Marginalized Identities Research Articles

Neighborhood Disorder, Social Support, and Outcomes Among Violence-Exposed African American Women.

Intimate partner violence (IPV) against women, particularly those living in poverty who have multiple marginalized identities, is a significant public health issue. IPV is associated with numerous mental health concerns including depression, hopelessness, and suicidal behavior. The present study examined the ecological determinants of these mental health outcomes in a high-risk sample of 67 low-income, African American women survivors of IPV. Based on an ecological framework that conceptualizes individuals as nested in multiple, interactive systems, we examined, longitudinally, the main and interactive effects of self-reported neighborhood disorder and social support from family members and friends on participants' mental health (i.e., self-reported depressive symptoms, hopelessness, and suicide intent). In multiple regression analyses, neighborhood disorder interacted with social support from family members to predict depressive symptoms and hopelessness over time. Neighborhood disorder also interacted with social support from friends to predict hopelessness and suicide intent over time. High levels of social support buffered against the dangerous effects of neighborhood disorder on depressive symptoms, hopelessness, and suicide intent; at low levels of social support, there was no significant association between neighborhood disorder and those mental health outcomes. Neighborhood disorder and social support did not yield significant main effects. These findings underscore the importance of interventions that target individuals, families, and communities (e.g., community empowerment programs). Group interventions may also be important for low-income, African American women survivors of IPV, as they can help survivors establish and strengthen relationships and social support.

Reinterpreting History and Restructuring Female Identities in Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls and Timberlake Wertenbaker’s Our Country’s Good.

The purpose of this study is to examine representation of marginal female identities and how history is reinterpreted to demonstrate the constant position of women in Carly Churchill’s play Top Girls and Timberlake Wertenbaker’s play Our Country’s Good. It discusses the representation of women identities with an exploration of female subjectivity, “personal is political” feminism and the establishment of a new female self in a patriarchal society. Both Churchill and Wertenbaker draw attention to historical subjects and past time, which make the history play an important role in writing their dramas.

Social constructions of fatness: legal proceedings in Canada as a case in point

This article uses reports of cases of Canadian legal processes to explore social constructions of fatness as disability, as well as illness, cultural aesthetic, and blame. The review of cases in Canadian human rights, civil, administrative, and employment law suggests that fatness has been constructed as a disability in Canadian law. This has led to favourable outcomes for fat persons seeking redress for discrimination. Illness, cultural aesthetic, and blame also surface as recurrent themes. To consider all four themes, a concept of mythopoeia – myth-making process – is introduced. This adds to models of social construction by focusing on where ‘un-reality’ is constructed in a non-hierarchical view of marginal identities. Fatness constructions/mythopoeia of disability, illness, cultural aesthetic, and blame overlap as well as diverge. This suggests that fatness may be an incomplete fit with current classifications in human rights law.

Marginalitatea opresivă: Spațiul-stereotip și spațiile de colecție în literatura scriitorilor moldoveni / Oppressive marginality: the place stereotype and the spaces of collection in the literature of Moldavian writers

This paper states out that marginality is not always the space of radical difference as a range of spatial theories underline, but also a hostile space that transforms the difference into a mechanism of exclusion. The spatial representations of Moldova, a conservative space with a particular mythology, expose a limitative oppressive space that alienates the people that fall out its canon. The borough in Mihail Sadoveanu’s work or the provincial city in Ionel Teodoreanu’s literature are examples of this hostile space which is marginality. The myths of periphery such as the glorious past, the social idyll or the organic community operate with mechanisms of power that constrain and fix according to a pre-existing image of space. Therefore, the periphery becomes the space of radical closure, excluding the difference in name of a marginal identity. I examine two realities of this radical space: the place stereotype and the spaces of collection. While the first one forces the diversity of spatial practices to fit a unitary ideal image of space, the second type accumulates the variety of spatial representations but deprives them of any functionality.

Profiles of minority stressors and identity centrality among sexual minority Latinx youth.

