This provocative volume is comprised of psychological, socioeconomic, and cultural perspectives on couple dynamics, particularly gender dynamics, and the future of marriage. Featuring data on married, cohabitating, male/female, and same-sex couples, the authors of the book's chapters analyze the changing impacts of work, parenting, and the health benefits of marriage for men and women. Trajectories in the evolution toward gender equality provide the backdrop for discussions of women and men as partners, parents, and workers in contemporary society. Contributors also keep a sharp focus on the complexities of gender issues as they intersect with crucial contexts of cohort, class, race/ethnicity, and sexual orientation. Among the topics covered: Gender equality and economic inequality: impacts on marriage. Expansionist theory expanded: integrating sociological and psychological perspectives on gender, work, and family change. Gender, work, and family: action in the interactions. Changes in U.S. mothers' and fathers' time use: causes and consequences. A case for gay fathers. Gender, marriage, and health for same-sex and different-sex couples Gender and Couple Relationships documents social roles and social change with fascinating insight to advance research in fields of psychology, sociology, demography and economics and to the benefit of work organizations, policy makers, family and couple therapists and other mental health professionals.

The introduction and 10 essays in this volume address questions about how feminist scholars conceptualize gender and view it in relationship to other attributes of individuals and of social systems. The authors strive for intersectional analyses broadening that approach beyond the gender, race and class paradigm to include sexuality, employing a variety of methodologies, and arguing that intersectionality is, or should be, not just theory, but praxis as well. The topics include the empowerment of women globally; the relationship of gender to international migration; gender differences in organizational participation; heteronormativity in organizations and in the media; the ways that the global affects the local in legislation, the workplace and the academy; the relationship between positive stereotypes of women and support for women's rights; and essentialist themes in men's movements. The discussions of globalization and empowerment and of migration are explicitly transnational in perspective. The remaining essays analyze data gathered in particular locations, but all have broader implications. Three nation-specific essays focus on organizational participation in Brazil, feminism in the Canadian academy, and sexual harassment legislation in Japan. Those on the media, social movements and voluntary organizations, and on modern prejudice are based on data from the United States. All of the authors and co-authors, whether professors emerita or graduate students, are trained in the social sciences. Nevertheless, the essays reflect the increasingly interdisciplinary approach to data and methods that characterizes contemporary feminist writing and research.

This ground-breaking study argues that literature and criminology share a common concern to understand modernity and that this project is often focused upon gender-specific criminality. Central to this concern is duplicity masquerade and performance. These subjects are explored for the first time in relation to criminality with reference to a range of literary and popular texts, from Dickens and Poe through to Toni Morrison and Easton Ellis, in which the traditional boundaries between different genders and sexualities are made more fluid and complex than in traditional criminal narratives.

Here is a pioneering and revealing study of the meaning of the abortion experience for American men. The book draws on over 400 detailed surveys from men involved in an abortion, along with opinion data from secondary polls of American women.

The first definitive book on researching gay and lesbian market behavior, Untold Millions: The Truth About Gay and Lesbian Consumers in America will help marketers, advertisers, and public relations managers learn how to successfully market and research products for gay and lesbian consumers. Author Grant Lukenbill, a leading consultant on the cultural and motivational aspects of gay and lesbian consumer behavior, provides you with important procedures, research, and guidelines that businesses today are following in order to develop successful marketing strategies to this growing target audience. From this updated and revised edition, you'll receive current methods, new data, and sure-fire strategies that will help your company break into this market segment, satisfy intended customers, and boost company sales.Providing you with statistics and data from the first market research study of its kind, the Yankelovich MONITOR's Gay and Lesbian Perspective, this book gives you suggestions on what things need to be done within your company before planning your marketing strategies. You'll benefit from ideas and suggestions in Untold Millions that will help you create consumer-driven market strategies to gays and lesbians, including: recognizing that there are families and relationships in society that are not heterosexual acknowledging age differences and the needs of particular generations attracting customers by circulating non-discriminatory hiring policies through press releases and company memos, installing domestic partner health care plans, and identifying cultural reference points to which gays and lesbians can relate remembering that many gays and lesbians may look at business with cynicism and doubt and may be quick to interpret actions as victimization referring to the Wall Street project before addressing gay- and lesbian-specific issues focusing on the areas of individuality, a need for association, and the need to allevia

