The relationship between Self-Esteem and sexual Self-Concept in people with Physical-Motor disabilities

Background: Self-esteem is the value that the individuals give themselves, and sexual self-concept is also a part of individuality or sexualself. Impairment or disability exists not only in the physical body of disabled people but also in their attitudes. Negative attitudes affect the mental health of disabled people, causing them to have lower self-esteem. Objectives: This study aimed to examine the relationship between self-esteem and sexual self-concept in people with physical-motor disabilities. Patients and Methods: This cross-sectional study was conducted on 200 random samples with physical-motor disabilities covered by Isfahan Welfare Organization in 2013. Data collection instruments were the Persian Eysenck self-esteem questionnaire, and five domains (sexual anxiety, sexual self-efficacy, sexual self-esteem, sexual fear and sexual depression) of the Persian multidimensional sexual selfconcept questionnaire. Because of incomplete filling of the questionnaires, the data of 183 people were analyzed by the SPSS 16.0 software. Data were analyzed using the t-test, Man-Whitney and Kruskal-Wallis tests and Spearman correlation coefficient. Results: The mean age was 36.88 ± 8.94 years for women and 37.80 ± 10.13 for men. The mean scores of self-esteem among women and men were 15.80 ± 3.08 and 16.2 ± 2.90, respectively and there was no statistically significance difference. Comparison of the mean scores of sexual anxiety, sexual self-efficacy, sexual self-esteem, sexual fear and sexual depression among men and women showed that women scored higher than men in all domains. This difference was statistically significant in other domains except the sexual self-esteem (14.92 ± 3.61 vs. 13.56 ± 4.52) (P < 0.05). The Kruskal-Wallis test showed that except for sexual anxiety and sexual self-esteem, there was a statistical difference between other domains of people’s sexual self-concept and degree of disability (P < 0.05). Moreover, Spearman coefficient showed that there was only a correlation between men’s sexual anxiety, sexual self-esteem and sexual self-efficacy with their self-esteem. This correlation was positive in sexual anxiety and negative in two other domains. Conclusions: Lack of difference in self-esteem of disabled people in different degrees of disability and in both men and women suggests that disabled people should not be presumed to have low self-esteem, and their different aspects of life should be attended to, just like others. Furthermore, studies should be designed and implemented based on psychological, social and environmental factors that can help disabled people to promote their positive sexual self-concept through marriage, and reduce their negative self-concept. © 2015 Iranian Red Crescent Medical Journal

How can sexual difference make a difference : remarks on what could sexual difference be

Este artigo procura experimentar com a noção de diferença sexual, tentando dar-lhe outras roupagens, a partir de críticas que surgem no seio da produção teórica feminista – como as de Monique Wittig e Judith Butler – mas também de tentativas de resgatá-la ou re-significá-la como nos escritos de Luce Irigaray e Rosi Braidotti. Será que a teoria queer e a crítica a política de identidade acabam de vez com o projeto de diferença sexual, ou há algo que sobra _________________________________________________________________________________________________________ ABSTRACTThe article endeavours to experiment with the notion of sexual difference, trying to dress it differently on the basis of the criticisms that came out of some feminist theory – particularly those of Monique Wittig and Judith Butler. It also attempts to rescue it from these criticisms based on the works of Luce Irigaray and Rosi Braidotti. Do queer theory and the criticisms to identity politics leave no more space to the project of sexual difference? Or there is still something that is left out

Sexual difference

This chapter explains the main conceptions of sexual difference that have influenced feminist theory, tracing their roots in the psychoanalysis of Freud and Lacan, and then introducing the radical rethinking of sexual difference put forward by Luce Irigaray. For Irigaray, in the Western symbolic order there has only ever been sexual hierarchy, not genuine sexual difference. Her political program for changing the symbolic order to create a positive feminine subject-position—one that is not merely the underside or negative opposite of the masculine position—has been developed practically by some Italian feminists. Conceptions of sexual difference have also helped feminist theorists to rethink embodiment beyond the sex/gender distinction. The chapter concludes by considering how conceptions of sexual difference have made various current directions in feminist theory possible, including the new “material feminisms.