Few studies have examined how the amalgamation of minority stressors for youth with multiple marginalized identities is associated with well-being. Additionally, among youth with multiple marginalized identities, identity centrality may clarify the associations between specific types of minority stressors (i.e., bias-based peer victimization, perceived discrimination) and adjustment. This study sought to identify intersectional profiles of perceived peer victimization, perceived discrimination, and identity centrality, specific to either Latinx ethnicity or sexual minority identity in the United States. Demographic characteristics associated with each profile (i.e., age, socioeconomic status, gender nonconformity, survey language, gender, rurality) were examined, as well as associations between profiles and grade point average, self-esteem, and depression. In a sample of 219 in-school Latinx sexual minority youth (47% secondary, 53% postsecondary; Mage = 19 years, SD = 2.3), four profiles of intersectional minority stress (perceived victimization, discrimination) and identity centrality were identified: (a) low stress, low centrality; (b) low stress, high centrality; (c) moderate stress, moderate centrality, and (d) high stress, moderate centrality. Men, youth who were relatively older, socioeconomically advantaged, gender nonconforming, and those living in urban areas had higher probabilities of membership in profiles with moderate and high stress. Compared to the low stress, low centrality profile, profiles with higher levels of intersectional stress were associated with maladjustment, whereas the profile characterized by low stress, high centrality had higher levels of self-esteem. (PsycINFO Database Record

Sexual Orientation and Social Attitudes

Gender, race, and class strongly predict social attitudes and are at the core of social scientific theory and empirical analysis. Sexuality (i.e., sexual orientation), however, is not as central a factor by which we conceptualize and systematize society. This study examines the impact of sexual orientation, gender, race, and education across attitudinal topics covered by the General Social Survey. Sexual orientation is an important part of people’s lives that, as I demonstrate, is a strong and exceptionally consistent predictor of social attitudes across issues regardless of whether it is measured with partnering behavior or self-identification. When sexual behavior and identity differ, however, identity is more influential. This pattern lends support to a marginalized identity explanation for why sexual minorities are consistently liberal. I conclude that future work should pay more attention to sexuality as a core factor in social scientific theory and empirical analysis.

Gay Glass Ceilings: Sexual Orientation and Workplace Authority in the UK

A burgeoning literature has examined earnings inequalities associated with a minority sexual orientation, but far less is known about sexual orientation-based differences in access to workplace authority – in contrast to well-documented gender and race-specific differences. We provide the first large-scale evidence on this question using confidential data from the 2009-2014 UK Integrated Household Surveys (IHS) (N = 607,709). We are the first to document that men and lesbians are significantly more likely to have objective measures of workplace authority compared to otherwise similar heterosexual men and women. However, we also find clear evidence that men face glass ceilings: their higher likelihood of attaining workplace authority is driven entirely by their significantly higher odds of being low-level managers. In fact, men are significantly less likely than comparable heterosexual men to be in the highest-level managerial positions that come with higher status and pay. Oaxaca decompositions suggest that this differential access to workplace authority for men is due to discrimination as opposed to different skills and characteristics. Moreover, this gay glass ceiling is stronger for racial minorities than for whites. Corresponding effects for lesbians exist but are notably weaker. These results provide the first direct evidence of social stratification in the workplace associated with a minority sexual orientation and reveal that differences are exacerbated for individuals with multiple marginalized identities.

Ni de Aquí, Ni de Allá: Conceptualizing the self-authorship experience of gay Latino college men using conocimiento

ABSTRACTThis essay aims to enhance our conceptual understanding of students with intersectional identities, specifically gay Latino men in college. We first explain how ethnic, gender, and sexual identities can act as compounding influences. Second, we review two distinct but complementary developmental theories. Conocimiento captures the disruptive, challenging path experienced by marginalized Latino youth. Self-authorship situates the broader developmental process in and beyond college. Our modified framework—conociéndose y escribiéndose—conceptualizes how college students navigate multiple marginalized identities. Finally, we discuss the implications of this intersectional framework for LGBTQ+ students and institutions seeking to enhance diversity, inclusion, and student success.

