Heteronormativiteten och den ensamma tvåsamheten- en undersökning av en familjerättslig handbok

Social workers meet individuals who structure their family in varied ways; these public servants have the possibility to initially accept and normalize new family forms. Their work is an arena where political power is exercised and it is therefore important that resources that are at hand enable them to meet non-normative families in an including and understanding way. This study investigates how a handbook from 2012 produced by Socialstyrelsen regarding custody, living-arrangements and right to access constructs the idea of the family. Queertheory and the ideological and juridical regulations of the family are used in creating a flow scheme where the normative family is identified. This flow scheme is through conceptual and content analysis applied to distinguish the handbooks construction of the family and used to examine if this construction resembles the normative family. In the flow scheme criteria’s such as heterosexuality, a sexual twoness, and parents who are legal guardians of their children are identified to be part of the normative family. In the handbook most of these criteria’s are likewise found, a reality that points to an exclusion of certain parents and that possibly indicates a structural problem in this field of the public sector

Kvinnor i kommunfullmäktige: en fallstudie av Bromölla och Östra Göinge

I den svenska demokratin är partierna centrala aktörer men de politiska företrädarna är också intressanta att studera. Kvinnor och män kan ha olika intressen och åsikter som speglar deras verklighet utanför politiken. I denna uppsats undersöks betydelsen av social representation för den politik som förs i kommunfullmäktige samt existerande normer för kvinnliga kommunpolitiker. Social representation avgränsas här främst till hur kvinnlig politisk representation påverkar hur väl kvinnors intressefrågor företräds. Undersökningen är en fallstudie av kommunfullmäktige i Bromölla och Östra Göinge, som är två relativt lika kommuner förutom i frågan om andel kvinnliga förtroendevalda. Materialet vi använder oss av är protokoll från fullmäktiges sammanträden samt en enkät som skickats ut till samtliga kvinnliga politiker i kommunfullmäktige. I protokollen trodde vi att vi skulle finna en markant skillnad mellan kommunerna som skulle kunna härledas till andelen kvinnliga förtroende-valda, detta var dock inte ett mönster vi kunde finna. Enkäterna visade på att de kvinnliga kommunpolitikerna hade vissa intressefrågor som stämde in på vad vi identifierat som ”kvinnofrågor” vilket tyder på att institutionell makt genom samhälleliga strukturer och normer låser kvinnor vid vissa frågor

Technologies of contraception and abortion

Soon to turn 60, the oral contraceptive pill still dominates histories of technology in the ‘sexual revolution’ and after. ‘The pill’ was revolutionary for many, though by no means all, women in the west, but there have always been alternatives, and looking globally yields a different picture. The condom, intrauterine device (IUD), surgical sterilization (male and female) and abortion were all transformed in the twentieth century, some more than once. Today, female sterilization (tubal ligation) and IUDs are the world's most commonly used technologies of contraception. The pill is in third place, followed closely by the condom. Long-acting hormonal injections are most frequently used in parts of Africa, male sterilization by vasectomy is unusually prevalent in Britain, and about one in five pregnancies worldwide ends in induced abortion. Though contraceptive use has generally increased in recent decades, the disparity between rich and poor countries is striking: the former tend to use condoms and pills, the latter sterilization and IUDs. Contraception, a term dating from the late nineteenth century and since then often conflated with abortion, has existed in many forms, and techniques have changed and proliferated over time. Diverse local cultures have embraced new technologies while maintaining older practices. Focusing on Britain and the United States, with excursions to India, China and France, this chapter shows how the patterns observed today were established and stabilized, often despite persistent criticism and reform efforts. By examining past innovation, and the distribution and use of a variety of tools and techniques, it reconsiders some widely held assumptions about what counts as revolutionary and for whom. Analytically, it takes up and reflects on one of the main issues raised by feminists and social historians: the agency of users as patients and consumers faced with choice and coercion. By examining practices of contraception alongside those of abortion, it revisits the knotty question of technology in the sexual revolution and the related themes of medical, legal, religious and political forms of control

Biomarkers for classification and class prediction of stress in a murine model of chronic subordination stress.

Selye defined stress as the nonspecific response of the body to any demand and thus an inherent element of all diseases. He reported that rats show adrenal hypertrophy, thymicolymphatic atrophy, and gastrointestinal ulceration, referred to as the stress triad, upon repeated exposure to nocuous agents. However, Selye's stress triad as well as its extended version including reduced body weight gain, increased plasma glucocorticoid (GC) concentrations, and GC resistance of target cells do not represent reliable discriminatory biomarkers for chronic stress. To address this, we collected multivariate biological data from male mice exposed either to the preclinically validated chronic subordinate colony housing (CSC) paradigm or to single-housed control (SHC) condition. We then used principal component analysis (PCA), top scoring pairs (tsp) and support vector machines (SVM) analyses to identify markers that discriminate between chronically stressed and non-stressed mice. PCA segregated stressed and non-stressed mice, with high loading for some of Selye's stress triad parameters. The tsp analysis, a simple and highly interpretable statistical approach, identified left adrenal weight and relative thymus weight as the pair with the highest discrimination score and prediction accuracy validated by a blinded dataset (92% p-value < 0.0001; SVM model = 83% accuracy and p-value < 0.0001). This finding clearly shows that simultaneous consideration of these two parameters can be used as a reliable biomarker of chronic stress status. Furthermore, our analysis highlights that the tsp approach is a very powerful method whose application extends beyond what has previously been reported

Obinutuzumab Versus Rituximab Immunochemotherapy in Previously Untreated iNHL: Final Results From the GALLIUM Study

The phase III GALLIUM trial assessed the safety and efficacy of obinutuzumab-based versus rituximab-based immunochemotherapy in patients with previously untreated follicular lymphoma (FL) or marginal zone lymphoma (MZL). At the primary analysis, the trial met its primary end point, demonstrating improvement in investigator-assessed progression-free survival (PFS) with obinutuzumab-based versus rituximab-based immunochemotherapy in patients with FL. We report the results of the final analysis in the FL population, with an additional exploratory analysis in the MZL subgroup. Overall, 1202 patients with FL were randomized 1:1 to obinutuzumab- or rituximab-based immunochemotherapy followed by maintenance with the same antibody for up to 2 years. After a median 7.9 (range, 0.0–9.8) years of follow-up, PFS remained improved with obinutuzumab- versus rituximab-based immunochemotherapy, with 7-year PFS rates of 63.4% versus 55.7% (P = 0.006). Time-to-next antilymphoma treatment was also improved (74.1% versus 65.4% of patients had not started their next antilymphoma treatment at 7 y; P = 0.001). Overall survival was similar between the arms (88.5% versus 87.2%; P = 0.36). Irrespective of the treatment received, PFS and OS were higher in patients with a complete molecular response (CMR) versus those with no CMR (P < 0.001). Serious adverse events were reported in 48.9% and 43.4% of patients in the obinutuzumab and rituximab arms, respectively; there was no difference in the rate of fatal adverse events (4.4% and 4.5%, respectively). No new safety signals were reported. These data demonstrate the long-term benefit of obinutuzumab-based immunochemotherapy and confirm its role as a standard-of-care for the first-line treatment of advanced-stage FL, taking into account patient characteristics and safety considerations