Advice Columns Research Articles

Courage to Cobble Something New: Creative Representations of Bisexuality and Aging

There are few cultural representations or scripts available for LGBTQ aging. Among bisexual and otherwise non-monosexual (bi+) women, stereotypes of hypersexuality exclude older adults while the contrasting experience of invisibility obscures the existence of bi+ aging. In this discourse analysis, we examined three issues of the Bi Women Quarterly (BWQ) newsletter published between 2014-2019 which were devoted to the intersection of aging and bisexuality. Data include 42 narratives, personal reflections, interviews, poems, letters, advice columns, and photos which were analyzed to identify linguistic tools, visual imagery, and broader discourses used to construct and convey the meaning and experience of bisexual aging. Themes include: 1) lacking a “blueprint” for bisexual lives, 2) significant “turning points,” 3) intergenerational (dis)connections across history, and 4) life-long patterns of discovery and disclosure. More visible and diverse narratives for bisexual aging might better enable bi+ individuals to envision and effectively plan for their own aging futures.

Career Confidential: Teacher upset about cyberbullying

In this monthly advice column, Phyllis Fagell answers questions from teachers who are trying to manage on-camera activity during remote teaching. One teacher wants to know how to respond when a student posts an embarrassing screenshot of a classmate on social media. Another teacher is having a hard time connecting with the class when most students keep their cameras off.

Career Confidential: Distance learning frustrations

In this monthly advice column, Phyllis Fagell answers questions from educators who are frustrated with distance learning during the COVID-19 pandemic — and with managing other people’s frustrations about it. A principal wants to know how to be supportive of teachers and staff who are unhappy with district-level decisions while also pushing them to do the work that must be done. A teacher is having trouble listening to parents’ complaints about distance learning, especially when she knows they’re right.

Career Confidential: Teacher feels more competent than the principal

In this advice column, Phyllis Fagell answers work-related questions from educators. This month, a teacher expresses frustration about a principal who seems out of touch with what kids need, especially in a time of remote teaching.

‘Is this normal?’

Abstract To properly understand sex education, it is important to consider the informal education that takes place outside the classroom. Students often seek out other resources to supplement the education they receive in school, especially to cover topics which are absent or underdeveloped in the formal sex education curriculum. A key resource for this, especially among young women, is the magazine advice column. Advice columns create a direct interaction between the reader and the magazine and encourage the disclosure of intimate, confidential information, making them a ready medium for the production and consumption of sex education. This study uses the advice columns in Dolly, a popular Australian magazine, to investigate adolescents’ concerns about normality. This research is based on a corpus of 88,000 words, with data from advice columns published 20 years apart (mid-1990s and mid-2010s), which is analyzed using keywords and concordancing. This is a unique corpus study in that it considers similarity as well as difference in the data by investigating the recurring concern with normality that is evident in both decades of the corpus.

‘Should Latinas go blond?’ Media representation and the regulation of Latina bodies and Latinas’ social and cultural practices in a beauty magazine

In the United States, ‘Latinas’ is an ethnic category that includes a very diverse population. Since second- and third-generation Latinxs tend to be Englishdominant speakers, it is common to see publications in English that target this group. This study analyses how one of these publications, a beauty magazine for Latinas, uses different linguistic devices in their interviews and beauty advice columns to create a racially/ethnically homogeneous image of this community. My analysis focuses on this publication’s articles about hair, with particular attention to metaphors, the use of Spanish, and the indexicality of the term Latina itself. It shows that while characteristics of, and stereotypes about, Latinas are praised and celebrated, the advice offered contains instructions to regulate the Latina body to conform to beauty norms that are more valued in the United States, those associated with White women. Also, my analysis shows how this publication establishes different levels of Latinidad (Latinity) in which being too Latina represents traditional and primitive values that seem to be part of these Latinas’ imagined community’s heritage but not their own. I argue that these advice articles are intended to discursively create a Latina body acceptable to mainstream America; that while attempting to create a homogeneous image of Latinas, the publication paints a picture of tolerance toward Latinas that many of them do not experience; and that the articles do not take into account racial, social, ethnic and sexual differences among Latinas. I show how instead this publication seeks to regulate the Latina body and establish which Latinas’ social and cultural practices are acceptable for White America, so that they do not disrupt the predominant social order.

