Negotiating gender relations in the context of heterosexual intimate partner relationships : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Psychology, at Massey University, Manawatū, New Zealand

Contemporary neoliberal postfemininism portrays women as empowered and existing in heterosexual relationships where equality is negotiated between two equal beings. The current study is a feminist project seeking to understand how men and women negotiate gendered relations in the context of heterosexual intimate partner relationships. The research draws on individual semi-structured interviews conducted with six men and six women aged between 25 and 40, who had been in a heterosexual intimate relationship for at least two years, thus having experience in the area of interest. A feminist poststructural discourse analysis was used to attend to the gendered power relations and dominant discourses that enabled and constrained subjectivities and positioning for the men and women. This research indicates that whilst equality and women’s empowerment are popularised ideals, the lived reality is quite different. In both their own gendered subjectivities and gendered performances in their intimate heterosexual relationships, men and women are navigating the positions/roles on offer in hegemonic masculinity, emphasised femininity and neoliberal postfeminist ‘choice’ femininity that are both enabled and constrained by heteronormativity. Heteronormativity produces discourses, subjectivities and positioning that are so dominant they are invisible, and are taken up as one’s own individualised choices. Social sanctions make resisting or developing new positions difficult. The result is the continuing enactment of traditional gendered roles in intimate heterosexual relationships, rather than negotiating new positioning, which is reproducing inequality and the continued subordination of women

Seeking Refuge in the Fifth Amendment: The Applicability of the Privilege Against Self-Incrimination to Individuals who Risk Incrimination Outside the United States

This Note argues that the Fifth Amendment privilege prohibits the U.S. government from compelling individuals to offer testimony that would incriminate them in criminal proceedings outside the United States. Part I explores the development of the Fifth Amendment\u27s privilege against self-incrimination. Part II discusses the conflicting positions that have emerged in lower courts concerning the Fifth Amendment\u27s extraterritorial application. Part III argues that the Fifth Amendment protection regarding self-incrimination should apply to the risk of non-U.S. prosecution. This Note concludes that the principles reflected in the enactment of the Fifth Amendment and its treatment in both U.S. and English courts warrant the extraterritorial application of the self-incrimination privilege

Black Deaths Matter: A Conceptual Framework for Understanding Racial Disparities in Relationship Loss and Health

Black Americans tend to die at younger ages than white Americans. Black Americans are also more likely than white Americans to experience the premature death of mothers, fathers, siblings, children, and other relatives and friends. In this brief, PRC director Debra Umberson presents a conceptual framework for how disparities in loss launch a lifelong cascade of psychological, social, behavioral, and biological consequences that undermine social connections, health, and well-being over the life course for black Americans.Population Research Cente

A soothing invisible hand: moderation potentials in optimal control

A moderation incentive is a continuously differentiable control-dependent cost term that is identically zero on the boundary of the admissible control region, and is subtracted from the `do or die' cost function to reward sub-maximal control utilization in optimal control systems. A moderation potential is a function on the cotangent bundle of the state space such that the solutions of Hamilton's equations satisfying appropriate boundary conditions are solutions of the synthesis problem - the control-parametrized Hamiltonian system central to Pontryagin's Maximum Principle. A multi-parameter family of moderation incentives for affinely controlled systems with quadratic control constraints possesses simple, readily calculated moderation potentials. One member of this family is a shifted version of the kinetic energy-style control cost term frequently used in geometric optimal control. The controls determined by this family approach those determined by a logarithmic penalty function as one of the parameters approaches zero, while the cost term itself is bounded.Comment: 26 pages, 6 figure