The aesthetic labour of polycystic ovarian syndrome: The strife of heteronormative standards and the possibilities of queering

Disclosure: A.E. Husby: None. M.R. Simpson: None. R. Dalbye: None. E. Vanky: None. T.S. Løvvik: None. Introduction:Polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) affects 5-20% of women. Women with PCOS frequently suffer from metabolic, psychological, and reproductive comorbidities. Pregnancy complications such as gestational diabetes, pregnancy-induced hypertension, pre-eclampsia, and preterm birth are more common in PCOS. Metformin has been used in an attempt to improve pregnancy outcomes in PCOS. Childbirth experience is influenced by previous life- and birth experiences, preparedness, fear of childbirth, experiences of pain and control, and the mode and outcome of delivery. A positive childbirth experience may result in improved post-partum functioning and bonding with the newborn. In contrast, a negative childbirth experience is associated with postnatal depression, post-traumatic stress symptoms and difficulties in relating to one’s partner and newborn. To our knowledge, there are no previous studies on women with PCOS and their childbirth experiences. The primary aim of our study is to explore childbirth experiences in women with PCOS compared to a reference population. The secondary aim is to explore whether metformin vs placebo during pregnancy affects the childbirth experiences in women with PCOS. Materials and methods:This study combines data from two RCTs. In the PregMet2 study, women with PCOS in Norway, Sweden and Iceland were randomized to metformin or placebo. Main outcomes were miscarriage and preterm delivery. The Labor Progression Study (LaPS) (reference population) in Norway, compared WHO partograph to the Zhang’s guidelines for progression of labor in women in Robson group 1*. Both studies used the Childbirth Experience Questionaire (CEQ). Total CEQ scores and scores (separately) from the four domains “own capacity”, “perceived safety”, “professional support” and “participation” were compared between a) women with PCOS in the PregMet2 study (n=131) and the reference population, the LaPS study (n=3604) and b) metformin (n=179) and placebo (n=185) groups in the PregMet2 study. Results: There was no difference in total CEQ score between women with PCOS and the reference population. Women with PCOS had a higher domain score for “perceived safety” (p<0,05) and lower score for “own capacity” (p<0,05), compared to the reference population, while there was no difference in the domains “professional support” or “participation”. Total CEQ-score and domain-scores were similar for the metformin compared to placebo groups in the PregMet2 study. Conclusion: Women with PCOS compared to women in the reference population had similar childbirth experiences. However, they reported higher “perceived safety” and lower “own capacity” compared to reference women. Metformin treatment in pregnancy did not influence childbirth experience in women with PCOS. *Nulliparous women with a singleton, term pregnancy, with spontaneous start of labor and cephalic lie (Robson group 1). Presentation: Friday, June 16, 2023

As one of the most common endocrine disorders in women of reproductive age, polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) is highly heterogeneous with varied clinical features and diverse gestational complications among individuals. The patients with PCOS have 2-fold higher risk of preterm labor which is associated with substantial infant morbidity and mortality and great socioeconomic cost. The study was designated to identify molecular subtypes and the related hub genes to facilitate the susceptibility assessment of preterm labor in women with PCOS. Four mRNA datasets (GSE84958, GSE5090, GSE43264 and GSE98421) were obtained from Gene Expression Omnibus database. Twenty-eight candidate genes related to preterm labor or labor were yielded from the researches and our unpublished data. Then, we utilized unsupervised clustering to identify molecular subtypes in PCOS based on the expression of above candidate genes. Key modules were generated with weighted gene co-expression network analysis R package, and their hub genes were generated with CytoHubba. The probable biological function and mechanism were explored through Gene Ontology analysis and Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes pathway analysis. In addition, STRING and Cytoscape software were used to identify the protein-protein interaction (PPI) network, and the molecular complex detection (MCODE) was used to identify the hub genes. Then the overlapping hub genes were predicted. Two molecular subtypes were found in women with PCOS based on the expression similarity of preterm labor or labor-related genes, in which two modules were highlighted. The key modules and PPI network have five overlapping five hub genes, two of which, GTF2F2 and MYO6 gene, were further confirmed by the comparison between clustering subgroups according to the expression of hub genes. Distinct PCOS molecular subtypes were identified with preterm labor or labor-related genes, which might uncover the potential mechanism underlying heterogeneity of clinical pregnancy complications in women with PCOS.