The process of becoming an adult in contemporary times is fragmented and unequal, shaped by chance, choice and timing. "Unfolding lives" presents a unique approach to understanding the changing face of youth transitions, addressing the question of how gender identities are constituted in late modern culture. The book follows individual lives over time, enabling the reader to witness gender identities in the making and breathing new life into static analytic models. At the heart of the book are vivid in-depth accounts of four young lives, emblematic of broader biographical trends. They reveal how inequalities and privileges are made in new and unexpected ways, through practices such as falling in love, coming out, acting out and religious conversion. A focus on temporal processes and changing meanings captures what it feels like to be young and shows the creative ways that young people navigate the conflicting and changing demands of personal relationships, schooling, work and play. "Unfolding lives" is also a demonstration of a method-in-practice, describing how longitudinal material can be analysed and animated to realise the relationship between personal and social change. Written in an accessible style that breaks the conventional academic mould, "Unfolding lives" is a compelling and provocative read. The book will be an essential text for students and academics involved in youth and gender studies as well as those interested in new directions in qualitative research methods and writing.

This is a revision and update of Gertzog's successful 1984 study of women in the United States Congress. Now, 10 years later, the congressional roster is far different: Women have made major in-roads in numbers and prominence in the House of Representatives. Based upon interviews with 45 members of the 103rd Congress, this study examines the rise in the number of women elected, the circumstances leading to their success, and their integration into the workings of the institution, in both legislative and political terms.

This book provides a psychoanalytic perspective on female psychology and includes articles with divergent theoretical viewpoints. It is useful for both research and clinical study and may also provide a bridge to scholars, teachers, and clinicians outside of psychoanalysis itself.

The chapters in this book illustrate, from a number of different perspectives, the ways in which power is located and articulated through gendered negotiations and acted out within the changing and differing setting of the household. The book is divided into four sections. The first section provides a theoretical, historical and philosophical setting, whilst the following three sections provide empirical contributions which examine aspects of Gendered Care ; dimensions of Gendered Time and Space , and straddling work and home, Gendered Work, Income and Power .

Women's needs are placed at the centre of this collection. The contributors discuss the extent to which the contemporary legal framework on abortion matches the needs of women faced with unwanted pregnancy. The book contains sections on Britain, including an account of the campaign to legalize abortion, written by those centrally involved with that campaign; international comparisons of abortion law, with chapters on France, the United States, Ireland and Poland; and chapters covering contemporary debates, including men's rights in abortion and abortion for foetal abnormality.

Opening up contemporary debates about emotion in social and historical contexts, Women and Ireland as Beckett's Lost Others investigates the relationship between emotion, memory, exile and language. Using a psychoanalytic framework, this monograph traces discourses of mourning (Klein), melancholia (Freud) and abjection (Kristeva) in Beckett's prose and drama, and demonstrates how Ireland and women are often Beckett's objects of loss. This study primarily focuses on Beckett's exploitation of ambivalent yet conscious use of psychoanalytic concepts in his works on an aesthetic level. It also addresses the impact of one of the key events in Beckett's life, his self-imposed exile, on his poetics of grieving. By exploring Beckett's ambiguous representations of his homeland - Ireland - and women in general and the mother in particular throughout his oeuvre, this study unveils his uneasy relationship with them - an anxious part of his identity.

Since Vietnam introduced economic reforms in the mid-1980s, domestic service has become an established sector of the labour market, and domestic workers have become indispensable to urban life in the rapidly changing country. This book analyzes the ways in which the practices and discourses of domestic service serve to forge and contest emerging class identities in post-reform Vietnam. Drawing on a rich and diverse range of qualitative data, including ethnographies, interviews, and narratives, it shows that such practices and discourses are rooted in cultural notions of gender and rural-urban difference and enduring socialist structures of feeling, which, in turn, clash with the realities of growing differentiation. Domestic workers' experiences reveal negotiations with class boundaries actively set by the urban middle class, who seek distinction through emerging notions and practices of domesticity. These boundaries are nevertheless riddled with gender and class anxiety on the side of the latter, partly because of the very struggles and contestations of the domestic workers. More broadly, Minh T. N. Nguyen links the often invisible intimate dynamics of class formation in the domestic sphere with wider political economic processes in a post-socialist country embarking on marketization while retaining the political control of a party-state. As a pioneering ethnographic study of domestic service in Vietnam today, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars of Southeast Asian culture & society, social anthropology, gender studies, human geography and development studies.

