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SummaryThe relation between women's timing of menarche and father absence was examined in a national probability sample of Great Britain (NATSAL 2000; N>5000). Current body mass index (as a proxy for childhood weight) was examined as a potential mediator of this relationship, along with the potential moderating role that siblings (e.g. number of older brothers) had on this relationship. As in a number of previous studies, an absent father (but not an absent mother) during childhood predicted an earlier age of puberty (i.e. an early menarche). There was no evidence that weight mediated this relationship or that siblings moderated it. Both a lower body mass index and more siblings (e.g. more younger sisters and brothers) were independent predictors of a later timing of puberty. The results confirm that certain psychosocial factors (i.e. father absence; presence of siblings) may affect the timing of sexual maturation in adolescent girls.

This article examines the meaning Israeli female dancers assign to extra-thin bodies. It claims that dancers interpret extra-thinness as an essential tool for the making of an ideal body-machine which allows entrance to a professional world of dancers. Working in a demanding professional world, anorexic bodies are seen by dancers as indicators of success and commitment. It is a means to win recognition from significant others and make the most out of a short-term and risk-embedded career. An haute-ecole of dance was chosen as a location for this study because it is a social setting that sets its own rules of transforming the body into an instrument of training. This study allows us to understand why certain professional and age groups tend to develop anorexia and helps understanding how anorexia, once embedded in a professional ideology, is hard to overcome.

SummaryMuch focus has been placed on the obesity epidemic due to its high prevalence and the costs it imposes on society. Using 2004 data from the Roper Center, complemented with 2003 data from the Behavioural Risk Factor Surveillance System, this study analyses the possible effect that time preference has on health in the United States, as measured by the body mass index. After controlling for a variety of covariates and correcting for potential selectivity, some evidence of a positive association between time preference for the present and the body mass index can be found, particularly for males. Research in this area has policy implications in terms of creating incentives for those who lack self-control through the use of pre-commitment devices. Measures addressing self-control issues may be more effective in reducing the rising obesity rates across the world.

Der Autor, der als Berater für die US-amerikanische Regierungskommission "Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe" arbeitete, plädiert in seinem Beitrag gegen die Wahl Kasachstans zum (jährlich rotierenden) Amtierenden Vorsitz der OSZE für das Jahr 2009, für die sich eine Mehrheit unter den OSZE Mitgliedsstaaten abzeichnet. (Zur Bestätigung wird allerdings ein einstimmiges Votum benötigt.) Als Sprecher der OSZE verträte Kasachstan die Organisation nach außen und besäße kraft des Amtierenden Vorsitzes wichtige Möglichkeiten der Politikgestaltung, insbesondere bei der Besetzung der Positionen der OSZE-Missionsleiter und der Wahlbeobachtungsleiter. Gegen eine Wahl Kasachstans zum Amtierenden Vorsitz sprächen fehlende demokratische Verhältnisse in dem Land und die grundlegend kritische Haltung Kasachstans zur bisherigen Politik der OSZE besonders in Demokratie- und Menschenrechtsfragen. Die Erwartungen der Förderer einer Kasachastan- Kandidatur , eine solche Funktion in der OSZE würde die Reformkräfte in dem zentralasiatischen Land stärken, teilt der Autor nicht. (IFSH-Pll)

This essay aims to explore the political messages found in the work of Soth Polin, one of Cambodia's influential writers in the 1970s. Soth's short story, Sramol Ptī Oey..Khluon Ūn Rahaek [My Dear Husband…My Body Was Torn Apart] illustrates how Cambodia was in a state of physical and moral decay during the Vietnam War as a result of attacks from Vietnamese Communists and American influence over the Cambodian leaders during the Vietnam War. In Soth's stories, pornographic, philosophical and political elements are artistically interwoven. The author uses women's bodies and sexuality as both a site of patriarchal control and as a site of negotiation between the female subject and the patriarchal power. The feminised body of Cambodia symbolizes the political oppression of foreign powers and resistance to these powers. Soth's text shows the continuity of traditional concepts and new creativity in modern Cambodian literature.

Gender transformations are normatively understood as somatic, based on surgical reassignment, where the sexed body is aligned with the gender identity of the individual through genital surgery – hence the common lexicon 'sex change surgery'. We suggest that the UK Gender Recognition Act 2004 challenges what constitutes a 'sex change' through the Act's definitions and also the conditions within which legal 'recognition' is permitted. The sex/gender distinction, (where sex normatively refers to the sexed body, and gender, to social identity) is demobilised both literally and legally. This paper discusses the history of medico-socio-legal definitions of sex have been developed through decision making processes when courts have been faced with people with gender variance and, in particular, the implications of the Gender Recognition Act for our contemporary legal understanding of sex. We ask, and attempt to answer, has 'sex' changed?