Aspects of Sex Differences: Social Intelligence vs. Creative Intelligence

In this article, we argue that there is an essential difference between social intelligence and creative intelligence, and that they have their foundation in human sexuality. For sex differences, we refer to the vast psychological, neurological, and cognitive science research where problem-solving, verbal skills, logical reasoning, and other topics are dealt with. Intelligence tests suggest that, on average, neither sex has more general intelligence than the other. Though people are equals in general intelligence, they are different in special forms of intelligence such as social intelligence and creative intelligence, the former dominant in women, the latter dominant in men. The dominance of creative intelligence in men needs to be explained. The focus of our research is on the strictly anthropological aspects, and consequently our explanation for this fact is based on the male-female polarity in the mating systems. Sexual dimorphism does not only regard bodily differences but implies different forms of sex life. Sex researchers distinguish between two levels of sexual intercourse: procreative sex and recreational sex, and to these we would add “creative sex.” On all three levels, there is a behavioral difference between men and women, including the subjective experience. These differences are as well attributed to culture as genetically founded in nature. Sexual reproduction is only possible if females cooperate. Their biological inheritance makes females play a decisive role in mate choice. Recreational sex for the purpose of pleasure rather than reproduction results from female extended sexual activity. Creative sex, on the contrary, is a specifically male performance of sexuality. We identify creative sex with eroticism. Eroticism evolved through the transformation of the sexual drive into a mental state of expectation and fantasizing. Hence, sex differences (that nowadays are covered up by cultural egalitarianism) continue to be the evolutionary origin of the difference between social and creative intelligence

Plasticity and difference. From ontological difference to sexual difference and back

Indexación: Revista UNAB.La lectura de Malabou desarrollada en este texto procura una aproximación a la plasticidad como pathos o método filosófico que disiente y resiste tanto de la metafísica como de la deconstrucción mediante una articulación estructural de la diferencia ontológica y de la diferencia sexual que, además, da lugar a una nueva consideración de lo femenino en virtud de la invención de una nueva esencia.The reading of Malabou hereby delivered offers an approximation to plasticity as philosophical pathos or method, which differs from and resists both, metaphysics and deconstruction by means of a structural articulation of ontological difference as sexual difference. This endeavor allows for a new consideration of the feminine by virtue of the “invention” of a new essence.http://revistahumanidades.unab.cl//wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Begonya-Saez-Plasticidad-y-diferencia.-De-la-diferencia-ontolo%CC%81gica-a-la-diferencia-sexual-y-viceversa.pd

Voicing embodiment, relating difference: towards a relational legal subjectivity

Focusing on the writings of Adriana Cavarero and Lia Cigarini, this piece examines the possible counterpractices and counterspaces of a politics of relational subjectivity outside the time of the masculine legal order which are to be found in Italian sexual difference theory. Both Cavarero and Cigarini share a desire to create a practice of sexual difference based on relational subjectivity. In their writings and in their praxis they have attempted to bring into being spaces where the unique embodied existent can interact with other unique existents in a space of relational politics. This is a politics based on the unique existent who acts, speaks, and thinks for herself rather than one based on the ideal abstract individual of liberal rights ideology. In effect, it amounts to a politics of relational plurivocality

Connecting women in the age of difference: Re-thinking gender in twenty-first century Aotearoa New Zealand

Editorial: This special issue of the Women’s Studies Journal is an exploration of the theme of difference and diversity among women in Aotearoa New Zealand in the twenty-first century. As a construct within feminist literature, ‘difference’ has, for over three decades, irrevocably altered the landscape of feminist politics – in both its scholarship and its praxis. Fundamental to the theories of difference that have emerged since the 1980s is the idea that women’s lived realities differ vastly depending on, amongst other variables, their sexual orientation, racial and ethnic background, religious beliefs, age and income status

