Weekly Roundup
Apr 6 - 12, 2026
LEADING ARTICLE
Her Property Transactions: White Women and the Frequency of Female Ownership in the Antebellum Era
Sociology of Race and Ethnicity
Abstract: The traditional historical narrative claims that White women were rarely involved in market transactions for enslaved people in the antebellum United States. Using transaction records, notary statements, and runaway advertisements, we provide the first quantitative estimates of the extent of White women’s involvement in antebellum slave transactions as owners of record. Contrary to the narrative, we find that White women were quite frequently noted as owners of record in transactions as both buyers and sellers. White women participated in more than 30 percent of the transactions in the largest market for enslaved people in the antebellum era. We also find that White women were especially likely to be owners involved in transactions with enslaved women, where they were listed as owners in nearly 40 percent of transactions. Linking transaction participants to the census, we find that White women owners were not significantly more likely to be widows nor were they older than women in the general population. Overall, our results are consistent with the new historical narrative that White women were ubiquitous in enslavement transactions and this was a critical part of White women’s economic activity in the antebellum era.
ARTICLES AND ESSAYS
Sex/Gender
Halt Payments to WHO for Unconscionable Discrimination Against Men
Domestic Abuse and Violence International Alliance (DAVIA)
UN Policies Leave Male Victims of Partner Abuse Unprotected
International Council for Men and Boys
SoCal college bans men from gym areas to make women, non-binary students more comfortable
New York Post
Professor blasts IOC decision banning trans women, says they have no ‘competitive advantage’
The College Fix
About half of Americans with siblings are close to at least one of them
Pew Research Center
Toxic/problematic masculinity: A critical appraisal of its role in CBT
Current Opinion in Psychology
Abstract: Recent years have seen the psychological community focus on traditional masculinity as a problem that needs to be addressed. Concurrently, cognitive behavioral therapists have increasingly been women or men who identify with feminist theory. Concerns have been raised that good intentions to address women’s issues have transmogrified into open anti-male bias even as men’s functioning has declined, including their enrollment in the behavioral health professions. Portraying traditional masculinity as “toxic” is likely to cause harm, not only in stigmatizing many men and their families, but also by reducing trust in the profession. As such, many men who would have benefited from cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) will decline to get it. Suggestions for a path forward that do not portray men’s issues and women’s issues as a zero-sum game are offered.
Acta Paediatrica
Aim: To examine the prevalence of severe psychiatric morbidity among gender-referred adolescents, focusing on gender differences and outcomes related to medical gender reassignment. Methods: Finnish nationwide cohort of all under-23-year-old gender-referred individuals between 1996 and 2019 (n = 2 083) and 16 643 matched controls. Cross-tabulations with X2 statistics and Cox regression were used to analyse the data. Results: Gender-referred adolescents showed significantly higher psychiatric morbidity than controls both before (45.7% vs. 15.0%) and ≥ 2 years after referral (61.7% vs. 14.6%). Those referred after 2010 had greater psychiatric needs than earlier cohorts, both before (47.9% vs. 15.3%) and ≥ 2 years after (61.3% vs. 14.2%) referral. Among adolescents who underwent medical gender reassignment, psychiatric morbidity increased markedly during follow-up—rising from 9.8% to 60.7% in feminising gender reassignment and from 21.6% to 54.5% in masculinising gender reassignment. After adjusting for prior psychiatric treatment, all gender-referred adolescents had similarly elevated risks of psychiatric morbidity, with hazard ratios approximately three times higher than female controls and five times higher than male controls. Conclusion: Severe psychiatric morbidity is common among gender-referred adolescents and appears to be more prevalent in those referred after the recent surge in referrals. Psychiatric needs do not subside after medical gender reassignment.
Education
Too Many Dogs Are Eating Too Much Homework
Minding the Campus
Students rely on trivial excuses to avoid academic responsibility—universities must stop accepting them.
UMich shutters DEI office, still spends $15.3 million on 162 diversity-related employees
The College Fix
Faculty Perspectives on Academic Freedom, Free Expression and Campus Climate at UW–Madison
Tommy G. Thompson Center on Public Leadership
Health Science
Where Do Americans Get Health Information, and What Do They Trust ?
Pew Research Center
Aerobic Physical Activity Among Adults Age 18 and Older: United States, 2024
NCHS Data Brief
Key findings: In 2024, 47.2% of adults age 18 and older met the federal guidelines for aerobic physical activity, with men being more likely to meet the guidelines (52.3%) than women (42.4%). The prevalence of meeting the federal guidelines for aerobic physical activity increased with increasing education level. Adults living in the West were more likely to meet the federal guidelines for aerobic physical activity compared with those in other regions. Aerobic physical activity was higher among adults without disabilities (49.8%), those with healthy weight (54.8%), and those with excellent or very good health (57.8%).
