Learning masculinities and femininities: power/knowledge and legitimate peripheral participation

This paper takes up my previous work [Women's Stud. Int. Forum 26 (2003b) 69] considering how masculinities and femininities can be regarded as local communities of practice. In particular, I focus on how the legitimate participation of children in adult communities of masculinity and femininity takes place within gendered power/knowledge relations. My main concern in this paper is the process of legitimation of participation in communities of masculinity and femininity practice. I examine this through a number of examples, including the medical appropriation of the process of gender assignment of intersex babies.Masculinity and femininity are intimately connected with power/knowledge. One aspect of the hegemonic processes that establish sex differences as important is the naturalization of the development and awareness of differences between males and females as part of early child development. To sustain gendered power/knowledge relations, we require our boys and girls to behave differently from birth and consciously or unconsciously reward them for this. In this paper, I tease out the relationship between power/knowledge, legitimation, and the learning of masculine and feminine roles within communities of practice.     

Faith in forgiveness? Exploring conversions to Christianity within a former Khmer Rouge community

This article explores stories of former members of the Khmer Rouge who have converted to Christianity. It sheds light on the intersections of patterns of religious change in Cambodia, which implicates peace-building, redress, and development trajectories in the wake of conflict and atrocities. The case raises important questions about why former members of the Khmer Rouge convert to Christianity and the social, political, and ethical implications of their conversions. We explore these questions to show that, while transitions and attendant redress efforts in Cambodia have been principally explained at the level of the state, we should pay closer attention to the granular experiences of former Khmer Rouge members as they navigate Cambodia’s changing post-conflict terrain, and the social and cultural sites through which they have made their experiences of the past meaningful.     

Informativeness of the CODIS STR loci for admixture analysis

Population admixture (or ancestry) is used as an approach to gene discovery in complex diseases, particularly when the disease prevalence varies widely across geographic populations. Admixture analysis could be useful for forensics because an indication of a perpetrator's ancestry would narrow the pool of suspects for a particular crime. The purpose of this study was to use Fisher's information to identify informative sets of markers for admixture analysis. Using published founding population allele frequencies we test three marker sets for efficacy for estimating admixture: the FBI CODIS Core STR loci, the HGDP-CEPH Human Genome Diversity Cell Line Panel and the set of 39 ancestry informative SNPS from the Shriver lab at Pennsylvania State University. We conclude that the FBI CODIS Core STR set is valid for admixture analysis, but not the most precise. We recommend using a combination of the most informative markers from the HGDP-CEPH and Shriver loci sets.     

Forensic dermatopathology and internal disease

The gross and microscopic analysis of skin lesions at autopsy can help the pathologist understand diseases and injuries inflicted premortem, perimortem, or postmortem. From January 2003 to January 2004, skin findings at autopsy were closely examined by a dermatologist and sampled for microscopic analysis at the Southwestern Institute of Forensic Sciences. Dermatologic abnormalities in some of these cases led to the discovery of internal disease and allowed for a more complete understanding of the pathologic disease processes affecting the individual. We present four autopsy cases with skin manifestations of internal disease, including pseudoxanthoma elasticum, calciphylaxis, the sign of Leser Trelat, and papular mucinosis, and demonstrate the usefulness of the dermatological assessment at autopsy. In all cases, discovery of these skin lesions and internal disease manifestations allowed contributing factors to the death of the individual to be uncovered.     

Sexual victimization and health-risk behaviors: a prospective analysis of college women

The present study utilizes the National College Health Risk Behavior Survey to examine the relationship between health-risk behaviors and sexual victimization among a sample of college women. A prospective design is utilized to examine the relationship between health-risk behaviors as measured at baseline and sexual victimization during a 3-month follow-up period. After controlling for age and parents' education, a history of adolescent sexual victimization was associated with the following health-risk behaviors as measured at pretest: increased likelihood of cigarette smoking, marijuana use, suicidal ideation, experience of physical violence within a dating relationship, use of diet pills and vomiting or laxatives to lose weight, multiple sexual partners, and early sexual intercourse. Prospectively, women's history of adolescent sexual victimization was the strongest predictor of sexual victimization during the 3-month follow-up. Implications of univariate associations between early sexual intercourse, suicidal ideation, and problematic weight loss behaviors and subsequent experience of sexual victimization are discussed.