'A tragedy as old as history':Medical responses to infertility and artificial insemination by donor in 1950s Britain

This chapter will explore how the infertile patient was characterized, perceived, and treated by the medical profession in 1950s England and Scotland. Such was the concern that this subject engendered in postwar Britain that a Departmental Committee was appointed in 1958 (known as the Feversham Committee) to investigate infertility and its treatment through artificial insemination. The written and oral evidence submitted by medical witnesses to that Committee offers rich insights into medical thinking and practice, and into the complex sociomedical politics and ethical anxieties which surrounded the topic. The testimony of legal and religious witnesses will also be explored to a more limited extent in order to offer some context to medical understandings and treatments of infertility. It will be considered how women’s bodies, personalities, and even agency in proactively seeking motherhood through artificial insemination were heavily pathologized in medical and religious discourses, but also how the men involved – husbands, sperm donors and even doctors – did not escape this tendency to pathologize

Religious revelation, secrecy and the limits of visual representation

This article seeks to contribute to a more adequate understanding of the adoption of modern audiovisual mass media by contemporary religious groups. It does so by examining Pentecostal-charismatic churches as well as the Christian mass culture instigated by its popularity, and so-called traditional religion in Ghana, which develop markedly different attitudes towards audiovisual mass media and assume different positions in the public sphere. Taking into account the complicated entanglement of traditional religion and Pentecostalism, approaching both religions from a perspective of mediation which regards media as intrinsic to religion, and seeking to avoid the pitfall of overestimating the power of modern mass media to determine the world, this article seeks to move beyond an unproductive recurrence to oppositions such as tradition and modernity, or religion and technology. It is argued that instead of taking as a point of departure more or less set ideas about the nexus of vision and modernity, the adoption of new mass media by religious groups needs to be analyzed by a detailed ethnographic investigation of how these new media transform existing practices of religious mediation. Special emphasis is placed on the tension between the possibilities of gaining public presence through new media, and the difficulty in authorizing these media, and the experiences they induce, as authentic. Copyright © 2006 SAGE Publications

Mothers construct fathers: Destabilized patriarchy in La Leche League

This paper examines changing masculine ideals from the point of view of women homemakers through a case study of La Leche League, a maternalist organization dedicated to breastfeeding and mother primacy. We suggest two reasons for studying the League: first, an emerging literature suggests that changing norms are seeping into many such seemingly conservative groups, and second, the League continues to be highly successful among white, middle-class, married women. The paper looks at two aspects of masculinity, examining changes in the League through fieldwork, interviews, and content analysis, and finds that new norms of increased father involvement and decreased rights over women's bodies have both influenced League philosophy. We conclude that while in some respects a measure of the decline of men's patriarchal privileges, the League's changes also may contribute to a “restabilization” of male dominance in a modified, partial form.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/43548/1/11133_2004_Article_BF00990071.pd

Cloud Structure of Galactic OB Cluster Forming Regions from Combining Ground and Space Based Bolometric Observations

We have developed an iterative procedure to systematically combine the millimeter and submillimeter images of OB cluster-forming molecular clouds, which were taken by ground based (CSO, JCMT, APEX, IRAM-30m) and space telescopes (Herschel, Planck). For the seven luminous ($L$$>$10$^{6}$ $L_{\odot}$) Galactic OB cluster-forming molecular clouds selected for our analyses, namely W49A, W43-Main, W43-South, W33, G10.6-0.4, G10.2-0.3, G10.3-0.1, we have performed single-component, modified black-body fits to each pixel of the combined (sub)millimeter images, and the Herschel PACS and SPIRE images at shorter wavelengths. The $\sim$10$"$ resolution dust column density and temperature maps of these sources revealed dramatically different morphologies, indicating very different modes of OB cluster-formation, or parent molecular cloud structures in different evolutionary stages. The molecular clouds W49A, W33, and G10.6-0.4 show centrally concentrated massive molecular clumps that are connected with approximately radially orientated molecular gas filaments. The W43-Main and W43-South molecular cloud complexes, which are located at the intersection of the Galactic near 3-kpc (or Scutum) arm and the Galactic bar, show a widely scattered distribution of dense molecular clumps/cores over the observed $\sim$10 pc spatial scale. The relatively evolved sources G10.2-0.3 and G10.3-0.1 appear to be affected by stellar feedback, and show a complicated cloud morphology embedded with abundant dense molecular clumps/cores. We find that with the high angular resolution we achieved, our visual classification of cloud morphology can be linked to the systematically derived statistical quantities (i.e., the enclosed mass profile, the column density probability distribution function, the two-point correlation function of column density, and the probability distribution function of clump/core separations)

La représentation de la fonction maternelle (nurturance) dans les mouvements féministes américains

Die Repräsentation der Mutterfunktion (nurturance) in den amerikanischen Frauenbewegungen. Die Frauenbewegungen greifen ständig auf klar defînierte Begriffe zurück, die sie zu modifîzieren suchen. Die vorliegende Studie will die widersprüchlichen Positionen in bezug auf nurturance erhellen, die amerikanische Feministinnen in den letzten zwei Jahrhunderten eingenommen haben. Als Quelle der moralischen Auroritat der Frau en eingeklagt, wird der Begriff doch auch als ein kültüreller Rahmen zurückgewiesen, worin der Frau angeblich eine sozial, ökonomisch und politisch unterprivilegierte Stellung zukommt, insofern sie darin auf die kulturell und materiell minder bewerteten Aufgaben der Betreuung abhängiger Personen beschränkt wird. Die Argumentation des Artikels stützt sich auf Forschungsmaterial im Zu- sammenhang mit Frauenrechtlerinnen, die anläfilich der Eroffnung einer Abtreibung praktizierenden Klinik in Fargo (Norddakota) aktiv geworden sind. Dieses Material wurde ergänzt durch die Auswertung von Dokumenten zur Geschichte der amerikanischen Frauenbewegung.The Contradictions of Nurturance in American Women's Movements. Female activists everywhere use to their advantage the defining constructs they are trying to change. This essay explores the contradictory position nurturance (this concept encompasses biological reproduction, childrearing, and heterosexually organized household and families) has held for American women activists for the last two centuries : it is claimed as a source of female moral authority yet rejected as a cultural frame that puts women at a disadvantage socially, economically, and politically, confining them to the culturally and materially devalued tasks of caring for dependent people. My argument is based on material from research I conducted with abortion activists mobilized around an abortion clinic in Fargo, North Dakota as well as an interpretation of historical materials on female activism in American history.La représentation de la fonction maternelle (nurturance) dans les mouvements féministes américains. Les féministes emploient constamment à leur avantage des concepts bien définis qu'elles essaient de modifier. Cette étude a pour but d'explorer les positions contradictoires vis-à-vis de la notion de nurturance qu'ont adoptées les féministes au cours des deux derniers siècles. Revendiquée comme source de l'autorité morale des femmes, cette notion est toutefois rejetée comme un cadre culturel qui placerait les femmes dans une position socialement, économiquement et politiquement désavantageuse, en les confinant dans les tâches culturellement et matériellement dévaluées de prise en charge de personnes en situation de dépendance. Mon propos se fonde sur une recherche menée auprès de militantes qui se sont mobilisées sur la question de l'avortement à l'occasion de l'ouverture, à Fargo dans le Dakota du Nord, d'une clinique pratiquant des avortements, recherche que j'ai complétée par l'analyse de documents concernant l'histoire du féminisme en Amérique.Ginsburg Faye D. La représentation de la fonction maternelle (nurturance) dans les mouvements féministes américains. In: Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales. Vol. 84, septembre 1990. Masculin/féminin-2. pp. 49-56