Suchergebnisse

Lee Daniels' award-winning film, Precious: Based on the Novel "Push" by Sapphire is a powerful and controversial cinematic narrative of resilience. After its release at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival, Daniels recruited Oprah Winfrey and Tyler Perry as executive producers to help promote this independent, African-American art film (Mask, 2012). Precious was released nationwide on November 6 of that year, and won Academy Awards for Best Supporting Actress (Mo-Nique) and Best Screenplay. The film is based on Sapphire's 1996 novel Push, which tells the story of Claireece "Precious" Jones, an overweight, illiterate, African-American 16 year old growing up in Harlem in the 1980s. According to Sapphire, in telling this story Push does not beat people over the head with a heavy-handed political commentary, but instead opens people's hearts (Push Pictures, 2009). As a faithful adaptation of Push, the film portrays the world from Precious' perspective and, although understated, Sapphire's critical social commentary comes alive through Precious' story (Push Pictures, 2009).

While related areas such as Queer Studies and Sexuality Studies have become established as disciplinary formations in North American and British universities, Lesbian Studies has not. This article reports on an analysis of key publications by critics and advocates of Lesbian Studies to explore the possibility that Lesbian Studies was flawed in ways that account for its non-emergence. Charges against Lesbian Studies include naïve essentialism, white middle-classness, separatism, and paranoia. Discourse analysis of books by Lesbian Studies advocates examines evidence of each of these qualities and concludes that Lesbian Studies was above all too lesbian to be successfully integrated into the enduringly heteropatriarchal institution of the university.

Catherine J. Taylor on life under restrictive abortion laws.

AbstractLaws and public policies that are seemingly unrelated to health, nevertheless, can have health consequences in populations that are targeted, or protected, by that legislation. In this paper, I first review research showing that systems of oppression, such as racism and sexism, can cause negative health outcomes. I next discuss mechanisms underlying the relationship between such systems of oppression and negative health effects. Last, I review research showing that laws and public policies can be seen as components of systems of oppression and, as such, are linked to health outcomes. Some policies and laws I include in my review are anti‐same‐sex marriage bills, punitive immigration laws, stop and frisk policies, and state‐level voter disenfranchisement policies. The link between health outcomes and laws and public policies has implications for the current political climate.

In this critical, feminist account of the management of intersex conditions under 2006's controversial "Disorders of Sex Development" (DSD) treatment model, I argue that like the "Optimal Gender of Rearing" (OGR) treatment model it replaced, DSD aims at securing a cisgendered future for the intersex patient, referring to a normalized trajectory of development across the lifespan in which multiple sexed, gendered, and sexual characteristics remain in "coherent" alignment. I argue this by critically analyzing two ways that intersex management has changed between OGR and DSD: 1) regarding sex‐assignment recommendations for three patient populations and, 2) with the prenatal treatment of pregnant individuals at risk of conceiving a fetus with congenital adrenal hyperplasia with the steroid hormone dexamethasone. I conclude that like OGR before it, DSD also unjustifiably presumes that typical genitalia are necessary for cisgendered development. However, unlike OGR, it appeals to the empirically inadequate, theoretically suspect, and biologically determinist model of gender development known as brain‐organization theory. Given this, I conclude that the treatment of intersex people under DSD continues to be driven by problematically heterosexist and transphobic assumptions regarding the value and normalcy of cisgendered life, while practically and discursively constituting it as such.

AbstractCortisol is a stress hormone that is reactive to social stress and thus should be of use to sociologists interested in understanding specific processes related to the broad category of "threats to the social self". In this paper I use cortisol as a case study to explore the utility of biomarkers for elucidating the relationship between the social environment and human biology. I focus on cortisol because it is a stress hormone that reacts in particular to social stress, and therefore could be of special interest to sociologists. I first discuss the relationship between the social environment and cortisol response. Then I briefly review sociological literature that uses cortisol as a measure. Finally, I provide an overview of how to use cortisol in research projects. This overview addresses some of the basic questions that are typically asked by social scientists who are considering taking cortisol measures in their own work.

This study examines how occupational sex segregation affects women's and men's perceptions of the availability of workplace support. Drawing on theories of gender and empirical studies of workplace tokenism, the author develops the concept of an occupational minority. Although the notion of tokenism was developed to describe processes at the level of the workplace, the author explores how being a minority at the occupational level affects workers. Using nationally representative data, she finds that in mixed-sex occupations, women report higher levels of workplace support than men; in male-dominated occupations, they perceive relatively low levels of support. Men, by contrast, perceive relatively high levels of workplace support in female-dominated occupations. That is, being a member of a numerical minority in one's occupation is an advantage for men and a disadvantage for women.