Weekly Roundup
Dec 30 2024 – Jan 5, 2025
PODCASTS AND PRESENTATIONS
Unpacking Feminism's Marxist Roots
Psychobabble, 2024 (Interview, 57 minutes)
ARTICLES AND ESSAYS
Reality’s Last Stand, 2024
The Story and Legacy of Ayn Rand’s Nonfiction Writing Course
New Ideal, 2024
University of Iowa to close Gender and Sexuality Studies department, eliminate social justice major
The College Fix, 2024
Journal of Open Inquiry in the Behavioral Sciences, 2024
Abstract: Some of the most controversial information in psychology involves genetic or evolutionary explanations for sex differences in educational-vocational outcomes (Clark et al., 2024a). We investigated whether men and women react differently to controversial information about sex differences and whether their reaction depends on who provides the information. In the experiment, college students (n=396) and U.S. middle-aged adults (n=154) reviewed a handout, purportedly provided by either a male or a female professor. The handout stated that (1) women in STEM are no longer discriminated against in hiring and publishing and (2) sex differences in educational-vocational outcomes are better explained by evolved differences between men and women in various personal attributes. We found that college women were less receptive to the information than college men were and wanted to censor it more than men did; also, in both the college student and community adult samples, women were less receptive and more censorious when the messenger was a male professor than when the messenger was a female professor. In both samples, participants who leaned to the left politically and who held stronger belief that words can cause harm reacted with more censoriousness. Our findings imply that the identity of a person presenting controversial scientific information and the receiver’s pre-existing identity and beliefs have the potential to influence how that information will be received.
HISTORICAL ARTICLES AND ESSAYS
Child homicide perpetrators worldwide: a systematic review
BMJ Paediatrics Open, 2017
Abstract: Objective: This study aims to describe child homicide perpetrators and estimate their global and regional proportion to inform prevention strategies to reduce child homicide mortality worldwide. Design: A systematic review of 9431 studies derived from 18 databases led to the inclusion of 126 studies after double screening. All included studies reported a number or proportion of child homicides perpetrators. 169 countries and homicide experts were surveyed in addition. The median proportion for each perpetrator category was calculated by region and overall and by age groups and sex. Results: Data were obtained for 44 countries. Overall, parents committed 56.5% (IQR 23.7-69.6) of child homicides, 58.4% (0.0-66.7) of female and 46.8% (14.1-63.8) of male child homicides. Acquaintances committed 12.6% (5.9-31.3) of child homicides. Almost a tenth (9.2% (IQR 0.0-21.9) of child homicides had missing information on the perpetrator. The largest proportion of parental homicides of children was found in high-income countries (64.2%; 44.7-71.8) and East Asia and Pacific Region (61.7%; 46.7-78.6). Parents committed the majority (77.8% (61.5-100.0)) of homicides of children under the age of 1 year. For adolescents, acquaintances were the main group of homicide perpetrators (36.9%, 6.6-51.8). There is a notable lack of studies from low-income and middle-income countries and children above the age of 1 year. Conclusion: Children face the highest risk of homicide by parents and someone they know. Increased investment into the compilation of routine data on child homicide, and the perpetrators of this homicide is imperative for understanding and ultimately reducing child homicide mortality worldwide.
RUBBISH BIN
Gender and Education, 2024
Abstract: The paper examines a ‘circulatory’ system of gender inequity in Australian universities where gender bias prevents women from accessing senior decision-making roles and stultifies their capacity to act as gender change agents. It has been mooted that equity quotas for senior roles can derail this circuit of male privilege in academia. Yet a plastic reading of the shape of gender equity policy and practice in Australian universities over the last 40 years reveals an increasing acceptance of individualism, which positions women’s liberation as being achievable through self-responsibilisation. If these discourses remain unchallenged, gender quotas for senior roles alone will likely only benefit those entrepreneurial women admitted to senior positions, rendering the causes of gender inequity hidden and exonerated. Using a novel methodology that combines a ‘plastic’ with a complex systems lens of policy manoeuvres, we suggest gender quotas, accompanied by strategy designed to develop leaders’ gender competency and change agency, are required to support more sustainably equitable work structure within the academy.
