In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Imperfect Men in Perfect Societies:Human Nature in UtopiaGorman BeauchampIUtopists view man as a product of his social environment. Nothing innate in the psychic make-up of man—no inherent flaw in his nature, no inheritance of original sin—prevents his being perfected, or at least radically ameliorated, once the social structure that shapes character can be properly reordered. Utopists, in short, deny that there is such a thing as "human nature"—if, as (...) John Plamenatz suggests, to say that something is human nature is just another way of saying that it cannot be changed.1 To accept the psychic constitution of man as fixed, immutable, is anathema to utopists, who agree rather with Ortega y Gasset: "Man has no nature. What he has is history."2 The social conditions that have obtained historically, that is to say, have made man what he has been—anything but utopian; but if man's history could be changed, so could his "nature." The idea of Progress, so pervasive in the West from the seventeenth century on, lends some credence to this contention. W. D. Howells's Altrurians, their creator notes, "get some sad amusement out of the fact that the capitalist world believes human nature cannot be changed, though cannibalism and slavery and polygamy have all been extirpated in the so-called Christian countries, and these things were once human nature, which is always changing...."3 Utopia is merely a means, then, of imaginatively expediting, directing, culminating the historically progressive creation of a morally exemplary race of men.The environmentalist psychology espoused by utopists springs from one of two anterior assumptions (although in the creation of many fictional idola the distinction between them is often blurred). The first [End Page 280] assumption is formulated most famously by Rousseau in the Discourse on Inequality: that "man is naturally good, and only by his institutions is he made bad."4 The second assumption is formulated most famously by Locke in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding: that the mind—and by extension the character—is a tabula rasa that takes impression from the stimuli exerted by the external world and thus is neither innately good or bad, but plastic, malleable.5 An intriguing conflation of these two theories operates, for instance, in the psyche of the monster in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. In the long middle section of the book, where the monster's side of the story is presented sympathetically, his character develops in a text-book demonstration of Lockean psychology; yet, at the same time, this lumbering tabula rasa quivers with enough benevolence (the implausible provenance of which mystifies) to put most saints to shame. He becomes evil and destructive only after being persecuted unmercifully for his misshapen appearance.6 Indeed, the criminal career of Mary Shelley's monster rehearses the common utopian argument that society's injustice to man (or monster) is the source of his crimes. "With our present state of society," writes James Casey in A New Moral World (1885), "we manufacture criminals and then punish them for being so."7 H. G. Wells, in A Modern Utopia (1905), concurs: "Crime and bad lives are the measure of the State's failure, all crime in the end is the crime of the community."8 And both are but restating the charge of Sir Thomas More's Raphael Hytholoday, leveled several centuries earlier in the original Utopia (1519): "If you allow people to be badly brought up and their habits to be corrupted little by little from childhood and if you then punish them for crimes to which their early training has disposed them, what else is this, I ask, but first making them thieves and then punishing them for it?"9 Evil deeds, then, to reiterate the utopist's point, result not from some vicious mole in human nature, but from the malfunctioning of society itself. Utopia, by contrast, is—or theoretically ought to be—a world without crime.Rousseau's concept of the innate goodness of man and the evil of his institutions most often informs primitivist models of utopia, exotic worlds inhabited by noble savages uncorrupted by civilization. The idealized Indians of Montaigne's essay... (shrink)

Gornick on V. S. Naipaul, James Baldwin, George Gissing, Randall Jarrell, H. G. Wells, Loren Eiseley, Allen Ginsberg, Hayden Carruth, Saul Bellow, and Philip Roth and the intimate relationship between emotional damage and great literature.

In this ethnography of Bangladeshi men living and working in South Africa, I draw on the intersection of three sets of literatures—masculinities studies, mobility studies, and the emerging body of work on migrant masculinities— to argue that migrant mobility shapes and is shaped by relational performances of racialized masculinities. I analyze three particular moments of such “mobile masculinities.” The first is in the home country wherein migration is seen as a mandatory rite of passage into manhood. The second moment is (...) in transit, where the relational masculinity of migrant men and “traffickers” is performed and made. The final moment is in South Africa, wherein we observe two contrasting forms of masculinities: hyper masculinity and Ummah masculinity. Both kinds of masculinity in the final moment are attempts by the migrants to recuperate masculinity within a situation of extreme powerlessness. This article invokes the need for mobility research within gender studies, and an attention to a complex, processual construction of identities wherein gender, race, and other differences define the identities of migrants but also the discourses and narratives of masculinities. (shrink)

In written and spoken communications, figures of speech (e.g., metaphors and synecdoche) are often used as an aid to help convey abstract or less tangible concepts. However, the benefits of using rhetorical illustrations or embellishments in visualization have so far been inconclusive. In this work, we report an empirical study to evaluate hypotheses that visual embellishments may aid memorization, visual search and concept comprehension. One major departure from related experiments in the literature is that we make use of a dual-task (...) methodology in our experiment. This design offers an abstraction of typical situations where viewers do not have their full attention focused on visualization (e.g., in meetings and lectures). The secondary task introduces “divided attention”, and makes the effects of visual embellishments more observable. In addition, it also serves as additional masking in memory-based trials. The results of this study show that visual embellishments can help participants better remember the information depicted in visualization. On the other hand, visual embellishments can have a negative impact on the speed of visual search. The results show a complex pattern as to the benefits of visual embellishments in helping participants grasp key concepts from visualization. (shrink)

