День: 02.10.2015

THE STATUS SHIELD AT WORK

Given this relation between status and the treatment of feel­ing, it follows that persons in low-status categories—women, people of color, children—lack a status shield against poorer treatment of their feelings. This simple fact has the power to utterly transform the content of a job. The job of flight at­tendant, for example, is not the same […]

I The Prison Lesbian Race, Class, and the Construction of the Aggressive Female Homosexual, 1915 -1965

I first encountered references to lesbianism in women’s prisons during my dissertation research in the 1970s, but when I later uncovered rich accounts of sexual relations between prisoners in the papers of Miriam Van Waters, I decided to look more closely at this phenomenon. The prison lesbian, like the male psychopath, seemed to supplant the […]

Multiple Models: From Typology to Relationship

Scalar models of personality have often stemmed from theories of personality ‘types’. Extraversion-introversion scales and the famous ‘F scale’ of authoritarianism both derive from such typologies, devised by Jung and the Frankfurt school respectively. M/F scales similarly derive from unitary models of sexual character, in effect ‘dimensionalizing’ them by adding a range of possibilities in […]

I Uncontrolled Desires The Response to the Sexual Psychopath, 1920 -1960

As I began to compare the response to male and female deviance in twentieth-century America, I kept encountering medical, legal, and popular references to the sexual psy­chopath. In this essay, I interpret the psychopath scare of the 1930s through the 1950s not simply as an expression of psychiatric authority but as a popular, discursive con­struction […]