Domestic Relationships Research Articles

Reimagining Elizabeth I and Mary queen of Scots: women’s historiography and domestic identities, c. 1750–1800

ABSTRACT This article explores eighteenth-century elite and middling women’s representations of Elizabeth I and Mary queen of Scots through manuscript-making and collecting as the means to confirm or critique their own social and domestic relationships. Scrutinising such practices, this article unpacks women’s modes of engagement in British history and the opportunities for creative reimaginings of the gendered, moral, and national identities these posed. It asserts that, in representing the combative tension between the historical figures of Elizabeth I and Mary queen of Scots, eighteenth-century women turned instead to models of collaboration to create and record their own histories, reflecting not only the lives of earlier women, but their own domestic and social situations.

Overcrowding and sense of home in the Canadian Arctic

This study examines the relationship between living in overcrowded conditions and sense of home among 289 Inuit, the Indigenous population living in the Canadian Arctic. This study was conducted in Nunavut and Nunavik, two of the four Inuit regions in Canada, where the prevalence of overcrowding is six times the national average. Sense of home was derived from the conceptual notion of ontological security, where home is defined as a symbolic place for making claims of cultural identity and belonging. Sense of home was operationalized according to participants’ perception of their home in relation to space, identity, control, privacy, satisfaction, relationships, location, and security. Overcrowding was negatively associated with sense of home. In overcrowded dwellings, fewer women reported positive perceptions of their house with regards to sufficient space, feeling of identity, satisfaction and domestic relationships. Relational and cultural aspects of housing resonate with sense of home and may be particularly interesting to examine as potential mechanisms leading to individual and community wellbeing.

Risk Factor Patterns in Domestic Minor Sex Trafficking Relationships

ABSTRACTDomestic minor sex trafficking (DMST) is the commercial sexual exploitation of a minor citizen or legal resident within United States borders. Officials often view DMST as a monolithic crime, rather than a problem driven by victims’ variable experiences with poverty, racism, and family dysfunction. The purpose of this study is to explore how various risk factors are associated with one another and with DMST victimization, particularly within specific subcategories of DMST, such as trafficking by a family member, stranger, friend, or romantic partner. This study utilizes the archival data from 242 sex trafficked minors. The author coded the case files for the presence of risk factors, such as race, child welfare involvement, juvenile justice involvement, poverty, and more. Then, the author employed chi-square procedures to explore the association between risk factors, and between risk factors and victim-trafficker relationship type. Findings suggest that DMST victimization is not a uniform phenomenon, in which all victims share the same risks. There appears to be variations between the risk factors experienced by victims prior to entering specific relationship dynamics. Counter-trafficking advocates need to articulate these variations to the range of professionals who work within the systems that may prevent, identify, and remediate DMST.

Feminism’s Forgotten Fight: The Unfinished Struggle for Work and Family. By Kirsten Swinth

Kirsten Swinth’s Feminism’s Forgotten Fight is an important addition to the historiography of the second-wave feminist movement. Focusing on activism between 1963 and 1978, Swinth challenges the notion that feminists neglected or ignored the issues of work and family. Swinth argues that this line of thinking overlooks feminist efforts to disrupt traditional social constructs of the self, domestic relationships, labor, and the law to create an egalitarian society where women could “have it all:” a career and a family, without neglecting one for the other. Feminists sought to redefine what “having it all” meant. After all, women could not “heroically be everything to everyone.” Instead, feminists argued society needed to separate womanhood from motherhood and equally redistribute the responsibilities of home and family between men and women. Although these activists faced resistance within their own movement and the growing New Right, their efforts resulted in the passage of key legislation that marked important victories for women, men, and children.

‘I am but a livery servant’: examining ruptures in master-servant relationships of the nineteenth-century country house

The balance of power in nineteenth-century country estates was firmly weighted in the employer’s favour, making it difficult for servants to carve out an identity, find a voice, or establish self-worth. Their characters, morality and conduct were often problematized by the upper classes, and they were frequently derided, as Davidoff (1993) suggests, for ‘having very ambivalent attitudes towards their employers’. Applying discourse analysis to data derived from nineteenth-century servant letters uncovered in two archived collections (the Savernake Estate and Mote House) this article reveals the complex tensions and ambiguities that characterised working relations between masters and servants in such households. By focussing explicitly on how servants managed perceptions of themselves in moments of rupture this article considers how their narratives can be re-conceived as active dialogues in which different representations of the self and the complex layers of the domestic service relationship are continually and creatively re-formulated.