The place of men in reproductive and contraceptive changes and the role of informal social interaction in these processes have become central themes in recent research on fertility change in sub-Saharan Africa and other developing regions. These two themes, however, have been treated separately in the literature, and this study bridges them by examining men's informal communication on family planning matters through a gender lens. This analysis, based on qualitative data collected in Greater Maputo, Mozambique, indicates that although men's communication (...) on these matters is limited in comparison to women's communication, it nonetheless plays an important role in the formation of men's reproductive and contraceptive attitudes and preferences. Gender ideology emerges as a powerful delimiter of men's communication circles and of the information transmitted in those circles. The author argues that gender barriers in peer communication affect individuals' perceptions of reproductive and contraceptive matters and their corresponding preferences and decisions. (shrink)

Imagining super rich women in the real and fictional world has long been a struggle. Those few depictions that do exist are scattered across time periods and literary genres, reflecting the legal restrictions that, at different points in time, would not allow women to accumulate assets independent of the patriarchal forces in their lives. The scarcity of extremely wealthy women in literature and film is confirmed by Forbes magazine’s list of the fifteen richest fictional characters that features forty different fictional (...) men and only nine women, with never more than two female characters nominated in a single year. This article explores the depiction of three exceptionally wealthy women: Cruella de Vil in The Hundred and One Dalmatians (1956) by Dodie Smith, Miss Havisham in Great Expectations (1861) by Charles Dickens, and the figure of the stepmother in various adaptations of “Cinderella.” I demonstrate how the protagonists’ wealth allows them to manipulate others and disconnect themselves from patriarchal and societal expectations. Further, I argue that these affluent antagonists are “rogued” by their respective narratives, highlighting their perceived anti-feminine and emasculating behaviour resulting in a mode of narration that greedily gazes at and shames their appearances and supposed unattractiveness. While this genealogy of rich rogues reiterates the narrow scope of imagining wealthy women on the page and on the screen, there are moments in the narratives that disrupt stereotypical depictions of these wealthy characters who defy the labels imposed on them. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Literature in MindH. G. Wells and the Evolution of the Mad ScientistAnne StilesIn 1893, H. G. Wells's article "Man of the Year Million" dramatically predicted the distant evolutionary future of mankind:The descendents of man will nourish themselves by immersion in nutritive fluid. They will have enormous brains, liquid, soulful eyes, and large hands, on which they will hop. No craggy nose will they have, no vestigial ears; their mouths (...) will be a small, perfectly round aperture, unanimal, like the evening star. Their whole muscular system will be shriveled to nothing, a dangling pendant to their minds.2The editors at Punch evidently found this prediction hilarious, publishing a poem and accompanying sketch ridiculing Wells's lopsided future humans (Figure 1, p. 318). But not everyone was laughing.As ridiculous as Wells's bodiless, large-headed "human tadpoles" may seem, they were based on the most rigorous evolutionary science of their day. Wells, a lower-middle-class academic prodigy, received a prestigious [End Page 317] Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 1."1,000,000 A.D.," Punch, or the London Charivari, 25 November 1893, 250.[End Page 318]government scholarship to attend the Normal School of Science in South Kensington (later absorbed into the University of London). Though Wells left South Kensington in 1887 without earning his degree, he was greatly inspired by his biology teacher, famed physiologist Thomas Huxley. Wells absorbed Huxley's pessimistic take on late-Victorian evolutionary theory, particularly his emphasis on the inherent brutality of natural selection.Huxley's pessimism surfaces in Wells's dystopian scientific romances, which imaginatively probe the consequences of evolutionary theory run amok.3 Beginning with the eponymous mad-scientist villain of The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896) and continuing with alien invasion narratives like The War of the Worlds (1897–98) and The First Men in the Moon (1901), Wells depicts brains becoming steadily larger and more powerful as bodies grow smaller and more useless, emotions increasingly muted, and conscience all but silenced. Wells's nightmarish vision of the massively over-evolved brain unites these three works, as the ruthlessly intellectual biologist Moreau morphs into the amoral, top-heavy Martians and lunar inhabitants.Wells's malevolent mad scientists and extraterrestrials owe an intellectual debt not only to Huxley, but also to discussions of genius and insanity in late-Victorian issues of Mind (1876–present).4 The now-familiar trope of the mad scientist in fact traces its roots to the clinical association between genius and insanity that developed in the mid-nineteenth century. Authors like Scottish journalist and materialist philosopher John Ferguson Nisbet, English eugenicist Francis Galton, and Austrian Jewish physician Max Nordau—all of whose works were reviewed in Mind—argued that mankind had evolved larger brains at the expense of muscular strength, reproductive capacity, and moral sensibility.5 Wells drew upon these arguments in his fiction and even contributed his own article to Mind, a philosophical reflection on science entitled "Scepticism of the Instrument" (1904).In its unique role as "the first English journal devoted to Psychology and Philosophy." Mind was an ideal venue for an inherently interdisciplinary [End Page 319] subject like the clinical study of genius.6 The journal's first editor, George Croom Robertson, was particularly concerned that articles in Mind rise "above the narrowing influences of modern specialism."7 This disciplinary breadth attracted contributors from all fields, including fiction writers and literary critics like George Henry Lewes, Grant Allen, Andrew Lang, and, of course, H.G. Wells. During the same period, literary works probed ideas discussed in Mind, such as the nature of the soul, the possibility of free will, and the ramifications of biological determinism. In the four decades following its auspicious start, Mind provided a venue where scientists, philosophers and literary authors could find intellectual common ground.In this essay, the early fiction of H.G. Wells will serve as a case study of cross-fertilization between literature and scientific ideas discussed in Mind. The goals of this exploration are threefold: to gain a better understanding of the journal's history and influence; to investigate why Victorians associated genius with insanity; and to illuminate the shared... (shrink)