This groundbreaking book provides a new perspective on equality by highlighting and exploring affective equality, the aspect of equality concerned with relationships of love, care and solidarity. Drawing on studies of intimate caring, or "love laboring," it reveals the depth, complexity and multidimensionality of affective inequality.

Opening in the period of revolutions between 1789 and 1850, this book explores the contention over social science from above and below. It breaks away from othodox interpretations of the development of social science to explore the subject as a contest for class and gender power.

Queer criminological work is at the forefront of critical academic criminology, responding to the exclusion of queer communities from criminology, and the injustices that they experience through the criminal justice system. This volume draws together both theoretical and empirical contributions that develop the growing scholarship being produced at the intersection of 'queer' and 'criminology'. Reflecting the diversity of research that is undertaken at this intersection, the contributions to this volume offer a deeper theoretical and conceptual development of this field alongside empirical research that illustrates the continued relevance and urgency of such scholarship. The contributions consider what it means to be queering criminology in the current political, social, and criminological climate, and chart directions along which this field might develop in order to ensure that greater social and criminal justice for LGBTIQ communities is achieved.

To be a virgin or a widow never promised a stable, uniform status to a woman during the Middle Ages. Rather, these positions were areas of contestation, constructions that did and still do create and interrogate notions of gender roles, areas of power, areas of disability. For example, chastity is an apparent given for both positions, but the chastity involved may have a number of possible cultural meanings or uses. The articles in Constructions of Widowhood and Virginity in the Middle Ages address many facets of these two female positions in medieval literature: gender constructions; the body and what it means to make it visible, whether in admiration, torture, or martyrdom; issues of physicality and abjection; creations of literary voice for women who write or create situations for them to be written about. A top-notch group of female scholars examines the meanings behind widowhood and virginity both individually and in relation to each other. The focus on both positions in the same volume makes Constructions of Widowhood and Virginity in the Middle Ages an unprecedented work.

Part of a series offering international reviews of comparative public policy, this volume provides comparative perspectives on family law and gender bias. The topics discussed include: the concept of the natural family and the American family; gender and racial sterotype; and patriarchy in China.

Paternity and fatherhood: is there more than an etymological difference between these two apparently synonymous terms? What do we understand by "paternity" and "fatherhood?" These crucial questions lie at the heart of this collection of essays selected from the humanities and social sciences. As an anthropological document, this book offers compelling evidence to support the premise that there is a profound difference between the biological reality of paternity and the cultural construct of fatherhood. At the same time, the theories of Freud and Lacan provide a background for many of the author's critical explorations of a kaleidoscope of literary texts, legal documents, case histories, painting and letters. Through their discussion of the relations, attitudes, emotions and values generated by the paternity/fatherhood distinction, the essays in this collection broaden our understanding of how dichotomy has evolved in Western societies and offer insights into its manifestations in some post-colonial cultures.

Today within neoliberal democracies, gender and sexuality provisions give people the opportunity of being granted social and legal protection. But how does the asylum system intervene within claimants' understandings of themselves and in what ways does this affect their livelihoods in the country of arrival? The Sexual Politics of Asylum emerges from a 2 year long ethnography, which explores the experiences of 60 gender and sexual minority refugees in the UK. Bringing previously unheard stories to the forefront, this enlightening volume challenges dominant notions about the construction of sexuality and gender as an instrument for claiming rights in a world shaped by postcolonial relations. Giametta first examines why the migratory experience of the studied migrants is located within a set of humanitarian-inflected discourses that privilege suffering and trauma. This is then followed by an assessment of the respondents' biographical accounts, which consequently uncovers how being situated in liminal socio-political and legal interstices produces precarious forms of life. Whilst the topic of asylum for gender and sexual minorities has attracted wide media coverage over the past decade, there persists a lack of academic attention to the complex experiences of these refugees. As such, this timely book will be of interest to undergraduate and postgraduate students interested in human rights, sociology, anthropology, migration, sexuality, gender and cultural studies, as well as people working within the refugee granting process.