"Don't worry": Figurations of the child in a Swedish parenting advice column.

Materials such as popular books, magazines, and newspapers have historically been important for the circulation of psychologists' and psychiatrists' expertise in the public sphere. In this article, I analyze an advice column published in the Swedish parenting magazine Vi Föräldrar [Us Parents], featuring the child psychologist Malin Alfvén. Drawing on the concept of figurations (Castañeda, 2002), denoting the process of outlining and defining an entity, I show how the expert framed the child-related problems brought up in the submitted letters as transient and a normal part of children's development. In fact, most problems were considered beneficial for both parents and the child. Instead of interpreting children's behavior through a medical framework, Alfvén's explanations drew on 3 naturalizing figurations of the child: as being one of several kinds of children; as going through phases and ages; and as being a unique individual. For instance, a child could be rowdy and temperamental because he was a willful kind of child, not because, as suggested by some parents, he suffered from a neuropsychiatric disorder. I conclude by contrasting these findings to the claims made by some scholars that "psy" experts have contributed to an increasing medicalization of childhood as well as to a framing of children's development as overwhelmingly determined by parents' care. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Promoting Familiarity with the Present Perfect through Advice Columns

Promoting Familiarity with the Present Perfect through Advice Columns

“To Help Enlighten Our People”: ‘Theater Folk’ and Stage Advice Columns in the 1920s Chicago Defender

“To Help Enlighten Our People”: ‘Theater Folk’ and Stage Advice Columns in the 1920s Chicago Defender Michelle R. Scott (bio) “Attention audience! Especially those of you that are commonly called stage struck,” noted the advice column on the Chicago Defender’s Stage Page of November 7, 1925. African American former chorus girl Vivienne Russell, who used the byline “Vivienne,” declared that she had “received a number of letters from girls and boys desirous of going upon the stage. I have answered them personally, however but not in detail. Hence this article ‘Stage Struck.’”1 Vivienne argued that overall “show business is a good business” for those with “plenty of grit,” but that only the “folks that are endowed with talent” should consider the entertainment industry. After measuring one’s vocal or dance ability against other “Race shows or acts,” Vivienne maintained, select amateur entertainers should “fight for their place” on the stage amid a racially segregated entertainment system.2 “Stage Struck” was one of the dozens of such pieces Vivienne addressed to young Black Defender readers who sought practical advice on how to successfully enter the vibrant and challenging world of the 1920s professional Black stage. Between October 1925 and May 1926, vaudevillian Vivienne Gordon Russell wrote the theatrical advice column, “Theater Folks and Theatergoers,” in the Chicago Defender, aimed at both entertainment professionals and audience members. When vivid reports of tragedy and turmoil, including chronicles of increased racial violence, new segregation policies, escalating poverty, or criminal exploits, flooded 1920s Black newspaper headlines, entertainment and leisure news could offer readers momentary escape and solace.3 Black newspapers including the Baltimore Afro-American, Pittsburgh Courier, New York Amsterdam [End Page 55] News, and Chicago Defender, often dedicated at least two pages (out of twenty) to national and local Black entertainment occurrences, from discussions of how blues singer Sarah Martin was a “hit in Baltimore” to laments of the separation of the “Crosby and Jackson” comedy team in San Diego.4 Click for larger view View full resolution Figures 1 and 2. Vivienne, “Theater Folks and Theatergoers: Chorus Girls Over the Top,” Chicago Defender, 25 October 1925 The importance of the Black press and the Chicago Defender specifically in transmitting the narratives of African American lives has been explored in historical, American Studies, and musicology texts over the past two decades.5 Likewise, the lives of Black female journalists in the twentieth century have also been chronicled by historians and media studies scholars.6 Yet Vivienne’s columns reveal a moment in the Defender’s 1920s history where a Black woman entertainer also commanded a space as a Black theater industry journalist. This social history article details Vivienne’s professional background and illuminates the broader historical context of the Defender’s “Theater Folks” column. It utilizes Vivienne’s industry experiences to explain her columns’ messages on the mechanics of Black show business, the challenges of respectability politics, her disdain for blackface minstrelsy, and the value of Black entertainment in early-twentieth-century America.7 In the absence of biographies, memoirs, or personal correspondence, Vivienne’s professional life was gleaned from census information, city directories, playbills, advertisements, oral histories of Black theater professionals, and, most importantly, the “Theater Folks” articles themselves. [End Page 56] As a Black woman theatrical journalist, amid many male theater columnists published in the Defender, Vivienne publicly championed Black entertainment as a method of “racial uplift”—the attempt to challenge racial hostility and negative images of African Americans through Black political, educational, and socio-cultural success.8 Black entertainers in the 1920s contended with the same heightened racial tensions and negative depictions of blackness that plagued African Americans more generally, and they often faced critique and ridicule from Black and white conservative communities who viewed the entertainment profession as one that was not suitable for proper ladies and gentlemen. Revealing that many in the Black entertainment world were quite self-conscious about the images of morality they exhibited on stage and off, Vivienne took it as her charge “to help enlighten” her people by redefining notions of stage respectability and demonstrating how the theatrical profession was a worthy and “honest occupation” for African Americans.9 In a decade plagued...

