From Love Jihad to Grooming Gangs: Tracing Flows of the Hypersexual Muslim Male through Far-Right Female Influencers

This article traces the transnational flows of constructions of the hypersexualized Muslim male through a comparative analysis of love jihad in India and the specter of grooming gangs in the UK. While the former is conceived as an act of seduction and conversion, and the latter through violent rape imaginaries, foregrounding both of these narratives are sexual, gender, and family dynamics that are integral to the fear of demographic change. Building upon these narratives, this study analyzes how influential women in Hindu nationalist and European/North American far-right milieus circulate images, videos, and discourses on social media that depict Muslim men as predatory and violent, targeting Hindu and white girls, respectively. By positioning themselves as the daughters, wives, and mothers of the nation, these far-right female influencers invoke a sense of reproductive urgency, as well as advance claims of the perceived threat of, and safety from, hypersexualized Muslim men. This article illustrates how local ideological narratives of Muslim sexuality are embedded into global Islamophobic tropes of gendered nationalist imaginaries.

Gender stereotypes about interests start early and cause gender disparities in computer science and engineering

Societal stereotypes depict girls as less interested than boys in computer science and engineering. We demonstrate the existence of these stereotypes among children and adolescents from first to 12th grade and their potential negative consequences for girls’ subsequent participation in these fields. Studies 1 and 2 (n = 2,277; one preregistered) reveal that children as young as age six (first grade) and adolescents across multiple racial/ethnic and gender intersections (Black, Latinx, Asian, and White girls and boys) endorse stereotypes that girls are less interested than boys in computer science and engineering. The more that individual girls endorse gender-interest stereotypes favoring boys in computer science and engineering, the lower their own interest and sense of belonging in these fields. These gender-interest stereotypes are endorsed even more strongly than gender stereotypes about computer science and engineering abilities. Studies 3 and 4 (n = 172; both preregistered) experimentally demonstrate that 8- to 9-y-old girls are significantly less interested in an activity marked with a gender stereotype (“girls are less interested in this activity than boys”) compared to an activity with no such stereotype (“girls and boys are equally interested in this activity”). Taken together, both ecologically valid real-world studies (Studies 1 and 2) and controlled preregistered laboratory experiments (Studies 3 and 4) reveal that stereotypes that girls are less interested than boys in computer science and engineering emerge early and may contribute to gender disparities.

Missing: A Musical Dramedy: Engaging with the missing through the perpetually present

Missing uses a historical reimagining of the murder of JonBenét Ramsey as a launchpad to examine what it is like for a woman of colour to be inundated in a sexist and racist media and cultural spin-cycle. The script tells the story of a young Black girl, Nancy, coming of age and absorbing these cultural messages. In Act 1, Nancy, a child beauty pageant contestant, learns about the death of her friend, JonBenét. Nancy is simultaneously drawn in, obsessed and repulsed by the media storm that follows. In Act 2, indelibly shaped by this childhood event and inspired by her role model Diane Sawyer (pageant winner turned news anchor), Nancy has grown up to be a reporter. She now finds herself peddling similarly problematic stories for ratings and clickbait. Nancy struggles increasingly with both the erasure of identities like her own and the salacious eagerness through which the media (now her job) capitalizes on violence against women in general. The title Missing stems from ‘missing white woman syndrome’ a phrase coined by PBS journalist Gwen Ifill and subsequently adopted by social scientists to refer to the immensely uneven media coverage favouring victims who are upper/middle-class white girls/women in contrast to the coverage and framing of victims of colour. A key goal of the play is to underscore and then question the dominant media representations of women whose stories garner mainstream attention. Whose stories get told? How are they framed? Who, in turn, are marginalized and ignored? How can artists engage representational inequity without inadvertently piling more attention on the already visible? Musicals can and should tackle questions of systemic inequity and inclusion; doing so requires more than positioning protagonists of colour in a theatrical world that fails to acknowledge the systemic realities of our actual one. Missing, a collaborative project in process, tackles these questions.

