their narrative struggles, and these narratives founder on their own analysis of autonomous, rational female subjectivity as 'impossible'. Wollstonecraft projected a historical desire to repudiate the humiliations of femininity under Enlightenment patriarchy. Her work engendered a history of feminist reasoning to answer its painful questions. Austen's work, by contrast, seems to have floated effortlessly to the pinnacle of narrative literary achievement, while remaining uncompromisingly feminocentric. Austen's novels have a tendency to resist feminist theorizing or to fit the paradigms of feminist argument only indirectly. Tauchert explores this apparent polarity between Wollstonecraft and Austen as contrasting origins for distinctive modes of female reason in writing. Wollstonecraft's tortuous textual displays of female reason in writing offer a familiar mode of thinking about the historical and personal enlightenment of women, sustained in a tradition of feminist materialist analysis; Austen's pure narrative offers a hitherto more opaque alternative.     

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.     

The forgetting of Mary Wollstonecraft’s religiosity: teleological secularism within feminist historiography

ABSTRACT

Religious concepts and themes are central to many of Mary Wollstonecraft’s writings, yet rarely feature within popular representations of her life, work and legacy today. This paper examines the forgetting of Wollstonecraft’s religiosity in light of the broader narratives that western feminism circulates about its past and present, focusing particularly on the historiographical practices and temporal tropes that construct feminism as a quintessentially secular project. It also considers the potentially transformative impact that unforgetting Wollstonecraft’s religiosity could have within feminist historiography and politics in the present, in terms of parochializing the political certitude of secular feminism and the politics of division conducted in its name.     

Deconstructing the Boundaries: Gender and Genre in Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden,Norway and Denmark

ABSTRACT

In her 1796 travelogue, Wollstonecraft combines the main elements of many different genres, blending together the physical-geographical account of the countries she was visiting with her own feelings, producing a Romantic conception of the human being overwhelmed by and subsumed into the natural elements. The journey through the Scandinavian countries turns out to be more than a business travel. It takes the shape of an inner route, a rediscovery of herself and of her experiences, including motherhood. The ability to dismantle the boundaries of the travel writing genre in such an innovative way is the same ability she shows when subverting the literary gender stereotypes that saw women marginalized inside the domestic sphere. What emerges from this extraordinary epistolary collection is a woman capable of the greatest sentimentality and, at the same time, of the smartest rationality, an active woman who does not deny her femininity but who strongly refuses the passivity society has always attributed to the female.     

A Male Poetics

All French literary fiction, Coquillat contends, from Madame de Lafayette to Philippe Sollers, can be shown to repeat a single representation of gender, a single, scarcely varied pattern: man is transcendence, woman contingency. Man defies death through his immortal m uvre , woman 'creates' only living beings that must die. The romantic hero, the male intellectual adventurer, continues even now to be the creator's alter ego and occupies the centre of French literature, from avant garde to mainstream. By definition, he is in aloof rebellion against a 'bourgeois society' that suppresses genius. His politics as such are more often than not an 'apolitical' conservatism, his misogyny averred, in and out of his writing. If he is intrinsically more valuable it is precisely because he can rise to the singular status of the creator-genius, while women remain biologically and sociologically rooted in the mass. Rousseau was the first to theorize this vision of male superiority in his Reveries of a Solitary Walker , celebrating creativity as a male-orgasmic return to essence of which women are by nature incapable. Rousseau's most hysterical attacks on women's literature are contained in the pages of this work.     

Mary Wollstonecraft’s divergent attitudes towards trust

ABSTRACT

Mary Wollstonecraft is increasingly being recognized as a philosopher who made a noteworthy contribution to moral and political philosophy. Her work not only encompassed political treatises, such as the now well-known A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, but also fiction. This article demonstrates how Wollstonecraft’s work comprised three main ways of engaging with trust, namely distrust, virtuous trust, and open trust. It puts these three forms of trust into context with Wollstonecraft’s ambivalent relation to the 18^th-century culture of sensibility. Moreover, Wollstonecraft’s open form of trust is compared with the 20^th-century Danish theologian and philosopher K. E. Løgstrup’s conception of trust. Løgstrup regarded genuine trust as a spontaneous, basic phenomenon that was not rooted in moral reasoning. While there are some similarities between Wollstonecraft’s open trust and Løgstrup’s understanding of trust, Wollstonecraft ultimately reinforced the value of ‘an educated heart’, namely the idea that the feelings of the heart should be cultivated by reason. Accordingly, this article offers some insight into how we may perceive Wollstonecraft’s strong rejection of Edmund Burke’s ‘inbred sentiments’, that is, Burke’s belief in innate, benign moral instincts.     

职场友谊对员工职业成长的影响研究—— 工作旺盛感的中介作用

伴随着组织扁平化和无边界职业生涯时代的到来,工作轮换成为频繁现象,为在劳动力市场中保持持续的竞争优势,关注和促进组织内的职业成长成为人们的最佳选择。本研究以职场友谊为切入点,探索职场友谊对员工职业成长的影响作用,同时探究了工作旺盛感在其中的中介效应。研究结果显示,职场友谊对员工职业成长有显著的正向影响;职场友谊对工作旺盛感有显著的正向影响;工作旺盛感对职业成长有显著的正向影响;工作旺盛感在职场友谊和职业成长的关系中起部分中介作用。在此研究基础上,提出对管理实践的启示,同时进一步探讨了本研究的不足和展望。     

Friends: The Role of Peer Influence Across Adolescent Risk Behaviors

This longitudinal project examined peer influence across five risk behaviors: cigarette smoking, alcohol consumption, marijuana use, tobacco chewing, and sexual debut. A total of 1,969 adolescents aged 12–18 years completed two waves of data collection. Each respondent matched behavior data for at least one friend. Results found that a random same sex peer predicts a teen's risk behavior initiation; there is influence only to initiate cigarette and marijuana use; and that there is influence to initiate and stop alcohol and chewing tobacco use. This finding suggests that friends may protect adolescents from risk activities. The study has implications for understanding how peer influence, expressed as social norms, may be used in public health campaigns that target teen behavior.     

Coercion, Consent and the Forced Marriage Debate in the UK

An examination of case law on forced marriage reveals that in addition to physical force, the role of emotional pressure is now taken into consideration. However, in both legal and policy discourse, the difference between arranged and forced marriage continues to be framed in binary terms and hinges on the concept of consent: the context in which consent is constructed largely remains unexplored. By examining the socio-cultural construction of personhood, especially womanhood, and the intersecting structural inequalities that constrain particular groups of South Asian women in the UK, we argue that consent and coercion in relation to marriage can be better understood as two ends of a continuum, between which lie degrees of socio-cultural expectation, control, persuasion, pressure, threat and force. Women who face these constraints exercise their agency in complex and contradictory ways that are not always recognised by the existing exit-centred state initiatives designed to tackle this problem.