How Will I Know If (S)He Really Loves Me? An Analysis of Romantic Relationship Concerns in Ghanaian Print Media Advice Columns, 2000–2016

Advice columns disseminate life dilemmas in a public forum for problem-solving. They provide readers’ entertainment and education, including about how to navigate romantic relationships. Thematic examination of 283 advice column articles published between 2000 and 2016 in two widely circulating Ghanaian newspapers was conducted to explore: (1) the scope of romantic relationship problems, and (2) the messages being transmitted about relationships, sexuality, and love. The articles comprised the following topics: (1) Commitment, (2) Communication, (3) Culture, (4) Socioeconomic Concerns; and (5) Violence. Agency and tension in relationships, the representation of romantic love, and other implications are discussed.

Black Girlhood in the Nineteenth CenturyAmerican Tomboys, 1850–1915

Black Girlhood in the Nineteenth CenturyAmerican Tomboys, 1850–1915

From language standards to a Standard Language: The case of Modern Greek

This study looks for changes in a standard variety through changes in that variety’s standards. It concentrates on the continuing process of the standardization of Modern Greek and it discusses: a) an inaugural change in status planning involving the shift from Jannis Psycharis’s codification of Modern Greek to a more “permissive” codification by Manolis Triantaphyllidis; b) the propagation of linguistic standards on a mass scale through the print and electronic media after the resolution of the “Greek Language Question”; c) the process of “de-ideologization” or “naturalization” of the established norms; d) a relatively recent instance of stylization of a certain highly prescribed variant (nasalization of voiced stops), which possibly marks a new phase in the standardization process. The four cases of changing standards are discussed under a performative theory of standardization. A corpus-driven approach is employed that concentrates on correctives (metalinguistic speech acts of the type: “one should neither say nor write X; instead, one should say or write Y”) and permissives (“one may say or write either X or Y provided that C”). Such triplets are located in texts that prescribe on language usage. A variety of such texts is taken into consideration: institutional Grammars, advice columns in the Greek newspapers, relevant radio and television broadcasts, Style Guides addressed both to the general public and to the media professionals. It is shown that correctives and/or permissives form repertories that change over time. Such changes in language standards account for changes in the standard language. According to the performative theory, standard languages are subject to restandardization as language standards are subject to redefinition. The changes in corrective repertories bear testimony to a process of a continuing standardization of Modern Greek. This process is shown to be mediated, i.e. it has affected and has been affected by prescriptive practices in the print and electronic media.

A Cross-Cultural Study of Persuasive Strategies in Relationship Advice Articles in Women’s Magazines

Women’s magazines have become the subject of an increasing scholarly exploration as they are widely seen as mirrors of social change in society. They typically cover a variety of topics but one enduring genre is the relationship advice genre. This study presents a cross-cultural analysis of the linguistic constructions of articles in relationship advice columns in women’s magazines. We examine the strategies, which are employed by them to persuade the reader to accept the advice given. We also examine the positioning of the implied reader in these texts by the writers of these articles. Data drawn from six English-language women’s magazines from three contexts which are, the US, Malaysia and the Middle East, was analysed with reference to the linguistic features used as persuasive strategies by the producers of texts, as investigated by several Discourse Analysis (DA) scholars. The findings of the study reveal that in all three contexts, the writers of advice articles in women’s magazines are often seen in a ‘balancing act’ as they set themselves up as experts while at the same time constructing themselves as a friend of the reader. However, we also found evidence of differences in how the reader is positioned as well as the strategies of persuasion used in the different contexts which we believe is attributed to the differences in the cultural norms and values of the respective societies.

