Positionality as Dialog

Gender has always explicitly or implicitly played a critical role in contracting and in contracts opinions—from the early nineteenth century, when married women lacked the legal capacity altogether to contract, through the next century, when women gained the right to contract but continued to lack bargaining power and to be disadvantaged in the bargaining process in many cases, to today, when women are present in greater numbers in business and commerce, but face continued, yet less overt, obstacles. Typical casebooks provide ample offerings for discussions of the ways in which parties can be and have been disadvantaged because of their gender and gender identity. At the core, gender inequity often stems from long-held stereotypes about women in contracting, which are often on full display in the cases. The vast majority of cases in the typical Contracts casebook are drawn primarily from the commercial context; sales, franchise, employment, and transfer of property cases predominate most Contracts casebooks, with many fewer cases in the family context. In the commercial cases, women and other people who do not identify as men, rarely seen as the businessperson, seller, or landowner, are sorely underrepresented, and the “non-male” perspective tends to be obscured. Casebook offerings involving non-male parties still tend to be clustered in certain areas—namely contract defenses, promissory estoppel, and family cases. The result is a Contracts curriculum that typically confines women to certain traditional roles and relegates women’s issues to a secondary status, privileging rational, arms-length market promises at the expense of family-based promises. The overall gender allocation in cases may or may not be reflective of the actual presence of women in the universe of American contracts cases. But either way, it raises some issues regarding how the typical casebook presents women in the realm of contracts cases, and overall, the role of women in contracting. There is, of course, a diversity of viewpoints and a multiplicity of voices among women and feminists, who are divided by age, race, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, ethnicity, and class, among other things. There are divisions among feminists over the nature and source of gender injustice, as well as over solutions.2 Feminists differ, for example, over the roles of men and women (such as biological differences and cultural frameworks that land women as the primary caretakers most of the time), and whether and how the law should account for those differences.3 When it comes to contract

Building on the medical residency model, teacher residencies provide an alternative pathway to teacher certification grounded in deep clinical training. The work described in this chapter details how a university–school district– community partnership supported a clinically rich residency model to prepare teacher candidates to work with linguistically and culturally diverse students. We collected interviews with current and former residents to explore their perceptions on areas of strength and improvement in the components of our residency model in preparing them to work with K–6 immigrant student populations. Findings revealed that residents who were placed in mainstream, English-only class, especially at higher elementary grades, reported not having had much exposure to immigrant students, especially if they were newcomers or classified as beginner English language learners (ELLs). These classrooms did not often provide specific scaffolding or differentiation for ELLs or newcomer immigrant students. On the other hand, residents who engaged directly and frequently with linguistic and cultural diversity felt more prepared to work with immigrant populations. In particular, bilingual classrooms afforded the greatest degree of significant interaction and practice for our residents as they taught and learned with immigrant students and families. Residents who pursued additional certification in teaching English to speakers of other languages (TESOL) or bilingual education were also more prepared. Whereas residents’ perceptions of readiness to work with immigrant students and communities varied based on experience, they all reported gains regarding scaffolding instruction for students from diverse linguistic backgrounds through deep clinical practice. We end the chapter with recommendations for programmatic reform directed at preparing teachers to work with immigrant populations.

This paper presents nine foundation stones for teaching about sex, gender and gender identity, proposed by the author as a basis for pragmatic consensus on how these issues should be addressed in Norwegian public schools. Initially integrated into a pedagogical design for Religion and Worldview Education teacher candidates, the foundation stones were subsequently refined through iterative feedback from a wide range of school actors and stakeholders. Following an exposition of these developmental stages, the paper will discuss the foundation stones in relation to norm-critical pedagogy, as it is presented and employed by two influential Norwegian teacher educators. Considerable alignments exist between their norm-critical approach and the foundation stones. A notable divergence, however, regards the role of disagreement in learning about gender issues. While the foundation stones explicitly promote student engagement with a wide range of perspectives and understandings, the norm-critical approaches in question imposes significant limitations on binary understandings’ access to the classroom. Although these limitations rest on vital concerns to safeguard transgender or gender questioning students, they risk obscuring critical distinctions within gender conservative viewpoints. To address this issue without jeopardizing the well-being of vulnerable students, the author recommends, firstly, to amplify teachers’ responsibility to ensure student safety through context-sensitive adjustments of how a given class should interact with the diversity of viewpoints. Secondly, to incorporate a lived perspective on norms into norm-critical approaches. This will enable students to critically and emphatically explore the diversity of norms arising from the ways humans navigate and apply norms in specific situations and in relation to other norms.

