Story Of Man Research Articles

Nudge, nudge, wink, wink: love, sex and gay men with intellectual disabilities – a helping hand or a human right?

How do human rights help us with the experiences of people with intellectual disabilities (ID) who face discrimination and barriers in their sexual lives? Men with ID who are gay face a whole range of rights violations when it comes to exercising their sexual identity. How can such a seemingly marginalised group draw on rights based claims for better and equal treatment? This paper explores how the power of men's own stories may usefully challenge prevailing social norms and in turn strengthen human rights claims in this area. It also reflects on the challenges posed to such an agenda by current economic difficulties and changes in the organisation of adult social care in the UK. The paper draws on empirical research with gay men with ID completed in the UK in 2005 and briefly revisits some key messages from the data. It also considers the wider literature on the power and possibilities of human rights, 'intimate stories' and translating human rights into everyday change. Gay men with ID tell powerful stories of love, longing and exclusion. Such stories have the capacity to transform wider social attitudes and in turn strengthen the rights claims of this marginalised groups. There are question marks about the possibility of such change in a time of austerity and the broader move in the UK's welfare state from the collective to the individual consumer of services. However, the telling of men's 'intimate stories' creates an almost unassailable challenge to current discriminatory practices and norms.

Hong Kong men's stories of intra-national cross border romances

This article explores experiences of gender, love, sex and family during the present period of complex social transformation in Hong Kong (HK) and the mainland through the narratives of five HK men and their adventures across the border. Whilst initially rose-tinted, their adventures encountered unexpected problems and brought about unforeseen needs. The article explores the emotions and responsibilities these men needed to contend with as they tried to exploit the opportunities that the mainland presented and argues for the need for services and support for the increasing number of men who frequently cross the border to achieve their goals.

Emotions and gender in oral history: narrating Italy's 1968

The year 1968 was and remains an emotion-laden topic in Italy, and yet few historians have used emotions to parse the history and memory of this period. This paper draws on a collection of interviews with former activists in the student movement and the New Left to explore the ways in which expressions of feeling in life-history narratives can flag up possible lines of difference in women's and men's stories. It draws on three emotive themes – rebellion, violence and liberation – to explore the interaction between gender, feeling, narrative, and what the author calls the ‘third person in the room’: meta-narratives of 1960s activism that can exert a powerful weight on the interview, blending and blurring the lines of individual and collective experience.

'You learn to live with all the things that are wrong with you': gender and the experience of multiple chronic conditions in later life.

This article examines how older adults experience the physical and social realities of having multiple chronic conditions in later life. Drawing on data from in-depth interviews with 16 men and 19 women aged 73+ who had between three and 14 chronic conditions, we address the following research questions: (a) What is it like to have multiple chronic conditions in later life? (b) How do older men and women 'learn to live' with the physical and social realities of multiple morbidities? (c) How are older adults' experiences of illness influenced by age and gender norms? Our participants experienced their physical symptoms and the concomitant limitations to their activities to be a source of personal disruption. However, they normalised their illnesses and made social comparisons in order to achieve a sense of biographical flow in distinctly gendered ways. Forthright in their frustration over their loss of autonomy and physicality but resigned and stoic, the men's stories reflected masculine norms of control, invulnerability, physical prowess, self-reliance and toughness. The women were dismayed by their bodies' altered appearances and concerned about how their illnesses might affect their significant others, thereby responding to feminine norms of selflessness, sensitivity to others and nurturance. We discuss the findings in relation to the competing concepts of biographical disruption and biographical flow, as well as successful ageing discourses.

