"Permanent discharge": deaths of people under 50 years of age in residential aged care in Victoria

In June 2007 there were 210 people under 50 years of age living in residential aged care in Victoria, Australia, most of whom had acquired brain injuries. There are an average of 21 deaths per year in this group yet very little is known about the causes of such deaths. While the Coroners Act 2008 (Vic) requires mandatory reporting of "unexpected" and "accidental" deaths, anecdotal evidence and data from the Coroner's Office suggest that most deaths of people under 50 years of age in residential aged care are not reported. This research presents the cases of three "preventable" deaths, none of which was reported to the coroner and all of which have implications for systemic reform. It concludes that cross-sectoral solutions to meet the complex needs of people under 50 years of age with disabilities in residential aged care are urgently needed as well as monitoring to help us to understand better the needs of young people in residential aged care.     

Public health and vulnerable groups

Editors' Introduction

Public health and vulnerable groups     

Jacob Zuma, the social body and the unruly power of song

This article tracks the life of the song ‘Umshini Wami’(My Machine Gun) adopted by Jacob Zuma, the President of theAfrican National Congress, since early 2005.  It exploresthe wider implications of political song in the public spherein South Africa and aims to show how ‘Umshini Wami’helped Jacob Zuma to prominence and demonstrated a longing inthe body politic for a political language other than that ofa distancing and alienating technocracy. The article also exploresthe early pre-Zuma provenance of the song, its links to thepre-1994 struggle period and its entanglement in a seamlessmasculinity with little place for gendered identities in thenew state to come. It argues too that the song can be seen asunstable and unruly, a signifier with a power of its own andnot entirely beholden to its new owner.     

Maytree: A respite center for the suicidal: an evaluation

This paper evaluates the contribution to suicide prevention made by an innovative project, Maytree, a respite center for the suicidal. Maytree offers a distinctive brief period of sanctuary for four nights for suicidal people; within this limited time it aims to provide opportunities through talking, reflecting, and relaxing for reducing the intense feelings that lead to suicidal behavior. The focus of this paper is on evaluating the first 3 years of Maytree's operation, exploring how Maytree works, and its effects on the people who stay there as "guests". This shows that Maytree reaches people who are at significant risk of suicide. Guests report both short term relief and longer term benefits. These changes are understood, through applying crisis intervention theory, as being generated by the opportunities for change in the Maytree approach. Thus, there is the potential for a benign cycle to be established. Maytree's model is different from that of mainstream, statutory services; we conclude that Maytree complements these services and also challenges the values and frameworks of statutory provision in the field of suicide prevention.     

Women have servants and men never eat: issues in reading gender,using the case study of mass-observation's 1937 day-diaries

Abstract

The category ‘gender’ has become axiomatic to feminist analysis: analysing the dynamics and outcomes of gender has come to be seen as constituting ‘what academic feminists do’. Within feminist analysis, gender is positioned as ana prioricharacteristic of social life; and gender is also analytically privileged as the most salient characteristic of people and social situations. Both assumptions are challenged. This article argues instead that gender is not a discovery, something innately ‘there’ in social life, but is rather to be understood as an invention, an imposed analytic category of great utility for academic feminism, but also one which creates as many analytic troubles as it solves. The article problematises thea prioriand privileged status of gender within feminist analysis by discussing various interpretational issues involved in analysing a set of day-diaries written by women and men for Mass-Observation in 1937, in particular focusing on reading and writing as interpretational acts which are often treated as analytically transparent. Here, however, this epistemological bracketing is suspended, and instead both are scrutinised in analytical detail. Although the argument is discussed in relation to these specific historical materials, it is argued that the same epistemological issues arise in relation to the analysis of all kinds of research materials, whether historical or present-day, for reading and writing are the crucial elements of interpretation, and interpretation is itself central to feminist as to all other analysis.     

DESIRING YOUNG LES(BI)AN VISIONARIES IN THE ARCHIVE

This paper presents a critically reflexive account of the experiences of a group of researchers at the Canadian Women's Movement Archives. Drawing on the work of Sara Ahmed, Claire Colebrook, and Victoria Hesford, it argues that the researchers shared intensely embodied and emotional encounters with the archival record of lesbians’ struggles to create and define community. These encounters encouraged the researchers to explore the potential of their own sexual subjectivities. Their deepened understanding of the complex lesbian and feminist past provided them with the desire to reconsider the collective promise of ‘lesbian’ and ‘bisexual’ for their own future community.     

urban spaces: gender,genre, mediation

After an initial period of feminist theorizing concerned with understanding patriarchy as a structure of male domination, many thinkers turned away from theorizing domination as such and focused instead on women's (constructed) subjectivity, identity, and agency. While this has fostered important insights into the formation of women's preferences, desires, and choices, this focus on subjectivity and subject formation has largely overshadowed deeper understandings of patriarchy as a structure of male domination while producing elisions between agency and freedom. In this article, I move to show how domination as a structural concept can help us to reclaim the idea of ‘patriarchy’ as a source of women's systematic oppression while freedom as non-domination, derived from early republican conceptualizations of freedom, can help us to disambiguate freedom from agency by taking as central the relative positions of actors within social and political structures. Structural freedom as non-domination is thus useful for feminist thinkers in that it gives us critical purchase on the dynamics inherent in unequal social and political relationships and can be linked clearly to the institutions and ideologies that shape and justify interactions between more powerful and less powerful groups. Further, from this point of view intersecting structures of domination can be analysed rather than intersecting identity categories, allowing us to take intersectionality into account and avoiding the need to ground feminist action on a unitary ‘category woman’. Finally, this analysis points toward the radical democratic connexion between freedom and participation in the creation of the material and symbolic structures that frame our collective lives.