Immigrant populations are a major driver of growth in many US metropolitan areas, and considerable research has focused on the effects of immigrant populations on neighbourhood outcomes. However, much of this research is based on data from 1990 or earlier, prior to substantial growth in the diversity of the immigrant population and to changes in immigrants’ US settlement patterns. This research uses tract-level data from the 2000 Decennial Census and the 2009–2013 American Community Survey to explore the relationship between an existing immigrant population and future changes in neighbourhood characteristics within the 100 largest US metropolitan areas. Spatial regression models are used to identify the neighbourhood features that predict future proportional growth in a neighbourhood’s foreign-born population. In addition, the associations between a neighbourhood’s initial foreign-born concentration and future neighbourhood relative income and population growth are investigated. Consistent with previous work, our results indicate that foreign-born populations of all races tend to move towards existing immigrant population clusters. All of the immigrant minority racial groups are also attracted to neighbourhoods with existing same-race US-born populations. Overall proportional population growth is positively associated with the initial presence of the white and Asian immigrant population; black and Hispanic immigrant concentrations are associated with proportional population loss. While immigrants do not contribute to neighbourhood relative income growth, a greater presence of immigrants – relative to their US-born co-racial group – is associated with lower rates of neighbourhood relative income decline.

People with Klinefelter syndrome (KS/XXY) may be at higher risk of gender dysphoria than the general population and gender diversity needs greater recognition and consideration in services for people affected. This study aimed to give systematic insights into experiences of gender diversity among people with KS/XXY, which could inform more person‐centered care for people with KS/XXY and contribute to practical guidance for healthcare professionals. We conducted individual, semi‐structured interviews with 11 adults with diagnosed KS/XXY. The verbatim interview transcripts were analyzed using experiential reflexive thematic analysis, which identified four themes: (1) Experience of gender, which described participants' experiences of exploring and negotiating their gender identity; (2) Navigating expectations, which described how participants' gender uncertainty was associated with confusion, isolation, and shame, and how fears about other people's reactions caused participants to keep their gender identity secret; (3) Testosterone assumptions, which described how participants needed more discussion and counseling before testosterone replacement therapy (TRT), and how some benefited from treatment with alternative hormones to testosterone; and (4) A different approach, which described participants' experiences of care at gender identity clinics. The findings give new insights into the gender identity journeys of people with KS/XXY, from early attempts to understand and make sense of gender, through dealing with social pressures, the development of gender identities more congruent with feelings, and experiences with hormone replacement therapy. The practice implications include that there should be improved consideration of gender identity in care for KS/XXY, better psychological support for those affected by gender diversity, and more consideration given to alternatives to testosterone‐based therapies. Future research could explore the experiences of gender identity among different groups of people with KS/XXY, the development of gender identity over time, the effects of TRT on gender identity, and healthcare providers' knowledge and attitudes about gender identity and KS/XXY.

For a generation of scholars gender has been an important analytical category for the study of the Middle Ages.1 It has come to be accepted that gender is socially constructed; that is, that masculinity and femininity do not exist as fixed organic categories, but are produced socially and vary. It has also been recognized in recent work that we must be prepared to think in terms of a whole series of masculinities and femininities. Much attention has been focused on medieval women in recent years, but although this work is extremely valuable it has not really been about gender; it has served to ‘add’ women to the historical picture, but has lacked insight into the relational aspect of gender identity (the ways, that is, in which men and women were defined in relation to one another), and the various ways in which gender identity was formed and reproduced. To develop the study of gender in the Middle Ages we need to move beyond the separate study of women, and in order to do so we have to address the gendered identity of men. There is a growing awareness that medieval men, and medieval masculinities, equally require theorizing and detailed analysis. This volume is the first multi-disciplinary contribution to that endeavour written for students of medieval history.2 It proceeds through a series of casestudies ranging in time from the fourth to the sixteenth century, which draw on documentary and literary sources, and on the evidence of archaeology and material culture, from England, France, Italy, Germany, Byzantium and Scandinavia. Insights into medieval masculinities are offered from legal, political, ecclesiastical, social, literary and archaeological perspectives. The diversity of evidence and viewpoints presented enables the contributors to the collection to expose a myriad of masculinities. No one methodological or theoretical approach predominates in the collection, and this allows the contributors, and the reader, to explore the multi-faceted nature of male experience and identity in the Middle Ages.