Is This How it Ends or What?: Vernon Fisher, Image/Text, and the Postmodern Narrative Under Erasure

narratives of the world are numberless. Narrative is first and foremost a prodigious variety of genres, themselves distributed amongst different substances-as though any material were fit to receive man's stories.' --Roland Barthes (1) Vernon Fisher admits it: I feel like I'm making abstract paintings with the materials of a novelist. (2) And it could be argued, similarly, that Fisher makes short stories with the materials of a multimedia artist, because even his abstract paintings are not strictly paint on canvas. In Fisher's work, photographs function as settings, sculpture as punctuation, color as tone, text as voice, and his paintings as open books. But Fisher is more than a painter; he is a storyteller. His work is widely accepted and routinely described as stylistically narrative, and one cannot deny that his cast polyurethane punctuation on the wall creates clauses out of the imagery it joins, as in Cat, Mouse (2003); or turns a sublime landscape painting into a parenthetical, as in The Death of Marat (2002)--using multiple images and sequential picture planes to create the idea that one is not just a viewer of the work, but a reader of stories nesting within stories. Can one then label him literary? Postmodern? Where does a postmodern literary style or sensibility find its place in the work of a predominantly visual artist? Like postmodern writers Richard Brautigan or John Barth, for example, who explore the visuality of narrative while concurrently examining the narrativity of the visual, Fisher uses text within his multimedia works to nudge, if not to dare, the viewer to become a reader. And then there are the compulsory elements: mockery, sarcasm, pastiche, irony, wit, refusal, reversal, and ultimately, erasure. But postmodernism cannot be condensed into eight words, especially when it comes to the complexities of an and literature with a past, with a powerful ism looming like an apparition in its family portrait. One must allow postmodernism to be defined as more than that which followed, expanded, responded to, or reacted against modernism. Appealing to a wider, more mass-market audience than the art of modernism, the presumably art of postmodernism is simultaneously accessible and challenging. It is both high and low (or a collapsing of the two), humorous and serious, and, as theorist Brian McHale purports, dominated by ontological questions rather than epistemological ones. (3) A close examination of Fisher's seminal works 84 Sparrows (1979) and Heart of Darkness (Revised) (2007) will address these notions. To complete the discussion, Fisher's work will be framed within the context of WJ.T. Mitchell's problem of the image/text, which stresses both the positive and negative relationships between the two representational forms. But does Fisher's reckoning with the problem of image/text contribute to a postmodern aesthetic? What is the postmodern aesthetic? In postmodern literary fictions like Barth's Lost in the Funhouse (1968), one notable characteristic is an emphasis on the physicality of the book; similarly, Fisher emphasizes the physicality of the gallery wall while at the same time converting it into a larger-than-life page, as in his 1994 text installation Vacuum. Other postmodern works, like Brautigan's Trout Fishing in America (1967), admit to and playfully examine the existence of the reader as well as the author/narrator and his creative process; Fisher, too, playfully nods at viewers in self-portraits like Annette (1977) or Baseball Cap (1978) while also confessing personal shortcomings or revelations--seemingly face to face. There is laughter at Fisher's (and our own) expense, as well as a sense of shared cultural pathos that viewers must both accept and deny. Remnants and relics from American history (Mickey Mouse, Hiroshima, colonial expansion, awkward love triangles) appear repeatedly and in various contexts in Fisher's work in much the same way that Brautigan's lamentation over a waning American countryside takes the form of a used trout stream for sale at the Cleveland Wrecking Yard for $6. …

