‘Quality’ drama has been an important institutional space on public service television for the expression of sexual subjectivities that lie outside the ‘respectable’ norm. Oppositional, political dramas have existed alongside the more conformist and ‘respectable’ costume dramas, which themselves have become more sexually adventurous in recent years (Nelson 2001b). The leeway in sexual censorship began […]
День: 02.10.2015
My Gay Problem, Your Black Problem
Earl Ofari Hutchinson HAVE BLACK ATTITUDES toward gays undergone much change today? Hardly. Rappers such as Ice Cube still rap that "Real niggers ain’t faggots." Leading Afrocentrists have sworn that "homosexuality is a deviation from Afrocentricity." Bushels of Black ministers, with generous support from their white Christian fundamentalist brethren, still brand homosexuality "a sin before […]
Theories Based on Life Transitions
Jung’s belief in a midlife crisis, Erikson’s belief that personality development proceeds in stages, and Loevinger’s notion that cognitive and ego development are mutually interactive laid the foundation for other theorists’ efforts. For many laypeople, the idea that adults go through an orderly sequence of stages that includes both crises and stability reflects their own […]
Coming out of the closet
The roots of a twenty-first century understanding of gay and lesbian sexuality as an ‘identity’ lie in late nineteenth-century medical and sexological discourses in which homosexuality moved from being a category of sin, as defined by the Christian Church, to a psychosexual disposition. As a sinful act it had been assumed that anyone could be […]
Loevinger’s Theory
Loevinger (1976, 1998) saw a need to extend the groundwork laid by Erikson both theoretically and empirically. For her, the ego is the chief organizer: the integrator of our morals, values, goals, and thought processes. Because this integration performed by the ego is so complex and is influenced by personal experiences, it is the primary […]
Violence against male adults by any other name is
ITEM A Coke ad shows a man wttng to "go for the Coke” at the nsk of a shark’s fin slicing through his testicles as it simulates a buzz saw. Coca-Cola knew that only a man’s life was worth, well, a little bit less than a Coke! The average American child watches more than 40,000 […]
Sheikh reconciliation and peace conference, October 1992
A reconciliation and peace conference attended by elders and clan members of the warring sub-clans was held in October 1992, in Sheikh, a town between Berbera and Burao. In accordance with custom, women were not present as participants or mediators but as one man put it: Women were the wind behind the peace conference from […]
Erikson’s Stages of Psychosocial Development
The best-known life-span theorist is Erik Erikson (1982), who called attention to cultural mechanisms involved in personality development. According to him, personality is determined by the interaction between an inner maturational plan and external societal demands. He proposes that the life cycle has eight stages of development, summarized in Table 9.1. Erikson believed the sequence […]
DISSIPATION AND ‘NATURAL CHARACTER’
So far we have been tracing the history of ‘the manly ideal’ and its countertypes in the modern era, looking especially closely at changing conceptions of the male body as it was re-imagined following the First World War. One disadvantage of Mosse’s account of the dominant form of masculinity — and this is also true […]
What’s Different about Personal Concerns?
Recently, many researchers have begun analyzing personality in ways that are explicitly contextual, in contrast to work on dispositional traits, which ignores context. This recent work emphasizes the importance of sociocultural influences on development that shape people’s wants and behaviors (Hooker, 2002). For example, Thorne (Thorne & Klohnen, 1993) showed that when people talk about […]