LGBTQ Persons’ Use of Online Spaces to Navigate Conception, Pregnancy, and Pregnancy Loss: An Intersectional Approach

Navigating conception, pregnancy, and loss is challenging for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) people, who experience stigma due to LGBTQ identity, other identities (e.g., loss), and intersections thereof. We conducted interviews with 17 LGBTQ people with recent pregnancy loss experiences. Taking LGBTQ identity and loss as a starting point, we used an intracategorical intersectional lens to uncover the benefits and challenges of LGBTQ-specific and non-LGBTQ-specific pregnancy and loss-related online spaces. Participants used LGBTQ-specific online spaces to enact individual, interpersonal, and collective resilience. However, those with multiple marginalized identities (e.g., people of color and non-partnered individuals), faced barriers in finding support within LGBTQ-specific spaces compared to those holding privileged identities (e.g., White and married). Non-LGBTQ spaces were beneficial for some informational needs, but not community and emotional needs due to pervasive heteronormativity, cisnormativity, and a perceived need to educate. We conceptualize experiences of exclusion as symbolic annihilation and intersectional invisibility, and discuss clinical implications and design directions.

Confidence Culture

In Confidence Culture, Shani Orgad and Rosalind Gill argue that imperatives directed at women to “love your body” and “believe in yourself” imply that psychological blocks rather than entrenched social injustices hold women back. Interrogating the prominence of confidence in contemporary discourse about body image, workplace, relationships, motherhood, and international development, Orgad and Gill draw on Foucault’s notion of technologies of self to demonstrate how “confidence culture” demands of women near-constant introspection and vigilance in the service of self-improvement. They argue that while confidence messaging may feel good, it does not address structural and systemic oppression. Rather, confidence culture suggests that women—along with people of color, the disabled, and other marginalized groups—are responsible for their own conditions. Rejecting confidence culture’s remaking of feminism along individualistic and neoliberal lines, Orgad and Gill explore alternative articulations of feminism that go beyond the confidence imperative.

Bail and Pretrial Justice in the United States: A Field of Possibility

In this review of scholarship on bail and pretrial justice in the United States, we analyze how the field of bail operates (and why it operates as it does), focusing on its official and unofficial objectives, core assumptions and values, power dynamics, and technologies. The field, we argue, provides extensive opportunities for generating revenue and containing, controlling, and changing defendants and their families. In pursuit of these objectives, actors consistently generate harms that disproportionately affect low-income people of color and amplify social inequalities. We close with an analysis of political struggles over bail, including current and emerging possibilities for both reformist and radical change. In this, we urge scholars toward sustained engagement with people and organizations in criminalized communities, which pushes scholars to reconsider our preconceptions regarding safety, justice, and the potential for systemic change and opens up new avenues for research and public engagement.

Facts and their Discontents: A Research Agenda for Online Disinformation, Race, and Gender

The January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol demonstrated how online disinformation can have severe offline consequences. For some time, the problems and possible impacts on democracy caused by online mis- and dis-information have dominated public policy discussions and thus research about these topics has developed rapidly in the last few years. However, this research generally lacks a focus on the impact of disinformation and misinformation on people of color, women, LGBTQIA+ communities, and other voices that are less prominent in mainstream political discourse in the U.S.Many disinformation campaigns are specifically designed with racist and/or misogynistic content, suggesting that disinformation is a tool used to promote ideologies like white supremacy and patriarchy.In September 2020, CDT brought together an interdisciplinary and international group of experts to share and discuss research on this issue. This report presents some of those ideas and builds upon them to identify key research opportunities, including important unresolved questions around the intersections of online disinformation, race, and gender. This report also makes recommendations for how to tackle the related methodological and technical problems that researchers and others face in addressing these topics. This is important in generating research that will be directly relevant for developing policy solutions to address disinformation.

A Systems Approach to Achieve Equity in Healthcare Research

Healthcare in the United States is inequitable. The consequence of inequity is that the burden of serious chronic disease, such as diabetes, falls disproportionately on populations experiencing health disparities, predominantly Black, Indigenous, and people of color. [1] The reasons for the inequity include the negative impact of the social determinants of health of individuals and families from these communities, being underrepresented as participants in clinical research, having limited access to technologies that support self-care, and a lack of researchers and clinicians from these same populations. [2] To achieve equity and fairness, there is a need for a paradigm shift in healthcare research and innovation based on improving access, trust, and self-efficacy [3] to convert new knowledge into positive health outcomes.

