Adolescent suicide myths in the United States

In the United States, teen suicide rates tripled over several decades, but have declined slightly since the mid-1990s. Suicide, by its nature, is a complex problem. Many myths have developed about individuals who complete suicide, suicide risk factors, current prevention programs, and the treatment of at-risk youth. The purpose of this article is to address these myths, to separate fact from fiction, and offer recommendations for future suicide prevention programs. Myth #1: Suicide attempters and completers are similar Myth #2: Current prevention programs work. Myth #3: Teenagers have the highest suicide rate. Myth #4: Suicide is caused by family and social stress. Myth #5: Suicide is not inherited genetically. Myth #6: Teen suicide represents treatment failure. Psychiatric illnesses are often viewed differently from other medical problems. Research should precede any public health effort, so that suicide prevention programs can be designed, implemented, and evaluated appropriately. Too often suicide prevention programs do not use evidence-based research or practice methodologies. More funding is warranted to continue evidence-based studies. We propose that suicide be studied like any medical illness, and that future prevention efforts are evidence-based, with appropriate outcome measures.     

Negotiating hybridity: Native women's performance as cultural persistence

New Delhi-based performer, Maya Krishna Rao’s experimental performances incorporate a variety of forms including kathakali, cabaret, comedy, drag, live music, and video, and draw attention to the performative, political, and ethical potential of gesture. This article traces Rao’s practice as a minor inhabitation of kathakali and everyday gesture. Following performance theorist Erin Manning (2016), I understand the “minor” to be a force that scrambles normative hierarchies of value and organization from within the intervals of the “major.” Rao’s minor practice retools the four-hundred-year-old dance-drama form to produce new sensory-kinesthetic knowledge of quotidian regimes. In works such as The Non-Stop Feel-Good Show, Khol Do, and A Deep Fried Jam, Rao straddles kathakali’s mythical economy, conventions, and physicality alongside snippets from contemporary news media, ideologically inflected historical narratives, and socially normative dress and behavior codes, to reveal the extraordinary with/in the everyday, such that we might inhabit the present differently. In distorting, combining, disarticulating, and deterritorializing kathakali’s gestural and expressive vocabulary, Rao invites audiences to partake and follow her into a gestural regime that lies alongside the known. By focusing on the possibilities for affective realignment and queering in a minor register, her experimental and hybrid kathakali-influenced performances impress upon discourses and practices of neoliberal urbanism, national memory, and gender and sexuality in New Delhi today.     

'Neither man nor woman'? Female Transvestism,Object Relations and Mourning in George Moore's 'Albert Nobbs'

Heilmann offers a psychoanalytic reading of Moore's narrative of cross-gender impersonation 'Albert Nobbs'. First published in A Story-Teller's Holiday (1918) and later transferred to Celibate Lives (1927), the story features a woman who passes herself off as a man, until a chance meeting with another male impersonator happily equipped with a wife galvanizes her desire for a companion. Her inability to reveal the secret of her body to her prospective bride, however, coupled with the marked absence of any expression of sexual passion, leads to the break-up of the relationship, and Albert dies, a loner hoarding money in order to sublimate her thwarted longing for love. In this text the no (wo)man's land of cross-gender masquerade operates as a psychological marker of Albert's social (hence internal) lack of identity. An illegitimate child brought up by a nurse, she never knew her parents, whose absent presence was embodied by an allowance discontinued after their death. Drawing on Kleinian object-relations theory, Heilmann argues that Albert's (mis)performance of 'manhood' constitutes a subliminal quest for her missing parents, a desire always frustrated and ultimately displaced into the hard currency of material commodities. If Moore's story represents the female tranvestite as a castrated, sexless and depressed 'perhapser', an 'outcast from both sexes', fatherless and yet forever locked into a male-authored, patronymic text, Simone Benmussa, who in 1977 adapted the story for the stage ( The Singular Life of Albert Nobbs ), offers a more subversive reading of the female cross-dresser as a 'figure that disrupts' (Marjorie Garber) cultural categories and binary oppositions. The article ends with a consideration of Benmussa's revisionary strategies.     

Sally Ledger: an appreciation

This appreciation of Sally Ledger, formerly Hildred Carlile Professor of English at Royal Holloway, University of London, who died in January 2009, is written by a colleague and fellow board member of Women’s History Review. It focuses upon her professional career as a Victorianist and literary gender specialist who made a major contribution to international scholarship on Victorian to fin‐de‐siècle culture, women’s writing, literary gender studies, and Dickens studies.     

