Gay Emerging Adult Dating in College: a Feminist Grounded Theory Exploration

Research on intimate relationships has mushroomed as the definitions, practices, and contexts for dating change across generations. As an often overlooked population, sexual minorities (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered individuals) have received increased scholarly attention within the social and family science research. Whereas this increased attention is warranted, still a lack of research exists regarding dating and romantic relationships among sexual minorities, particularly during emerging adulthood (ages 18-25). The purpose of this study was to explore the definitions, processes, and contexts for dating among a small, same-sex oriented sample of emerging adults (aged 18-25) currently enrolled in a large southeastern university in the United States. The topic was approached using the symbolic interactionist and feminist lenses. Analyses of semi-structured interviews were conducted using a modified grounded theory approach Emergent themes and subthemes were compared and contrasted with specific attention to gay men’s and lesbian’s between- and within-group accounts. Results were that the definitions and the meanings of dating varied between participants. Participants detailed a process of dating that was consistent across gender, although some gender variations emerged regarding casual sex expectations. Last, dating seemed to be facilitated by the progressive nature of their affiliated college environment. The study concludes with a discussion detailing important findings, implications for future research, and recommendations for practice

‘Nothing to Hide … Nothing to Fear’: Discriminatory Surveillance and Queer Visibility in Great Britain and Northern Ireland

This chapter will ‘queer’ surveillance, interrogate the assumptions on which it is based and consider the uses to which it is put, by examining surveillance and policing practices in both the United Kingdom generally and, more specifically, in Northern Ireland, particularly as they have been directed at queer people. In the human crises engendered by surveillance, I will suggest, we also see a crisis in the meanings and value of the public, privacy, visibility and normalisation, issues that have long resonated with queer theory and queer studies

Surveillance, Gender, and the Virtual Body in the Information Age

Submitted in application of KU's Open Access policy.In our contemporary 'information age', information and the body stand in a new, peculiar, and ambiguous relationship to one another. Information is plumbed from the body but treated as separate from it, facilitating, as Irma van der Ploeg has suggested, the creation of a separate virtual 'body-as-information' that has affected the very ontology of the body. This 'informatization of the body' has been both spurred and enabled by surveillance techniques that create, depend upon, and manipulate virtual bodies for a variety of predictive purposes, including social control and marketing. While, as some feminist critics have suggested, there appears to be potential for information technologies to liberate us from oppressive ideological models, surveillance techniques, themselves so intimately tied to information systems, put normative pressure on non-normative bodies and practices, such as those of queer and genderqueer subjects. Ultimately, predictive surveillance is based in an innately conservative epistemology, and the intertwining of information systems with surveillance undermines any liberatory effect of the former

Lexical organization in deaf children who use British Sign Language: Evidence from a semantic fluency task

We adapted the semantic fluency task into British Sign Language (BSL). In Study 1, we present data from twenty-two deaf signers aged four to fifteen. We show that the same ‘cognitive signatures’ that characterize this task in spoken languages are also present in deaf children, for example, the semantic clustering of responses. In Study 2, we present data from thirteen deaf children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) in BSL, in comparison to a subset of children from Study 1 matched for age and BSL exposure. The two groups' results were comparable in most respects. However, the group with SLI made occasional word-finding errors and gave fewer responses in the first 15 seconds. We conclude that deaf children with SLI do not differ from their controls in terms of the semantic organization of the BSL lexicon, but that they access signs less efficiently

Safety and Pharmacokinetics of a Four Monoclonal Antibody Combination Against Botulinum C and D Neurotoxins.

Botulism is caused by botulinum neurotoxin (BoNT), the most poisonous substance known. BoNTs are also classified as Tier 1 biothreat agents due to their high potency and lethality. The existence of seven BoNT serotypes (A-G), which differ between 35% to 68% in amino acid sequence, necessitates the development of serotype specific countermeasures. We present results of a Phase 1 clinical study of an anti-toxin to BoNT serotypes C and D, NTM-1634, which consists of an equimolar mixture of four fully human IgG1 monoclonal antibodies (mAbs), each binding to non-overlapping epitopes on BoNT serotypes C and D resulting in potent toxin neutralization in rodents. This first-in-human study evaluated the safety and pharmacokinetics of escalating doses of NTM-1634 administered intravenously to healthy adults (NCT03046550). Three cohorts of eight healthy subjects received a single intravenous dose of NTM-1634 or placebo at 0.33 mg/kg, 0.66 mg/kg or 1 mg/kg. Follow-up examinations and pharmacokinetic evaluations were continued up to 121 days post-infusion. Subjects were monitored using physical examinations, hematology and chemistry blood tests, and electrocardiograms. Pharmacokinetic parameters were estimated using noncompartmental methods. The results demonstrated that the materials were safe and well-tolerated with the expected half-lives for human mAbs and with minimal anti-drug antibodies detected over the dose ranges and duration of the study