ObjectiveAs one of the most common endocrine disorders in women of reproductive age, polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) is highly heterogeneous with varied clinical features and diverse gestational complications among individuals. The patients with PCOS have 2-fold higher risk of preterm labor which is associated with substantial infant morbidity and mortality and great socioeconomic cost. The study was designated to identify molecular subtypes and the related hub genes to facilitate the susceptibility assessment of preterm labor in women with PCOS.MethodsFour mRNA datasets (GSE84958, GSE5090, GSE43264 and GSE98421) were obtained from Gene Expression Omnibus database. Twenty-eight candidate genes related to preterm labor or labor were yielded from the researches and our unpublished data. Then, we utilized unsupervised clustering to identify molecular subtypes in PCOS based on the expression of above candidate genes. Key modules were generated with weighted gene co-expression network analysis R package, and their hub genes were generated with CytoHubba. The probable biological function and mechanism were explored through Gene Ontology analysis and Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes pathway analysis. In addition, STRING and Cytoscape software were used to identify the protein-protein interaction (PPI) network, and the molecular complex detection (MCODE) was used to identify the hub genes. Then the overlapping hub genes were predicted.ResultsTwo molecular subtypes were found in women with PCOS based on the expression similarity of preterm labor or labor-related genes, in which two modules were highlighted. The key modules and PPI network have five overlapping five hub genes, two of which, GTF2F2 and MYO6 gene, were further confirmed by the comparison between clustering subgroups according to the expression of hub genes.ConclusionsDistinct PCOS molecular subtypes were identified with preterm labor or labor-related genes, which might uncover the potential mechanism underlying heterogeneity of clinical pregnancy complications in women with PCOS.

Polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) is a common endocrine disorder in women of reproductive age, characterized by menstrual irregularity, hyperandrogenism, and the presence of cysts in the ovaries. This study aims to analyze the main benefits and challenges of using hormonal contraceptives in women with PCOS, considering their impacts on the health and quality of life of patients. This is a qualitative integrative literature review based on books and scientific articles published in the last ten years, retrieved from databases such as Scientific Electronic Library Online (SciELO), Virtual Health Library (BVS), PubMed, and Google Scholar, using the descriptors: “polycystic ovary syndrome,” “Stein-Leventhal syndrome,” “oral contraceptives,” and “hormonal oral contraceptive,” extracted from DeCS (Descriptors in Health Sciences) and MeSH (Medical Subject Headings). Combined oral contraceptives are considered the first-line treatment for PCOS in women who do not wish to become pregnant, demonstrating efficacy against menstrual irregularity and hyperandrogenism. Furthermore, they promote the prevention of endometrial cancer. Despite the medication’s benefits, it can worsen insulin resistance, increase the risk of cardiovascular disease, and thrombotic events. Therefore, it is concluded that the therapeutic intervention for PCOS should be individualized and multifactorial, always associated with lifestyle changes to achieve better results. Keywords: polycystic ovary syndrome; combined oral contraceptives; treatment.

Inflammation is the body response against infection, injury and illness. It is a significant factor which can affect reproduction processes. Inflammatory state has key roles in physiological reproductive functions in women like menstruation, ovulation, implantation and pregnancy. Previous studies evaluated the association of inflammatory mechanisms with disorders such as ovulatory abnormalities, polycystic ovary syndrome, endometriosis, premature onset of labor and infertility in women—the present review summarized association between inflammation state and some reproductive disorders in female. Based on available findings, the inflammation state can be associated with various female reproductive disorders, which finally can affect fertility potential. Thus, assessment of inflammatory mechanisms and their association with processes of reproductive in treatment strategies of female infertility can be efficient. More comprehensive studies with a large number of patients and consideration of inflammatory pathways are required to provide more definitive evidences.

This chapter draws from research on aesthetic labour, gender, management and organisation studies and research on women's careers. We base our analysis on two empirical data sets, namely interviews with women mid-managers in Finland and Scotland, and interviews with highly positioned expert women in Finland in knowledge work. Women in different phases of their careers and life experience manifold pressures on appearances, and are increasingly aware of the demands to ‘look good and sound right’. We address how these pressures impact on women managers' and experts' well-being and career plans.

ABSTRACTWhile the visibility and acceptance of trans women have grown globally in recent years, this progress has primarily been within a traditional, heteronormative narrative. But a growing number of trans women identify as butch lesbians and challenge this heteronormative narrative. The existence of butch trans women has created a debate on where they fit within queer and lesbian communities and how their gender performance fits within traditional butch/femme understandings of lesbian or queer relationships. This article seeks to explore the intersections of gender identity and sexual orientation that butch trans women experience when they engage with lesbian and trans communities.