Blood and race – The black male vampire as action hero in the Blade trilogy

Abstract This article examines the representation of the black male vampire as an action hero in the Blade trilogy. Specifically, this article builds on Yvonne Tasker’s scholarship on racial discourse in the action cinema, where her reading of Predator 2 (1990) leads her to contend that ‘blackness is repositioned in terms of the monstrous within the film’s symbolic hierarchy’. Extending this argument to a relatively less analysed but commercially successful text, we suggest that even when cinematically presented as an action hero in the Blade trilogy, male vampiric blackness is inevitably conceived as aberrant, gesturing towards the failure of cinematic containment strategies. These complex and contradictory articulations ‘queer’ Blade from within, producing a peculiar cinematic vampiric masculinity and masculine identity that renders Blade as both an action hero and a villain. To this end, this article considers the spectacle of the black male vampiric body in action and inaction, and how other characters in the trilogy (re)define Blade’s vampiric masculinity. Consequently, this article examines how and why other forms of (white) masculinities threaten the survival of the protagonist and concludes by making the claim that the Blade trilogy has opened up a cinematic space for understanding the complex narrative strategies involved in the negotiation and articulation of marginal identities within a cultural system of hegemonic practices.

Postdoctoral scholars in a faculty of education: Navigating liminal spaces and marginal identities

The last decade has seen a slow but steady increase in the number of postdoctoral scholars employed in faculties of education. In this article, seven postdoctoral scholars who worked in the same Canadian faculty of education explore their past positionings within the postdoctoral space. We share personal narratives related to issues of agency and identity in our relatively ill-defined positions. Similar to other early career academics, our reflections expose key concerns surrounding clarity of expectations, workload and work/life balance, and issues related to community and collegiality. In addition, we identify institutional or structural constraints that need to be reconciled in order to support postdoctoral scholars in their aspirations for success on personal and institutional levels. We provide recommendations and invite dialogue with regard to this emerging role in faculties of education.

A Social Embeddedness Perspective on Turnover Intention: The Role of Informal Networks and Social Identity Evidence From South Korea

This study examines turnover intention through a social embeddedness perspective proposing that turnover intention may be a function of the degree to which an organization’s members are attached to one another in terms of relational ties and emotional bonds. Drawing on network theory and social identity theory, it was hypothesized that peripheral positions in informal networks (solidarity ties and instrumental ties) and marginal identity in the workplace may influence higher turnover intention. Sequential mixed methods design was utilized to explore the context-specific bases upon which informal networks and social identities can form and to test the generality of the link between the explored bases and turnover intention against larger samples using Ordered Logistic Model. The results showed that (a) peripherally positioned individuals in informal networks will likely have high turnover intention and (b) individuals with marginal identity in the workplace will likely have high turnover intention. The study results suggest that the social factors accrued from informal networks and social identities deserve enhanced attention in both theorization and personnel management.

Marginalised Identity in Timberlake Wertenbaker’s Play: New Anatomies

The purpose of this study is to discuss the space for a marginalized feminine identity in contemporary British feminist dramatist Timberlake Wertenbaker’s play. The play New Anatomies dramatizes the life of a historical woman called Isabelle Eberhardt, who disguised herself as an Arab man called Si Mahmoud living among Algerians. The focus of the play is the construction of a marginalised identity through dislocation of a woman from the European culture. Finding no space for her radical identity, she disguises herself as an Arab man to escape the constraints imposed on women by European ideals of femininity. Eberhardt disrupts the conventional gender codes by showing how gender is dramatized within the space of the salon. In contrast, Eberhardt is received as a man in male attire when travelling in Algeria trying to find out a space for her radical identity. She achieves a certain kind of freedom by her dislocation although this eventually leads to her death in desert.

