affective politics,debility and hearing voices: towards a feminist politics of ordinary suffering

This paper is an intervention within feminist and queer debates that have re-posed so-called negative states of being as offering productive possibilities for political practice and social transformation. What is sometimes called the politics of negative affect or analyses of political feeling has sought to de-pathologise shame, melancholy, failure, depression, anxieties and other forms of ‘feeling bad’, to open up new ways of thinking about agency, change and transformation. Ann Cvetkovich’s recent memoir explores depression as a public feeling and argues that ‘feeling bad might, in fact, be the ground for transformation’. As she suggests, the question, ‘how do I feel’ could usefully be reframed as ‘how does capitalism feel’? This performative staging of political forms of psychosocial reflexivity opens up new strategies for survival, new visions of the future, and importantly de-medicalises feeling beyond an individual expression of psychopathology. The grounds for affective politics might be found within new feminist futures that are attentive to the relations between emotion, affect, feelings and politics. This paper will be situated within these debates and the challenge of thinking about the productive possibilities of negative states of being. However, rather than focus on depression, I will turn my attention to experiences such as psychosis and temporal dissociation, based on my long-standing research with the Hearing Voices Network. In the context of discussions of disability and capability I will discuss the value of concepts such as debility, and ‘living in prognosis’, and respond to the call to think through what such states might offer for feminist and queer practice.     

A new barrier to participation: Heterogeneous application of voter identification policies

In democratic societies there is a tension between maximizing ballot access and minimizing voter fraud. Since the 2000 presidential election, this tension has been central to discussions about election reform at the national, state, and local level. We examine this tension by focusing on the implementation of voter identification laws in one state that has experienced significant issues in recent elections, and that is currently implementing election reform: New Mexico. We hypothesize that Hispanic voters are more likely to show some form of identification than other types of voters. Using a voter data set from New Mexico's First Congressional District in the 2006 election, we find that Hispanic, male and Election Day voters are more likely to show some form of identification than non-Hispanic, female and early voters. In addition, using an overlapping study of Bernalillo County 2006 poll workers, which almost entirely overlaps with the First Congressional District, we find no evidence that differences in poll worker partisanship or ethnicity produce differences in voter identification procedures. Our findings suggest that broad voter identification laws, which may be applied unequally, may be perceived as discriminatory.     

Filial Daughter? Filial Son? How China’s Young Urban Elite Negotiate Intergenerational Obligations

ABSTRACT

This article deploys narrative method to explore how young adults in China enrolled in higher education negotiate future intergenerational obligations. The study finds that the process through which filial piety is being renegotiated is complex and sometimes contradictory, and norms and values do not always align with practices, as intergenerational obligations need to be managed in tandem with obligations envisioned towards future spouses, as well as work opportunities. Although no longer explicitly son-centred, the intergenerational contract is highly gendered, and patrilineality and patrilocality have not simply become attenuated through some general process of modernization. Rather, there are many ways in which they have become renegotiated, revealing both continuity and change in intergenerational relations. The article illustrates ways in which both patrilineality and patrilocality—whether endorsed, resisted, or negotiated—are still important organizing principles for how intergenerational relations play out. It introduces the concept of “neo-patrilocality” to denote the practice of families channelling resources along the patriline to organize housing for sons in order to enhance their prospect of getting married and having children, a central aspect of filial piety. While filial sons may be involved in more complex relations of reciprocity due to both cultural imperatives and material investments, filial daughters appear to have more leeway in negotiating intergenerational relations. This may reflect a watered-down, but still implicit, understanding that daughters and grandchildren by daughters are outside of the lineage. It seems that, for filial daughters, the parent–adult-child relation is both more intense and more central to filial piety, while for filial sons, intergenerational relations extend beyond the parent–child relation—to grandparents and future children—more than they do for young women. The article concludes that gender relations and intergenerational relations interact and mutually reinforce one another, and that there are differences in class. Patrilineality and neo-patrilocality were more central for affluent and less privileged families than for families belonging to the middle class.     

Cross-ethnic Invariance of Self-esteem and Depression Measures for Chinese,Filipino, and European American Adolescents

Self-esteem and depression are fundamental psychological adjustment constructs in the study of adolescent well-being. Most measures of these constructs have been developed and validated using European American samples, and while the correlates and predictors of psychological adjustment have been examined in multiple cultural settings, no existing research explicitly compares the equivalence of measures of self-esteem or depression for contemporary Chinese, Filipino and European American adolescents. Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (the Add Health study), this study examines the factorial invariance of self-esteem and depression measures for European American adolescents and the two largest Asian American ethnic groups in the U.S.: Chinese and Filipino Americans. Results indicate strong evidence for invariance of the measure of self-esteem; however, the often-used measure of depression (CES-D) does not satisfy basic tests of measurement invariance for Asian Americans in this sample.