Global debates around the criminalisation of coercive control have relatively neglected queer and gender diverse communities. This is due, at least in part, to the continuing erasure of LGBTIQA+ identities in legal discourses on Domestic and Family Violence, and to desires from within queer communities to tell positive stories about thriving relationships and communities. This article seeks to understand how coercive control in queer relationships might be understood outside of heteronormative frames, and to interrogate the concept of coercive control through a queer critical understanding of gender and power. To do this, the article offers a contextual reading of Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House (2019), a memoir about an experience of abuse within a queer relationship. Writing through vignettes that encircle an impermeable centre of abuse, Machado relives a relationship punctuated by unbearable silences, impossible and changing demands, and the foreboding threat of physical violence. This article reads In the Dream House as an entry point to contemporary debates about the ways that coercion and controlling behaviours in queer relationships might depart from heterosexual scripts of abuse, and connects Machado’s vignettes to critical concerns around the limits of contemporary legal reforms in relation to domestic and family violence.

Gay or queer relationships in Zimbabwe remain a site of discursive contestation. The rise in human rights advocacy has re/located the subject within the human rights premise, shifting the discussions away but not disconnected from the religious, political and cultural representations. This paper examined the societal constructions and attitudes toward homosexuality by analyzing Twitter exchanges that followed the disclosure on the 21st of September 2018, by a teacher (Neal Hovelmeier) of St John’s College in Zimbabwe, that he was gay. The disclosure prompted substantial online and offline debates on gay and queer relationships (what is popularly known as homosexuality in Zimbabwe) and produced two discursive divisions. The first division was against homosexuality and galvanized support across cultural, political, traditional, religious and social constructions. Though less popular, the other division found support from within the gay or queer community itself, the global North diplomatic missions resident in Zimbabwe, liberal left-leaning and some civil society organizations. The former’s key feature is societal resistance to homosexuality which is constructed by way of inferences to Christianity and traditional belief systems about binary gender and sex categories and sexual relations. The latter has constructed homosexuality from the premise of human rights, acceptance and tolerance.

Intimate partner violence among lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer adolescents is a serious social and public health issue. Yet qualitative data is scarce. Using multiple qualitative methods and a feminist methodological approach, this study examines how intersecting identities, minority stress, and adolescent development impact queer adolescent perceptions and negotiations of romantic relationships and dating violence. Analysis of interview and focus group data from 23 adolescents and one year of ethnographic fieldwork yield three interrelated sets of results. Findings presented in chapter four examine the social landscape of LGBTQ adolescence. Sexual minority stress theory helps explain how social inequalities impact queer youth. This chapter offers an expanded framework: sexual and gender minority stress, that better accounts for trans-related stress and a changing cultural climate. Chapter five offers results specific to queer romantic relationships and dating culture. Participants maintain queer relationships are essentially "the same...but different" from their cisgender, heterosexual peers. Insights from intersectionality theory and adolescent development highlight how social location, minority stress, and the developmental tasks of adolescence together influence queer dating and relationships. Finally, chapter six presents findings specific to queer teen dating abuse. Youth unequivocally assert that relationship violence is a significant issue in LGBTQ communities. A lack of social scripts and language for queer relationships and violence, coupled with the universal culture of shame and secrecy surrounding intimate violence, help explain the disjuncture between participants' perceptions of abuse and how they discuss actual encounters with relationship violence. Also, factors that may be especially salient to teen dating violence among LGBTQ adolescents are discussed; in order to promote understanding of why LGBTQ youth discourses minimize violence, and to indicate how LGBTQ teen dating violence may differ from that in non-LGBTQ/adolescent communities. Together, findings establish the need for an integrative theory accounting for structural inequalities, minority stress, and adolescent development. This interdisciplinary theoretical approach provides the groundwork for future health and violence research with LGBTQ adolescents. The concluding chapter outlines foundational elements of this approach, discusses policy and practice implications, and identifies limitations and directions for future research.

Trans and nonbinary communities often cite different priorities in their activism than do cisgender queer communities. This paper seeks to explore the effects of marriage equality, as well as the prioritization of marriage equality on queer trans and nonbinary individuals using a combined methodology of autoethnography and oral history. The findings suggest that trans individuals in queer relationships may have difficulty reconciling disparate aspects of their identities, including their political and activist priorities. The authors conclude that providing queer trans individuals platforms to voice their opinions is essential to ongoing dialogue about the role of marriage in queer communities.

This article examines the role of queer relationality and utopian imaginaries within queer and feminist science fiction. Drawing on Larissa Lai’s concept of the insurgent utopia, as well as José Esteban Muñoz’s understanding of queer futurity as inherently relational, I explore the role of utopian futurity within three queer and feminist science fiction novels—The Tiger Flu, The Female Man, and The Kappa Child. Despite being written decades apart, each novel embodies the insurgent utopia as enclave found within queer relationality, in which queer love, longing, desire, friendship, and community provide the basis for imagining, and bringing into being, utopian futures.