O02 What are the motivations and barriers to effective HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis (PREP) use for black men who have sex with men (BMSM) aged 18–45 in london? results from a qualitative study

IntroductionPrEP has the potential to transform the HIV epidemic in the UK. BMSM experience a significantly higher HIV prevalence compared with other MSM meaning that PrEP rollout should be attentive to reducing health inequalities in this group. This research aims to describe the motivations and barriers to PrEP use for BMSM aged 18–45 in London.MethodsTwenty-five BMSM were recruited through social sexual apps for semi-structured interviews. All participants reported sexual behaviours consistent with PrEP candidacy. Interviews were transcribed verbatim and analysed using a thematic framework informed by inter-sectionality theory.ResultsAn ‘ideal’ PrEP candidate was frequently perceived to embody characteristics that participants themselves did not necessarily identify with (e.g. that they were insufficiently risky or sexually active to require PrEP). Many already felt marginalised by virtue of being both black and gay, or felt ‘type-cast’ as sexually dominant within the gay scene. Concern was expressed that taking PrEP may exacerbate such marginalisation by suggesting that they were also promiscuous. For others, however, taking PrEP meant avoiding another marginalised identity: that of someone with HIV. Participants tended to prefer conveniently located clinics outside of traditionally ‘black’ areas. Accessing services from staff of similar ethnic backgrounds was difficult for many, except for staff also perceived as gay.DiscussionMarginalisation remains a key barrier for this group, and should be considered when developing PrEP interventions. Existing services are acceptable for delivering PrEP interventions, but staff need to be mindful, sex affirmative and focus on developing rapport with BMSM of similar ethnic backgrounds as themselves.

Watching Marginal Bodies: Representation of the Transgender Identity on Turkish Media

The world in which we live is seen, on the one hand as a global village in some sense and, on the other, as a divided geography. In other words, it is localized and ghettoized simultaneously. The everyday life that transforms rapidly and in an amorphous notion bears testimony to the rise of new identities and belongings as well as new opposition and disengagement. This dilemma generates new and different notion of tension and conflict. Body and gender are considerably significant paradigms in terms of showing and representing this sense of physical, mental and ideological separation; so much so that they change continuously in the shade of freedom and security deadlock. As for media, they do not merely capture but formalized the social events and collective facts. They manipulate the viewer perception and attitudes. From institutional and traditional to individual, digitalized and social media, they redefine the meaning of distant and ambivalent identities and design some clichés about them. That is why this paper is an attempt to describe the representation of marginal identities in Turkish media mainly through television channels, newspapers, internet and films that may stimulate the controversial relationship between normals and deviant and between insider and outsider. For this purpose, in this study, it is focused on the question of how Turkish media display and represent the transvestites.

Two-part models with stochastic processes for modelling longitudinal semicontinuous data: Computationally efficient inference and modelling the overall marginal mean.

Several researchers have described two-part models with patient-specific stochastic processes for analysing longitudinal semicontinuous data. In theory, such models can offer greater flexibility than the standard two-part model with patient-specific random effects. However, in practice, the high dimensional integrations involved in the marginal likelihood (i.e. integrated over the stochastic processes) significantly complicates model fitting. Thus, non-standard computationally intensive procedures based on simulating the marginal likelihood have so far only been proposed. In this paper, we describe an efficient method of implementation by demonstrating how the high dimensional integrations involved in the marginal likelihood can be computed efficiently. Specifically, by using a property of the multivariate normal distribution and the standard marginal cumulative distribution function identity, we transform the marginal likelihood so that the high dimensional integrations are contained in the cumulative distribution function of a multivariate normal distribution, which can then be efficiently evaluated. Hence, maximum likelihood estimation can be used to obtain parameter estimates and asymptotic standard errors (from the observed information matrix) of model parameters. We describe our proposed efficient implementation procedure for the standard two-part model parameterisation and when it is of interest to directly model the overall marginal mean. The methodology is applied on a psoriatic arthritis data set concerning functional disability.