A Quarter Century of Participation in School-Based Extracurricular Activities: Inequalities by Race,Class, Gender and Age?

Extracurricular activity participation is linked to positive development, but it is also a setting for inequality. Using a quarter century of data from Monitoring the Future (N?=?593,979; 51% female; 65% non-Hispanic white; 13% non-Hispanic black; 12% Hispanic; 4% non-Hispanic Asian/Pacific Islander; 7% other race), this article documents patterns and trends in school-based extracurricular participation by race, social class, gender, and age, and their links to academic and substance use outcomes. Findings reveal differences by race and confirm a division by social class that has worsened over time. Further, girls are gaining on boys and surpass them in some types of school-based activities. Participation is linked to better academic outcomes and less substance use, affirming the importance of redressing the inequalities revealed.     

Street Ball,Swim Team and the Sour Cream Machine: A Cluster Analysis of Out of School Time Participation Portfolios

Adolescents spend only a fraction of their waking hours in school and what they do with the rest of their time varies dramatically. Despite this, research on out-of-school time has largely focused on structured programming. The authors analyzed data from the Educational Longitudinal Study of 2002 (ELS:2002) to examine the out-of-school time activity portfolios of 6,338 high school sophomores, accounting for time spent in school clubs and sports as well as 17 other activities. The analytical sample was balanced with respect to sex and racially and ethnically diverse: 49% female, 67% White, 10% Latino, 10% African American, and 6% Asian and Pacific Islander. Approximately 76% of the sample attended public schools, 30% were in the highest socioeconomic quartile, and 20% were in the lowest socioeconomic quartile. The authors identified five distinct out-of-school time activity portfolios based on a cluster analysis. The demographic profiles of students by portfolio type differed significantly with respect to sex, race/ethnicity, socioeconomic status, school type and location. Students by portfolio type also differed significantly in terms of measures of academic success, school behavior, victimization and perceptions of school climate, controlling for covariates. These findings underscore the importance of more complex considerations of adolescents’ out-of-school time.

Colonial labour,Tawdenni and ‘L’enfer du sel’: the struggle from slave to free labour in a Saharan salt mine

Abstract

Can we understand the arrival of Capitalism in Africa by tracking labour – from unfree to free, from slave to wage? The question supposes slavery to lie at its heart, yet the conversation between labour and slave studies is in early stages. The sources are problematic: the colonial ‘language of labour’ was often political rhetoric camouflaging ongoing forms of slavery. Then, there was the question of how the metropole-incorporated colonies into its economy: French West Africa’s sun and sand offered few economic resources. One was salt. The Niger Bend economy depended on Tawdenni, a desert salt mine controlled by Saharans and exploited by their slaves. In 1910, it was predicted that the French abolition of slavery would spell the end of Tawdenni: “Never will a man from the South – unless a slave – give himself to this work”; what, therefore, was to be done? The paper challenges the view that engagement with colonial capitalism necessarily led directly or even inevitably from slavery to wage labour by exploring how Tawdenni’s servile labour system responded to French colonial attempts to combine political abolition and economic sustainability.     

Act Natural: Dubious Proposals in The Mill on the Floss,The Pastor’s Wife,Vera and Rebecca

Abstract

Following George Eliot, Elizabeth von Arnim showcases a male rhetoric of naturalness. Her men cultivate and punish their women when they resist naturalizing. Without denigrating the intelligence of women, von Arnim shows their unwitting complicity in their subjection. In The Pastor’s Wife (1914) and in Vera (1921), the highly literate women have read the wrong books or missed the unfriendly truths about relationships in those they have read. The husbands and lovers make shallow use of philosophical and scientific reasoning to justify their control and enforce female uniformity deemed ‘natural’. Darwin is misappropriated by the tyrannical Wemyss: evolutionary theories support his imperious dismissal of Lucy’s aunt and friends. Wemyss’s most monstrous actions suggest an atavistic patriarchal dominance like the hereditary reversion theorized by Samuel Butler as unconscious memory. Wemyss brings up the issue of England’s inheritance, and a disturbing vision dawns as the philistine and self-appointed natural man subdues Lucy. Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca (1938) follows Vera’s plot, but it does not interrogate naturalness in the same way. Entrapped in her husband’s vision of a natural woman, the narrator registers Rebecca’s wild transgressiveness as more powerful and universal than her own tamed naturalness.