Faking like a woman? Towards an interpretative theorization of sexual pleasure.

This article explores the possibility of developing a feminist approach to gendered and sexual embodiment which is rooted in the pragmatist/interactionist tradition derived from G.H. Mead, but which in turn develops this perspective by inflecting it through more recent feminist thinking. In so doing we seek to rebalance some of the rather abstract work on gender and embodiment by focusing on an instance of 'heterosexual' everyday/night life - the production of the female orgasm. Through engaging with feminist and interactionist work, we develop an approach to embodied sexual pleasure that emphasizes the sociality of sexual practices and of reflexive sexual selves. We argue that sexual practices and experiences must be understood in social context, taking account of the situatedness of sex as well as wider socio-cultural processes the production of sexual desire and sexual pleasure (or their non-production) always entails interpretive, interactional processes

Preservation of meander channel and scour features under aggradational and non-aggradational conditions

The internal architecture of channel belts commonlyconsists of channel-form bounding surfaces due to channelmigration and scouring (e.g. Miall, 1985). These boundingsurfaces are essential to our reconstructions of palaeochannel dimensions. It is therefore crucial tounderstand the suite of processes that form and transferthese surfaces into the fluvial rock record. Quantitativetheoretical relations have been derived between fluvialsurface processes and the formation of channel boundingsurfaces in the subsurface (e.g. Paola & Borgman, 1991). These indicate that the balance between lateral channelmigration and aggradation rate determines boundingsurface formation. How large the aggradation rate needs tobe to have a notable impact on bounding surfaceformation and how this affects preservation is currently notwell understood. While these subsurface bounding surfacesare straightforward to measure from the sedimentaryrecord and thus to characterize as a probability distribution,the conditions that formed these surfaces are unknown. The objective of this study is to quantify the relationbetween meander surface morphodynamics and theresulting meander belt internal architecture duringaggradation in contrast to non-aggradational conditions

Preservation of meandering river channels in uniformly aggrading channel belts

Channel belt deposits from meandering river systems commonly display an internal architecture of stacked depositional features with scoured basal contacts due to channel and bedform migration across a range of scales. Recognition and correct interpretation of these bounding surfaces is essential to reconstruction of palaeochannel dimensions and to flow modelling for hydrocarbon exploration. It is therefore crucial to understand the suite of processes that form and transfer these surfaces into the fluvial sedimentary record. Here the numerical model ‘NAYS2D’ is used to simulate a highly sinuous meandering river with synthetic stratigraphic architectures that can be compared directly to the sedimentary record. Model results highlight the importance of spatial and temporal variations in channel depth and migration rate to the generation of channel and bar deposits. Addition of net uniform bed aggradation (due to excess sediment input) allows quantification of the preservation of meander morphology for a wide range of depositional conditions. The present authors found that the effect of vertical variation in scouring due to channel migration is generally orders of magnitude larger than the effect of bed aggradation. This explains the limited impact bed aggradation has on preservation of meander morphology. Moreover, lateral differences in stratigraphy within the meander belt are much larger than the stratigraphic imprint of bed aggradation. Repeatedly produced alternations of point bar growth followed by cut-off result in a vertical trend in channel and scour feature stacking. Importantly, this vertical stacking trend differs laterally within the meander belt. In the centre of the meander belt, the high reworking intensity results in many bounding surfaces and disturbed deposits. Closer to the margins, reworking is infrequent and thick deposits with a limited number of bounding surfaces are preserved. These marginal areas therefore have the highest preservation potential for complete channel deposits and are thus best suited for palaeochannel reconstruction