Young men’s friendships: inclusive masculinities in a post-university setting

When Eric Anderson published inclusive masculinity theory (IMT), it was largely situated in relationships he observed with first-year undergraduate students. Here, he noticed a striking difference in behaviours and attitudes between the adolescent heterosexual men in the United States, compared to those in the UK. Since IMT’s inception, there has been a great deal of further enquiry into the social lives of young heterosexual men in both of these nations. What is undertheorized, however, is whether the intense emotional and physical tactility of homosocial relationships described in this literature will occur with current and future generations. Nor do we know if men described as exhibiting inclusive masculinities at university continue to do so – and to what degree – as they enter the workplace and develop family ties. This research utilizes 10 semi-structured interviews with the same participants from Anderson’s initial studies, showing that they continue to strive for the same emotional intimacy with male friends that they achieved during their time at university. Half also carried this behaviour into the friendships developed with other men since graduating from university. Thus, this research contributes to IMT as it offers preliminary analysis into the friendships of inclusive men, after their time at university.     

The Age–Crime Curve in Adolescence and Early Adulthood is Not Due to Age Differences in Economic Status

One of the most consistent findings in developmental criminology is the “age–crime curve”—the observation that criminal behavior increases in adolescence and decreases in adulthood. Recently, Brown and Males (Justice Policy J 8:1–30, 2011) conducted an analysis of aggregate arrest, poverty, and population data from California and concluded that the widely-observed adolescent peak in rates of offending is not a consequence of developmental factors, but rather an artifact of age differences in economic status. Youngsters, they argue, offend more than adults because they are poorer than adults. The present study challenges Brown and Males’ proposition by analyzing data from the National Longitudinal Study of Youth (NLSY97; N = 8,984; 51 % female; 26 % Black, 21 % Hispanic, 52 % non-Black, non-Hispanic; ages 12–18 at Wave 1), which collected measures of criminal behavior and economic status at multiple time points. Consistent with scores of other studies, we find that criminal offending peaks in adolescence, even after controlling for variation in economic status. Our findings both counter Brown and Males’ claim that the age–crime curve is illusory and underscore the danger of drawing inferences about individual behavior from analysis of aggregated data.     

Gender models: changing representations and intersecting roles in Dutch and Italian fashion magazines, 1982–2011

This article presents a comparative content analysis of gender representation in fashion magazines in Italy and the Netherlands. Updating Goffman’s classic study of Gender Advertisements, we study the intersections of gender, professional role, country and time in media representation. Thus, we combine and confront quantitative content analysis with insights from critical gender studies on polysemy and intersectionality. Analyzing a sample of 5840 images from mainstream, commercial and high fashion magazines published in 1982, 1996 and 2011, we find that gender representation strongly intersects with time, place, and notably: professional role. Models, who represent the specific ‘aesthetic capital’ of the fashion field, are portrayed in highly specific ways. Over time, gender differences in representation become stronger in Italy, while in the Netherlands male and female representation converges towards conventionally ‘feminine’ styles. In both countries, we find increasing prominence of (North-American) Goffmanian gender conventions and a new ‘withdrawn’ gendered style emerging in the early 2000s. This new style employs new signs and conventions to denote gender and professional status: it separates men from women, and models from non-models. Our analysis shows, first, that gender representation does not directly reflect gender inequality. Second, it demonstrates the impact of globalization on gender representation. Third, it highlights the polysemy and cultural specificity of visual signs: gender difference can be ‘ritualized’ and ‘stylized’ in various ways. These diverse gendered conventions intersect with other characteristics, and may convey diverse, and changing messages about the relation between gender and sexuality, power, aesthetics and (visual) pleasure.     

Preventing ‘robotised women workers’: women,sport and the workplace in Scotland 1919–1939

This article examines a new area of women's leisure; women's participation in work-related sport. The growth and development of industrial welfare in Scotland in the interwar period will be discussed. Within broader studies, Stephen Jones, Helen Jones and Melling have all indicated that there was a growth in industrial welfarism in Britain from the turn of the twentieth century. This development of welfarism, which included provision of educational classes, pensions and medical support, increasingly also encompassed a variety of sports and physical activities. By looking at case studies, developments in provision across a range of industries will be examined. This discussion will draw on a wide range of sources from a variety of women's employment, from factories to clerical positions and from the retail sector to the civil service. This article will examine the types of sporting opportunities open to women through their workplaces, including organised welfare schemes and independent employee-led activities. Moreover, it will explore working women's experiences of these activities and the ways in which they chose to participate in sport.     

‘Whether you are gay or straight,I don’t like to see effeminate dancing’: effeminophobia in performance-level ballroom dance

This article discusses recent responses to performances of same-sex male ballroom dancing in order to consider the subtle difference which can exist between homophobia and effeminophobia. Given that the world of performance-level ballroom dancing is a gay-friendly environment, in which many participants are openly gay identified, this article will argue that a discourse of effeminophobia, rather than homophobia, underpins the world of performance-level ballroom dance. Performance-level ballroom dance is often read as camp not only because it represents exaggerated gender roles but because its official technique requires that the male dancer synthesise codes of masculinity and femininity in his dancing. What protects the gender-dissident male ballroom dancer from being read as effeminate is that he is paired with a female body performing excessive femininity. Without the foil of the hyper-feminine female partner, the same-sex couple draws attention to the fact that the male ballroom dancer is not dancing as a man but in accordance with ballroom’s queer construction of masculinity. Given that performance-level dance has struggled for so many years to be viewed as masculine sport, practitioners may, quite understandably, be anxious about any representation which suggests that ballroom dance may be an effeminate activity.     