Traumatic Brain Injury within Domestic Relationships: Complications, Consequences and Contributing Factors

ABSTRACT Traumatic brain injury (TBI) resulting from episodes of domestic violence (DV) is a serious yet greatly underreported issue. Head injuries arising in these circumstances are often concussive or sub-concussive in nature, and are unlikely to be isolated incidents, with victims frequently suffering repetitive TBIs over time. Although men may also be victims of DV, women and children are most at risk of DV via intimate partners and parents, respectively. Due to the complexities of these interpersonal relationships, victims of DV are not always able to receive appropriate clinical diagnoses, care or follow-up after TBI. TBI arising from DV is also likely to occur in a complex milieu of fear, anxiety and depression, the physical and psychological consequences of which may worsen or perpetuate the pathology of TBI. This review examines the complexities of TBI arising from DV from several perspectives, with focus on three pertinent and interrelated topics: 1) pathobiology and complications of single and repetitive TBI, encompassing direct neural consequences, inflammation and hormonal changes; 2) behavioral, cognitive and psychosocial consequences of TBI; and 3) contributing factors to TBI and complications, including strategies to increase clinician recognition of TBI in DV patients, and programs and policies in place in Australia and abroad to decrease rates of offending.

The Wheelchair: A Three-Part Drama

In a review for The New York Times, Amor Towles writes that Manhattan Beach “is far less interested in domestic relationships than in those of the workplace.” I would submit that Manhattan Beach is in fact suffused with domestic relations and that many of those relations are structured by disability plots. A few of those plot strands are so clichéd that you can hardly believe their prominence in this contemporary novel. But another cluster of the novel's disability motifs spins a fabric so inventive and rich that you begin to suspect Egan of deploying the other, shopworn plots chiefly to authenticate the novel's mid-century ethos, to evoke a moment when the American public tended to perceive disability as hopeless, or tragic, or repulsive. In what follows I extricate from the novel's broader historical concerns three of these related disability plots. I begin with an account of the disability-as-melodrama plot and then move to an analysis of the plotlines associated with novel's diffuse treatment of disability's generative powers. I close with a reading of the problematic plot that relies on what disability scholars call the “curative imaginary.” My aim here is to illustrate Egan's contrapuntal disability aesthetics.

“A Frankenstein Monster”: Henry Kissinger, Richard Nixon, and the Year of Europe

“‘A Frankenstein Monster’: Henry Kissinger, Richard Nixon, and the Year of Europe,” tells the story of the severe crisis in US–European relations when Henry Kissinger was directing American foreign policy. Referencing contemporary concerns over the Trump Presidency’s harsh rhetoric and actions toward the European Union, the article demonstrates that such tensions have a long history in the US–European relationship, and are rooted in the concerns of American domestic politics, which Henry Kissinger well understood. Kissinger’s policy choices during the crisis represented the dilemmas that exist between domestic political priorities and alliance relationships, and may hold lessons for today’s US–European relationship.

Legal Politics and Strategy on Protection of Women from Violence in Human Rights Context

In the past, violence against women was viewed as common actions and was tolerated, especially if it occurred within a household. People were often powerless to protect the victims, and any kinds of intervention were considered as taboo, due to the essence of domestic relationship that was portrayed as private matters. Not only domestic violence, but other acts of violence such as sexual harassment, most of the time, women became victims of these violence. However, as the community progressed, many of these actions were later criminalized because it led to rape and murder. In addition, today's discourse on violence against women is something that is widely discussed by practitioners, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), academics and the wider community. This was motivated by the demands of an increasingly complex role of women, along with the growing progressive view on human rights which see both sexes as equal. Violence against women is an act of human rights violations experienced by women. Therefore, the United Nations (UN) organization later recognize violence against women as a crime. The existence of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), 2. Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Woman, Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, and other related international conventions require legal politics to seek harmonization and synchronization of national regulations which ultimately resulted in Law of the Republic of Indonesia Number 23 Year 2004 concerning the Elimination of Domestic Violence as an effort to minimize the crime against women. But it is not enough to eliminate the violence due to various factors, especially the law enforcement officers. Therefore, another strategy is strongly needed to support the protection of women from violence in the context of human rights. Keywords: human rights, legal politics, strategy, woman protection. DOI : 10.7176/RHSS/9-4-04