ROMANTIC ART
Singer-songwriter Mark Wilkinson has released a new single: Lost in Flight. For more information on Wilkinson’s music, see my essay, “Mark Wilkinson’s Music – Romanticism in an Anti-Romantic Age.”
RUBBISH BIN
United Nations Population Fund
CAPS: Feminist academic activism in capital letters
Organization
Abstract: Inspired by the practices of Collages Féminicides—an activist movement gluing capital letters on urban walls to denounce instances of violence like femicides, acts of racism, or child abuse—this essay develops “Writing in capital letters” (CAPS), a performative notion and process of academic writing that has the potential to mobilize practices of feminist academic activism beyond the page. Standing for CLARITY, ATTENTION, PRESENCE(S), and SOLIDARITY (CAPS), CAPS invites academics to reframe their (our) writing and research practices in ways that denounce forms of heteronormative oppression and violence. CAPS demands CLARITY in choosing bold capital words that name and do justice to lived experiences. These words seek to attract the audience’s ATTENTION, encouraging performative reactions and interactions. CAPS also calls for performing organization research and writing through embodied PRESENCE(S) that consider differences and affects reflexively. It can promote spaces for SOLIDARITY and care where differences are not denied and resistance is organized collectively. Stressing the emancipatory potentials of CAPS as a form of feminist academic activism grounded in performative writing, we offer concrete recommendations for reframing academic practices in activist terms more broadly.
Searching for (meanings of) rest: An elusive concept
European Journal of Women’s Studies
Abstract: As a scholar and a feminist, I find myself fascinated, bewildered, and frustrated by rest on conceptual, empirical, and personal levels. In this Open Forum text, based on a project investigating rest practices as well as articulations of rest and their significance in contemporary Sweden, I draw upon existing research to identify meanings of rest. I discuss the multifacetedness and elusiveness of rest on conceptual levels and as lived experience, noting that this elusiveness is exacerbated by acceleration, “productivism,” and gendered, racialised, and classed power relations as well as compulsory able-bodiedness and able-mindedness. Situating rest as a justice and access issue and as highly subjective and elusive, the text calls for more research on rest from feminist perspectives.
Acting up for animals: A (R)evolution for the business school
Organization
Abstract: Business schools (BS) can be seen as a microcosm of the neoliberalist society upholding 4P’s of patriarchy, power, profit and privilege. Through autoethnographic illustrations this Acting up! essay uses a Critical Animal Studies lens and contributes to the emerging field of Animal Organization Studies analyzing the underlying ideals that hinder interspecies solidarity in business and organization. I argue for interconnectivity, a decolonializing effort to support an interspecies agenda beyond an immediate circle of, often anthropocentric and exploitative, concerns which not only diminishes multispecies wellbeing but also separate us from our own humanity. Some examples of academic activism are shared to highlight how one of the most prominent social injustices of our times—the exploitation of animals—is hidden by animals being absent referents in the performative context of the BS. I also discuss how affective ignorance of animal concerns shape dissonance and intentionally resist the rationalized language of the field, to highlight the affective and passionate, of being a vegan in a non-vegan world.
Intersectionality and metronormativity in picture books read during drag storytimes
International Journal of LGBTQ+ Youth Studies
Abstract: Public libraries offer drag storytimes to promote appreciation of diversity and difference, in addition to supporting early and emergent literacy and school readiness. Previous research has shown that drag storytimes include more picture books depicting LBGTQ+ characters than non-drag storytimes. In this analysis, we examine the ways in which representations of LGBTQ+ characters in a corpus of picture books read during drag storytimes are intersectional, reflecting the diverse identities of LGBTQ+ individuals and families. We also examine the ways in which books in this corpus reflect metronormativity, the belief that LGBTQ+ people predominantly live and thrive in urban areas. The books in this corpus included limited representations of intersectional LGBTQ+ identities, with greater diversity among LGBTQ+ non-lead characters. These books also reflected metronormativity, as more books included depictions of LGBTQ+ characters living in urban areas as compared to rural or suburban areas. Our analysis serves to highlight the ongoing need for the publication of books featuring a diverse array of LGBTQ+ identities living in a variety of settings, in addition to their use in storytimes and other settings that aim to reduce bias and discrimination.
Gender, Work & Organization
Abstract: The contemporary business school is increasingly portrayed as dystopian, shaped by neoliberal managerialism, metric-driven performativity, and precarious labor. These pressures weigh heaviest on women academics, whose careers are fractured by intersecting lines of gender, race, class, and citizenship. Drawing on a year-long collaborative autoethnography involving three women scholars situated in three distinct national systems, this article interrogates the everyday dystopias of academic life and maps the emergence of sororal counterspaces: utopian pockets of solidarity, care, and collective resistance that materializes within, against, and beyond the neoliberal academy. By weaving feminist political economy, intersectionality, and utopian studies with dialogic vignettes, we demonstrate how practicing sorority transcends entrenched institutional boundaries, rehumanizes academic subjectivities, and offers concrete mechanisms for change. We conclude with a framework for cultivating sororal counterspaces and ritualizing solidarity and a call for gender-equitable, care-centered business schools.