The paper scrutinizes the literary output of George Moore with reference to the expectations of the new generation of Irish writers emerging at the beginning of the twentieth century. Although George Moore is considered to belong to the Anglo-Irish ascendancy writers, he began his writing career from dissociating himself from the literary achievements of his own social class. His infatuation with the ideals of the Gaelic League not only brought him back to Dublin, but also encouraged him to write short (...) stories analogous to famous Ivan Turgenev’s The Sportsman’s Sketches. The idea of using a Russian writer as a role model went along with the Gaelic League advocating the reading of non-English European literature in search for inspiration. However the poet’s involvement in the public cause did not last long. His critical view on Ireland together with his uncompromising approach towards literature resulted in a final disillusionment with the movement. The paper focuses on this particular period of Moore’s life in order to show how this seemingly unfruitful cooperation became essential for the development of Irish literature in the twentieth century. The Untilled Field, though not translated into Irish, still marks the beginning of a new genre into Irish literature—a short story. More importantly, the collection served as a source of inspiration for Joyce’s Dubliners. These and other aspects of Moore’s literary life are supposed to draw attention to the complexity of the writer’s literary output and his underplayed role in the construction of the literary Irish identity. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Men with Muskets, Women with Lyres: Nationality, Citizenship, and Gender in the Writings of Germaine de StaëlSusanne HillmanOn 23 May 1812 Germaine de Staël (1766–1817), Europe’s best-known enemy of Napoleon Bonaparte, set out from her estate on Lake Geneva to escape to England. In her reminiscences, she reflected on the pivotal event as follows:[A]fter ten years of ever-increasing persecutions [...] I was obliged to leave two homelands as a (...) fugitive, Switzerland and France, by order of a man less French than I. For I was born on the banks of the Seine, where his only claim to citizenship is his tyranny. He saw the light of day on the island of Corsica, practically within Africa’s savage sway. His father did not, like mine, devote his fortune and his sleepless nights to defending France from bankruptcy and famine; the air of this beautiful country is not his native air; how can he understand the pain of being exiled from it, when he considers this fertile land only as the instrument of his victories. [End Page 231] Where is his patrie? It is any country that accepts his domination. His fellow-citizens? They are whatever slaves obey his orders.1In this passage, de Staël deliberately links nationality and citizenship. In her view, citizenship status was acquired simply by being born on French soil. Her family’s tireless labors on behalf of the nation added another irrefutable proof of Frenchness. In addition, growing up in France and breathing the country’s invigorating air had created an emotional attachment that a person raised elsewhere simply could not fathom. We thus have a triad of birth/service/sentiment that connects the deserving individual to his or her nation (in this case la grande nation).In this essay I explore de Staël’s understanding of the twin concepts of nationality and citizenship through the lens of gender. Nationality and citizenship were of perennial concern to her thought, partly because of the turbulent times she lived in, partly because of her personal experience in exile. Influenced by history and literature, she early on admired the gallant men with muskets who heroically sacrificed their lives for the glory of the nation. But it was the exceptional women with lyres who were destined to act as the nation’s unifying agents by recreating the gallants’ deeds in writing. By imagining the nation these women fulfilled the supreme task of citizenship. In what follows I will argue that de Staël conceived of the ideal citizen as a woman writer or artist who served her nation by inspiring its members with enthusiasm and virtue.2 In elaborating her view of the superior woman as citoyenne and national muse she made an important contribution to the debate on the nation and the citizen.The only daughter of Louis XVI’s finance minister Jacques Necker and the salonnière Suzanne Curchod-Necker, of Genevan and Vaudois citizenship respectively, de Staël gained fame and notoriety through her brilliant conversational talents, political intrigues, and unconventional relationships with famous men. Though she considered herself a “true Frenchwoman” (véritable française),3 she was a citizen of Geneva and a Swedish subject by marriage, at least until 1803 when she took advantage of the Code Civil [End Page 232] and officially claimed French citizenship.4 Considering this multiplicity of conflicting loyalties, it is not surprising that her major writings reveal a sustained preoccupation with these issues.Despite their undeniable significance for early nineteenth-century European intellectual history, historians have so far devoted scant attention to de Staël’s writings. In fact, in the US, Staëlien studies have largely been dominated by literary criticism and theory.5 This has had the effect of prioritizing her novels over her non-fiction, downplaying the historical context of her oeuvre and, most grievously, ignoring de Staël’s historical contribution to socio-political thought.6 As a result of the complex ways in which her personal experience informed her writing, her oeuvre is best examined as a unified, though certainly inconsistent, whole. Her writings were rarely “products of intense deliberation, but rather reflections... (shrink)

Men, culture and hegemonic masculinity: understanding the experience of prostate cancer Following a diagnosis of, and treatment for prostate cancer, there is an expectation that men will cope with, adjust to and accept the psychosocial impact on their lives and relationships. Yet, there is a limited qualitative world literature investigating the psychosocial experience of prostate cancer, and almost no literature exploring how masculinity mediates in such an experience. This paper will suggest that the experience of prostate cancer, the process by (...) which it is investigated, and the way in which it is understood has been shaped by an essentialist interpretation of gender, exemplified by hegemonic masculinity as the archetypal mechanism of male adaptation. In response to this static and limiting view of masculinity, this paper will offer a reframe of hegemonic masculinity. This reframe, being more aligned with common experience, will portray masculinity as a dynamic and contextual construct, better understood as one of a number of cultural reference points around which each man organises and adopts behaviour. It will be suggested that the extant literature, in being organised around hegemonic masculinity, obfuscates the experience of prostate cancer and acts to render covert any collateral masculinities, public or private, that may also be operating. (shrink)