Communities of mutation: becoming feminist pedagogical monstrosities
Gender and Education, 2024
Abstract: We are feminist scholars who research and teach at a university in the United States situated within histories of sociopolitical conservativism and oppressions. In the present, looming over our classrooms, are mandates to eliminate ‘divisive concepts’ such as race and gender. These political monsters gnash their teeth and foam at the mouth as they swallow up equity and intersectionality from education. Here, we draw on posthuman feminisms to specifically consider what monstrous mutant feminist pedagogies are, what they might do, and how they have healed/emboldened us in these politically ruined places. We contextualize the mutant pedagogies that are kinned through the composts we inhabit/create, then, we situate ourselves within these monstrous landscapes and tell the stories of our Communities/Pedagogies of Mutation. We conclude by looking forward and, drawing inspiration from post feminisms, speculate generative, hopeful, and affirmative futures that are made possible through our agentively monstrous mutations.
Croning academics: menopause matters in higher education
Gender and Education, 2024
Abstract: This writing is born out of our experiences of becoming older women, academy hags, facing the performative demands of the neoliberalizing patriarchal university. We are raging. With the figure of the Crone, and feminist-killjoy-croning as our creative and livid research method (Ahmed, S. 2023. Feminist Killjoy. London: Penguin Random House), we squeeze time out/with impossible university spaces and schedules to tend to grey matters. This paper traces the normalization of menopause policies in workplaces and universities, following the social trending and capitalization of menopausal and ageing matters. We question what menopause policies do and argue they constitute a failed project for the advancement of gender equality and should be abandoned. Inspired by Barad’s (2021. “Dialogue with Karen Barad Dialogues on Agential Realism.” In Dialogues on Agential Realism: Engaging in Worldings through Research Practice, edited by H. P. Juelskjær and A. W. Stine, 118–141. London: Taylor and Francis) call to engage in ‘spacetimemattering’, we create webs of entanglement through the objects of university menopause policies. We grey, fade out/ fit in, sweat, bleed, scowl. Powered by fury and frustration, we scrape away the genealogical underpinnings of menopausal bodyminds.
Gender and Education, 2024
Abstract: In this paper, I theorize my becoming as a transnational trans* scholar through posthuman autoethnography. Grounded in Deleuzian ontology, I conceptualize trans* as a dynamic, fluid capacities beyond fixed gender categories. I use vignettes, diary entries, text messages, conversations, and photos as multiple thresholds where things collide, creating opportunities. Building on [Puar, J. K. (2012). “I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess”: Becoming-intersectional in assemblage theory. PhiloSOPHIA, 2(1), 49–66] and [Nicolazzo, Z. (2021). Imagining a trans* epistemology: What liberation thinks like in higher education. Urban Education, 56(3), 511–536], I introduce Trans*-Assemblage thinking, which involves understanding trans* both as an assemblage and within assemblages. This approach offers an innovative both/and framework for education, emphasizing fluidity, complexity, and pluriversality in rethinking gender, posthumanism, and social justice in educational studies.
Everything changes but nothing changes: gender stereotypes in the Italian population
Archives of Women's Mental Health, 2024
Abstract: Purpose: Gender stereotypes refer to consensual or cultural shared beliefs about the attributes of men and women, influencing society behaviors, interpersonal relationships, education, and workplace. The literature has shown the existence of gender stereotypes on career choices, internalization of roles, and school and social experiences and demonstrates the impact of demographic factors on stereotypes. However, all the studies conducted in Italy available in scientific literature analyzed small sample sizes within specific schools of university settings, with a limited age range. Methods: To assess the current state of gender stereotypes in Italy, we conducted an online survey from October 2022 to January 2023 on the general population residing in Italy. The questionnaire comprised sociodemographic factors and questions about gender stereotypes, investigating six fields: games, jobs, personality traits, home and family activities, sports, and moral judgments. Results: The study involved 1854 participants, mostly women (70.1%) with an undergraduate or postgraduate degree (57.5%). The statistical and descriptive analyses revealed that gender stereotypes influenced respondents' beliefs, with statistically significant effects observed in most questions when stratifying by age, gender, and degree. Principal component analysis was performed to assess latent variables in different fields, revealing significant main stereotypes in each category. No statistically significant differences between men and women were found for the fields home and family activities, games, and moral judgments, confirming that stereotypes affect both men and women in the same way. Conclusions: Our results show the persistence of gender stereotypes in any fields investigated, although our cohort is predominantly composed of high educational level women living in the North of Italy. This demonstrates that the long-standing gender stereotypes are prevalent, pernicious, and, unfortunately, internalized at times even by successful women pushbacking and sabotaging them unconsciously.
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