Techniques of producing monosex or sterile population of fish for aquaculture -- a review of selected literature

The need to develop techniques that can make the male grow faster in many species of fish as well as the female in some other species cannot be over-emphasized. Monosex culture of the faster growing sex can increase production if the method is reliable. The use of such techniques as manual sexing, sterilisation, hybridization, gynogenesis, androgenesis polyploidy and sex-reversal can provide solutions or partial solutions to the problems associated with sexual difference, sexual maturation and unwanted reproductio

Sexual difference in/and the queer beyond of ethics

In her recent book, Are the Lips a Grave? A Queer Feminist on the Ethics of Sex, Lynne Huffer offers a daring call for a reconsideration of the rifts between feminist and queer theory in order to develop a "queer feminist ethics of eros" (Huffer 2013, 44). Arguing that sexual ethics lies at the fractured nexus between feminist and queer theory, Huffer seeks both to restore "a claim to an ethical queer feminism" and to transfigure ethics as "erotic living" (22). This project is clearly staged in the book's titular chapter, which provocatively brings together Michel Foucault's and Luce Irigaray's respective reformulations of sexual ethics with the so-called antisocial queer theory of Leo Bersani and Janet Halley. To my mind, one of the most invaluable contributions of Huffer's book is her queer reclamation of Irigaray's philosophy of sexual difference—a philosophy that many feminist and queer theorists alike have dismissed as irredeemably essentialist, conservative, heteronormative, and even homophobic, transphobic, and racist.1 For Huffer, however, "Irigaray's … absence from queer theory is evidence of a forgetting of her radical feminist practice as an always already queer method" (2013, 42). Taking off from Huffer's queer feminist rereading of Irigaray, I want to further queer ethics by exploring the relationship between ethics and sexual difference as it has been thought in European philosophy. First, I offer a critique of the conflation of queerness and "negativity" in antisocial queer theory and the abdication of ethical responsibility it ultimately entails. Following both Irigaray and Jacques Derrida, I then argue that sexual difference is wholly other (tout autre) to "the ethical" as it has been thought within phallogocentrism and, thus, I contend that justice demands a fidelity to this radical otherness of sexual difference. Queerness, I suggest, names precisely this "beyond" of the ethical—that is, sexual difference "itself"—and, thus, ironically, both queer and feminist theory must struggle for the heteros of sexual difference, beyond any distinction between she/he, hetero-/homosexual, friendship/love, or sex/eros

Abjection and Sexually Specific Violence in Doris Lessing’s The Cleft

The article applies selected concepts from the writings of Julia Kristeva to the analysis of a novel by Doris Lessing entitled The Cleft. Published in 2007, The Cleft depicts the origin of sexual difference in the human species. Its emergence is fraught with anxiety and sexually specific violence, and invites comparison with the primal separation from the mother and the emancipation of the subject in process at the cost of relegating the maternal to the abject in the writings of Julia Kristeva. Lessing creates an ahistorical community of females (Clefts) from which the male community (Squirts) eventually evolves. The growing awareness of sexual difference dovetails with the emotional and intellectual development, as the nascent human subject gradually enters linear time viewed from perspective by the narrator of the novel, a Roman senator who hoards ancient manuscripts with the story of Clefts and Squirts. The article juxtaposes the ideas of Lessing and Kristeva, who have both cut themselves off from feminism, and have both been inspired by psychoanalysis. Primarily, Lessing’s fictional imaginary can be adequately interpreted in light of Kristeva’s concept of abjection as an element that disturbs the system. My interpretation of abjection is indebted to Pamela Sue Anderson’s reading of Kristeva, notably her contention that violence as a response to sexual difference lies at the heart of collective identity. Finally, the imaginary used by Lessing and Kristeva is shown to have stemmed from the colonial imaginary like the concepts of Freud and Jung