Though there is a vast literature on performances of drag, performances of gender and sexual transgressions outside of drag clubs are less studied. This case study of men’s marches protesting violence against women—“Walk a Mile in Her Shoes” marches— examines the politics of such transgressions. Cross-dressing to various degrees is strategically utilized at these events in an attempt to encourage men to become empathetic allies. This article suggests, however, that context is critical to the political potential of performances of drag. (...) The author’s observations of the interactions at the marches suggest that drag at “Walk a Mile” marches often symbolically reproduces gender and sexual inequality despite good intentions. At these marches, feminism is gendered when performances of politics and protest are contextually framed as gender and/or sexual transgressions when “feminism” is understood as “feminine.”. (shrink)

To address the underrepresentation of women in philosophy effectively, we must understand the causes of the early loss of women. In this paper we challenge one of the few explanations that has focused on why women might leave philosophy at early stages. Wesley Buckwalter and Stephen Stich offer some evidence that women have different intuitions than men about philosophical thought experiments. We present some concerns about their evidence and we discuss our own study, in which we attempted to replicate their (...) results for 23 different responses to 14 scenarios . We also conducted a literature search to see if other philosophers or psychologists have tested for gender differences in philosophical intuitions. Based on our findings, we argue that that it is unlikely that gender differences in intuitions play a significant role in driving women from philosophy. (shrink)

In Europe the elderly population is projected to increase from 18.5% (93.9 million) in 2014 to 28.7% (149.1 million) by 2080. In the USA it is estimated that by the year 2030 more than 20% of the population will be aged 65 years or over. This specific population is at high risk of unrecognised or untreated psychiatric illnesses and suicide. It is well known that completed suicide rate increases with age in both men and women. Although elderly people attempt suicide (...) less often than other age groups, they show a higher completion rate. Generally the methods chosen by elderly are more lethal, the intent is more serious, they are more determined and they show fewer warning sign than the younger population. A recent systematic review and meta-analysis of psychosocial intervention following self-harm in adults found that cognitive behavioural therapy was the most effective in these patients. Unfortunately there have been few reported trials of other potentially effective interventions. Because the scientific literature on psychosocial suicide prevention interventions in the elderly is still scant we decided to conduct a mini-review in order to take stock of the situation. Studies were identified through electronic searches of the Cochrane library, MEDLINE, Scopus and Web of Science databases. PRISMA guidelines were followed and only 7 articles met the inclusion criteria. No firm conclusions can be drawn about this topic because there is still little data and studies used inconsistent outcome measures and designs. Nonetheless, the existing data suggests that psychosocial interventions are promising. (shrink)

Using data from 52 in-depth interviews with working-class and professional men and women, I examine gender differences in friendships. Men and women respond to global questions about friendship in culturally specific ways. Men focus on shared activities, and women focus on shared feelings. Responses to questions about specific friends, however, reveal more variation in same-sex friendships than the literature indicates. Men share feelings more, whereas women share feelings less; furthermore, the extent to which they do so varies by class. I (...) argue that conceptualizing gender as an ongoing social construction explains the data better than do psychoanalytic or socialization accounts. (shrink)

Urban dwellers are more likely to develop mental disorders such as mood and anxiety disorder as well as schizophrenia compared to rural dwellers. Moreover, it has been demonstrated that even short-term exposure to nature can improve mood and decrease stress, but the underlying neural mechanisms are currently under investigation. In the present intervention study we examined the effects of a one-hour walk in an urban vs. natural environment on activity in the amygdala, a brain region previously associated with stress processing. (...) Before and after the walk 63 participants underwent an fMRI paradigm inducing social stress. Since there is a pronounced gap in the literature regarding interindividual differences in stress-related neural effects of urban and natural environments, we set out to explore sex differences. We observed that amygdala activity decreased after the walk in nature, but only in women, suggesting that women may profit more from salutogenic effects of nature. Moreover, performance on the arithmetic tasks improved in women after the walk in nature, whereas men performed better after the walk in the urban environment. To our knowledge, this is the first study to report differencial tendencies in men and women concerning the stress-related neural activity as an effect of acute exposure to urban vs. natural environments. Furthermore, our findings highlight the importance of sex differences when exploring effects of the environment on brain function and stress. Evidence for beneficial effects of nature on stress-related brain regions may inform urban design policies to focus on providing more accessible green areas in cities and this study suggests that sex differences in experiencing the environment should be taken into consideration. (shrink)

Recent revisions in child support and paternity establishment legislation enacted under the 1996 welfare reform act, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, significantly alter the American welfare state's relationship to men's fathering. Through a critical review of prior research and social service literature, the authors argue that PRWORA actively constructs fatherhood not only through state policies that maintain males as “breadwinners” but also through state-sponsored social service programs that seek to influence men's identities as fathers. PRWORA's policies and (...) their accompanying discourses simultaneously reproduce and undermine gender hierarchy yet tacitly maintain structural race and class inequalities. (shrink)

The literature on hybrid masculinity suggests that some men manage subordinate or contradictory forms of masculinity while still maintaining and benefiting from gender inequality. Drawing from 35 in-depth qualitative interviews with religious participants in pornography addiction recovery programs, we expand this literature by illustrating how hybrid masculinity operates through shared cultural knowledge about sex, gender, and sexuality. We find that participants use distinct cultural schemas related to religion and science to explain how men are created by God to be biologically (...) “hard-wired” for pornography addiction. We use the phrase redemptive masculinity to describe a type of hybrid masculinity that upholds the cultural association between hegemonic masculinity and pornography consumption, but allows religious men to describe their avoidance of pornography as a masculine feat. Redemptive masculinity depends upon particular beliefs about gender that give advantage to the religious men who work to overcome pornography addiction. We show how their stories reinforce essentialist differences between male and female bodies that protect the interests and sexual expressions of religious men. In turn, we show how hybrid masculinities may involve gender-flexible practices for men but also how these may ultimately reinforce strict and inflexible beliefs about so-called “opposite” sexes. (shrink)