First Queer Voices from Thailand: Uncle Go's Advice Columns for Gays, Lesbians, and Kathoeys

This is a fully revised and substantially expanded edition of Peter Jackson's highly regarded pioneering study of an Asian gay culture, Male Homosexuality in Thailand (1989). The hero of Jackson's fascinating narrative is Go, which was the pen name of a popular magazine editor who, despite being avowedly heterosexual, was tolerant of all sexual practices and whose agony uncle columns in the 1970s provided unique spaces in the national press for Thailand's gays, lesbians, and transgendered (kathoeys) to speak for themselves in the public domain. By allowing the voices of alternative sexualities to be heard, Uncle Go emerged as Thailand's first champion of gender equality and sexual rights. Peter Jackson translates and analyzes selected correspondence published in Uncle Go's advice columns, preserving and presenting important primary sources. In this new edition, Jackson has expanded his coverage to include not only letters from Thai gay men but also those from lesbians and trans people, thus capturing the full diversity of Thailand's modern queer cultures at a key moment in their historical development when new understandings of sexual identities were first communicated to the wider community.

Beyond risk and safety? Identifying shifts in sex education advice targeted at young women

This study investigates changes in sex education advice from the 1990s to the 2010s. Our research is based on the analysis of an 88,000 word corpus of advice columns from Dolly, a beauty, lifestyle and celebrity magazine aimed at Australian girls. The data are taken from 1994, 1995, 2014 and 2015, with both decades compared against each other to identify any potential shifts in sex education advice. The study combines corpus linguistic techniques with analysis of evaluative language (appraisal). Our analysis reveals a preoccupation with sexual health in the 1990s, shifting to a preoccupation with mental health in the 2010s. We identify a discourse of risk and safety and a discourse of pleasure in the 1990s, and medicalising and normalising discourses of mental health in the 2010s. We also consider interactions between question and answer in the advice pages, to better understand how discourses are introduced and negotiated in such written dialogic texts.

Lovelorn Columns: A Genre Scorned

AbstractThe newspaper advice column has shaped the American imagination in unacknowledged ways. Using Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts (1933) as a lens into a wily, underestimated genre, I juxtapose West’s riff on the newspaper advice column with readings of the real thing. I review the lovelorn column’s distinctive features and situate West’s satiric novella in that context. I also examine the racial dynamics of both the novella and the genre, touching briefly on the careers of two lovelorn columnists: the well-known Dorothy Dix, who was white, and the now-obscure Princess Mysteria, who was African American. In the process, I show that literary critics have allowed the misogyny of West’s novella to define one of the most enduring of all women’s popular genres. Advice columns have been dismissed as a morally bankrupt product of consumer capitalism, but they did more than simply render irrelevant the question of genuine emotional expression. Using a complex masquerade of gender and race, columnists shifted counsel outside the bounds of interpersonal exchange, forged an anonymous, recursive imaginative field, and generated glimmers of an ethics of intimacy.