Emotional Deviants and the Politics of Love: ‘spiritual friendships’ in late nineteenth-century Christchurch

William Smith, also known as ‘the man with two wives’, and Mary Colborne-Veel's ‘spiritual friendships’ are part of a significant window into the emotional politics of late nineteenth-century New Zealand. This research explores the relationship between the apparently ‘deviant’ emotions expressed by respectable middle-class political reformers like Smith and his second wife Kate Sheppard, and the political nation-state which they sought to reform. It is the contention of this article that emotional ‘deviancy’ was a reflection of the wider contemporary political situation which saw the nation in flux; the early women's movement politicised love and affection, while the fractured nation that that movement unsettled enabled emotional deviance the privilege of social sanctioning.     

Misogyny in ‘post-war’ Afghanistan: the changing frames of sexual and gender-based violence

Abstract

Although the US and NATO invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 was ideologically justified under the banner of democracy and women’s rights, the latter issue has been completely forgotten within the public sphere since then. As the war has officially ended in Afghanistan, new forms of misogyny and sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) have arisen. The ‘post-war’ Afghan context presents an institutional normalization of violence, favouring a culture of rape and impunity. The changing frames of violence against women are widely related to the political situation of the country: while public attention is focused on peace agreements, women’s issues are relegated to banalities and depicted as ‘everyday’ news. Meanwhile, new frames of SGBV appear as body part mutilation within marriage, forced prostitution, and increasing domestic violence, partly due to the growing consumption of opium but also to the perpetuation of powerful warlords in state structures. This article draws on gender studies to analyse the current misogynist culture in ‘post-war’ Afghanistan, framing the new forms of violence induced by successive armed conflicts. It relies on interviews conducted in 2013 in Afghanistan; and on secondary sources, mostly taken from the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan and Human Rights Watch reports.     

‘A Jazzed and Patchwork Modern’: ‘future’ girls and modern masculinities in the early popular romances of Berta Ruck

As a best‐selling writer of popular romances during the first half of the twentieth century, Berta Ruck (1878–1978) has been characterised as a producer of ‘omelettes of frivolity and sweetness’ whose appeal was confined to adolescent girls and the servant classes. Closer attention to some of the early novels and to her own evaluation of her work, however, reveals her attempts to confront and articulate the impact of societal change upon a generation whose world was being irrevocably altered by the Great War and its aftermath. Her almost forensic attention to local detail and her treatment of contemporary questions of gender identity make her a compelling chronicler of the period and lend credibility to her claims of a broader readership than that generally associated with the genre.     

As unconscious and gay as a trout in a stream?: turning the trope of the Australian Girl

The instability of colonial representational economies, identities and tropes is the subject of analysis in this paper. I take as my starting point the anxieties that were generated during the late 19th century in relation to what I nominate the fictitiousness of settler subjects in colonial Australia. In order to examine these historical concerns and their explicitly gendered representations, I consider in detail one text, Rosa Campbell Praed's Fugitive Anne: A Romance of the Unexplored Bush (1902). This text was published in 1902 and was one of a number of romance novels this author produced for readerships in both colonial Australia and England. This adventure romance features the trope of the Australian Girl and also engages in varying degrees with discourses of colonial ethnography that, to my knowledge, have not been examined in relation to the ideological production and effects of this figure.     

When does the Gender Difference in Rumination Begin? Gender and Age Differences in the Use of Rumination by Adolescents

A cross-sectional non-clinical sample of 1,218 adolescents, aged 10–17 years, completed measures of stress, rumination, and depression to allow tests of the response style theory of S. Nolen-Hoeksema [J Res Adolesc 4:519–534, 1994] in adolescents, in particular whether increasing levels of stress and rumination in early adolescence are predictive of the onset of the gender difference in depression. Overall, females reported higher levels of stress, rumination, and depression than males. The onset of the gender differences in stress and depression occurred at age 13 years, and for rumination one year earlier at 12 years. Significantly, also from 13 years, rumination explained the gender difference in depression by showing that it significantly mediated the effect of gender on depression. Gender moderated the rumination to depression relationship; specifically the association was stronger for females than males. Developmental differences were noted in that rumination significantly mediated between stress and depression earlier in the age range for females than males. Results supported many of the predictions of Nolen-Hoeksema’s model of the emergence of a gender difference in adolescent depression.

Dacoity and rural crime in Madras, 1860–1940

Dacoity in south India was one of the several inter‐related forms of rural crime wth a strong element of social and economic protest, running from spontaneous looting to banditry as the experimental stage of incipient revolt. Far from being confined to “criminal tribes”, recourse to crime was frequent and widespread in rural society, especially in response to famine and high prices, in reaction to the disruptive impact of colonialism, and in the attempts of declining rural groups to maintain or regain their old preeminence.     

How Do Chinese Youth in Hong Kong Evaluate Maternal Guilt and Shame Induction? Age,Form, and Domain Differences

Journal of Youth and Adolescence - Although Chinese parents are seen as employing guilt and shame induction to socialize children’s culturally appropriate behavior, research has focused...     

Forest land and peasant struggles in Assam, 2002–2007

Historically, and currently, agrarian mobilisation in Assam is – and has been – informed by a desire on the part of poor peasants in Tengani for security of tenure on forest land that they have occupied and cultivated in the course of successive historical waves of migration. The result was the emergence of a peasant movement, a process informed by and in turn structuring not just competing claims to nature, particularly as this involved a conflict between forest conservation and cultivation. This problem was compounded by the different class positions of those who subsequently became involved in the struggle: traders, moneylenders, poor peasants, better-off producers, NGOs, bureaucrats and government. These contradictions underwrote what became distinctions between the BTUSS and the DMSS, or the development of what in effect were two movements.