Incompetence was one way to induct traditional men into the second shift. Sickness was another. Carmen has arthritis that “acts up” and prevents her from carrying heavy things. It isn’t clear that she “uses” sickness like she uses helplessness. But curiously, other traditional women I talked with seem to get sick more often than egalitarian […]
День: 02.11.2015
The National Health and Social Life Survey
The outbreak of the devastating AIDS epidemic in the 1980s occurred at a time when the U. S. public health community was ill informed about the contemporary sexual practices of the citizenry. To fill this informational void with data that could be used to predict and prevent the spread of AIDS, in 1987 an agency […]
Women fighting for their rights
The Jola, a small ethnic group of about 500,000 individuals who subsist mainly on rice paddy farming in Lower Casamance, pose an intriguing challenge to the common Western understanding of female circumcision as an un-changing, deeply rooted custom introduced by men in order to control women’s sexuality. Since the middle of the twentieth century, the […]
The Kinsey Reports
The studies of Alfred Kinsey are perhaps the best known and most widely cited example of survey research. With his associates Kinsey published two large volumes in the decade following World War II: One, on male sexuality, was published in 1948; the follow-up report on female sexuality was published in 1953. These volumes contain the […]
Transforming communism
Gendered Transformation This privatization of gender violence in the 1990s was part of a larger gendered process across postcommunist societies in Central and Eastern Europe and Eurasia (hereafter the “region”). Although moving the system toward a liberal democracy where markets prevail was portrayed as a gender-neutral process—with the rhetoric of gender-neutral citizens and consumers—the consequences […]
Cross-Cultural Differences
Numerous studies have documented different cultural patterns of erotic development and sexual orientation, challenging the notion of sexuality as a universal biological given. The work of Herdt (1984) is particularly illustrative. He identified 53 distinct societies in the Pacific and New Guinea that have “age structured homosexual practice.” In a longitudinal study of the Sambia […]
Mothering and social responsibilities in a cross-cultural perspective1
Henrietta L. Moore Mothering and motherhood are not, contrary to popular belief, ‘the most natural things in the world’. They have taken very different forms in different times and places. What it is to be a ‘mother’ is both cross-culturally and historically variable. Historians writing about wet-nursing and child fostering in Europe remind us how […]
Leydig and Sertoli cells
Each of the two testicles — separated from each other in the scrotum by a membrane, the septum — is made up of two compartments. In terms of volume 95 per cent of the testicle is devoted to sperm production. There are approximately 250 lobules, and if you were to lay all the tubes in […]
Motywy seksiatryezne wyrazonc w mitach
W mitach motyw kazirodztwa spotykany jest bardzo cz? sto. Kazirodcze malzenstwa І stosunki plciowe bogow wyst? pujf| nagminnie we wszystkich mitolo- giach. W pocz^tkowych stadiach rozwoju czlowieka stosunki piciowe nti? dzy ludzmi mialy charakter kazirodczy; w owczesnych warunkach rozwoju czlowieka bylo to zrozumiale, a nawet pozqdane. Jeszcze u niektorych dawnych ludow cywilizowanych (Egipcjanie, Fenicjanie, Persowie) […]
THE OPPRESSIONS OF OBJECT CHOICE
The initial task involved in the denaturalization of the sexual is a critical examination of the categories of the sexual that reinforce the illusion of compelling homogeneities. By far the most important of the categorizations must be and continue to be those based on object choice. The notion of object choice, however rich with meaning […]