The Convention on Preventing and Combating Violence against Women and Domestic Violence (also known as the Istanbul Convention) was adopted by the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe on 7 April 2011. The Convention entered into force on 1 August 2014 and has currently been ratified by 22 states. This Convention constitutes a crucial development as regards the movement to combat gender-based violence, as it sets new legally binding standards in this area. This book provides a detailed analysis of the Convention and its potential to make an impact in relation to the specific issue of domestic violence. The book places the Istanbul Convention in context with regard to developments relating to domestic violence as a human rights issue. The background to the adoption of the Convention is examined, and the text of this instrument is analysed in detail. Comparative analysis is engaged in with reference to the duties that have been placed on states by other bodies such as the UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women and the European Court of Human Rights. Comparisons are also drawn with the Inter-American Convention on the Prevention, Punishment, and Eradication of Violence against Women and with the relevant provisions of the Protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa. An in-depth examination of the advantages of the adoption of the Istanbul Convention by the Council of Europe is provided along with a detailed analysis of the challenges faced by the Convention. The book concludes with a number of brief reflections in relation to the question of whether the adoption of a UN convention on violence against women may be a possible development, and the potential such an instrument holds, in the context of domestic violence.

Recent societal changes have challenged long-established concepts in psychoanalysis, including the Oedipus complex, parental functions, and male and female psychosexuality. 'Postmodern families', based on sexual and emotional exchanges independent of gender, now include homoerotic couples who adopt children, or who create them through assisted fertilisation, as well as single parent families and blended families. A number of highly-renowned Latin American psychoanalysts have drawn attention to the urgency of revising theoretical and clinical concepts in the light of these new scenarios. In this book, they open up ideas which cover familiar territory of current concerns in psychoanalytic work, as well as other little-explored areas, with the emphasis on evolving sexualities and new experiences of parenthood. The first section revisits psychoanalytic theories, particularly parental functions in the area of sexuality and gender. The following section discusses new family configurations, and vicissitudes of the desire to have a child in men and women, with the authors presenting some psychic consequences for parents in therapy who have turned to assisted fertilisation.

Refugees and asylum seekers are the subject of major debates both at national and international level. But the debates exclude a gendered perspective that considers the experiences and needs of men and women. This study provides a comprehensive account of the situation of women refugees globally and explains how they differ from men. Looking at causes of refugee flows, international laws and conventions and their application, the policies and legislation of Western governments, and lived experiences of refugees themselves, this book is a much-needed addition to the migration literature.

This collection of multi-authored essays not only refashions and revises critical understandings of the early modern dramatist Ben Jonson and his canon of work, but is also self-reflexive about the process. It includes original essays by both established and emergent Jonson scholars, and employs materialist, feminist and queer theory in the production of its readings of Jonsonian playtexts and masques, familiar and otherwise. It is intended to encourage new approaches by students to this central figure from the Renaissance.

Work-life integration is an increasingly hot topic in the media, social research, governments and in people's everyday lives. This volume offers a new type of lens for understanding work-family reconciliation by studying how work-family dynamics are shaped, squeezed and developed between consistent or competing logics in different societies in Europe and the US. The three institutions of "state", "family" and "working life", and their under-explored primary logics of "regulation", "morality" and "economic competitiveness" are examined theoretically as well as empirically throughout the chapters, thus contributing to an understanding of the contemporary challenges within the field of work-family research that combines structure and culture. Particular attention is given to the ways in which the institutions are confronted with various moral norms of good parenthood or motherhood and ideals for family life. Likewise, the logic of policy regulation and gendered family moralities are challenged by the economic logic of working life, based on competition in favour of the most productive workers and organizations. Demonstrating different aspects of what is behind and between the logics of state regulation, morals and market, this innovative volume will appeal to students, teachers and researchers interested in areas such as family studies, welfare state studies, social policy studies, work life studies as well as and gender studies.