Recovering the Secret History of a City: Montserrat Roig's Ramona, adéu

Recovering the Secret History of a CityMontserrat Roig's Ramona, adéu Carmiña Palerm (bio) From there, after six days and seven nights, you arrive at Zobeide, the white city, well exposed to the moon, with streets wound about themselves as in a skein. They tell this tale of its foundation: men of various nations had an identical dream. They saw a woman running at night through an unknown city; she was seen from behind, with long hair, and she was naked. They dreamed of pursuing her. As they twisted and turned, each of them lost her. After the dream they set out in search of that city; they never found it, but they found one another; they decided to build a city like the one in the dream. In laying out the streets, each followed the course of his pursuit; at the spot where they had lost the fugitive's trail, they arranged spaces and walls differently from the dream, so she would be unable to escape again. Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities Barcelona and the Gendered Space of the City A long tradition, in both Spanish literature and European literature in general, figures the city as a space of freedom. The German idiom Stadtluft macht frei, or "city air makes free," dates back all the way to the Middle Ages—it points to the fact that after a year and a day of residence in a city, freed serfs could no longer be claimed by their employers. An early novel of the late Catalan novelist and documentarist Montserrat Roig, El temps de les cireres (1977), resonates with this very old tradition of understanding cities as spaces of freedom.1 In Roig's novel, set in the 1970s, the city of Barcelona functions both as a catalyst that enables the female protagonist to understand her past and as a space used by the Catalan people in order to retaliate against a totalitarian state. Here the city is therefore understood as a potential space of freedom for the dispossessed and disenfranchised. Many works of Spanish literature that represent [End Page 13] the oppression of women in rural areas—such as the short stories of Emilia Pardo Bazán or the theater of García Lorca—complement this view of the city as a site of liberation.2 The quote with which I began this essay, however, suggests that for women the city has also meant something quite different. For Calvino's representation of the fictional city of Zobeide as a kind of net to entrap women suggests that with respect to women, the city might entrap as well as liberate. In fact, when one examines the history of the city from a feminist standpoint, one sees that the history of the city has always been two histories: one told and one unspoken. When, for example, the urban planner Charles Adams describes the city as a human artifact, his use of the gendered pronoun is telling: A city … is the pulsating product of the human hand and mind, reflecting man's history, his struggle for freedom, his creativity, his genius—and his selfishness and errors. It is a palimpsest on which man's story is written, the record of those who built a skyscraper or a picture window, fought a pitched battle for a play street, created a bookshop or a bakeshop that mattered. It is a composite of trials and defeats, of settlement houses, churches, and schoolhouses, of aspirations, images and memories.3 The city is indeed a sedimentation of these struggles, but the great majority of those Abrams mentions were waged by men. In the conventional historiography of the city, focused in particular on wars and revolutions, women simply disappear. At the same time the mechanisms by which women have been made to disappear—whether ideological or material—have themselves disappeared from the story of the city. Monserrat Roig's first novel, Ramona, adéu (1972), a fictional chronicle of the fates of three women—a grandmother, her daughter, and that daughter's daughter—in three different historical Barcelonas, works against this two- fold disappearance of women from the city. The novel begins with a pregnant mother's...

Psychotopologies: Closing the Circuit between Psychic and Material Space

In this paper we present an argument for a psychoanalytic understanding of space. While Freud struggled to move away from his own early prepsychoanalytic attempts at mapping the psyche through cerebral localization, he nevertheless found himself compelled to use spatial language and topographical models throughout his career. In his ambivalence, Freud emphasized that the space of the psyche should be read as no more than metaphorical. We argue that the topographical models that Freud struggled with were constrained by the metrics of Euclidean space. The psyche is spatial, just not in topographical terms. For Jacques Lacan many of the psychic operations that Freud described (such as the transference) are better understood in terms of topological operations. Lacan uses such figures as the torus, the cross-cap, and the Möbius strip to demonstrate how the subject is formed through internal exclusions and external inclusions. Using Freud's famous case of the Rat Man, we argue that the neurotic's journey shows him seeking to overcome a psychospatial problem, one that resembles a topological conundrum. Through the Rat Man's story, we demonstrate how Lacan's topology of the subject (the R-schema as cross-cap) accounts for the Möbius twist that allows the neurotic to situate people, events, and places that are apparently separated in time and space in the same place. Ultimately, we consider the usefulness of topology over Euclidean space for building an understanding of space that is at once psychic and material.

