I'm Stuck as Far as Relationships Go

Abstract

This is a study of how heterosexual girls construct the meaning of their health issues within their dating relationships. We found that a number of barriers contributed to girls' difficulty with articulating their needs and desires in their romantic relationships. Adolescent girls who participated in our study blamed themselves for their boyfriends' abuse and lack of commitment and experienced their ability to speak in their own interests as compromised. Many of the girls experienced what researchers term an “impossible choice” between compromising self to maintain a relationship or compromising the relationship to maintain self. The dating relationship was predominantly determined by patriarchal and dualistic thinking that undercut healthy decision making. Assisting girls within supportive environments to reflect upon gendered power differentials in their relationships can facilitate their expression of authentic voice which in turn can enhance their own health behaviors.     

Microaggressions as Boundary Objects

What do new materialist activisms and direct theory look like? Something massively distributed yet also micro somehow in relation to persons, indeed crowd-sensible among personal storifyings, is emergent among and as microaggression and microaggressions. Literally we see, in data visualisation, this perhaps hyperobject (see the online Microaggressions Project). A mattering entanglement not simply micro or macro reframes anything personal, person-all. And the connections with movements of re-action, #Baltimore, #Ferguson, and #BlackLivesMatter, matters too along with other massive distributions: of military hardware escalating aggression in police forces, of debt peonage of whole towns, and county, regional, and national citizenry to pay to arm police, against themselves. People gathering in their person at sites of danger to confront these activating realities, as well as to enact the distributive social media and art activisms supporting them and making their actions widely available. All this at scales both intentional and not, sometimes tactical and often spontaneous, escalations fraught with danger and release, and all thoroughly neurologically entangled as mattering motivations: caring, attention, attachment, aggression. These move within and through and among bodies and infrastructural embodiments. Our holobiont/s include/s it all.     

Chinese Fathers in the Twentieth Century: Changing Roles as Parents and as Men

ABSTRACT

Fathers and fatherhood are increasingly visible in social science scholarship and public discourse, although the father’s different roles are yet to be integrated. Moreover, most existing studies on fathers and fatherhood focus on either European or North American fathers, or contemporary non-Western fathers; little is known about the historical changes in fatherhood culture in non-Western contexts. This article explores how elite fathers in Republican, Socialist, and Reform-era China see their roles as parents and as men amidst dramatic social changes in intergenerational and gender relations. A close examination of five elite fathers’ family letters and autobiographical writings reveals that the parent–child hierarchy began to diminish as early as Republican-era China and continued to decrease during the Socialist and Reform eras, as seen in fathers’ increasing recognition of their children’s autonomy and the heightened sense of intimacy in the father–child bond. However, changes in gender relations, especially in the fathers’ generation (as opposed to the fathers’ gender beliefs and practices towards their children) followed a much less straightforward path. The asynchronized changes in different facets of Chinese fatherhood may be attributed to the unique and complicated modern history of China in the twentieth century.     

Kay Daniels as feminist historian

Abstract

While spending the better part of two academic years out of her home country, the USA, the author became increasingly perplexed by the current emphasis on poststructural theory in the writing of women's history. She says this because such theory may not only isolate this highly successful new subfield from the ongoing Second Women's Movement in the United States and from history teachers trying to integrate material on women into their classes, but most sadly, isolate American historians of women from their counterparts in Eastern European and Third World countries who are only beginning to write about their past.     

Sexual Difference as Nomadic Strategy

Lisa Folkmarson Käll's article “Sexual Difference as Nomadic Strategy” deals with Rosi Braidotti's attempt at rethinking sexual difference and female subjectivity in terms of nomadism. It explores how the idea of nomadism can function as a framework for understanding sexual difference which takes into account the multiple ways in which difference is configured, experienced, and contextually given meaning. Braidotti's account of sexual difference as nomadism captures difference in three interrelated dimensions, namely the difference between man and woman, differences between women, and differences within each woman. In all three dimensions, the central issue at stake is to bring forth an understanding of identity as a site of difference. Such an understanding allows Braidotti to locate sexual difference at the very core of subjectivity and recognize difference as constitutive of identity in a more fundamental way than as marking out its external limits. According to Käll, Braidotti's tripartite understanding of nomadism further opens up towards a rethinking of sexual difference beyond the confines of a strict exclusionary binary relation between man and woman. It locates sexual difference as a central element in the identification and becoming of subjectivity while at the same time recognizing that sexual difference is not the only central element, but one which intersects with others.     