The presence of a ‘nanny’ in South African infant observations: learning opportunities and challenges for student observers and their teachers

ABSTRACTMany South African infants are co-reared by a ‘nanny’ employed as a domestic worker in the family home. The racial distribution of this sector of the labour force is 100% black. Domestic workers seldom have any formal or semi-formal training and they remain undervalued and subordinate in labour status. Given the country’s cruel apartheid history; racial, cultural, socio-economic, labour and power dynamics underpin these domestic relationships. There is a paucity of research into the impact of ‘nannies’ on the infant’s early life and development, or on the relational dynamics that develop between infant, mother and ‘shadow mother’ in the South African context. Privileged learning and qualitative research opportunities are proffered by the high percentage of infant observations situations that include the presence of a nanny. Further, the student observer and indeed the observation situation itself are not immune to the influence and impact of the complex relational dynamics. In a country that is working hard to repair damaged relationships in the aftermath of apartheid, small opportunities for hope emerge in the reflective discussions of the seminar groups. This paper explores several of these themes illustrated by vignettes from infant observations presented to the author over several years.

The ‘Shared Household’ Argument & Other Fundamentals: The Protection of Women From Domestic Violence Act, 2005 (43 of 2005)

A daughter-in-law has no right in the property which is exclusively owned by her parents-in-law and further, such property of the parents-in-law is not a ‘shared household’ under the provisions of the DVA. As per the mandate of Section 2 (q) of the DVA read with the dictum of the Hon’ble Supreme Court of India in the matter of Hiral P. Harsora & Ors V/s Kusum Narottamdas Harsora & Ors, the term “respondent” is to mean any person who is, or has been, in a domestic relationship with the aggrieved person and against whom the aggrieved person has sought any relief under the DVA.

Clinical and Psychosocial Characteristics of HIV-Positive and HIV-Negative Females with Opiate Dependence

The objective of the study was to explore the clinical-psychological and social characteristics of injecting drugs women users (IDWU) with opiate dependence with different HIV status living on the territory of the Republic of Belarus based on multi-dimensional assessment of opiate dependence dynamics in order to develop therapeutic measures for relapse prevention and achievement of the long-term remission. Materials and methods: Totally 217 IDWU were examined. The research cohort was randomized into 2 groups: HIV-positive women (HPW) (104 persons, mean age 30.8 years (SD=4.86) and HIV-negative women (HNW) (113 persons, mean age 29.9 years (SD=6.67). The level of patients social functioning, quality of life, craving for narcotic substances were studied by means of the Scale of the social and functioning, SF-36 and the Scale of the craving for drugs. The particularities of the social functioning and life quality of women with opiate addiction and different HIV status were described. The results: show that the majority of IDWU were characterized by frequent work replacement and labor skipping (27/25.9% in HPW group vs 30/26.5% in HNW group; P>0.05). 21 /20.1% HPW vs 15/13.2% HNW (P<0.05) was characterized by low qualification, 43/43.3% HPW vs 41/36.2% HNW (P>0.05) - vocational education. HPW have more severely impaired psychosocial parameters compared to HNW. Family climate can be described as hostile aggressive (84/80.7% in HNW group vs 69/61.0% in HNW group; P<0.05). For women of both groups were characteristic parental alcohol abuse (18/17.3% in HPW vs 16/14.1% in HNW; P>0.05), and high level of parental divorces (24/23.1% in HPW vs 32/28.3% in HNW; P>0.05). It was found that the treatment itself allows to diminish the problems associated with drug use and HIV infection. Nevertheless, the short-term treatment course can only provide the clinical improvement but not stabilization of psychosomatic state of HIV-positive patients with opiate dependence. Conclusions: The results of the study indicates the vast majority of women who are injecting drug users, living in Belarus, can be characterized by high level of social functioning disturbances including domestic, social and professional relationship. They need for development of specific tactics of management to suit their needs, including the long-term complex treatment and rehabilitation programs.

