Introduction: Complexities of Care and Caring Blum, Linda M.; Musser, Amber Jamilla
Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society,
09/2023, Letnik:
49, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
This introduction situates our special issue’s focus on care, as concept and practice, within several lineages of feminist scholarship to grapple with the difficulties of the present moment. Over the ...past four decades of feminist scholarship and practice, notions of care and caring, as noun and verb, have had great traction across disciplinary divides, spurring debates about power and positionality while challenging binaries of equality and difference, public and private, the rational and irrational, and paid and unpaid labor. It is in the differing institutional, national, and community contexts explored in this issue that new perspectives on the complexity of care and caring emerge.
Based on in-depth interviews and fieldwork, this article examines mothers raising kids with invisible, social/emotional/behavioral disabilities to refine feminist theories of mother-blame. The ...mother-valor/mother-blame binary holds mothers responsible for families and future citizens, maintaining this "natural" care at the center of normative femininity. The author explores how mothers raising such burdensome children understand their experiences and makes three arguments: (1) Fewer mothers are blamed for causing their child's troubles in an era of "brain-blame," but more are blamed as proximate causes if they do not make unrelenting efforts, paralleling "concerted cultivation," to resolve them; (2) such mothers often exceed concerted cultivation, as they seize authority, as vigilantes, within educational and medical systems in the midst of turf wars, cost containment, and a resulting proliferation of medication treatments; and (3) this maternal speedup holds mothers accountable for feminizing ties to sons, for policing gender boundaries while policing their own feminine care. In sum, mothers raising invisibly disabled kids may represent the model of maternal valor for an era of public stinginess and extensive medicalization.
Researchers agree that the predominant scripts of campus sexual culture, normalizing casual encounters with ambiguous distinctions between hookups and dating, offer contradictory risks and rewards ...for young adults, particularly young women. The arrival of the novel coronavirus in 2020, however, upended the lives of young adults just as they were shaping sexual and romantic careers. We ask, extending critical intersectional approaches, whether the global pandemic, like a natural experiment, might challenge troubling exclusionary as well as gendered aspects of contemporary sexual culture. In‐depth interviews with 40 “twenty‐somethings” completing undergraduate degrees at a selective university at two points over a year apart found that for most the pandemic offered a needed respite. We suggest: first, many young women used the disruption to prioritize their autonomy, with increased partner churn and detachment. Second, some sexual and racial minority participants, and the few with physical disabilities, reported the pandemic normalized their experience as outsiders, strengthening their self‐development. Finally, the more intentional dating practices one participant named “Covid consent” lessened gendered risks of sexual violence and modeled mutual respect for boundaries. While those without class privilege had less ability to enact such boundaries, pandemic challenges may point to healthier, more inclusive sexual scripts.
Lymphoma is the fourth most frequent cancer in pregnancy; however, current clinical practice is based largely on small series and case reports.
In a multicenter retrospective analysis, we examined ...treatment, complications, and outcomes for Hodgkin lymphoma (HL) and non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL) occurring during pregnancy.
Among 90 patients (NHL, n = 50; HL, n = 40), median age was 30 years (range, 18 to 44 years) and median diagnosis occurred at 24 weeks gestation. Of patients with NHL, 52% had advanced-stage versus 25% of patients with HL (P = .01). Pregnancy was terminated in six patients. Among the other 84 patients, 28 (33%) had therapy deferred to postpartum; these patients were diagnosed at a median 30 weeks gestation. This compared with 56 patients (67%) who received antenatal therapy with median lymphoma diagnosis at 21 weeks (P < .001); 89% of these patients received combination chemotherapy. The most common preterm complication was induction of labor (33%). Gestation went to full term in 56% of patients with delivery occurring at a median of 37 weeks. There were no differences in maternal complications, perinatal events, or median infant birth weight based on deferred versus antenatal therapy. At 41 months, 3-year progression-free survival (PFS) and overall survival (OS) for NHL were 53% and 82%, respectively, and 85% and 97%, respectively, for HL. On univariate analysis for NHL, radiotherapy predicted inferior PFS, and increased lactate dehydrogenase and poor Eastern Cooperative Oncology Group performance status (ECOG PS) portended worse OS. For HL patients, nulliparous status and "B" symptoms predicted inferior PFS.
Standard (non-antimetabolite) combination chemotherapy administered past the first trimester, as early as 13 weeks gestation, was associated with few complications and expected maternal survival with lymphoma occurring during pregnancy.
Researchers agree that the predominant scripts of campus sexual culture, normalizing casual encounters with ambiguous distinctions between hookups and dating, offer contradictory risks and rewards ...for young adults, particularly young women. The arrival of the novel coronavirus in 2020, however, upended the lives of young adults just as they were shaping sexual and romantic careers. We ask, extending critical intersectional approaches, whether the global pandemic, like a natural experiment, might challenge troubling exclusionary as well as gendered aspects of contemporary sexual culture. In‐depth interviews with 40 “twenty‐somethings” completing undergraduate degrees at a selective university at two points over a year apart found that for most the pandemic offered a needed respite. We suggest: first, many young women used the disruption to prioritize their autonomy, with increased partner churn and detachment. Second, some sexual and racial minority participants, and the few with physical disabilities, reported the pandemic normalized their experience as outsiders, strengthening their self‐development. Finally, the more intentional dating practices one participant named “Covid consent” lessened gendered risks of sexual violence and modeled mutual respect for boundaries. While those without class privilege had less ability to enact such boundaries, pandemic challenges may point to healthier, more inclusive sexual scripts.