For God and Gaga: Comparing the Same-Sex Marriage Discourse and Homonationalism in Canada and the United States

Against Chronology:Intergenerational Pedagogical Approaches to Queer Theatre and Performance Histories Benjamin Gillespie (bio) and Bess Rowen (bio) Our intention with this essay is to demonstrate that chronology is not the most effective approach for teaching queer theatre and performance histories. While it is a common practice to map out significant theatrical events through presenting a linear progression of history, especially in larger survey courses, the essay proposes an alternative model that seeks to uncover the intergenerational connections and queer temporalities embedded within queer history. US-focused LGBTQ+ theatre courses taking a chronological approach tend to begin with landmark gay and lesbian plays and performances from the beginning of the twentieth century, including Sholem Asch, Mae West, Lillian Hellman, Tennessee Williams, Robert Anderson, Mart Crowley, Jane Chambers, Terrence McNally, Paula Vogel, Harvey Fierstein, Larry Kramer, Martin Sherman, Moisés Kaufman, Tony Kushner, Charles Ludlam, Split Britches, Carmelita Tropicana, Charles Busch, the Five Lesbian Brothers, Cherríe Moraga, the NEA 4, Pomo Afro Homos, Taylor Mac, Diana Son, Justin Vivian Bond, Vaginal Davis, Robert O'Hara, and Donja R. Love, among many other possibilities. The works of these artists are framed by key moments in LGBTQ+ history such as censorship and anti-gay legislation; gay rights movements; the Stonewall Riots; the AIDS epidemic and the rise of Act Up and Queer Nation; the culture wars; marginal to mainstream representation on stage, film, and television; transgender rights; the passing of hate crimes law; and gay marriage, to name some of the most prominent. But without impinging upon the importance of positioning these queer texts within their appropriate cultural and political moments, we would like to challenge the strict adherence to chronology and embrace the potential for cross-temporal connections between historical and artistic movements. This would serve to highlight the intergenerational linkages among queer artists and communities through a nonlinear clustering of works that would highlight influences and legacies unfolding outside and beyond linear progressions of time. Importantly, this move is not a proposal for an unhistoricism as identified by Valerie Traub, but rather to show the queer potential of an anti-chronological arrangement of queer performance history that challenges the implications of straight time and heteronormative life course models. This methodology, as elucidated below, is influenced by critiques of chrononormativity advanced in both queer studies and age studies. While linear frameworks assist in creating seemingly coherent narratives for students less familiar with the field of study, we argue that chronology creates a false linear-progress narrative that does not value or underscore the dynamic exchange of aesthetic ideas, activist values, and alternative communities embedded in queer history that offer the potential for new perspectives and critiques of the present. Both queer studies and age studies challenge linear approaches to temporality, disrupting static perceptions of the life course that reinforce compulsory heterosexuality for the perceived "good life" and emphasize the false binary between youth and age as well as "peak-and-decline" ideology surrounding the aging process, which positions mid-to-later life as both an undesirable and burdensome position for the supposedly nonproductive older individual within society.1 These homophobic and ageist cultural assumptions, combined with heteronormative standards, undermine the important contributions and lineages of queer elders across theatre and performance histories, [End Page 69] while reinforcing the fallacy that creativity dwindles with age. Age studies theorist Cynthia Port draws important connections between queerness and aging: "the old are often, like queers, figured by the cultural imagination as being outside mainstream temporalities and standing in the way of, rather than contributing to, the promise of the future" (3). Taking an intergenerational approach to LGBTQ+ theatre and performance histories allows students to perceive creativity across the entire life course without privileging youth over age, and also challenges decline ideology by highlighting the continuously developing aesthetic in an artist's later years as well as their direct influence on younger generations. Calling attention to such forms of intergenerational queer kinship and collaboration complicates the notion of progress that serves to displace the old in favor of the young (a reality often unconscious to our college-age students). While we do not suggest privileging the work of the old over the young or the...

ABSTRACTThis article examines how a secular lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer (LGBTQ) community choir in New Zealand negotiates a relationship with sacred repertoire, and the church in which the choir is located. A mixed-methods study included semi-structured interviews with 26 current and past members, musical directors and a church representative. Themes that emerged included tensions between religion and an LGBTQ cultural secularism, intersections of reconciliation and affirmation and the identity constitutive uses of space. Findings suggest that although, as LGBTQ-identified people, secularism is an important identity, sacred music is pleasurable. The choir provides church-like functions, through a sense of community, ritual and an environment for spiritual reflection and the practice of values. The church location offers reconciliation for those with Christian backgrounds. Benefitting each other, the choir gives St. Andrew’s legitimacy in its identity as an LGBTQ-inclusive church, and the church space has a queering effect on the presentation of the choir.