Dear Sweet Pea by Julie Murphy

Reviewed by: Dear Sweet Pea by Julie Murphy Quinita Balderson Murphy, Julie Dear Sweet Pea. Balzer + Bray, 2019 [288p] Trade ed. ISBN 978-0-06-247307-3 $16.99 E-book ed. ISBN 978-0-06-247309-7 $10.99 Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 5-7 Patricia "Sweet Pea" DiMarco is struggling: her dad came out, her parents (amicably) split, and now she divides her time between their nearly identical houses; she also desperately misses her friendship with Kiera, who got sucked into the orbit of popular older girls. Her eccentric neighbor, Miss Flora Mae, author of their small town's advice column, secretly tasks Sweet Pea with forwarding the letters requesting advice while she's out of town. Sweet Pea can't resist opening the letters, and when she recognizes Kiera's handwritten missive seeking advice regarding her parents' fighting she responds as Miss Flora Mae and understands her former friend much better. Murphy, author of the epic Dumplin' (BCCB 12/15), offers a funny, imperfect lead [End Page 134] whose positive self-image is refreshing as she deflects ignorant notions about her dad's being gay and about her plus-sized frame. The drama is rewarding as Sweet Pea juggles her parents' parallel parenting, her tentatively reborn friendship with Kiera, and her strained friendship with loyal bestie Oscar, and the book is realistic in its depiction of the way she's been a bad friend. The book successfully handles tough topics with humor, and by the end most of the problems she created while attempting to help are satisfyingly resolved. Fingers crossed for follow-up novel. Copyright © 2019 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Crossing Borders, Crossing Boundaries: The Rhetoric of Lines Across America ed. by Barbara Couture and Patti Wojahn

Reviewed by: Crossing Borders, Crossing Boundaries: The Rhetoric of Lines Across America ed. by Barbara Couture and Patti Wojahn Adam Hubrig Crossing Borders, Crossing Boundaries: The Rhetoric of Lines Across America Barbara Couture and Patti Wojahn, Eds. University Press of Colorado, 2016. 314 pp. Crossing Borders, Crossing Boundaries: The Rhetoric of Lines Across America Barbara Couture and Patti Wojahn, Eds. University Press of Colorado, 2016. 314 pp. At a time when both physical and symbolic borders from national borders to socio-economic inequality are at the front of political debate, the exigency of Crossing Borders, Drawing Boundaries: The Rhetoric of Lines Across America cannot be overstated. The collection explores the rhetorics of borders and their immediate implications for our students, our classrooms, and our communities. The essays in this collection operate in concert to highlight how the rhetoric of lines impacts democratic discourse as well as offer sites of intervention for rhetoricians and compositionists. The collection opens with a foreword by Nancy Welch titled "Crossing the Threshold." Welch's forward presents the main theme of the collection to "explore how borders are socially, historically, and linguistically constructed—and thus how they can be rhetorically examined and contested" (xi). Welch praises the collection authors for their recognition that the rhetoric of consciousness raising is inherently limited in rhetorical effect, but identifies this sort of rhetorical education a necessary threshold to cross—by teachers and students alike—for meaningful change to be achieved (xii). In chapter one, collection editors Couture and Wojahn highlight the book's organization and major themes. The book, divided into two sections, first concerns itself with "symbolic" boundaries, and the authors' investigate imagined borders, like a national boundary and spirituality. The second section explores "living borders" and Couture and Wojahn's sites of inquiry center on dismantling and challenging the rhetoric of spaces. The collection editors preview how several disparate threads of border rhetoric are gathered up to offer broader insights into thinking about the rhetorics of difference. Part one opens with Victor Villanueva's thoughtful application of Kenneth Burke's rhetorical trope of the metonym to interrogate a hegemonic sense of nationalism in "Metonymic Borders and Our Sense of Nation." Metonym, is defined by Villanueva [End Page 157] as "a reduction with grand representational possibilities" (31), and he continues to use this rhetorical trope to unpack American cultural identity. Drawing on an American understanding of "nation" as complicated by its relationship to Puerto Rico and establishing how a sense of "nation" is deeply racialized, Villanueva argues that both a collective understanding of "border" and "nation" are "metonymy, a fiction within a fiction of a nation, a trope that serves racism in an era that no longer admits racism" (34). From this argument, Villanueva urges "We, the rhetoricians, can instead accept that part of what we must do […] is both to see and to publicize the rhetoric at play and then work to demystify and dymythify the ideological" (41), a pressing call to action for public rhetoric scholars. Christopher Schroeder continues inquiry into imagined borders in chapter three as he productively scrutinizes how notions of literacy and language create their own borders and boundaries and how code-switching works to cross these boundaries. Schroeder's examination of a multilingual press in Chicago and an advice column written primarily in English that mixes Spanish into responses, seeks to challenge "tacit English-only language policies that reflect misunderstandings about the relative role of English within the larger debates… over the official designation of an official language, linguistic civil and political rights and educational policies for minority students" (52). Through this linguistic study of code-switching, Schroeder underscores how hierarchical perspectives about English are often tied to cultural identity. In chapter four, Jonathan P. Rossing examines the potential of humor as a rhetorical intervention into cultural processes that create marginalized identities. Through a study of Stephen Colbert's satirical representation of a conservative pundit, Rossing examines how rhetorically savvy humor "appropriates and defamiliarizes common arguments about immigration so as to call into question their logic" and ultimately deconstruct notions of racial borders (63). Rossing offers humor as site to create new meanings, perspectives, and understandings (69). While Rossing acknowledges that "humor...