By examining the case of one man in the early nineteenth century, this article challenges the assumptions of separate work and emotional lives for men and women and raises questions for the study of gender. The experience of Brigham Nims, as revealed in his diaries and letters, demonstrates that men and women did not live their lives in completely separate spheres during this period. Men could ignore the prescriptive adages of advice manuals and ministers, and regularly break gender-role stereotypes, yet (...) still be honored in their communities. They also engaged in special intimate friendships. If the separation of spheres was observed by individuals as rigidly as it was advocated in prescriptive literature, then it is unlikely that Brigham Nims would have sewed, cooked, ironed, and quilted with womenfolk. (shrink)

Very little research into women farmers in developed countries has been produced by economists, but much of what has been studied by scholars in other disciplines has economic implications. This article reviews such research produced by scholars in all disciplines to explore to what extent women farmers are becoming more equal to men farmers and to suggest further contributions to the literature. As examples, topics that has been widely researched in developing countries but have received almost no attention in developed (...) countries include comparisons of men and women farmers’ productivity and their access to and use of resources. Discoveries in these and other areas will be important not only for their insights into the agricultural industry in developed countries, but also because they will inform, and be informed by, research on women farmers in developing countries. (shrink)

Children’s literature provides a critical method of socialization and familiarization with gender roles, providing examples, boundaries, and limitations for gender identity construction. While extensive research has been done on how children’s literature depicts both traditional and non-traditional gender roles, very little research has been published on the cultural differences between literary representations. The aim of the present paper is to describe the representations of social roles of men and women in American, Czech, and Spanish children’s books published between 2010 and (...) 2020. Three best-selling children’s picture books from each year from each respective culture were selected and analyzed, culminating in a thematic analysis of ninety-nine books. Using inductive thematic analysis, the study found all three cultures to be conservative in their depictions of gender roles, with Czech books as the most likely to feature traditional gender roles. Spanish books are more, and American books are the most subversive in their depiction of gender roles, containing an increasing number of non-traditional elements over an examined time period. (shrink)

In the animal literature, the concept of dominance usually links status in intermale encounters with differential reproductive success. Mazur & Booth effectively review the human literature correlating testosterone with intermale competition, but more profound questions relating this to male–female dynamics have yet to be addressed in research with humans.

This paper constructs the theological polemic among Near Eastern Christian sects and the encounter with the new religio-political regional power: Islam. Focusing on the period from around the first Muslim conquests in the mid-seventh century until the ninth centure C. E., a list of East Syriac Church Fathers and their writings are selected as representative voices in the continuing Christological debates. In particular, the paper is concerned with how theological arguments were first used and reinterpreted to address conversion to Islam (...) and later used to emphasize, in an ironic twist, the proximity between Nestorianism and Islam contra other Christian “heresies”. This historical development is important to understand how Nestorian literature was later used by Muslim theologians well after the ninth century, such as Ibn Abī Ţālib al-Dimašqī in the fourteenth century, to defend Islam and debunk Christianity. For Nestorian apologetics the immediacy of addressing the issue of Christian conversion to Islam was clear. Letters from Nestorian clergy, such as Katholikos Īšō’yahb III. and Katholikos Georg, recount the old debates among Nestorians, Miaphysites, and Melkites concerning the nature of Christ. In order to explicate best the erroneous attraction of Islam, these two men contextualized Islamic theology as similar to a Christian heretical sect. Yet over time, appealing to Islamic overlordship became necessary. With the rise of the Abbasid caliphate and the establishment of its capital in the historical heartland of the Nestorian Church, the polemic was reversed. Hereafter, Nestorian dyophysite doctrine was used as an appeal to the Islamic conception of Christ’s divinity. For example, Katholikos Timotheos I. and the theologian Theodor Bar Koni underlined the blasphemy of the Miaphysite and Chalcedonian Christology. This very tactic, however, was easy for Muslim scholars to appropriate in Islamic apologetics. Well before al-Dimašqi, the words of the Abbasid Caliph al-Mahdi to Timotheos are distinct: the Nestorians understood correctly that God could not have suffered and died, but that they all were still wrong that Jesus is the Son of God. (shrink)

There is a general consensus among religious scholars that Pentecostalism has risen phenomenally in Africa and Zimbabwe is no exception. In most cases, Pentecostalism has been presented as a sophisticated brand of Christianity while members of African Independent churches are shown to be gullible. The newly founded Pentecostal churches are more focused on gospreneurship while the media is busy with cases of cheating, dishonesty and the sexual abuse of women in these churches. Thus, academic scholars have begun to pay their (...) attention on gullibility in Pentecostalism. Unfortunately, not many scholarly works have looked at literary texts that bring out the gullibility of members of Pentecostal churches in Zimbabwe. This article seeks to bridge this gap by analysing Aaron Chiundura Moyo’s Kereke Inofa [The Church Can die]. The main purpose is to bring out the significance of literary texts in projecting societal ills, specifically the gender power dynamics in Zimbabwean Pentecostal churches that may be difficult to deal with directly. The focus is on how women and some men are victims of the whims of some Pentecostal church leaders. The article is informed by the socio-historical approach, which states that artists derive the material for their works of art, subject matter, images and artistic languages from the life experiences of their societies. The socio-historical approach enables the researcher to understand the prevalence of gullibility in Pentecostal churches in Zimbabwe. The article relies heavily on content analysis of Moyo’s Kereke Inofa’s presentation of deception, and infidelity in Pentecostal Churches being performed on members who are projected in this play as ‘gullible’.Contribution: This article’s contribution lies in its critical analysis of gender and gullibility in African Pentecostalism in Zimbabwe. It is significant as it utilises a literary text to project the ills in Pentecostal churches and women’s sexual vulnerabilities. (shrink)