The Voices of the Dead: Stalin's Great Terror in the 1930s by Hiroaki Kuromiya (review)

REVIEWS 567 'Compromise with the Dictatorship?'), Djokic then charts the growing opposition movement to the king's suspension of democratic life (Chapter 4, 'The Serb-Croat Opposition'). In these chapters it ismade clear that the dictatorship cannot and should not be interpreted as an exclusively Serbian imposition, and that the anti-dictatorship opposition included both Serbian and Croatian components. In this way, Djokic dissolves homogeneous national blocks intomultilayered and ever-changing political formations, and it is in these formations, he contends, thatwe should seek for an explanation of the failure ofYugoslav integration. Chapter 5, 'The 1939Agreement', deals with the 'Cvetkovic-Macek Agreement' which allowed for the creation of the largely autonomous Croatian Banovina within Yugoslavia, and Chapter 6, 'The Aftermath', looks at how this concession led to counter claims throughout the country, especially in Serbia. There is a lot of information in this book. The devil is in the detail, and Djokic has a remarkable skill for narrating what is often a convoluted tale, and for discerning patterns and historical meaning inwhat may appear to be no more than a morass of political chicanery. A particularly nice touch is the repeated references to train journeys made by politicians of various party colour across the country, especially to and fromBelgrade and Zagreb. Djokic uses these both as evidence of the energy and commitment invested into finding a workable political system and as a metaphor for the ongoing quest for the elusive Yugoslav compromise. The ultimate failure of thisquest is a reminder that the compromise itself is a counter-factual. One wonders, then, by how far it eluded itspursuers? Was the constant shuttie diplomacy a cause or an effectof the country's instability? If the latter, then the conven tional thesis can stillbe sustained: the politicians were chasing afata morgana, forever out of reach since no compromise would ever be satisfactory to all parties. Djokic is to be applauded for challenging historiographical orthodoxy and by extension challenging his reader to re-think the history of the interwar kingdom. One isalso reminded of theprotean nature of theYugoslav concept. Djokic is continuing an investigation started in thevolume Tugoslavism: Histories ofa Failed Idea (London, 2003). The contributors to that book, which Djokic edited, demonstrated that Yugoslavia meant different things to different people at different times.With thiswork, Djokic shows that the concept has also meant different things to differentpeople at the same time. The failure of interwarYugoslavia lay in the failure to agree on a Yugoslavia acceptable ifnot to all, then at least tomost. Djokic has shown thatwe need not presume the failurewas inevitable. School of History andArchives University CollegeDublin John Paul Newman Kuromiya, Hiroaki. The Voices of the Dead: Stalin's GreatTenor in the1930s.Yale University Press, New Haven, CT and London, 2007. viii + 295 pp. Maps. Illustrations. Notes. Index. ?19.99. When Nikita Khrushchev condemned Stalinist Terror in the 1950s and early 1960s, he chose to focus on the sufferingof theCommunist Party. The 568 SEER, 88, 3, JULY 20IO profile of thepurge victim he created was of a loyal Bolshevik cut down inhis prime. Encouraged by works such as Arthur Koestier's Darkness atNoon, this image of the purge victim has largely persisted inWestern writing on the terror.This is only part of the picture, however, for social groups other than the party elite were also hit hard: those who had already been identified as enemies (kulaks,priests, former nobles) were attacked anew, and anyone with foreign associations became suspect in the years 1936?38. Hiroaki Kuromiya's monograph recounts in detail the ordeal of several dozen of these more 'ordinary' victims. Based on a close reading of the personal files of purge victims located in theKiev archives, The Voices of the Dead tells the stories ofmen and women destroyed by theNKVD during Stalin's Terror. Kuromiya's richwork details (amongst others) the lives of former kulaks charged with anti-kolkhozagitation, ofOrthodox priests accused of spreading anti-Soviet agitation and of former nobles arrested as spies simply because they received money and provisions from relativeswho had fled abroad. Members of ethnicminorities which had their own nation-state outside of the Soviet Union were particularly vulner able. This was perhaps particularly true inUkraine which...

