From Pathology to ‘Born Perfect’: Science, Law, and Citizenship in American LGBTQ+ Advocacy

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Joanna Wuest

In recent years, there has been an explosion of legislative and litigation campaigns to ban conversion therapy for sexual orientation and gender identity. In championing such bans, the American LGBTQ+ advocacy movement has incorporated its massive network of scientific and medical allies into legal arguments, legislative testimonies, educational materials, and political cultural discourse more generally. By linking these recent campaigns to the long history of scientific influence in LGBTQ+ politics, I demonstrate how biomedical and mental health institutions and ideas have become foundational to the character of American LGBTQ+ advocacy. I do so by marrying theories and methodological approaches to studying political identity and social movements, American political development, and public opinion to those in Science and Technology Studies (STS) and biopolitical citizenship studies. This joint perspective reveals both the power of scientific authority as well as the political, legal, and normative pitfalls that attend certain biomedical articulations of identity and personhood, legal rights claims, and demands for full and equal citizenship. This approach demonstrates how scholars might conceptualize and study the role of extra-political institutions and ideas that become constitutive components of minority rights coalitions.

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Morgan Matthews

Since “women and politics” scholarship emerged in the 1970s, social, institutional, and theoretical developments have shaped the trajectory of U.S. scholarship in this field. First, the presence of women in formal politics has increased, albeit unevenly across parties and minority groups over time. Simultaneously, the capacity to study ‘political women’ has become supported through institutional mechanisms such as academic journals and communities of practice. Moreover, gender as a critical focus of analysis has been developed and refined. In the literature on women and politics, the shift from studying sex differences to interrogating gendered political institutions is especially salient. This institutional focus, along with recent intersectional studies of gender and politics, increases opportunities for cross-pollination of sociological and political science perspectives. In this review, I provide a brief history of the U.S. scholarship on gender and politics and map these relevant social, institutional, and theoretical advances. I highlight the value of recent intersectional contributions in this field and make the case for bringing partisanship – an increasingly salient political identity and structure – into intersectional approaches to gender and politics.


2020 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 44-70
Author(s):  
Debra Thompson

This article explores the erratic history of counting by race on the Canadian census. It argues that the political development of racial classifications on Canadian censuses has been shaped by the interactions among evolving global ideas about race, the programmatic beliefs of international epistemic communities of statisticians and census designers, and domestic institutions involved in the administration of the census. First, Canadian census designers drew from shifting global conceptions about the nature of race and racial difference, which normatively defined the legitimate ends of race policies. Second, Canadian census designers often paid heed to the programmatic beliefs of the international statistical community about the appropriateness of collecting racial data. Finally, evolving political institutions involved in the administration of the census mediated these transnational ideas, molding them to fit the Canadian national context through institutional and cultural translative processes. Theoretically, this research makes the case that focusing on interactive political development can augment the theoretical toolbox of American political development, enabling a more comprehensive picture of the emergence, dynamism, and persistence of the Canadian racial order.


1992 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 140-155 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary P. Ryan ◽  
Anne Norton ◽  
George M. Shulman

In May, 1990, a conference was held at UCLA on the theme of “American Politics in Historical Perspective.” Panels were organized on political institutions and social history, on periodization, and on political identity. The panel presentations on political identity are printed below, along with some of the exchanges among the conference group. Slightly edited for clarity, they are offered to readers in the interest of conveying some of the intellectual ferment currently surrounding the focus on political identity and its use as an approach in historical study. The editors of Studies in American Political Development do not endorse any of the views or interpretations expressed.