The literature on gender and health typically addresses behavioral patterns when discussing men’s attitudes to health. Few of these studies explore men’s anxieties or presentations of self in relation to health problems, particularly for stigmatizing conditions such as sexually transmitted infections. Through direct observation and focus group interviews of health workers, clients, and students, this study explores African American men’s attitudes toward attending STI clinics in the Deep South. The men’s concerns about STI clinics center on realistic health or stigma-related (...) concerns. Using a gender-relational analysis, three main sources of fear are identified in relation to attending the clinics: Gender anxiety, social anxiety, and racial anxiety. These fears present a barrier to STI care for African American men. (shrink)

Recent feminist literature has begun to call attention to the diverse linkages between work and family, including the extensive work married women often do for their husbands' careers. Using a longitudinal sample of American women born around 1910, this study employs quantitative and qualitative data to compare different aspects of wives' support and to develop an understanding of how women of their generation constructed their involvement. The authors begin their analysis by comparing wives' support across husbands' occupations and then examining (...) differences in activities and the ways in which women describe their relationships to their husbands' work. They find considerable variation in the way women constructed their relationships to husbands' careers. The evidence suggests that women who provided services directly related to their husbands' work may have been the most satisfied with their involvement. (shrink)

Shaftesbury's Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times was published in 1711. It ranges widely over ethics, aesthetics, religion, the arts (painting, literature, architecture, gardening), and ancient and modern history, and aims at nothing less than a new ideal of the gentleman. Together with Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding and Addison and Steele's Spectator, it is a text of fundamental importance for understanding the thought and culture of Enlightenment Europe. This volume presents a new edition of the text together with an (...) introduction, explanatory notes and a guide to further reading. (shrink)

The straw man fallacy consists in inappropriately constructing or selecting weak versions of the opposition’s arguments. We will survey the three forms of straw men recognized in the literature, the straw, weak, and hollow man. We will then make the case that there are examples of inappropriately reconstructing stronger versions of the opposition’s arguments. Such cases we will call iron man fallacies. The difference between appropriate and inappropriate iron manning clarifies the limits of the virtue of open-mindedness.

While standard histories of Western political thought represent women’s rights as an offshoot of the earlier movement for the equal rights of men, this essay argues that the eighteenth-century push for democracy and equal rights was grounded in arguments first used to defend women’s right to moral and religious self-determination, based on their rational and spiritual equality with men. In tandem with the rise of critiques of absolute monarchy, ideal marriage, which had previously involved lordship and subjection, was transformed into (...) an equal companionate relationship based on inclination and affection. The essay argues that the transformation, by the time of the American and French revolutions, of neo-Roman republicanism—which had been aristocratic and oligarchic—into egalitarian, democratic republicanism had been mediated by the extension of arguments, widely distributed in the literature criticizing the slavery of marriage, into a general critique of slavery and support for the equal rights of men. (shrink)

Samizdat, the underground circulation of unofficial and forbidden literature in the Soviet Union, is an example of how censorship can backfire. Ideological restrictions produced walls of monotony in libraries and bookstores, propelling readers to search for more interesting fare. Sensitive texts on religion, philosophy, human rights, and current events, as well as literary works, passed from hand to hand clandestinely from around 1960 until censorship was abolished in the late 1980s. Von Zitzewitz's study is itself interesting fare, uncovering the workings (...) of samizdat as both a distribution network, comparable to that of print culture, and a social network that developed bonds between people who shared a defined purpose outside the public space. By no means did they all think of themselves as dissenters. For many people who lived ordinary Soviet lives, it was simply that “reading samizdat increased [their] individual feeling of freedom and represented a personal act of resistance.”One merit of this book is its point-by-point comparison of the samizdat distribution network to the print-culture production chain of author-publisher-printer-shipper-bookseller-reader. Samizdat had an analogous chain, in which a text made its way from author to reader through a network of people, each performing a specific function—procuring manuscripts, housing them, typing (or photographing) multiple copies, and delivering copies to readers. There were others who served as compilers, translators, collectors, and even editors and “librarians” (although accepting this designation requires abandoning the notion of a library as a stationary physical repository).Since all participants in the network strove to hide their traces from the prying eyes of the security police, samizdat researchers are hampered by a lack of records and evidence. To help fill the information gap, von Zitzewitz (in collaboration with Memorial's Gennadii Kuzovkin) designed a sixty-three-question survey targeting former samizdat participants and posted online in 2017. Tables display statistics (from the first 122 respondents) on demographics (respondents’ gender, place and decade of birth, and education level) as well as information on which authors, genres, and subject matter were most read. Other survey questions were designed to elicit recollections that help us understand what it felt like to participate in samizdat culture, whether as an author or reader, or in some aspect of acquisition or distribution. The many quotations from the survey responses bring to life the intensity of this activity. Receiving a sought-after text with an injunction to return it (or pass it on) the next day might mean reading all through the night to get through hundreds of pages. And while it is intuitive to think of samizdat as walled off from official culture, this study argues persuasively that they were intertwined. There were plenty of gray areas and fuzzy boundaries, too. One owner of samizdat books had several of them confiscated during a KGB search of his apartment, only to find them later for sale in a bookshop.Having begun as a clandestine, makeshift response to the institution of censorship, samizdat became more sophisticated over time, evolving into an institution itself. It arguably contributed to the perestroika reforms and became unnecessary when censorship was given the heave-ho. Subsequently, samizdat activists who had managed the covert production and circulation of entire journals published full accounts of their activity and the operation of their networks. Von Zitzewitz makes good use of these sources and shows admiration for the role these men played. She notes, though, that their detailed descriptions omit names of any of the typists who gave up their leisure hours and nightly sleep for the pleasure of hammering out multiple carbon copies of forbidden literature, usually for no pay. The word typist, given its lowly connotation in both Russian and English, is unfortunate. Typists were samizdat's printing press, and without their commitment and sacrifice the whole enterprise would have collapsed. Von Zitzewitz suggests that it may never have occurred to the samizdat heavyweights to acknowledge them by name. They were just... women. On the other hand, the menial typist designation had its upside. It seems to have resulted in a shorter prison sentence for at least one of them.Von Zitzewitz argues strenuously that samizdat was first and foremost a social network. If you wanted to get hold of, say, The Gulag Archipelago, you needed to know someone with the connections to help you get it. To call samizdat a social network is, of course, to wade into comparisons with today's online social media networks. Von Zitzewitz notes parallels, but she finds that the differences overwhelm the similarities. Samizdat was a social network, but one that depended on mutual trust. (shrink)