IntroductionInterest in the co-occurrence of gender dysphoria and autism spectrum disorder has gained prominence in recent years. Gender dysphoria refers to the distress experienced when there is an incongruence between gender identity and sex assigned at birth. On the other hand, autism spectrum disorder is characterized by difficulties in communication and social interaction, as well as restrictive and repetitive patterns of behavior.ObjectivesThe aim of this paper is to review the current available literature in order to expand our knowledge about gender identity and dysphoria in the population with autism spectrum disorder.MethodsA qualitative review was conducted over the last 20 years, using the Medline database through PubMed. Combinations of MeSH terms related to gender identity and people with autism spectrum disorder were used, selecting those studies in English, French or Spanish that met the objectives of the review, excluding references in other languages. The scientific evidence obtained was analyzed and synthesized.ResultsThe development of gender identity of people with autism spectrum disorder can be a complex process. Comparing the general population with the population with autism spectrum disorder, a higher prevalence of gender dysphoria has been evidenced in the population with autism spectrum disorder, and within this group when segmented by gender, greater in women than in men.ConclusionsThis review highlights the importance of increasing knowledge about sexuality and gender dysphoria in people with autism spectrum disorder in order to facilitate the development, understanding and acceptance of their gender identity and sexual orientation of these people.Disclosure of InterestNone Declared

PurposeCanada has a globally recognized universal health-care system. However, immigrants experience a number of obstacles in obtaining primary health care (PHC) that may differ within various communities due to the intersection of culture, gender and other identities. To date, no research has been done on the difficulties Nepalese immigrant women in Canada may face accessing PHC. The purpose of this study was to learn about their perceptions of barriers to PHC access and to share the findings with a wide range of stakeholders, including health-care providers and policymakers.Design/methodology/approachThe authors conducted a community-engaged qualitative study in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. A total of six focus group discussions (FGD) among 34 participants (each FGD consisted of 5–7 participants) were conducted. The authors collected demographic information before each focus group. The FGDs were audio recorded and transcribed verbatim. The transcriptions were coded and analysed thematically.FindingsThe focus groups identified long wait times as a major barrier to receiving PHC services. Long wait times in emergency rooms, unable to see family doctors when they were sick, tedious referral procedures, long waits at the clinic even after scheduling an appointment, family responsibilities and work all impacted their access to PHC. Further, a lack of proficiency in English was another significant barrier that impeded effective communication between physicians and immigrant women patients, thus compromising the quality of care. Other barriers mentioned included lack of access to medical records for walk-in doctors, insufficient lab/diagnostic services, a lack of urgent care services and unfamiliarity with the Canadian health-care system.Originality/valueAccessible PHC is essential for the health of immigrant populations in Canada. This study recognizes the extent of the barriers among a relatively less studied immigrant population group, Nepalese immigrant women, which will help effectively shape public policy and improve access to PHC for the versatile immigrant population fabric in Canada.

In gerontological research and practice, an increasing amount of attention is being paid to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) older people and how their experiences differ from their heterosexual and cisgender counterparts. However, LGBTQ older adults themselves are not a homogenous group. Moreover, as the immigrant populations in industrialized nations age, the number of LGBTQ older adults from ethnic minority backgrounds will only grow. This systematic review hence investigates the experiences of LGBTQ ethnic minority older adults. Following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analysis guidelines, we conducted a systematic search in 5 databases for English peer-reviewed studies. The retrieved articles were coded and analyzed inductively using an intersectional framework to tease out the varying influences of ethnicity, age, gender, and sexual identity on the LGBTQ ethnic minority older adults' experiences. A total of 30 articles across 21 studies (13 qualitative, 7 quantitative, and 1 mixed-methods) were identified. Six key themes emerged from the studies: stigma and discrimination; isolation, support and belonging; interactions with services and institutions; self-acceptance, resilience, and agency; mental health and well-being; and uncertain futures. The experiences of LGBTQ ethnic minority older adults echo those of LGBTQ ethnic majority older adults when they are shaped by gender and sexual identity factors. Nevertheless, significant differences in experiences-both positive and negative-emerge when cultural and ethnicity-related factors come to the fore. These findings emphasize the need for intersectional aging policies and services that go beyond catering for LGBTQ older adults to include the diversity within this subpopulation.