2021 ◽  
Vol 65 (2) ◽  
pp. 89-99
Author(s):  
S. Pritchin

The transit of power is an important and vulnerable stage in the development of political processes for any state. For States with unstable political institutions and a short history of independence, the change of the head of state is an even more serious challenge to stability. In 2016 and 2019, respectively, the two largest Central Asian republics of Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan launched power transit procedures for the first time in the history of their independence. The transit scenarios differed significantly, despite the common similarity in power structure, political culture, and stage of political development. The more closed political system of Uzbekistan at the time of the death of the first President, Islam Karimov, managed to take a consolidated approach to the choice of a successor and unite for the duration of the transit. In Kazakhstan, on the contrary, after leaving the post of President, Nursultan Nazarbayev remained a key actor in domestic political processes, creating together with his successor, the current head of the Republic, Kasym-Zhomart Tokayev, a bipolar political system that began to contribute to the formation of a split of the political class. One of the reasons for the distinct approaches to transit was the different model of initial capital accumulation after the collapse of the USSR, when large-scale privatization of state property in Kazakhstan created a class of large owners who actively promoted a more open and competitive political system to protect and promote their interests. In contrast to Kazakhstan, the main state property of the Uzbek SSR remained under the control of the state and quasi-state institutions, which slowed down the process of forming a class of owners independent from the state. Separately, each of the transits of power in the post-Soviet space became the object of research, but primarily from the point of view of the development of political systems. A methodological basis of the study was a systemic, comparative analysis of transit of power scenarios considering the politico-economic aspects of the privatization of state property and formation of the proprietary class.


2013 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 119-130
Author(s):  
Declan William Kavanagh

This essay argues that the work of a lesser-known mid-eighteenth-century satirist Charles Churchill (1731–1764) provides a rich literary source for queer historical considerations of the conflation of xenophobia with effeminophobia in colonial imaginings of Ireland. This article analyzes Churchill's verse-satire The Rosciad (1761) through a queer lens in order to reengage the complex history of queer figurations of Ireland and the Irish within the British popular imagination. In the eighth edition of The Rosciad – a popular and controversial survey of London's contemporary players – Churchill portrays the Irish actor Thady Fitzpatrick as an effeminate fribble, before championing the manly acting abilities of the English actor David Garrick. The phobic attack on Fitzpatrick in The Rosciad is a direct response to Fitzpatrick's involvement in the ‘Fitzgiggo’ riots of January 1763 at the Drury Lane and Covent-Garden theatres. While Churchill's lampooning of the actor recalls Garrick's earlier satirizing of Fitzpatrick as a fribble in The Fribbleriad (1741) and Miss in her Teens (1747), The Rosciad is unique in its explicit conflation of androgyny with ethnicity through Irish classification. The portraiture of Fitzpatrick functions, alongside interrelated axes of ethnicity, class and gender, to prohibit access to a ‘normative’ middle-class English identity, figured through the ‘manly’ theatrical sensibility of the poem's hero, Garrick. Moreover, in celebrating a ‘Truly British Age’, the poem privileges English female players, in essentialist and curiously de-eroticized terms, as ‘natural’ though flawed performers. By analyzing Churchill's phobic juxtaposition of Garrick and the female players against the Irish fribble, this article evinces how mid-century discourses of effeminacy were also instrumental in enforcing racial taxonomies.


2013 ◽  
Vol 154 (16) ◽  
pp. 619-626
Author(s):  
Mária Resch ◽  
Tamás Bella

In Hungary one can mostly find references to the psychological processes of politics in the writings of publicists, public opinion pollsters, philosophers, social psychologists, and political analysts. It would be still important if not only legal scientists focusing on political institutions or sociologist-politologists concentrating on social structures could analyse the psychological aspects of political processes; but one could also do so through the application of the methods of political psychology. The authors review the history of political psychology, its position vis-à-vis other fields of science and the essential interfaces through which this field of science, which is still to be discovered in Hungary, connects to other social sciences. As far as its methodology comprising psycho-biographical analyses, questionnaire-based queries, cognitive mapping of interviews and statements are concerned, it is identical with the psychiatric tools of medical sciences. In the next part of this paper, the focus is shifted to the essence and contents of political psychology. Group dynamics properties, voters’ attitudes, leaders’ personalities and the behavioural patterns demonstrated by them in different political situations, authoritativeness, games, and charisma are all essential components of political psychology, which mostly analyses psychological-psychiatric processes and also involves medical sciences by relying on cognitive and behavioural sciences. This paper describes political psychology, which is basically part of social sciences, still, being an interdisciplinary science, has several ties to medical sciences through psychological and psychiatric aspects. Orv. Hetil., 2013, 154, 619–626.


