The Stress Response and Adolescents’ Adjustment: The Impact of Child Maltreatment

Experience with and management of stress has implications for adolescents' behavioral and socioemotional development. This study examined the relationship between adolescents' physiological response to an acute laboratory stressor (i.e., Trier Social Stress Test; TSST) and anger regulation and interpersonal competence in a sample of 175 low-income urban adolescents (51.8% girls). Findings suggested that heightened reactivity as indicated by cortisol, heart rate, and blood pressure was associated with increased interpersonal competence and anger regulation. However, these findings were context dependent such that, for youth high in self-reported child maltreatment, heightened reactivity was associated with decreased interpersonal competence and anger regulation. Results highlight the importance of considering how context may condition the effect of stress reactivity on functioning during adolescence.     

The new left and labor: The early years (1960–1963)

This article analyses the labour history of Italy's recruitment of workers for settlement in the Italian colony of Eritrea. The quest for full employment, both in Italy and within its nascent colonial ‘empire’, was the main driving force behind Italian colonialism in general. Italy's labour policy, which started to take shape in the 1890s, was never linear. Unlike the previous liberal Governments, the Fascist regime's policy was far more determined to use its colonies as places to settle the Italian peasant masses (the same that were migrating to the Americas for a better life, a trend which Fascist Italy considered humiliating to the mother country). In keeping with its vision of the colonies as a means to attain full employment, Fascist ideology characterised the Italian colonial empire as an ‘empire of labour’. In fact, the reality of the labour situation that Italian workers found themselves in after settling in Italy's African colonies would soon show the fallacy underlying Fascist colonial ideology.     

The Girl and Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex: Feminine Becomings

This article traces the girl in The Second Sex [(1949). Paris: Éditions Gallimard] as a necessary figure for understanding what it means to become woman. I argue that Simone de Beauvoir’s overall significance and philosophical contribution is intimately connected to what she discovered by asking about this moment of feminine becoming. My central contention is that we cannot understand how one ‘becomes’ woman without first/also undertaking the task of understanding the situation of the girl. Drawing on the new translation of The Second Sex by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier [(2010). London: Vintage], I offer a close reading of the chapter entitled ‘The Girl’ with attention to embodiment and temporality. In so doing, I seek to expand and refine our understanding of Beauvoir’s philosophical project in The Second Sex; a project which launched a fundamental challenge to the meaning of being and gave rise to the possibility of a feminist philosophy.     

The ‘Civilizing Mission’: The Regulation and Control of Mourning in Colonial India

The control of women's public form of mourning in India was undertaken in the colonial era by male social reformers. The article argues that this was both a part of the process which enabled the consolidation of colonial rule – since laments were repositories for the social memory of the dead which could lead to vendettas – and that this fed into the construction of a specific domestic ideology. The latter was predicated on the privatization and interiorization of grief, whereby women were enjoined to bear themselves with rectitude. The taming of the transgressive form of mourning, whereby women who had earlier exhibited their grievances in a spectacular form through lament, took to more quietist (devotional) forms, has reconfigured the relationship to death and mourning. However, this has been a partial phenomenon, limited to the upper-caste, middle-class milieu. Where women continue to hold a dependent position within community, nation-state and international economy, the article suggests that, in contexts of modern conflicts and warfare, where death runs ‘wild’, the exhibitionist and ‘wild’ forms of showing grief and anger continue to be demonstrated by women as an appropriate public response.     

The Power of Feminist Judgments?

Recent years have seen the advent of two feminist judgment-writing projects, the Women??s Court of Canada, and the Feminist Judgments Project in England. This article analyses these projects in light of Carol Smart??s feminist critique of law and legal reform and her proposed feminist strategies in Feminism and the Power of Law (1989). At the same time, it reflects on Smart??s arguments 20?years after their first publication and considers the extent to which feminist judgment-writing projects may reinforce or trouble her conclusions. It argues that both of these results are discernible??that while some of Smart??s contentions have proved to be unsustainable, others remain salient and have both inspired and hold important cautions for feminist judgment-writing projects.     

“The tender mother”: The social construction of motherhood and the lady's magazine

My aim in this essay is to explore the politics of one of the seemingly least political forms of literature, the woman's magazine. Specifically, I will analyze the ideological content of the Lady's Magazine, one of the most popular and profitable of British monthly miscellanies in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth‐centuries.¹ In this essay I will explore the role the Lady's Magazine played in the development of the idea of the “tender mother,” a concept which was key in the formation of the cult of domesticity and in the development of the ideology of “woman's sphere” as a realm distinct and separate from the man's world of work.²An underlying assumption informing this essay is that the concept of motherhood was (and still is) culturally constituted,³ and that literature, including popular literature found in magazines, has played an important role in this process.⁴ In the Lady's Magazine's portrayal of motherhood we can see one of the means by which the ideology of motherhood, in particular, the concept of the tender mother, was created, legitimated, and perpetuated.⁵     

The “Crisis” of Gender Equality: The Norwegian Newspaper Debate on Female Genital Cutting

This article examines how tensions between feminism and multiculturalism conflate in a media debate on female genital cutting. The following questions are addressed: how is gender equality problematized, in what ways is the gender equality approach challenged, and what are the main solutions to prevent female genital cutting. The empirical analysis is based on the newspaper debate that followed the Norwegian Broadcasting Company's (NRK) documentary on female genital cutting in June 2007. The findings of our study do not support a claim that gender equality would be challenged by accommodations to multiculturalism. Our conclusion is that it is difficult to disconnect policy-making aimed at combating female genital cutting from the processes of stigmatization. Rather, by advocating the type of measure that is the most contested by the actors of ethnic minority organizations, the proponents for adopting routines of genital examination ultimately contribute to a problematic pattern, where the political debate about the situation within ethnic minority groups is run and dominated by the majority.     