Postcolonial literature has always been interested in exploring what is double, ambiguous, multiform, and migrant. Amitav Ghosh and Salman Rushdie have notoriously dealt with those topics in their novels, such as in their most celebrated The Shadow Lines (1988) and The Satanic Verses (1988). The postcolonial theory of 1980s pervades their masterpieces, especially considering scholars’ focus on the costs of the blurring global phenomena on migrant processes. Tejander Kaur has properly underlined how diaspora experience of the 1980s “has assumed newer and vibrant dimensions. The experience of migrancy and Diaspora also engenders various problems and facts of journeys and relocation in new lands e.g. displacement, up-rootedness, discrimination, alienation, marginalization crisis in identity, cultural conflicts, yearning for home and homeland etc.” (Kaur 2008, p. 8). Moreover, Victoria Arana has accurately added that migrants “sought to affirm their personal process of renegotiation, their cultural diversity, and the denial of rigid borders between black and white” (Arana 2005, p. 237). Those prerogatives have been the seeds of a harsh debate begun in 1987 among postcolonial scholars and novelists to point out the inadequateness of the term “Black” and of similar notions, “terms that mask the ‘constructedness’ of much more complex racial and ethnic identities” (236). Nowadays those same identities have undergone another significant change due to the collapse of historicism and of the centre-periphery dichotomy, as well as to the spread of globalization. In their more recent production – especially in Sea of Poppies (2008) and The Golden House (2017) – both Ghosh and Rushdie investigate the influence of such phenomena on migrant identity by observing and narrating multiple processes of erection of blurred identities in a changing world. The Golden family in Rushdie’s text and Ghosh’s coolies on the vessel Ibis are groups of migrant people who do not hesitate to abandon their beliefs for a “rebirth” in a new host land. By looking for new belongings in foreign lands – else/nowhere places which do not assure to welcome them – migrants from the Asian continent wish to remove every link to their past lives and worlds thanks to the acquisition of a new identity, a goal achieved at the expense of deep inner conflicts. The characters of Dionysus Golden and Baboo Nob Kissin are epitomes of that condition. They both embody the difficulties and aspirations of their communities; moreover, in the middle of their migrant journey, they also experience a personal “migration” towards a new gender identity which should lead them to a sort of “reincarnation” into a spiritual – but also a physical and actual – femininity. Gender and migrant identities thus escape from the traditional and usually accepted definitions which see XXI-century young migrants like Dionysus and the respectable gomusta of colonial India like Nob Kissin as prototypical emblems of virility. Therefore, in their novels, Ghosh and Rushdie deal with transgender, transnational, and transcultural movements: the vicissitudes of the characters twist and turn through two multicultural microcosms – contemporary New York and the vessel of the East Indian Company Ibis – which are temporally distant, but strongly convergent.

This paper presents empirical evidence that racial diversity and immigrant population at the local level tend to be associated with lower life satisfaction for Whites by matching individual data with the county-level population data during the period 2005–2010. The magnitudes I find suggest that a ten-percentage-point increase in the share of the non-White population (approximately one half of a standard deviation) is associated with 0.006 and 0.007 points reduction in life satisfaction on a four-point scale for White men and White women, respectively. For White men, this effect appears to be driven by the percentage of the population that is Black. I also find that a ten-percentage-point increase in the percentage of the immigrant population (approximately 2 standard deviations) is associated with 0.009 and 0.021 points reduction in life satisfaction for White men and White women, respectively. The percentage of the non-White population seems to reduce older Whites’ life satisfaction more than that of younger Whites. Though the scale of the findings relating to the impact of local racial compositions and immigrant population is relatively modest, the findings may pose a challenge in the coming years as the percentage of the population that is non-White rises in the USA.