Author(s):  
A. James McAdams

This book is a sweeping history of one of the most significant political institutions of the modern world. The communist party was a revolutionary idea long before its supporters came to power. The book argues that the rise and fall of communism can be understood only by taking into account the origins and evolution of this compelling idea. It shows how the leaders of parties in countries as diverse as the Soviet Union, China, Germany, Yugoslavia, Cuba, and North Korea adapted the original ideas of revolutionaries like Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin to profoundly different social and cultural settings. The book is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand world communism and the captivating idea that gave it life.


Author(s):  
Erika Lorraine Milam

After World War II, the question of how to define a universal human nature took on new urgency. This book charts the rise and precipitous fall in Cold War America of a theory that attributed man's evolutionary success to his unique capacity for murder. The book reveals how the scientists who advanced this “killer ape” theory capitalized on an expanding postwar market in intellectual paperbacks and widespread faith in the power of science to solve humanity's problems, even to answer the most fundamental questions of human identity. The killer ape theory spread quickly from colloquial science publications to late-night television, classrooms, political debates, and Hollywood films. Behind the scenes, however, scientists were sharply divided, their disagreements centering squarely on questions of race and gender. Then, in the 1970s, the theory unraveled altogether when primatologists discovered that chimpanzees also kill members of their own species. While the discovery brought an end to definitions of human exceptionalism delineated by violence, the book shows how some evolutionists began to argue for a shared chimpanzee–human history of aggression even as other scientists discredited such theories as sloppy popularizations. A wide-ranging account of a compelling episode in American science, the book argues that the legacy of the killer ape persists today in the conviction that science can resolve the essential dilemmas of human nature.


2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Sri Evi New Yearsi Pangadongan ◽  
Agustina Rahyu ◽  
Selvy Pasulu

Bronchial Asthma generally starts from childhood which is condition where respiration channel experiences constriction because of hyperactivity with some specific stimulation which cause inflammation. Some risk factors are smoking exposure of cigarette smoke, weather changes, mite on house dirt, pet and history of family sickness. The purpose of this research is to know Relation of mite on house dirt, exposure of cigarette smoke  and history of family sickness with bronchial asthma incident to child 5 – 10  years old on working area of Puskesmas Lempake Samarinda City in 2016. Method which used was analytic survey with Case Control approaching. The total sample was 36 children which consisted of 18 case group and 18 control group with matching by using age and gender which submitted with Purposive Sampling technique. Data Analysis used Chi Square with wrong degree α = 0,005. The result showed that there was relation of mite of house dirt (p = 0,006), history of family sickness (p = 0,001) and no relation with exposure of cigarette smoke (p = 0,370) with bronchial asthma incident to child 5 – 10 years old on working area of Puskesmas Lempake Samarinda City in 2016.


2016 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 86-99
Author(s):  
Vimbai Moreblessing Matiza

Dramatic and theatrical performances have a long history of being used as tools to enhance development in children and youth. In pre-colonial times there were some forms of drama and theatre used by different communities in the socialisation of children. It is in the same vein that this article, through the Intwasa koBulawayo performances, seeks to evaluate how drama and theatre are used to nurture children and youth into different developmental facets of their lives. The only difference which this article will take into cognisance is that the performances are done in a different environment, which is not the one used in the pre-colonial times. Although these performances were like this, the most important factor is the idea that children and youth are socialised through these performances. It is also against this backdrop that children and youth are growing up in a globalised environment, hence the performances should accommodate people from all walks of life and teach them relevant issues pertaining to life as they live it now. Thus the main task of the article is to spell out the role of drama and theatre in the nurturing of children and youth through socio economic and political development in Intwasa koBulawayo festivals.


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