The complications of ‘hiring a hubby’: gender relations and the commoditisation of home maintenance in New Zealand

This paper examines the commoditization of traditionally male domestic tasks through interviews with handymen who own franchises in the company ‘Hire a Hubby’ in New Zealand and homeowners who have paid for home repair tasks to be done. Discussions of the commoditization of traditionally female tasks in the home have revealed the emotional conflicts of paying others to care as well as the exploitative and degrading conditions that often arise when work takes place behind closed doors. By examining the working conditions and relationships involved when traditionally male tasks are paid for, this paper raises important questions about the valuing of reproductive labour and the production of gendered identities. The paper argues that while working conditions and rates of pay for ‘hubbies’ are better than those for people undertaking commoditized forms of traditionally female domestic labour, the negotiation of this work is still complex and implicated in gendered relations and identities. Working on the home was described by interviewees as an expression of care for family and a performance of the ‘right’ way to be a ‘Kiwi bloke’ and a father. Paying others to do this labour can imply a failure in a duty of care and in the performance of masculinity

The effect of twisted magnetic field on the resonant absorption of MHD waves in coronal loops

The standing quasi modes in a cylindrical incompressible flux tube with magnetic twist that undergoes a radial density structuring is considered in ideal magnetohydrodynamics (MHD). The radial structuring is assumed to be a linearly varying density profile. Using the relevant connection formulae, the dispersion relation for the MHD waves is derived and solved numerically to obtain both the frequencies and damping rates of the fundamental and first-overtone modes of both the kink (m=1) and fluting (m=2,3) waves. It was found that a magnetic twist will increase the frequencies, damping rates and the ratio of the oscillation frequency to the damping rate of these modes. The period ratio P_1/P_2 of the fundamental and its first-overtone surface waves for kink (m=1) and fluting (m=2,3) modes is lower than 2 (the value for an untwisted loop) in the presence of twisted magnetic field. For the kink modes, particularly, the magnetic twists B_{\phi}/B_z=0.0065 and 0.0255 can achieve deviations from 2 of the same order of magnitude as in the observations. Furthermore, for the fundamental kink body waves, the frequency bandwidth increases with increasing the magnetic twist.Comment: 18 pages, 9 figure

Propagating Disturbances in Coronal Loops: A Detailed Analysis of Propagation Speeds

Quasi-periodic disturbances have been observed in the outer solar atmosphere for many years now. Although first interpreted as upflows (Schrijver et al. (1999)), they have been widely regarded as slow magnetoacoustic waves, due to observed velocities and periods. However, recent observations have questioned this interpretation, as periodic disturbances in Doppler velocity, line width and profile asymmetry were found to be in phase with the intensity oscillations (De Pontieu et al. (2010),Tian1 et al. (2011))}, suggesting the disturbances could be quasi-periodic upflows. Here we conduct a detailed analysis of the velocities of these disturbances across several wavelengths using the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA) on board the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO). We analysed 41 examples, including both sunspot and non sunspot regions of the Sun. We found that the velocities of propagating disturbances (PDs) located at sunspots are more likely to be temperature dependent, whereas the velocities of PDs at non sunspot locations do not show a clear temperature dependence. We also considered on what scale the underlying driver is affecting the properties of the PDs. Finally, we found that removing the contribution due to the cooler ions in the 193 A wavelength suggests that a substantial part of the 193 emission of sunspot PDs can be contributed to the cool component of 193\AA.Comment: 26 Papges, 15 Figure