Erotic attachments and cruel optimism: Sexual fantasy as affective impasse
Feminist Theory
Abstract: Sex is routinely framed as a site of repair: with the right communication, technique or therapeutic work, intimacy will heal damage and secure coherence. This article asks what happens when that promise wears thin. Reading Berlant and Edelman’s Sex, or the Unbearable alongside Berlant’s later work and Freeman’s notion of chrononormativity, I theorize contemporary sexuality as a scene of maintenance structured by cruel optimism and organized by time. I argue that erotic optimism now attaches not only to the fantasy of ‘better sex’ but also to a chrononormative arc in which desire should build, crest, resolve and, with sufficient labour, eventually arrive. Therapy culture, sex education and platformized dating translate structural non-relation into ongoing self-regulation, recoding endurance as an ethical project of continuous improvement. Drawing on disability and illness discourses, I show how crip and sick temporalities trouble this mandate by improvising non-teleological tempos that dominant scripts then misrecognize as lack. Across these sites, sexual subjects are compelled to stay ‘in circulation’ – tracking, optimizing and narrating their erotic lives – even as the structural mismatch between what sex is asked to do and what it can do persists. In this way, swipe culture, intimacy industries and therapeutic sex education materialize cruel optimism in erotic time.
Gender, Place & Culture
Abstract: Drawing on feminist scholarship on money and finance and geographical scholarship on everyday life and masculinities, this article examines the promises and futures that investment in and use of cryptocurrency represents for men in the UK. We explore the financial practices, logics and decision-making of ordinary crypto-users and examine how engagement with cryptocurrency shapes how these men understand themselves, their futures, and their place in the broader world. Through focus group and interview data we explore how research participants explain their rationale and motivations for their financial practices, including examining men’s perceptions of and relations to cryptocurrency, and how these shape and are shaped by the intimacies and moralities of everyday life. Based on our findings, we conceptualise crypto-masculinities as a historically and socially specific financial practice and gendered expression of the relations of (digital) money and finance. This article remedies the limited geographical attention that has been paid thus far to cryptocurrency ‘users’, and offers novel insights into the embodied dimensions of cryptocurrency use, including how cryptocurrency is experienced and lived.
Street fighters and tricksters: far-right masculinities as hegemonic agitators in London
Gender, Place & Culture
Abstract: In 2016 those promoting patriarchal ideals saw a championing of their ideals promoted from many ‘strongmen’ figures, highlighting the hold patriarchy still has in many societies and cultures. Through analysis of ethnographic data carried out in two pubs in London amongst Brexit voters in London, this article aims to highlight how this division of masculine figures in politics (specifically Tommy Robinson and Nigel Farage) are set to contrast weak-willed and effeminate mainstream politicians who have no regard for their subjectivities or values. The significance of this division is further presented as the populist division between ‘the people’ and ‘the elite’ with those said to represent the former being signified as symbolically heroic and virile, while the latter being relegated to a ‘feminised position’. In this article, I will outline the process of the radical rights’ exclusion from hegemony intersects with how the far-right masculinities are positioned as rebellious figures abasing this very hegemony.
Reciprocal relationalities and possibilities between Indigenous queer and Fat Studies
Fat Studies
Abstract: Indigenous Queer Studies prioritizes Indigenous queer worldviews in response to western settler-colonial cis-heteropatriarchal societies and their ongoing occupation. While performing critical anti-colonial work, Indigenous Queer Studies also invests in the salvage and continuity of sovereign embodiments, expressions, and desires produced and maintained by Indigenous societies for thousands of years globally. Extending out from the focal point of gender and sexuality, this article explores the possibilities between Indigenous Queer Studies and the emergent field of Indigenous Fat Studies as mutually beneficial and co-constructed sites that hold potential to further embed the self-determined agenda of contemporary Indigenous Studies as a humanizing and future-oriented academic project. This article will engage these interconnected fields of inquiry through the perspectives of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander LGBTIQ+SB peoples who have reinvigorated conversations about Indigenous identities and embodiment as sites of resistance to settler-colonialism in so-called Australia. This will be explored by examining how Indigenous fat/queer embodiments challenge settler-colonial imaginaries through socio-political issues including racialized homo/trans/queerphobia, misogyny, fatphobia, and introduce conceptualizations of Indigenous sovereignty which recognizes, validates, and affirms the level of inclusivity that Indigenous relational theory encompasses.
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All good work James but I confess I especially look forward to "RUBBISH BIN" each week. Always good for a laugh — and for a reminder that one is on the right side of history.
Another great group of articles James, many thanks. The first one on slave ownership should be sent to all women's studies profs. Oooops, there went the victim narrative. I wonder what creative ways they would rationalize that one?