Village of the Damned

Village of the Damned J.D. Smith (bio) Inferno Stories George Williams Down & Out Books www.downandoutbooks.com 244 Pages; Print, $14.95 The Selected Letters of the Late Biagio Serafim Sciarra George Williams Down & Out Books www.downandoutbooks.com 258 Pages; Print, $15.95 Zoё George Williams Down & Out Books www.downandoutbooks.com/ 270 Pages; Print, $15.95 George Williams' America is the Times Square of Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver (1976), arguably the last grown-up (not "adult") film before Star Wars and its spawn helped to undo the work of the GI Bill and other initiatives of mass literacy and turn us into twelve-year-olds collecting action figures. Venality rules the day from pimp-infested doorways to pimp-infested campaign headquarters, and in a social corollary to Gresham's Law, bad intentions drive out good. Perhaps more precisely, Williams' America is that era's Times Square metastasized through Robin Leach's Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous and the sophistry of management consulting jargon, whose most notable achievements include paving over extensive wetlands and some of the world's richest farmland in favor of jerry-built McMansions and strip malls whose tenants seem to consist largely of payday loan providers and operations offering cash for gold. In the cinematic version of events this refuse-strewn landscape called forth Travis Bickel, who hoped for and attempted to bring down a hard rain that would wash the streets clean. Travis Bickel is, in turn, a latter-day reimagining of John Brown, homegrown American terrorist, and scourge of Harpers Ferry, or Girolamo Savonorola, igniter and tender of the Bonfire of the Vanities intended to purge Florence of its golden excrescences of iniquity and inequality. Williams has certain advantages over these. Besides being non-fictional and alive, he has already racked up a career longer than all three combined, and he shows no signs of slowing down in his creation of hallucinatory fables and thought experiments that consider how the aggrieved parties and avenging angels of his creation might address a historical moment that is both mad and maddening. In Williams' work, the former often appear as letter writers in a deft updating of the epistolary tradition for an age of hot online tempers and entitled consumerism. A story in Inferno, "The Ethicists," a darkly hilarious send-up of the advice column "Ask the Ethicist" in The New York Times Magazine, fields questions posed by our loquacious Jungian shadows. One, a professor considering a mass poisoning, writes: My wife is a professor too, tired of her job, so we thought, rather than take early retirement, we'd take out the town's citizens, all of the students, faculty, and staff, and live on their stolen wealth, collect disability—we're going to poison ourselves, but just [End Page 25] so—and enjoy our remaining days living in the most beautiful city in Mexico . . . Would you trade the lives of over a thousand American nationals and a few misguided foreigners too stupid to realize my college is a complete fraud, the degree utterly worthless in today's job market, an institution run by a dominatrix and managed by a devil with a fetish for removable heads of fashion mannequins? His inquiry is fielded by, rather than insightful and temperate philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah, a panel of figures from history and urban folklore who display less interest in the matter at hand than in their obsessions and mutual resentments. Locusta, first-century concoctress of poisons, advises since we are talking screenplay here, why not give yourselves some trouble, to maximize tension and create a sense of impending doom in the wretched creatures we call moviegoers, desperate to escape their ever emptier selves, hollow barrels in which not even homeless drunks are able to build a fire. All-purpose regular guy Dan the Man answers questions with questions such as "[W]hat kind of stupid effing question is this? You ain't got the 'nads to commit mass murder? What is your fucking problem?" No fan of women, he later adds "There's only way to deal with women like Locusta. Kill her...

Career Confidential

In her regular advice column for education professionals, Phyllis Fagell responds to a principal’s question about a teacher who is competent, but too rigid and inflexible with her students. A teacher wonders about the value of a principal selection process in which the decisions appear to have been made without sufficient input from the selection committee.