In 1997 the women-run nonprofit organization Dress for Success opened its first location with the aim of empowering low-income women by providing gently used suits for job interviews. Drawing on ...eight months offieldwork in an affiliate office, we analyze crossrace and cross-class interactions between privileged volunteers and low-income clients to demonstrate the emergence of what we term "neoliberal maternalism." Historical forms of maternalism—the mother-centric voluntarism aimed at assisting indigent families a century ago—emphasized women's domesticity and promoted the earliest welfare provisions. We suggest that neoliberal maternalism, instead, works alongside welfare retrenchment by insisting that single mothers become self-sufficient workers. Similar to earlier maternalisms, the benevolence of affluent volunteers serves to reinforce class and race superiority while producing moments of genuine care and connection. We argue that while all forms of maternalism come with a related body politics aimed at disciplining the bodies of othered women, neoliberal maternalism carries a distinct body politics that, rather than regulating the home and reproduction, intrusively enforces ideals of aesthetic labor required for the postindustrial service economy. Finally, we suggest that retaining maternalism as an analytic framework is particularly important for investigating the influence of neoliberalism and the eroding social safety net on interactions between women.
This article, which represents part of a larger ethnographic study, asks how mothers raising children of color understand the medicalization of their children’s issues as they navigate medical and ...educational systems. While biomedicine and the lens of neuroscience now predominate in defining children’s troubles, the article primarily focuses on schools as sites that organize daily lives, provide services, and hold keys to future opportunities. It analyzes mothers’ reflections on the intersections of race, disability, class, and gender in schools through sixteen oral history interviews. Women of color have long been suspect as mothers whose children are burdensome or costly, and their children have often been labeled with deficiencies. Currently boys and young men of color are disproportionately diagnosed with invisible disabilities and assigned to special education, although they are much less likely to receive psychopharmaceutical treatments than white children. I emphasize two suggestive findings: First, most of the mothers interviewed expressed complex ambivalence toward medicalization, selectively resisting it but also drawing on it to protect the progress of vulnerable children through school. That is, a majority acquiesced to at least some period of medication, yet they remained ambivalent as individual protection from school failure leaves larger cultural images of black male badness unchallenged or even reconfirmed. Second, I show the insights offered by the way some mothers linked race to gender and class, suggesting that medicalization may have a range of meanings according to class privilege (or its lack). Mothers of children of color may have less ambivalence toward medicalization if they can marshal sufficient class resources to supplant images of badness with those of respectability.
Summary Background Treatments with survival benefit are greatly needed for women with heavily pretreated metastatic breast cancer. Eribulin mesilate is a non-taxane microtubule dynamics inhibitor ...with a novel mode of action. We aimed to compare overall survival of heavily pretreated patients receiving eribulin versus currently available treatments. Methods In this phase 3 open-label study, women with locally recurrent or metastatic breast cancer were randomly allocated (2:1) to eribulin mesilate (1·4 mg/m2 administered intravenously during 2–5 min on days 1 and 8 of a 21-day cycle) or treatment of physician's choice (TPC). Patients had received between two and five previous chemotherapy regimens (two or more for advanced disease), including an anthracycline and a taxane, unless contraindicated. Randomisation was stratified by geographical region, previous capecitabine treatment, and human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 status. Patients and investigators were not masked to treatment allocation. The primary endpoint was overall survival in the intention-to-treat population. This study is registered at ClinicalTrials.gov , number NCT00388726. Findings 762 women were randomly allocated to treatment groups (508 eribulin, 254 TPC). Overall survival was significantly improved in women assigned to eribulin (median 13·1 months, 95% CI 11·8–14·3) compared with TPC (10·6 months, 9·3–12·5; hazard ratio 0·81, 95% CI 0·66–0·99; p=0·041). The most common adverse events in both groups were asthenia or fatigue (270 54% of 503 patients on eribulin and 98 40% of 247 patients on TPC at all grades) and neutropenia (260 52% patients receiving eribulin and 73 30% of those on TPC at all grades). Peripheral neuropathy was the most common adverse event leading to discontinuation from eribulin, occurring in 24 (5%) of 503 patients. Interpretation Eribulin showed a significant and clinically meaningful improvement in overall survival compared with TPC in women with heavily pretreated metastatic breast cancer. This finding challenges the notion that improved overall survival is an unrealistic expectation during evaluation of new anticancer therapies in the refractory setting. Funding Eisai.
Since Prozac emerged on the market at the end of 1987, there has been a dramatic increase in antidepres-sant use and in its discussion by popular media. Yet there has been little analysis of the ...gendered character of this phenomenon despite feminist traditions scrutinizing the medical control of women's bodies. The authors begin to fill this gap through a detailed content analysis of the 83 major articles on Prozac and its "chemical cousins" appearing in large-circulation periodicals in Prozac's first 12 years. They find that popular talk about Prozac and its competing brands is largely degendered, presented as manifestly gender neutral, yet replete with latent gendered messages. These are about women with neurochemical imbalances but also about the need to discipline elite female bodies, to enhance their productivity and flexibility. This new form of female "fitness" mirrors demands of the New Economy and indicates how psychiatric discourse contributes to the historically specific shaping of gendered bodies.