Abstract  During the first half of the twentieth century eugenics became a mainstream body of thinking and an approach to the solution of social problems across Europe and North America. Fears of degeneration and certain notions of heredity and fertility had produced widespread discourses regarding threats to the nation's health and its reproductive capacities. Governing nations' procreative activities shaped social policies and practices thus placing gender and sexuality at the centre of analysis. The article examines how eugenics became an axis of intervention in family and reproductive politics through discourses and practices of "positive" eugenics. The substantive focus here is on the eugenic content of premarital advice and family politics in Switzerland assessing the impact of the eugenics movement as well as the women's movement. The article contributes to a growing body of scholarship on comparative historical analyses of eugenics by contextualising Switzerland in a eugenic international.

This paper examines the ways in which a divided self may be actively cultivated for thrill in sadomasochistic scenes. In The Divided Self, Laing (1959/1990) presented an existential theory of schizophrenia and personal alienation describing a process where there is a separation of self/body amongst the ontologically insecure outsider. Whilst Laing's theory concerns an experience of deep despair, van DeurzenSmith (1991) argues that the theory should be reconceptualised as a way of understanding the existential anxiety common to all human experience rather than just the extreme experience of psychosis. In this paper I draw on some of Laing's ideas to look at the way in which the splits between the self/body might be deliberately cultivated during sadomasochistic sex scenes amongst ontologically secure individuals. In addition, I explore the ways in which 'petrification' (Laing, 1959/1990) and 'the look' (Sartre, 1943/2003) might also be key parts of the sadomasochistic experience.

Society in Northern Ireland has undergone substantial change in recent years, the most controversial aspect of this being the reform of policing following the report of the Independent Commission for Policing in Northern Ireland in 1999. Section 15.2 of the report's recommendations called on the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA), Ireland's largest sporting body, to repeal Rule 21. This rule prevented security force personnel in Northern Ireland from joining the GAA. Utilizing Mawby's models on policing, this article examines a range of views expressed by GAA members concerning the rule's eventual removal. Those advocating the retention of Rule 21 cited decades of alleged maltreatment at the hands of state security forces. In contrast, a growing body of opinion within the wider nationalist community favored a more enlightened approach on the issue. The resulting discourse reflected the symbolic importance of Rule 21 in the construction of Irish Nationalism as a whole.

One of the most significant features of the television series CSI: Crime Scene Investigationis its central preoccupation – forensic evidence – and the profession practised by its major characters – forensic science. Scientific inscriptions consistently allow the crime scene investigators (CSIs) to determine 'evidence' and 'truths' that otherwise elude them. At the same time, the dazzling digital effects used to punctuate key moments in each episode inevitably reference scientific technologies and the knowledge about reality that these promise. The success of the CSIs in every episode is premised upon knowledge guaranteed by scientific inscriptions and is itself an inscription of ways of seeing human bodies and the social body, represented by police scientists working to ensure public safety – a healthy social body. And it is also about how bodies, individual and social, are constituted as information, made knowable and validated by scientific instruments and procedures used to produce evidence.

The contentious topic of female circumcision brings together medical science, women's health activism, media, and national and international policy-making in pursuit of the common goal of eradicating such practices. Referring to these diverse and heterogeneous practices as 'female genital mutilation' (FGM), eradicators have then condemned them as 'barbaric' and medically harmful to female bodies and sexuality. In presuming that bodies can be separated from their cultural contexts, the anti-FGM discourse not only replicates a nature/culture dualism that has been roundly questioned by feminists in science studies and cultural studies, but has also perpetuated a colonialist assumption by universalizing a particular western image of a 'normal' body and sexuality in its quest to liberate women and girls. I use my own story as a circumcised woman to highlight the entanglements of body and culture as presented in these feminist theories of female bodies.

This article argues that the identity of the 'new' Indian woman in the rapidly altering cultural and social imaginary of India is constructed, shaped and redefined in the everyday experiences of women as they both contest and submit to the images and constructs that impinge on their senses, emotions, and material and social conditions. In this context, the article examines samples of advertisements, fashion photography and selected textual material from the Indian women's magazine Femina to understand how body images serve to construct embodiment and womanhood through the medium of visual representation and textual discourse. The focus in the magazine is on the desirability of woman's body, not only as a glamorous, well-groomed product, but also as a commercialised product for consumption in an international marketplace, thus affirming that India has arrived in the world of beauty and glamour, and legitimising the recolonisation of Indian woman's embodiment in the global economy.

Part of a special journal symposium on the US prison-industrial complex, sociological & phenomenological rationales are offered for examining the everyday experiences of prisoners. Based on his experiences as a volunteer teacher of a philosophy seminar at a maximum security men's penitentiary in MD, the author draws on transcripts of inmate dialogues to describe their perceptions of "lived time" & "lived space" behind bars. Martin Heidegger's phenomenology of the life-world, Maurice Merleau-Ponty's analysis of the lived body, & Michel Foucault's writings on the body in power relations provide the philosophical groundwork with which to interpret prisoners' experiences. It is concluded that inmates can be "active constitutors" of their everyday worlds inside the prison, creating their own freedoms; structural & policy constraints on prisoners' ability to transcend their circumstances & make something positive out of their experiences are discussed. 17 References. K. Hyatt Stewart