Kiss and Tell: ‘The Writing Cure’ in Kathryn Harrison's The Kiss (1997)

The article challenges conventional assumptions regarding the question of incest survival within contemporary discourses. A textual analysis of Kathryn Harrison's autobiographical novel tracing her consensual sexual relationship with her father is used to address the issue of failed or unresolved mourning as a prototypically ‘modern’ cultural phenomenon. Psychoanalytically informed feminist literary criticism is used to explore the parallels between the cultural construction of femininity and failed or postponed mourning in western historical and philosophical traditions. Following the work of Juliana Schiesari and Kathleen Woodward, the article contends that melancholia is a gendered discourse that has historically privileged male theorists and film-makers, such as Barthes and Fassbinder. The article suggests that contemporary women writers, such as Harrison, are engaged in a revisionary approach to the construction of loss within their writing. By situating themselves at the heart of the contemporary family narrative, instead of the ‘melancholic’ margins, they are able to produce a counter-discourse that dispels the conventional dynamics of the traditional family romance. By using the ‘writing cure’ to overcome ideological loss, the desiring daughter is able to challenge misogynist constructions of femininity within contemporary literature.     

The Mead–Freeman Controversy in Review

Journal of Youth and Adolescence -     

The ‘Facts’ of Life?

Taken together, evolutionary psychology and neuroscience combine to provide a compelling heuristic account of sex/gender differences. In this article, I explore how the meta-theoretical framework provided by evolutionary psychology provides support for a reading of sex/gender effects in neuropsychological research that sees these as evidence of a ‘hardwired’ neurobiological basis for sex/gender. I discuss the resistance of these ‘hardwired’ accounts to arguments that—like other neuropsychological phenomena—sex/gender could be theorised in terms of experience-dependent neuroplasticity. I conclude that the evolutionary-neuropsychology heuristic obtains much of its appeal from the apparently ‘scientific’ evidence it provides for understanding sex/gender as a ‘natural’ rather than ‘sociocultural’ phenomenon—a view which is aligned with postfeminist ideologies of sex/gender in the contemporary west.     

The Soviet Reception of Selma Lagerlöf

Abstract

The focus of this paper is Selma Lagerlöf’s literary presence in Soviet Russia. Despite being one of the most translated and published foreign authors in pre-revolutionary times, Lagerlöf made very infrequent appearances on the Soviet literary scene for 40-odd years between 1917 and the end of the 1950s. The process of literary production is examined in this paper in search of an explanation for the changing pattern in the publication of Lagerlöf’s texts. To problematize the process of literary production in the newly established Soviet state, Foucault’s conceptualization of the process of knowledge construction is utilized to describe, understand, and explain the interplay between critical resources, such as linguistic and literary expertise, individual initiative, and the government-controlled publishing enterprise in the Soviet state. I argue that the agency of literary workers remained relevant to the literary process, despite increasing ideological pressure on literary production, and that they paved the way towards the official reintroduction of Lagerlöf to the Russian Soviet readership during the 1950s.     

The Co-development of Friends’ Delinquency with Adolescents’ Delinquency and Short-term Mindsets: The Moderating Role of Co-Offending

Journal of Youth and Adolescence - The companions in crime hypothesis suggests that co-offending moderates the link between peer delinquency and adolescent delinquency. However, this hypothesis has...     

The suffragist and the “average woman”

This paper questions the marginality of women's suffrage to the new social history of women in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Britain. In so doing, it seeks to challenge any notion of the suffragist and the “average woman” as absolutely distinct categories. Its argument draws on two major revisions underway in the historiography of this field: firstly, the growing recognition that “votes for women” was not simply a single-issue, equal rights demand, reflecting only a restricted liberal perspective; secondly, the equally significant insistence on the need to apply more extended definitions of both the “political” and the “public” to women's history in this period. The autobiographical writings of Helena Swanwick, Hannah Mitchell and Mary Gawthorpe, it is argued, suggest that the meaning of the vote lies in the mesh experienced by such suffragists between the politics of ordinary, everyday life and their subsequent involvement in the formal politics of parliament and political parties.     

The ‘Invisible Institution’ and Black Youth Crime: The Church as an Agency of Local Social Control

We examine the degree to which an individual's religious involvement significantly mediates and buffers the effects of neighborhood disorder on youth crime. To test this hypothesis, we analyzed the fifth wave of data from the National Youth Survey, focusing on black respondents given the historical as well as contemporary significance of the African-American church for black Americans. Results from estimating a series of regression models indicated that (1) the effects of neighborhood disorder on crime among black youth are partly mediated by an individual's religious involvement (measured by the frequency of attending religious services) and (2) involvement of African-American youth in religious institutions significantly buffers or interacts with the effects of neighborhood disorder on crime and, in particular, serious crime. Theoretical and methodological implications of the present findings are briefly discussed.