‘God Even Blessed Me with Less Money’: Disappointment, Pentecostalism and the Middle Classes in Brazil

AbstractThrough shedding light on traditional Pentecostalism in Brazil this article reveals how middle-class people in São Paulo, Brazil, manage disappointment relating to current socio-economic conditions. Ethnographic research on Brazil's oldest Pentecostal church, which preserves an anachronistic style of practice, shows how people embrace a marginal identity and thereby critique social conditions in the country. In stark contrast to newer forms of Pentecostalism, people featured in this paper respond to an ‘anti-prosperity gospel’, in which failures and setbacks are construed as signs of spiritual purity and development. In a country where a ‘new middle class’ is supposedly finding prosperity, this study shows a religiously-oriented way in which people confront the disappointing gap between the promises of neoliberalism and the realities of jobless growth.

Black Women’s and Girls’ Persistence in the P–20 Mathematics Pipeline: Two Decades of Children, Youth, and Adult Education Research

Like other women and girls of color in the U.S. education system, Black1 women and girls negotiate and integrate multiple marginalized identities in mathematics. As such, this integrative review used critical race theory (CRT) and Black feminism as interpretive frames to explore factors that contribute to Black women’s and girls’ persistence in the mathematics pipeline and the role these factors play in shaping their academic outcomes. A synthesis of 62 research studies reveals that structural disruptions, community influences, and resilience strategies significantly influence Black women’s and girls’ persistence in mathematics, and that combined, these factors can culminate into a more robust mathematics identity for Black women and girls. A robust mathematics identity, in turn, is an aspect of self-actualization that is needed for persistence, engagement, and sustained success in the pursuit of a mathematics doctoral degree. New questions, paradigms, and ways of examining the experiences of Black women and girls in mathematics to advance further knowledge that will inform policy are identified and discussed as a future research agenda.

Depression and discrimination in the lives of women, transgender and gender liminal people in Ontario, Canada.

This article uses an intersectionality lens to explore how experiences of race, gender, sexuality, class and their intersections are associated with depression and unmet need for mental healthcare in a population of 704 women and transgender/gender liminal people from Ontario, Canada. A survey collecting demographic information, information about mental health and use of mental healthcare services, and data for the Everyday Discrimination Scale and the PHQ-9 Questionnaire for Depression was completed by 704 people via Internet or pen-and-paper between June 2011 and June 2012. Bivariate and regression analyses were conducted to assess group differences in depression and discrimination experiences, and predictors of depression and unmet need for mental healthcare services. Analyses revealed that race, gender, class and sexuality all corresponded to significant differences in exposure to discrimination, experiences of depression and unmet needs for mental healthcare. Use of interaction terms to model intersecting identities and exclusion contributed to explained variance in both outcome variables. Everyday discrimination was the strongest predictor of both depression and unmet need for mental healthcare. The results suggest lower income and intersections of race with other marginalised identities are associated with more depression and unmet need for mental healthcare; however, discrimination is the factor that contributes the most to those vulnerabilities. Future research can build on intersectionality theory by foregrounding the role of structural inequities and discrimination in promoting poor mental health and barriers to healthcare.

Masking as sexualization of sighting: Ontology and resistance

The image of a woman in visual arts is profiled and limited by social constructs, which are shaped and represented in accordance with the needs of a male author on the one and the observer on the other side. The image of a woman is produced in such discursive frames that it deviates from essential femininity, insisting on masking and camouflage strategies, in order to satisfy the imposed norm. When it comes to artistic practices that defy strategies with a masculinized approach in the representation of a woman's body and identity, feminist studies of images recognize several forms. One is aimed at presenting what the dominant discourse excludes - articulating marginal identities, others focus on the deconstruction of the masculine­centred language and the space as a representational framework, while some are directed at mapping the space beyond hegemonic discourse to the discovery and performance of discursively unrecognizable identities. All these practices are common in that they are critically related to the construct of gender and gender differences, by providing resistance to the masked image of a woman in visual arts, and by defining new, specific, decentred subjectivities in their work. The greatest contribution to feminist strategies for the realization of idiosyncrasies was precisely the surrealistic picture, in which the decentralized subject as a paradigm encouraged their own deconstruction, by removing all those layers imposed by the canonical patriarchal culture, by changing, transforming and transgressing in the field of feminist self­representation.