The Greatest Generation Revisited: Conscientious Objectors and the “Good War”

More than 60 years after the end of Second World War, a strong, consistent metanarrative has evolved regarding the World War II generation. Heralding the special qualities of the World War II cohort's patriotism, tenacity, hard work, and sacrifice, journalist Tom Brokaw called it “the greatest generation any society has produced” (Brokaw 1998: xxx). Fighting in the war is seen as the defining moment of that generation. Left out of the narrative are the stories of those who refused to fight, conscientious objectors and war resisters who stood against the tide to oppose the “good war.” This article shares the wartime stories of three conscientious objectors who refused to fight in World War II. First, I briefly review the social and political context in which these individuals made the decision to resist. Then I share each man's story, focusing on the pre-war socialization that shaped their ideas about peace and war, the process of making the decision to resist, and the experience during the war. Finally, I touch briefly on the post-war activity of World War II conscientious objectors and war resisters and their cultural contribution to the modern peace and justice movement in the United States.

Behind the allure of gambling: A qualitative exploration of the existential yearnings of Chinese men with problem gambling in Hong Kong

Drawing on a qualitative exploratory study of the gambling narratives of a group of Chinese men with problem gambling in Hong Kong, this paper proposes an alternative understanding of problem gambling. Rather than identifying problem gambling as a personal deficit or pathology, a narrative analysis of these Chinese men's gambling stories reveals their existential yearnings behind problem gambling. Told from the perspectives of these men, their gambling narratives invite us as researchers and practitioners to explore the meanings gamblers ascribe to gambling which they derived from the interplay between the socioeconomic and cultural ethos of the society and their personal histories. This offers us new insights into their motivations of gambling. As an attempt to fill the methodological gap in gambling studies, this paper also shows how an in-depth narrative research method can contribute to expanding our understanding of problem gambling beyond pathology.

Youth, Linguistic Ecology, and Language Endangerment: A Yup'ik Example

Using data from a longitudinal study, this article traces how in- and out-of-school processes placed youth at the center of a community language tip into English in Piniq, a Yup'ik village in Alaska. During an early phase of language tip, youth underscored bilingual connections to community and place through storytelling with peers. Yet youth were also experiencing linguistic insecurities and losing forms that marked a linguistic orientation to land. Further, adult responses to youth language changes fed vicious cycles of reduced resources for and increasing doubts about bilingualism. Situating and examining young men's seal-hunting stories, the article highlights how youth in the first group to speak mostly English mediated life contingencies, uneven linguistic resources, and apprenticeship experiences as they learned a knowledge system embedded in the life of their community. Implications for educators in rapidly changing linguistic ecologies are discussed.

In the dark: young men's stories of sexual initiation in the absence of relevant sexual health information.

A growing body of research has investigated the effectiveness of abstinence-only sexual education. There remains a dearth of research on the relevant sexual health information available to young men who have sex with men (YMSM). Drawing on a mixed-methods study with 526 YMSM, this study explores how and where YMSM receive relevant information on sexual health/behavior. Findings indicate that information related to gay men's sexuality is not readily available from family, friends, or schools. At initiation of anal intercourse, respondents generally had limited information about HIV and sexually transmitted infections (STIs). In some cases, this resulted in the perception that activities such as unprotected sex were "low risk." Many mentioned they first learned about anal sex during their sexual debut, describing painful and/or unpleasant experiences. Some relied on older/more experienced partners, the Internet, and pornography for information. Findings are discussed in relation to how providers can help YMSM build solid foundations of sexual education to protect them from STI and HIV infection.