From Global Risk to Private Catastrophe: The Domestic and the Planetary in Daniel Kramb’s From Here and Susannah Waters’ Cold Comfort

Climate change is at the heart of recent critical debates about the role of the global and the local in the critical practice of the environmental humanities. While critics like Ursula K. Heise and Timothy Clark have argued for putting the global at the conceptual centre of inquiry, others have warned that such a wide focus obscures the localized effects of climate change and their connection to histories of colonial and capitalist exploitation. Rather than privileging one side of this argument over the other, this paper seeks to put both perspectives into a productive dialogue that focusses on how literature can connect the local histories and global environmental risks. The paper draws on two relatively unknown novels, Susannah Waters’ Cold Comfort (2007) and Daniel Kramb’s From Here (2012), in order to show how the threat of climate change disrupts understandings of scale that structure our social lives by linking global forces to moments of domestic and intimate crisis. From Here’s protagonist is a cosmopolitan culture worker, whose perpetual uprootedness becomes the vantage point for her political engagement with the threat of climate change. Cold Comfort’s Alaska Native protagonist finds her house literally tilting due to the melting permafrost ground, while domestic violence and sexual abuse make her home uninhabitable. Despite the huge disjuncture in the contexts they portray, the texts share an interest in the disjuncture between awareness and agency, in the impact of climate change on domestic and intimate relationships, and in links between the private, the political and the planetary.

Domestic Violence Asylum and the Perpetuation of the Victimization Narrative

Pitiful. Helpless. Powerless. The words often used to describe survivors of domestic violence conjure a vivid and specific image of a woman lacking both strength and agency. These (mis)conceptions stem from the theories of “Battered Woman Syndrome” and “learned helplessness,” developed in 1979 by psychologist Lenore Walker, who hypothesized that intimate partner abuse ultimately causes a woman to resign herself to her fate and cease efforts to free herself from violence or dangerous situations. Although widely criticized, learned helplessness has permeated the legal establishment, for example, serving as the foundation for mandatory arrest and “no drop” policies in the criminal sphere of domestic violence law. Legal scholars have examined the problematic impacts of both the theory of learned helplessness itself and its effect on survivors in the criminal and civil justice systems. This article adds to that important conversation by exploring the previously unexamined area of learned helplessness’ impact on immigration, specifically asylum, law. Through a series of cases from 1996 to 2014, it is now established that a woman may receive asylum protection if she can establish that she is “unable to leave” a violent domestic relationship. This formulation fits squarely within Walker’s framework, as it requires a victim to advance a narrative of helplessness if she is to obtain refuge in the United States. Furtherance of the notion of Battered Woman Syndrome in asylum law is troubling for a number of reasons, namely, as this piece details, in the harms that can result when survivors of domestic violence are required to conform to a specific “stock story” (including injury to both those who fit the stereotype and those who do not). Additionally, continued adherence to and reliance on learned helplessness poses challenges for client-centered lawyering, perpetuates the tendency of victim-blaming, ignores the realities of the dangers of separation violence, and furthers the damaging dichotomy of “worthy” and “unworthy” immigrants. By identifying these concerns and proposing alternative bases for protection that would encompass not just pitiable and vulnerable victims of domestic violence, but strong, empowered and capable fighters against domestic abuse, this article seeks to critique, rebut and prevent the infiltration of static and stereotypical images of battered women in the realm of immigration law.

Hephaestus the Hobbling Humorist: The Club-Footed God in the History of Early Greek Comedy

Abstract This article argues that Hephaestus, the only physically disabled Olympian deity, occupies an important position in the history of comedy and the Greek tradition of laughter. From the Homeric epics to fourth-century comedy and vase-painting, Hephaestus is consistently to be found in cultural contexts which explore the instrumentality of laughter in domestic and social relationships, rituals and entertainments. The article proposes that the structure of the mythical narrative of the Return of Hephaestus, with its estrangement of the protagonist from his community, riotous reconciliation, and komastic procession, underlies several Old Comedies. It also suggests that his banausic profession and deformity helped to make him particularly popular in cultural artifacts—vases and dramas—produced in Athens in the democratic period because neither his trade nor his appearance would have disqualified him from wielding sovereign power, κράτος, as a citizen there.