This article presents the findings of research conducted on ‘forgiveness’ as a spiritual construct, religious survival strategy and meaning-giving tool during incarceration. The research was conducted with 30 men serving long-term sentences in Zonderwater, a correctional centre outside Pretoria, South Africa. A review of literature showed that forgiveness has mainly been seen as something the perpetrator owed the victim and that asking for and granting forgiveness were religious imperatives. However, this study shows that offenders, in the troubled space of incarceration, (...) survived by putting themselves in control of forgiveness. They found peace of mind by granting forgiveness to those who caused them to be incarcerated, whilst at the same time taking responsibility for their own actions. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with the participants. Applying an interpretative phenomenological analysis methodology, the collected data were analysed and the following themes were identified: forgiving those who transgressed against me; the role of politics in forgiveness; God’s role in forgiveness; and the effects of forgiveness on the self.Contribution: This article contributes to an understanding of the construction of forgiveness as experienced by offenders, independent from the traditional victim-offender relations. Living in a troubled, unforgiving space, these men are expected to practice forgiveness by set standards. From their shared narratives, it is illustrated that their spiritual navigation with this phenomenon is not a chronological, time dependent process, but a multi-dimensional, personal journey to self-discovery. (shrink)

BackgroundThe risk of child sexual abuse among non-forensic, non-correctional patients with Pedophilic Disorder is largely unknown.MethodsWe recruited a consecutive sample of 55 help-seeking, non-correctional adult men diagnosed with DSM-5 PD at a university-affiliated sexual medicine outpatient unit in Sweden. PD participants were compared with 57 age-matched, non-clinical control men on four literature-based dynamic risk domains and self-rated child sexual abuse risk.ResultsPD participants scored higher than controls on all tested domains ; expectedly so for pedophilic attraction : [1.91–2.89]), but also for (...) sexual preoccupation, impaired self-regulation, impaired cognitive empathy and antisocial traits, and self-rated child sexual abuse risk. When summarizing all five domains into a pre-specified composite score, PD subjects scored substantially higher than matched control men. Five PD participants self-reported any previous conviction for a contact child sexual offense and eight for possession of child sexual abuse material or non-contact sexual offending. Eighteen subjects acknowledged past week, child-related sexual behaviors.ConclusionSelf-referred, help-seeking men with PD scored higher than non-clinical control men on psychiatric measures of dynamic risk of child sexual abuse suggested in prior research with correctional samples diagnosed with PD. Our findings, including the composite risk measure, might inform clinical practice, but needs validation against actual sexual offending behavior. (shrink)

Women have a life-expectancy advantage over men, but a marked disadvantage with regards to morbidity. This is known as the female–male health-survival paradox in disciplines such as medicine, medical sociology, and epidemiology. Individual differences in physical and mental health are further notably explained by the degree of stress individuals endure, with women being more affected by stressors than men. Here, we briefly examine the literature on women’s disadvantage in health and stress. Beyond biological considerations, we follow with socio-cognitive explanations of (...) gender differences in health and stress. We show that gender roles and traits (masculinity in particular) explain part of the gender differences in stress, notably cognitive appraisal and coping. Stress in turn degrades health. Implications are discussed. In conclusion, traditional socialization is advantageous for men in terms of health. (shrink)

Drawing on a range of sources such as Roman oratory, love elegy, Carmina Priapea and Petronius, the paper claims that the Priapic model of Roman Sexuality entails a particularly vulnerable form of male sexuality which can best be observed in descriptions of young men in the transitional period to manhood, such as, e.g., Achilles in Statius' Achilleis.

Shaftesbury's Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times is a collection of treatises on interconnected themes in moral philosophy, aesthetics, literature, and politics. It was immensely influential on eighteenth-century British taste and manners, literature, and thought, and also onthe Continental Enlightenment. The author was a Whig, a Stoic, and a theist, whose commitment to political liberty and civic virtue shaped all of his other concerns, from the role of the arts in a free state to the nature of the beautiful and (...) the good.This is the first new edition of Shaftesbury's Characteristicks as a coherent collection for almost a century. A substantial Introduction discusses Shaftesbury's works and ideas in the context of his times, and traces the reception and influence of his writings through the eighteenth century andbeyond. A full and scholarly commentary is provided, as well as a complete textual apparatus. The very thorough Index is Shaftesbury's own.The text is essentially that of the first edition of 1711, as marked up with changes by Shaftesbury himself in preparation for the posthumous second edition of 1714; and the striking emblematic engravings he commissioned especially for the second edition are incorporated. (shrink)