GHOSTWRITING FOR PERFORMANCE: Third Angel's The Lad Lit Project

Exploring the research, devising and writing processes of Third Angel's theatre piece The Lad Lit Project: a one-man show, devised and written by over 40 people. I asked men, What would you call the chapters in the unwritten book of your life story? My friend Annie says, What I like about it most is that I can see the ghosts of the other men on stage the men who aren't in it. Recently I've been thinking about The Lad Lit Project as an act of ghostwriting. The Lad Lit Project isn't verbatim theatre. I retell other men's stories in my own words, to my own ends; casting the audience as the protagonist. They combine to create an (auto)biography made up of chapters from many men's lives; an overall narrative of life experiences that speaks to me. That speaks, I think, for me, somehow. I tell their stories, as your stories, in order to tell my own.

‘He's got no game’: young men's stories about failed romantic and sexual experiences

This study examined how 12 small groups of young adult male friends (N = 36 participants; ages 18–23) told stories about romantic and sexual experiences. Contrary to the expectation that male friends will boast and brag to one another about their romantic endeavors, the young men's romantic and sexual stories were often about embarrassing romantic and sexual mishaps and gaffes. Like the ‘lovable loser’ laddishness that parades itself in television shows and advertisements, these forays into non-heroic masculinity were cloaked in a knowing irony and self-reflexivity that made it difficult to determine whether their positions were complicit with or resistant to normative masculinity. Critical discursive analyses focus on how positions of failed gamesmanship function in the accomplishment of male homosociality, how a sense of conventionality or ordinariness is re-claimed, and what these processes reveal about the shifting nature of hegemonic masculinity in contemporary culture.

Masculinities and Vulnerability

There is a developing body of research that investigates the links between masculinities and men's health experiences in the United Kingdom, but the links between social connectedness and the health experiences of men have been a neglected focus for research. Findings were drawn from a parent study that examined fathers' experiences of health and social connectedness, but findings presented in this article were unforeseen. Specifically, findings presented here indicate that African-Caribbean and white working-class fathers, in the United Kingdom, were involved in solitary ways of feeling, thinking, and acting to deal with the vulnerability associated with health concerns, the psychological experience of stress, and difficulties in personal relationships. Those solitary experiences were associated, within men's stories, with conservative and complicit forms of masculinity. Challenges and qualifications to men's solitary and conservative discourses and practices are also identified within men's stories. These challenges were linked to crisis situations, the uncertainty associated with gender, social class and racism, and the experience of fathering, in particular. The significance of gender, ethnicity, and social class for policy, practice, and future research regarding working-class fathers' experiences of vulnerability is identified.

Challenging Hegemonic Masculinities: Men's Stories on Gender Culture in Organizations

The article emphasizes the importance of storytelling in helping or hindering a change in organizational practices brought about by the entry into force of a legislative measure. It concentrates in particular on the introduction of a normative change intended to reshape the dominant gender order by giving fathers the same rights to parental leave as mothers. Whilst storytelling can be an instrument of change, it may also be perceived and used as a means to prevent such change and to consolidate dominant models. In the latter case, analysis of rebellious and marginal voices reveals hegemonic practices and brings out viewpoints silenced by the official versions. The stories of eight men, belonging to different organizations, who have experienced parental leave, enable analysis to be made of the ways in which organizational storytelling can support or prevent the introduction of a change which challenges the symbolic gender order within organizations.

Masculinities and fathering

There is a developing body of research regarding fathering, in the UK, but the experiences of African-Caribbean and white working-class fathers, and how their experiences are mediated by gender and ethnicity have been neglected. The purpose of this paper is to address this gap in research by reporting on the similarities and differences within the stories of African-Caribbean and white working-class men about fathering, and to examine the personal and structural dimensions to these experiences using Connell's theoretical framework for understanding masculinities (1995, 2005). Qualitative, semi-structured individual interviews were undertaken with seven white and six African-Caribbean fathers. Findings indicate that African-Caribbean fathers, specifically, their associated practices, regarding children's ‘behaviour’ and learning, with experiences of racism that they anticipated their children may encounter in the future. Both groups of men's stories demonstrated limited reflexivity about the unequal distribution of domestic labour within the home. The study also found that fathers’ experiences were associated with contradictory and differing forms of masculinity. The fathers’ stories provide evidence of changing forms of masculinity, for example, in ways in which fathers conceptualised fathering as enjoyable involvement with children, and the ways fathers negotiated and resisted the constraints of paid work in order to be involved with children. Findings also reinforce the importance of health and social care services reorienting their priorities to engage with fathers, and opportunities for future research, regarding the experiences of African-Caribbean fathers in particular, are also identified.