Contractual safeguarding of specific assets in cross-border and domestic buyer–supplier relationships

Safeguarding specific investments and mitigation of potential opportunistic behaviours are among the most prominent functions of formal contracting in buyer–seller relationships. Extending the extant literature, the present study investigates the relationship between specific investments and the extent of formal contracting in cross-border and domestic relationships. Based on a sample of 156 buyer–seller relationships, the analysis shows that there is a positive association between specific investments and the extent of formal contracting. However, the emphasis on formal contracting is stronger in cross-border relationships than in the domestic ones. Interestingly, the association between specific investments and formal contracting becomes even stronger in cross-border relationships.

Rethinking Relationships

The Property (Relationships) Act 1976 is generally regarded as progressive and inclusive. The Act applies an equal property sharing regime to married spouses, civil union partners and de facto partners. It does not, however, recognise other sorts of close domestic relationships such as those between a parent and adult child or between siblings. This is in contrast to Australia where a number of jurisdictions have conferred relationship status on domestic relationships. This article considers whether there is a similar case to be made in New Zealand for extending property rights to people in domestic relationships.

Octopuses in wild and domestic relationships

People commonly interact with terrestrial domestic animals, such as dogs and cats, horses, cattle and goats, and birds. Thereby individuals of different species form animal–human bonds. We are now forming relationships with ocean animals in increasingly common ways through growing human populations, advances in technology such as SCUBA, ocean mapping, underwater instrumentation and advances in aquatic animal husbandry. Octopuses and humans share quite distant evolutionary ties and yet share aspects of sensory ability and intelligence. Octopuses thereby pose interesting challenges and conundrums for understanding animal–human relationships. I consider several reasons to expect that the evolution of octopuses, and of animal cognition generally among active and visually sophisticated animals, will favour traits that support relationships between individuals. The evolutionary outcome of animals capable of forming inter-individual relationships may thus be expected in any evolving biota with organisms of this kind. This article explores the ability of ocean and terrestrial animals to relate to one another in ways that are reciprocal, if not equally balanced, and illustrates this with the examples of octopuses.

‘It is very difficult to like and to love, but not to be respected or valued’

This article interrogates two contemporary documentaries that explore the roles and experiences of domestic and childcare workers in Brazilian society: Consuelo Lins’s Babás (2010) and Gabriel Mascaro’s Doméstica (2012). In order to examine their formal differences, the analysis draws on Ismail Xavier’s typology of Brazilian documentary (2009) and Catherine Russell’s discussion of experimental ethnographic films (1999). Both Lins’s and Mascaro’s documentaries indicate the ways that colonial slave-owning relationships continue to weigh uncannily on modern-day domestic labour arrangements. They show how attempting to confine maids to ‘depoliticized’ home-spaces is a tactic used to deny them autonomy, and political and labour rights. However, while Babás attempts to redress the marginalization of nannies within hegemonic narratives of Brazilian cultural memory, it occasionally risks othering the figures to whom it pays homage. By contrast, Doméstica’s experimental ethnographic practice and haptic, affective images actively foreground the violent domestic relationships upon which bourgeois home-spaces are constructed.

Dogs were domesticated in the Arctic: Culling practices and dog sledding at Ust’-Polui

Domestication has particular salience in archaeology, and numerous recent theoretical papers describe this process as a set of evolutionary, ongoing, social, and material relationships between humans and select other species. In contrast, analytical papers on the domestication of dogs nearly always involve a search for their origins as marked by changes in genes and morphologies. This article explores this contrast through the examination of dog remains from the Iron Age Ust’-Polui site in the western Siberian Arctic. Many of the numerous dogs represented at this site were killed and probably consumed when young, likely as part of sacrifices. Others at the site were intentionally buried. Ust’-Polui also contains abundant evidence of advanced dog sledding, including probable harness parts and portions of several complex sleds. Sacrificing and otherwise killing dogs is a domestication practice, as these activities are a form of selective breeding. Domestication of dogs at Ust’-Polui and elsewhere is more than selective breeding, as it is enabled and dependent upon specific landscapes, built things, and other species. At Ust’-Polui these at a minimum included a rich local environment, sleds and harness swivels, and freshwater fish, all of which intertwined in making the particular domestic relationships at the site possible.