Frequent police stops, parental incarceration and mental health: results among US non-Hispanic Black and White adolescent girls and boys

BackgroundNational monitoring of police–public contact does not extend below age 16 and few studies have examined associations with adolescent mental health.MethodsWe describe the distribution of police stops in a nationally representative cross-sectional sample of adolescents ages 12 to 18 years in the Panel Study of Income Dynamics Child Development Supplement 2002 and 2007 (n=2557). We used survey-weighted race/ethnicity-stratified and gender-stratified regression models to examine associations between the frequency of police stops and both depressive symptoms and subjective well-being (emotional, psychological and social). We adjusted for several socioeconomic covariates and evaluated effect modification by parental incarceration.ResultsWe estimated that 9.58% of adolescents were stopped two or more times. Despite fewer police stops compared with boys, Black and White girls who were stopped at least two times in the last 6 months had higher average depression scores relative to girls who were not stopped (Black: 2.13 (95% CI: 0.73 to 3.53), White: 2.17 (95% CI: 1.07 to 3.27)) and these associations were stronger among girls whose parents had been incarcerated. Police stops were significantly associated with higher depressive scores for White, but not Black, boys (2+ vs 0 stops: White: 1.33 (95% CI: 0.31 to 2.36, Black: 0.53 (95% CI: –0.28 to 1.34)). Associations between subjective well-being and police stops were stronger among non-Hispanic Black relative to White girls, whereas for boys, associations varied across subjective well-being subscales.ConclusionNational monitoring data and public health research should examine adolescent police contact at younger ages stratified by both race/ethnicity and gender in order to better understand its relationship with adolescent mental health.

"Saturated with Vice": Angelic White Children, Incorrigible Youth, and Reformable Subjects

This article looks at the eugenic sterilization in the United States in the twentieth century through the lens of race and property ownership. In Kansas specifically, sterilization was sensationalized in the media amidst two events that showcased contradictory understandings of white girlhood in the liberal eugenic era. Sterilization was championed in 1917 after a young white girl was raped and murdered, and then decried two decades later in 1937 when a senator uncovered a (legal) sterilization campaign at a girls' reformatory. I argue that these competing representations of white girlhood resulted from larger-scale societal anxieties about womens' expanding property ownership and voting rights in the twentieth century. Further, I analyze representations of race in the Girls' Industrial School in Beloit, Kansas to show how Black girls in the institution were understood as inherently criminal in a way that validated the ultimate "reformability" of white girls from eugenecist understandings of class and sexuality amongst white youth.

“Every day brings fresh wonders!”

In 1754 Oliver Hart led a revival among the youth of the Charleston Baptist Church which mirrored the awakenings that had been taking place throughout the colonies since the 1730s. Hart kept a careful record of the revival in his personal diary after the pattern of George Whitefield’s Journals, documenting his own revivalist practices, such as preaching in private homes and counseling those who had fallen into sin. The 1754 Charleston revival involved a number of dramatic conversion experiences and exhibited some of the egalitarian tendencies of the Great Awakening, including Hart’s encouragement of public testimony and exhortation of a enslaved black woman to a group of white girls. This revival is also noteworthy for the conversion of Samuel Stillman, who would go on to become the influential pastor of the First Baptist Church of Boston at the time of the American Revolution. The 1754 Charleston revival shows Hart attempting to walk the line of discerning, moderate revivalism in the context of a dynamic awakening. It also demonstrates that a robust revivalism existed among the Regular Baptists of the South before the more famous Separate Baptists arrived in 1755.

School-Related Barriers that might be Impeding Academic Success for African American Girls

This study explored African American girls’ perceived racial/ethnic discrimination and teachers’ perceptions to understand the unique impact of each on educational outcomes for African American girls compared to girls from other racial/ethnic groups. The sample included 2,384 7th grade girls. In this multi-informant study, girls completed a survey that included ratings of perceived teacher discrimination, teachers rated the girls on academic engagement and antisocial behavior, and end-of-the-year GPA for each girl was gathered from school records data. One-way ANOVA revealed a main effect of race/ethnicity, such that African American girls reported higher levels of racial/ethnic discrimination, had a lower GPA, and were rated by their teachers as less engaged and more anti-social compared to Asian, Latinx, and white girls. Regression analysis revealed that, compared to white and Asian girls, low teacher perceived engagement was related to lower achievement for African American girls. These results highlight the need to analyze the educational experiences that African American girls are facing.