Intergenerational Contact as Intergroup Communication

Abstract

This Epilogue highlights important progress in the area of intergenerational contact research and identifies some important operational and empirical lacunae. The diverse array of intergenerational programs is discussed as are the potential consequences of program contact for older adults, children and youth. We highlight for researchers and program planners the likelihood that pre-existing stereotypes can affect program experiences (and the communicative patterns within them) as well as the need to articulate program goals more clearly. The paper's main thrust is in drawing attention to several theoretical models that can usefully guide future research. A theoretical framework based on intergroup communication is outlined that explores the motivations and communicative behaviors likely during intergenerational exchange. Researchers should investigate communicative strategies that promote successful intergenerational contact.     

Girl culture as a chastity belt

The concept of the women-friendly welfare states, introduced by the Norwegian political scientist Helga Maria Hernes in 1987, has had a considerable influence on welfare theory and research. In this article the normative basis and the analytical potential of the concept are explored. The concept can be criticized for its bias towards social democratic welfare states, which has challenged its analytical potential. Instead of abandoning it altogether, the authors suggest that an alternative could be to reformulate and contextualize the concept with gender equality as the key notion. The reformulation would make it possible to distinguish analytically between women-friendliness and policies that promote gender equality between different dimensions of welfare, and between civil and political from social aspects of citizenship.     

Motherhood as the Value of Labour

This article concerns migrant domestic labour. It departs from existing analyses of such labour by examining the place of workers' mobility and workers' intimate life histories in the valorisation of migrant domestic labour. Drawing on insights from the literature on the autonomy of migration and on affective labour, this article argues that migrant domestic workers' status as mobile bodies infused with affective histories of maternal care is critical in the constitution of a market for their labour. This history endows migrant domestic workers' labour with unprecedented value, not least because the worker is expected to exude the affects of motherhood authentically in the home of her employer. The analysis forwarded here demands a new understanding of the operations of global care chains and transnational motherhood.     

Programming as a Means of Assault Prevention

A variety of techniques for preventing youths from being physically assaulttve are introduced. Techniques are presented in three categories: (a) those that may be applied to an individual prior to, or immediateIy after, assaultive episodes, (b) those that promote prosocial behavior as applied on an individual basis, and (c) those that are utilized on a group basis with assaultive behavior diminishing as prosocia1 behaviors are promoted. Also introduced are ways to approach psychotic youths so that violent outbursts are eschewed. Treatment modifications are presented which may be helpful to children or adolescents as they progress to less restrictive settings.     

not-/unveiling as an ethical practice

The practice of Islamic veiling has over the last ten years emerged into a popular site of investigation. Different researchers have focused on the various significations of this bodily practice, both in its gendered dimensions, its identity components, its empowering potentials, as a satorial practice or as part of a broader economy of bodily practices which shape pious dispositions in accordance with the Islamic tradition. Lesser, however, has this been the case for the practice of not veiling or unveiling. If and when attention is accorded to the latter, it is often grasped as a product of integration or an effect secular governmentality, but only rarely as a bodily practice. Drawing on narratives of second generation secular and religious Maghrebi Muslims in Belgium, this paper pursues this second perspective by examining to which extent not-veiling can be understood as a technique of the self (Foucault) that is functional to shaping a liberal (Musilm) subject. While a first part of this article will unpack the ethical substance of such discursive interrogations and point to the ways in which they are intertwined with the enactment of a liberal self, the second part will examine the embodied contours of this problematization, which appeared through the labour upon one's affect and bodily dispositions that this refusal of the hijab, or the act of unveiling, implies.     

vulnerable writing as a feminist methodological practice

This article discusses the possibility for vulnerable writing within feminist methodological approaches to research. Drawing upon a project that involved difficulties and tensions in conducting transnational research, including the documenting and telling of a partial narrative of an individual who set herself on fire, the article discusses what it might mean to focus more explicitly on explicating and recognising vulnerability in writing. In providing examples from working with a situated, localised analysis that engages feminist, postcolonial and queer theoretical approaches to attend to the particular and everyday, I address some of the hesitations and uncertainties in undertaking research and producing knowledge, and concerns with forms of reflexive practice. At the heart of the discussion is the question of a vulnerable ethics, of how it is possible for feminist methods to represent the lives of others, especially when stories fail in the telling, both in providing adequate explanations and in the ways that trauma and suffering can remain incommunicable. Included in this are concerns as to how we as researchers are affected within the production of research. As a form of receptivity and wounding, the article argues for vulnerable writing that challenges feminist methods to remain open and receptive to what will always resist sense-making, while continuing to respond to the demand that we do justice to the lives of others.