There is a scarcity of research on men’s experience of bereavement (Reiniche, 2006), particularly in relation to qualitative research that focuses on the meaning of such an experience. This paper seeks to address this scarcity by presenting the findings from a phenomenological study of the lifeworlds of a small number of bereaved men. The study looked specifically at how the loss of a spouse influences men’s experience of meaning, grief and loss. Three men aged between 32 and 54 years old (...) who had all lost their partners to cancer between 3 and 7 years ago were interviewed. The hermeneutic phenomenological method of Van Manen (1990) was used to uncover three key themes, labelled grief and self-reflection, meaning of life and loss, and refiguring the life-world. These themes are discussed in the light of broader existential concerns and the extant literature. (shrink)

Volume 1 -- Unit 1: Tragedy as an independent art of musical drama. Chapter 1: Plato's well-educated men, the dancers: Harmonia kai rhuthmos as "music and dance" -- Chapter 2: Tragedy as a necessarily performed "musical" art in the Poetics -- Chapter 3: The irreducibility of tragedy to literature -- Chapter 4: Harmonia kai rhuthmos as "music and dance" in Politics VIII.

What happens once the rogue rides off into the sunset? This cross-genre essay considers the figure of the rogue’s decline and gradual dismemberment in the face of the pressures of the world. Beginning with the “rogue” digits and other body parts lost by the men who surrounded him in his youth—especially his grandfather—Dobson considers the costs of labour and poverty in rural environments. For him, the rogue is one who falls somehow outside of cultural, social, and political norms—the one who (...) has decided to step outside of the establishment, outside of the corrupt élites and their highfalutin ways. To do so comes at a cost. Turning to the life of writer George Ryga and to the poetry and fiction of Patrick Lane, this essay examines the real, physical, material, and social costs of transgression across multiple works linked to rural environments in Alberta and British Columbia. The essay shows the ways in which very real forms of violence discipline the rogue, pushing the rogue back into submission or out of mind, back into the shadowy past from whence the rogue first came. Resisting nostalgia while evincing sympathy, this essay delves into what is at stake for one who would become a rogue. (shrink)

Christoph Meiners (1747—1810) was one of 18th-century Europe's most important readers of global travel literature, and he has been credited as a founder of the disciplines of ethnology and anthropology. This article examines a part of his final work, Untersuchungen über die Verschiedenheiten der Menschennaturen [Inquiries on the differences of human natures], published posthumously in the 1810s. Here Meiners developed an elaborate argument, based on empirical evidence, that the different races of men emerged indigenously at different times and in different (...) places in natural history. Specifically this article shows how a sedentary scholar who never left Europe constructed a narrative of human origins and migrations on the basis of (1) French theory from the 1750s (Charles de Brosses and Simon Pelloutier) and (2) data gathered by explorers as reported in travel literature (J. R. Forster, Pérouse, Cook, Marsden). (shrink)

Feminist scholarship highlighting the importance of sexuality suggests the utility of studying beliefs about gender and sexuality, but the public opinion literature on gender-related attitudes has paid almost no attention to this issue. This research report addresses U.S. men's and women's beliefs about several aspects of sexuality: gender differences in sexual drives, gender inequalities in sexual power, and sexual orientation. The results suggest that men and women tend to share similar beliefs about sexual drives and sexual orientation but disagree notably (...) on issues of sexual power. In addition, naturalization of sexuality is associated with greater acceptance of the sexual status quo, suggesting that naturalizing beliefs play a role in maintaining sexual inequality. (shrink)

This paper looks, in the first place, at gender issues in Pentecostal Christianity in Nigeria. This is especially as captured by the Nigerian writer, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, in her novel, Americanah. It is found that women in Nigerian Pentecostalism are more than the men in number and participate more actively both in church activities and in spiritual efforts at home. However, it is mostly the men who are the pastors and leaders of the Nigerian Pentecostal churches, even if at home, (...) by what is sometimes called ‘domestication’ of the same men, the women are empowered in some ways. The paper then considers what their place has in common with the place of women in the Roman Catholic Church in contemporary Nigeria. The paper adds to the existing literature on the place and role of women in both Pentecostalism and Catholicism in contemporary Nigeria. (shrink)

Discussions of reproductive responsibility generally draw heavily upon the principles of nonmaleficence and beneficence. However, these principles are typically only applied to women due to the incorrect belief that only women can cause fetal harm. The cultural perception that women are likely to cause fetal and child harm is reflected in numerous social norms, policies, and laws. Conversely, there is little public discussion of men and fetal and child harm, which implies that men do not (or cannot) cause such harm. (...) My goal in this paper is to begin to fill the void in the academic literature about men’s reproductive responsibility by highlighting the health-related, economic, and social harms men can cause to potential fetuses and children and then examining what it would mean to hold them responsible for preventing these harms. Applying the principles of nonmaleficence and beneficence to men, I conclude that men have a moral duty to use contraception if their behavior—past, current, or future—could harm the potential fetuses and children who result from their unprotected sexual behavior. (shrink)

The book analyses the Indian Supreme Court's jurisprudence on homosexuality, its current approach and how its position has evolved in the past ten years. It critically analyses the Court's landmark judgments and its perception of equality, family, marriage and human rights from an international perspective. With the help of European Court of Human Rights' judgments and international conventions, it compares the legal and social discrimination meted out to the Indian LGBTI community with that in the international arena. From a social (...) anthropological perspective, it demonstrates how gay masculinity, although marginalized, serves as a challenge to patriarchy and hegemonic masculinity. This unique book addresses the lack of in-depth literature on gay masculinity, elaborately narrating and analysing contemporary gay masculinity and emerging gay lifestyles in India and highlighting the latest research on the subject of homosexuality in general and in particular with respect to India. It also discusses several new issues concerning the gay men in India supported by the living law approach put forth by Eugen Ehrlich. (shrink)