Race/Ethnicity Differences in COVID-19 Vaccine Uptake Among Nurses

Introduction: There is evidence for relatively lower COVID-19 vaccine uptake among people of color in the United States. The purpose of this study was to investigate associations between race/ethnicity and COVID-19 vaccine uptake among nurses. Methods: Nurses in Southern California ( N = 1183) completed a one-time, web-based survey to assess COVID-19 vaccine perceptions and uptake. Results: In all, 82.8% of respondents ( N = 979) received at least one COVID-19 vaccine dose. Identifying as East Asian was associated with 14% higher odds of COVID-19 vaccine uptake relative to identifying as White (odds ratio [OR] = 1.14/95% confidence interval [CI] = [1.06, 1.24]); identifying as Filipino was associated with 14% higher odds of uptake (OR = 1.14/95% CI = [1.08, 1.20]); and identifying as Hispanic/Latinx was associated with 6% higher odds of uptake (OR = 1.06/95% CI = [1.00, 1.12]). Discussion: Although nurses and people of color have been identified as groups with low levels of COVID-19 vaccine uptake, this study found that nurses of color received the vaccine at higher levels than their White counterparts.

Intimate Eating

In Intimate Eating Anita Mannur examines how notions of the culinary can create new forms of kinship, intimacy, and social and political belonging. Drawing on critical ethnic studies and queer studies, Mannur traces the ways in which people of color, queer people, and other marginalized subjects create and sustain this belonging through the formation of “intimate eating publics.” These spaces—whether established in online communities or through eating along in a restaurant—blur the line between public and private. In analyses of Julie Powell’s Julie and Julia, Nani Power’s Ginger and Ganesh, Ritesh Batra’s film The Lunchbox, Michael Rakowitz’s performance art installation Enemy Kitchen, and The Great British Bake Off, Mannur focuses on how racialized South Asian and Arab brown bodies become visible in various intimate eating publics. In this way, the culinary becomes central to discourses of race and other social categories of difference. By illuminating how cooking, eating, and distributing food shapes and sustains social worlds, Mannur reconfigures how we think about networks of intimacy beyond the family, heteronormativity, and nation.

Representation of Race and Ethnicity in Counseling and Counseling Psychology Journals

Literature reviews have concluded that People of Color are underrepresented in psychological literature; however, the fields of counseling and counseling psychology have taken a clear affirmative stance with respect to human diversity. This study sought to evaluate the representation of People of Color in four key journals across the 2000–2019 timespan: The Counseling Psychologist, Journal of Counseling Psychology, Journal of Counseling & Development, and Counselling Psychology Quarterly. Journal articles were coded for variables including focus on racial/ethnic minority (REM) groups and article content topics. Results indicated that 26.3% of the articles were coded as REM-focused (3.8% focused on African Americans, 4.1% on Asian Americans, 3.1% on Latinxs, and 0.7% on Native Americans). The need for additional research is especially notable in the case of Latinxs (the least represented REM group relative to United States Census estimates) and for several multicultural topics that remain underrepresented in the literature.

How Do We Look?

In How Do We Look? Fatimah Tobing Rony draws on transnational images of Indonesian women as a way to theorize what she calls visual biopolitics—the ways visual representation determines which lives are made to matter more than others. Rony outlines the mechanisms of visual biopolitics by examining Paul Gauguin’s 1893 portrait of Annah la Javanaise—a trafficked thirteen-year-old girl found wandering the streets of Paris—as well as US ethnographic and documentary films. In each instance, the figure of the Indonesian woman is inextricably tied to discourses of primitivism, savagery, colonialism, exoticism, and genocide. Rony also focuses on acts of resistance to visual biopolitics in film, writing, and photography. These works, such as Rachmi Diyah Larasati’s The Dance that Makes You Vanish, Vincent Monnikendam’s Mother Dao (1995), and the collaborative films of Nia Dinata, challenge the naturalized methods of seeing that justify exploitation, dehumanization, and early death of people of color. By theorizing the mechanisms of visual biopolitics, Rony elucidates both its violence and its vulnerability.