Enough About Adaptation. Let's Talk About Adapting

Enough about adaptationLet's talk about adapting Thomas Leitch (bio) Literature, Film, and Their Hideous Progeny: Adaptation and ElasTEXTity by Julie Grossman (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). Pp. 228. $99.00 cloth. $34.99 paper. Any eyebrows that are raised by the authorship of the volume that inaugurates Palgrave Macmillan's new series on Adaptation and Visual Culture, edited by R. Barton Palmer and Julie Grossman, should immediately be lowered because Grossman's approach to the subject of adaptation is novel, illuminating, and provocative. A brief perusal of the table of contents might suggest that this is just another collection of case studies ranging from the latter-day quasi-human creations of Gods and Monsters and Hugo to the intertextual daisy chain running from Cape Fear to the "Cape Feare" episode of The Simpsons to Anne Washburn's Mr. Burns, A Post-Electric Play. But Grossman's case studies are so inventively conceived, intelligently organized, and imaginatively analyzed that together they mount a formidable challenge to received wisdom about adaptation. A writer seeking material or inspired by earlier reading produces an adaptation of that earlier material. The two texts—books or plays or comics or movies or television shows—are alike in some ways, different in others. Knowing audiences, in Linda Hutcheon's resonant phrase,1 are invited to enjoy both the similarities and the differences, and critics are invited to compare and contrast the two texts and the two experiences of encountering them. Grossman does not reject this model, but she [End Page 507] complicates it by emphasizing the agency of the adapted and adapting texts over that of their adapters. These texts, "hideous progenies" like Frankenstein's Creature whose births are difficult and often "monstrous," are marked by " elasTEXTity," a "state of being for sources and adaptations that are indivisibly connected" (2). The central insight that drives Grossman's analysis is the scandalously intimate connection between these two seemingly opposite qualities. On the one hand, adaptations are deformed monstrosities, often delivered under considerable stress, that the authors of the original texts may well regard as parodies rather than duplicates. On the other, their very existence demonstrates the tropism of the original texts toward replication, rejuvenation, and renewal, all qualities that emphasize their chameleon fluidity and call their very status as originals into question. Adaptation studies has grappled with this problem before, most notably in the model Kamilla Elliott has derived from Lewis Carroll of "verbal/visual looking glass analogies . . . predicated on the reciprocal power of words and of pictures to evoke verbal figures in cognition" (153)2 and in Robert Stam's application of an intertextual model derived from Mikhail Bakhtin and Julia Kristeva to discuss adaptation as one of a legion of processes by which texts are inevitably produced, inflected, deformed, and recreated by other texts in an "ongoing whirl of intertextual reference and transformation" (186).3 What Grossman adds is a shift in emphasis from adaptations as a series of texts variously participating in these intertextual revels to adapting as an often monstrous practice of textual generation, degeneration, and regeneration. The "state of being" of elasTEXTity turns out to be indistinguishable from a state of becoming, whereby texts are most truly themselves when they spawn unholy offspring that challenge their primacy, integrity, and identity. Grossman has chosen a series of case studies that dramatize this process and arranged them to mount an increasingly sweeping series of challenges to models of textual integrity that have long served as a basis for Western aesthetics, more general models of identity that continue to anchor theories of selfhood and humanity, and the canons and methodologies of adaptation studies itself. Beginning with the Frankenstein's Creature and Hugo's Automaton, mechanical creations who paradoxically "illuminate the importance of human bonds and creativity" (32), she considers the transformative journeys, sometimes adaptive, sometimes anti-adaptive, undertaken by both the heroes and the creators of Apocalypse Now and O Brother, Where Art Thou? Next she turns [End Page 508] to the anatomies of marginal identity in the two film versions of Imitation of Life, "The Yellow Wallpaper," and [Safe], and films like Dogfight, Far From Heaven, and Kinky Boots whose hideous progeny include Broadway...