Search

Sexualization is changing the way we think about romantic love. According to recent research, young people are increasingly confronted by narrowing ideals of sexual attractiveness making romantic intimacy increasingly difficult forcing a choice between ‘raunch or romance’. This article investigates the alleged distinction between romance and sexualization, in the process challenging claims that the current crisis of sexualization is a product of societal change in late modernity. Responding to a call to consider sexualization from a hitherto neglected historical perspective, the paper employs critical discourse analysis to identify the formation of gendered meanings and practices in How the Good Wife Taught Her Daughter, a late medieval advice text for young women, and twenty-first-century advice from the MyBliss website. Focusing on sexualized clothing, contact with others, reputation and social status, the paper argues that in both medieval and modern advice, discourses of romantic love and sexualization are mutually dependent. In addition, similarities between medieval and modern advice reveal that our current sexualization crisis is not solely a product of modern life, but is part of a longer pattern of gender normativity and inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With changing socio-economic conditions, some men choose to become stay-at-home fathers in Hong Kong. Although they constitute only about .5% of the total male population, they have captured widespread media attention in recent years. This paper is an exploratory study on the gender representation of stay-at-home fathers in newspapers, and their identity and practice in real life in relation to the construction of masculinity in the Asian context, with particular focus on the intersection of masculinity and social class. Although stay-at-home fathers have given up their traditional breadwinner role, the media continue to portray them in terms of conventional masculinity. Contrary to the findings in Western society, this paper, which is based on Bourdieu’s practice theory, reports that middle-class men in Hong Kong with social and cultural capital are less reflexive in their gender habitus to accept their carer identity, whereas working-class fathers, who lack the appropriate capital to resume their provider status, define themselves as carers who are responsible to the family. As the identity of provider is still central to men, the emergence of this new fatherhood is only a refashioning of the traditional role of fathers and thus does not challenge the existing gender structure. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Feminists have coined the term ‘compulsory monogamy’ to describe the deeply normalised status of coupling, especially for women. To say that monogamy is compulsory is to call attention to constraints on our ability to imagine alternatives. The visibility of alternative relationship models can challenge monogamy's grip on our imaginations, but it can also reinforce its status. This paper explores how normative femininity functions to code monogamous and non-monogamous possibilities as desirable and undesirable, respectively. While both are possible, monogamy is reinforced as healthy adult sexuality – for women and men – through the policing of femininity. The paper grounds this discussion in a reading of a film –Two Girls and a Guy– in which the possibility of a non-dyadic relationship is on the table and at the same time rendered implausible. The analysis has implications both for further unpacking cultural investments in coupling and for resisting compulsory monogamy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper explores the representation of the hero in the 1935 Hitchcock classic "The 39 Steps." The film, while drawing on the original adventure story of "The Thirty Nine Steps," adopts a modernist sensibility in its cinematic depiction of technology and its representation of a bantering heterosexual couple. However, this does not displace the gendered, classed and racialised role of the hero. I examine the construction of the hero via discourses of masculinity, linked to the notion of the flâneur, that is, the right of the male hero to wander, gaze and appropriate different space and place for his own use. Hannay, as the hero, also has the correct credentials of class and "race." This permits him a particular imperialist position which allows him the right of disguise and dissimulation. This freedom assures him a final bourgeois romantic union, consolidating his position as the hero. The role of the hero is one that is not available to women, who are either punished or only permitted to take up the role of heroine, the complementary and lesser partner to the hero. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article draws on findings from an auto/biographical study about relationships with food to demonstrate how everyday foodways continue to be influenced by the intersectionalities of gender and class. Following Bourdieu [1984.Distinction, a social critique of the judgement of taste. London: Routledge] how ‘foodies’ use food and foodways (the production, preparation, serving and eating of food) as a material and cultural display of capital (Johnston, J., & Baumann, S. 2010.Foodies, democracy and distinction in the gourmet kitchen. London: Routledge) or even ‘culinary capital’ (Naccarato, P., & LeBesco, K. 2012.Culinary capital. London: Berg) has been demonstrated. There has been less work exploring how mothers use ‘feeding the family’ (DeVault, M. I. 1991.Feeding the family. London: University of Chicago Press) as a source of cultural capital for themselves. Three-quarters of the 75 respondents in my UK study were parents andallmothers with dependant children fed their family ‘healthy’ food as a means of performing a particular middle-class habitus. I therefore examine how mothers engaged in ‘healthy’ foodwork as a means of positioning themselves as ‘good’ mothers or ‘yummy mummies’ (Allen, K., & Osgood, J. 2009.Studies in the Maternal,1). Indeed, despite decades of gender equality in the public sphere and neo-liberal assertions regarding individualism, ‘feeding the family’ (DeVault, 1991) continues to be a highly gendered activity, with the added pressure of now having to provide ‘healthy’ food cooked from scratch. In these accounts, convenience foods and/or ‘unhealthy’ family foodways were vilified and viewed with disgust, with an adherence to ‘healthy’ family foodways used as a means of drawing boundaries within fields of ‘organised striving’ (Martin, J. 2011.On the explanation of social action, Chicago: University of Chicago Press; Savage, M., & Silva, E. B. 2013.Cultural Sociology,7, 111–126). This article considers ‘healthy’ foodwork as a significant aspect of ‘good’ middle-class mothering, whereby ‘healthy’ family foodways become significant in the performance and display of ‘proper’ middle-class femininity that pathologises alternative family foodways and ‘other’ femininities. This serves to illuminate continuities within the intersectionalities of gender and class, with a commitment to ‘healthy’ family foodways central to ‘future oriented’ (middle classed) maternal identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main aim of this study was to evaluate intersections of gender (female/male), class (household income), and ethnicity (country of birth) in relation to various measures of psychological and physical health. The study is based on data from the Swedish National Public Health Survey 2006, comprising a randomly-selected sample of 26,305 men and 30,584 women aged 16-84 years. Of these 2147 men and 2916 women were born outside Sweden. Results from the present study show that being female and from an ethnic minority were consistently and statistically significantly associated with poor health outcomes. Men born in Sweden had overall better health than women who had been born in Sweden, who had better health than men born outside Sweden. The worst-off category was women born outside Sweden, particularly those in households with high income levels. Low income was consistently and statistically significantly associated with all measures of poor health outcomes among men but this association was not so clear for women. Based on the findings from the present study, we conclude that the strongest risk factor with regards to health is being from an ethnic minority, then being female and finally, having a low income. This study contributes to knowledge on the complex association between socio-economic factors and health which provides an evidence base for considering gender when formulating strategies to tackle health inequalities. We hope that the present study will inspire further studies that simultaneously evaluate combinations of differing social constructs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article attempts to identify the innovative qualities of the writing of Annie Ernaux, and their continuing relevance for feminisms. It discusses both the new literary forms and styles she creates, and the extent to which her writing contributes to the work of intersectionality in its representation of class, gender, sexuality, "race" and ethnicity. The exceptional nature of Ernaux's foregrounding of social class in the French context, and its troubling nature, perhaps in a broader sense, is discussed through an analysis of its impact on the shape and style of the writing. There is some discussion of Ernaux's popularity in France as a writer and of the critical attention she receives in France and in university French departments abroad. The article raises the question of Ernaux's absence from the canon of French feminist works created by anglophone feminist theorists, and taken up by university departments of English and critical theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]