It has been argued that humans are designed to categorize information, that is, it may be part of human nature to attempt to group together disparate arrays of stimuli within a single category, as in the use of a symbolic system. Such an attempt will be made in this summary chapter. Our goal in this summary chapter is to highlight what we regard as the major themes and issued that were raised in this book. Given the diversity of viewpoints and populations discussed, such an effort may seem to some readers to be nothing more then a projective test for the editors. Although some editorial “projection” may be involved, it also seems clear that certain issues were repeatedly discussed in these chapters. What consistencies exist may be due to the fact that, as clinicians and researchers, the chapter authors are struggling with a common set of problems in the assessment of young developmentally disabled children. In attempting to categorize themes, three major issues seem to cut across the majority of chapters in this volume.

Health professionals play an essential role in the protection and promotion of health rights without distinction of sex, sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, ethnicity/race, nationality and migration status, age, functional diversity, or any other individual and/or cultural positions. With the growing diversity of patient populations, health professionals must be able to identify and be responsive to individual and cultural diversity, ensuring equity in access to high-quality individually-centered care. For this, it is fundamental to promote training in cultural competence, understood as responsivity and the ability to work the valorization of multiple and intersectional identities throughout life. The paper aims to describe the experience of the implementation of the program “Health in Equality”, aimed at training the primary healthcare workforce in Portugal, which was based on Sue and Sue’s (2008) three-dimensional model of multicultural skills, which champions cultural best practices in an intersectional perspective. Based on the trainees’ and trainers’ evaluation of four completed editions developed online between March and July 2021, this study discusses ways to improve the impact of the training program and amplify the number of leaders and role models for other health care providers towards culturally competent healthcare systems and organizations.

The Basques have a well-documented history of migration and settlement in the Americas, and they often retain cultural identity across generations. Numerous genetic studies have been carried out on European Basques; thus, immigrant Basques are an ideal population for investigating the genetic consequences of a recent human migration event. We have sampled 53 unrelated individuals with Basque ancestry in Boise, Idaho and determined the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) sequence variation of the first and second hypervariable regions. Thirty-six mtDNA haplotypes were detected in our sample. We found evidence of genetic changes consistent with founder effects, which is compatible with the known history of migration. Compared with the European Basque population, the immigrant Basques are significantly different in terms of haplogroup frequency distribution and diversity. They have a lower measure of weighted intralineage mean pairwise diversity (WIMP) and greater genetic distance from other European populations. These data indicate that this immigrant Basque population has experienced a reduction in genetic diversity compared with the putative source population. However, this loss of diversity is not detectable using indices of demographic history such as Tajima's D and Fu's F. This study represents the first description of mtDNA diversity in an immigrant Basque population, and our findings indicate that founder effects accompanying this relatively recent migration event have shaped the genetic diversity of this population.

This thesis examines the diverse lives of Japanese women migrants who live in southeast London. It draws on ethnographic fieldwork to question how social identities are shaped and framed by various relationships in and through migration, with particular foci on gender, life course and locality. The Japanese women who live in southeast London network extensively with their compatriots, reproducing a distinctive ‘Japaneseness’ and capitalise it in their everyday lives. While social and cultural reproduction —particularly as this relates to their children—is central within this, their practices are also telling of their own agency in navigating the different registers of their gendered identities. They may be mothers, but they are also daughters, roles that carry with them a range of expectations and that are enacted and performed in different locations and that have enhanced significance at different points in their lives, with both intra- and inter- ethnic communities. Underpinned conceptually by an understanding of migration as an ongoing process, the study builds on existing research on Japanese women’s migration—which highlights the diversity of this population—to demonstrate their complex and multiple community making practice and belonging in which they accumulate and deploy locally-specific values and capitals. By bringing the concepts of translocalism and biographical approach together, this thesis therefore contributes to the understanding of how gender, ethnicity and migration intersect in the everyday lives of these women. Furthermore, in disentangling their complex multi-layered lives and everyday identity negotiations, it speaks further to considerations over agency through the life course and the ways in which social world are both constitutive of and constituted by wider social structures.