Fictionalizing the Folkloric: Matt Clark's Hook Man Speaks

Matt Clark's 2001 novel Hook Man Speaks emerges from familiar, protean American of Hook Man- for Clark the rock star of (142). Identified by Jan Brunvand as archetypal example of genre and a favorite of folklore scholars Encyclopedia 200), story enacts Hook Man's terrorizing of trysting young couples parked in secluded areas. Typically, a radio broadcast announces escape of hook-armed man, criminal or sex maniac, who interrupts teenagers' lovemaking either through their belief in imminence of his assault or their conviction that he is actually invading car. Often in story couple returns to girl's home to discover a bloody hook on door of passenger side of car. Stephen King proclaims legend of The Hook to be the most basic horror story I know (19), and Clark's novel attempts both an imaginative embodiment of this vaporous figure of inveterate horror and a contemplation of Hook Man's place in American culture and history (Clark 3). In its knowing transformation of oral legend into novel, Hook Man Speaks cunningly mediates realms of folkloric and literary. Clark specifically confronts problem of possible ephemerality of contemporary legends, suspicion that Hook Man's story and its ilk are old potatoes, greasy kids' stuff (80). In raising questions about Hook Man's obsolescence, Hook Man Speaks functions not only as commentary on nature of circulation of contemporary legend but proffers literary repositioning of Hook Man as a necessary replenishment of legend itself. Folklorist Gary Alan Fine's usage of proves more useful for this analysis than more common nomenclature of urban associated with Jan Brunvand. Fine proposes that even rubric is a compromise of convenience (1) but argues that a temporal (contemporary) rather than geographic (urban) base for term ought to prevail, because These legends are not always urban, often are transmitted in suburbs and are about suburban life, and sometimes are about rural areas and small towns (1-2). Given southwest American setting of Hook Man Speaks, Fine's remarks are especially pertinent. Moreover, Fine's suggestion that contemporary legends, through their ability to borrow from and to transcend traditional and current, comprise a recognizable form of postmodern discourse (2) establishes some discursive continuum between contemporary legends and Clark's twenty-first century novel. The primary difference between two, though, resides in self -consciousness of Clark's rendering of material. Brunvand underscores how unselfconscious narration of contemporary legends is Hitchhiker xiii); similarly, Fine observes that contemporary legends tend to be relatively formless (2), Rosenberg notes how folktales have scant descriptions of inner life of their and rely heavily on active events- and repetition- for their effects (149), and King acknowledges that Hook Man story offers characterization, no theme, no particular artifice (21). Clark responds to precisely these lacunae, crafting in Hook Man Speaks a strikingly writerly novel. Hook Man Speaks begins, for example, with epigraphs from Neruda and Nabokov. Much of novel unfolds as a colloquy between Hook Man and folklore professor Dr. Brautigan, a pointed reference to Richard Brautigan, popular American novelist of 1960s. The final section of Hook Man Speaks revels, like a Nabokov novel, in its own artifice, constructing an elaborate screen of literary allusions whose meaning is unavailable to characters themselves of novel. Although novel evokes and revises an extensive body of contemporary legends and seemingly grants narrative primacy to Hook Man's first-person perspective, authorial consciousness that looms behind events of book finally predominates. …

The Guestworker: Bienvenidos a Carolina del Norte (review)

Reviewed by: The Guestworker: Bienvenidos a Carolina del Norte Lisa Rathje The Guestworker: Bienvenidos a Carolina del Norte. 2007. By Cynthia Hill and Charles Thompson. 53 min. DVD format, color. (Filmakers Library. New York.) Employing documentary techniques and field-work strategies, The Guestworker tells the story of the H2–A "guestworker" program and one of its participants, Don Candelario Gonzalez Moreno. Through interviews, visual stories, and brief narrative texts containing contextual information, the film provides a "slice of life" documentation and uses one man's story to illuminate a much larger narrative—one that impacts almost every American who buys the produce harvested by hundreds of thousands of "guests" from south of the U.S. border. The film organizes itself loosely by following the chronological path of H2–A guestworker Don Candelario from spring to late fall. The exploration of the tensions that emerge in the tales of workers and farmers weaves seamlessly throughout the script, and interesting parallels and disjunctions can be noted through the thoughtful editing of the interviews gathered over a two-year period of fieldwork and filming. The viewer is first introduced to both the H2–A program and Don Candelario as the buses unload after their trip up from the U.S./Mexico border. The film concludes after the viewer is allowed to travel back across the border to the home of Don Candelario after a summer of work and harvest. Throughout the film, text appears on the screen with the date and information about the weather, which moves the film forward and also orients the viewer to how the passing time and the vagaries of weather become a significant part of the agricultural cycles and seasons. Time is one of the key elements of the film, and it is highlighted by the filmmaker's playing with the linear flow of the narrative to underscore the fact that the guest-workers' time is not their own. They want to work and to earn more money, but drought conditions mean that there are only a few hours of work each day. To avoid being added to the "black list," however, they must remain at the farm until the boss allows them to go back to Mexico. This highlights one of the many moments that disrupt the seeming neutrality of the film and illustrates its contribution to discussions of immigration and the H2–A program. This film is not designed as an exposé, but of course the narratives carry within them stories that resonate in multiple ways, exposing questions, concerns, and doubts about the program and the human lives sustaining the larger process. The frame used throughout this film is mostly an intimate one. While there are broad shots of the workers in the fields or on the bus, almost immediately the lens quickly pans in and focuses on one worker's hands or face. The cinematography makes clear that the film is not about vegetables but about the people who plant and harvest them; it is not about immigration but about the people who move across borders. With this intimate aesthetic and due to the nature of the political, cultural, and economic stories embedded in The Guestworker, some of the decisions made in the production and editing of the film merit additional consideration. As a technology of representation, film and video allow for the semblance of verisimilitude that can produce for many audiences a belief in the "truth" and "authenticity" of the story that is unfolding. Yet simultaneously, the invisibility of the film crew, director, editor, and other staff creates uneasiness, as audiences are required to evaluate the reliability of the film's representation of events. How well does the action depicted on screen reflect the originating event, and does the editing and production of the film reliably represent this? These questions mediate viewer reception and are weighted depending upon the nuance and perspective offered through the film event. And while this summary simplifies the very complex experience [End Page 491] of film, The Guestworker brings to the fore how videographic techniques can be strengthened through engagement with thoughtful fieldwork processes. Given trends towards reflexive and collaborative ethnographic process, both in research and its creative outcomes...

Unique outcomes of women and men who were abused.

To determine if individuals who have experienced extensive victimization throughout their lives tell stories about "unique outcomes." An examination of existing narrative data collected from 27 women and 17 men who had participated in one of several qualitative studies of sexual violence. Unique outcomes stories identified from the interview transcripts were categorized according to the type of experiences described, and the nature of men an women's stores were compared. Six types of unique outcomes stories were identified in the women's narratives (rebellion, breaking free, resurgence, refuge, determination, confidant) and three types in the men's narratives (reawakening, buddy and normal guy, champion). Unique outcomes stories are common in narratives otherwise focused on abuse. Common themes are apparent, and the nature of men's and women's stories differ markedly.