Ana S. Q. Liberato

Learning to Live with OCD: Labeling, the Self, and Stigma

Researchers have long questioned relationships among self-conceptions, “mental illness,” and stigma. This article looks at these issues through the lens of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD), as minimal research has focused on the lived experience of OCD. We examine the impact of OCD on constructions of identity and the management/resistance of stigma. We do this through in-depth interviews with an untraditional Internet-based sample. We find respondents experience a crisis of self that leads them to a variety of strategies to deal with self-stigma, experienced stigma, and anticipated stigma.

Latinidad and Masculinidad in Hollywood Scripts

Abstract We examined representations of Latinidad and masculinidad in a set of crime and independent films. Findings show that crime films emphasized marginality and suggested Latinos’ inadequate cultural stock. They focused on violence and created notions of Latino inferiority based on class-specific presumptions of power, masculinity and success. The narratives suggest that Latinos lack the assertiveness and brilliance of the tough white gangster of the 1930s and 1940s. The deviant Latino is rather emotional and succumbs to his own vulnerabilities. He possesses an unfit masculinity which is linked to the presumed backwardness of his own ethnic community. The independent films reproduced some elements of these stereotypes, but one, Girlfight, situated Latinos in the context of racism, assimilation and multiculturalism. They offered a different narrative and a new Latino subject, one that somewhat destabilizes the coherence of racist and patriarchal messages found in the crime movies examined in this paper.

The Well-Being of Industrial Workers: A Quantitative Assessment of the Dominican Case

This paper examines the influence of gender and industrial employment on two dimensions of well-being. An analysis based on the 1996 DHS survey showed the non-significant effects of the two variables on material wealth and housing quality. Key factors in increasing household well-being were urban location, household labor, and education. Urban location showed the largest positive effect on well-being. The Chi-square test showed a significant relationship between free trade zone employment and access to durable goods (P ≤ 0.5). These findings show the larger impact of specific demographic conditions on womens well-being, favoring contextual analysis over exploitation and opportunity frameworks.

Systemic Racism and Anti-Haitian Racism: Challenges and Opportunities

The authors demonstrate that systemic racism theory can be utilized to explain and confront anti-Haitian racism. The main argument is that systemic racism theory is exportable because it provides a framework from which the historical, structural-institutional, and ideological can be articulated in a coherent and integrated way. Systemic racism’s argued plausible exportability lies in its ability to link anti-Haitian racism to the dynamics of power, hegemony, and material interests, past and present practices of the state and government and societal institutions, and different dimensions and forms of discrimination. It also provides a structural standpoint for identifying and challenging racial oppression. The chapter establishes connections between systemic racism and the white racial frame, shedding light on the mechanisms through which anti-Haitian oppression is legitimized and maintained.

Democracy and the Left: Social Policy and Inequality in Latin America

odization of the racial project in the Obama era. Given the volume’s focus on the United States, it is striking that so little attention (with the exception of Singh’s essay) is given to the mass incarceration and policing of the last thirty years; here surely is one of those elusive social processes by which race is forged and institutionalized. Undergirding the most trenchant chapters, however, is a common grounding in the transnational racial project of a declining U.S. hegemon. Whether this remakes the liberal imperial project or marks the failure of the neo-liberal/neo-conservative project remains very much an open question here. These ambiguities are revealed in Omi and Winant’s concluding chapter, where readers remain curiously tethered to a consideration—and in many ways, a defense— of the gains of the 1960s and 1970s social movements. This is at times difficult to grasp given the fierce abandonment by the left and right, Democrats and Republicans alike, of the postwar liberal and social democratic racial project. Still, as the authors in this collection repeatedly emphasize, uncertainty and fluidity in racial conceptions, identities, and movements for justice mark the present and near future—and this is a remarkable advance from the scholarship of a generation ago. Confronting the inability of past structural formations and discourses to explicate racial meanings and hierarchies as they are being remade by today’s movements, migrations, and states is still a bracing tonic. Even more problematic, and yet to be unearthed here, is the ongoing impact of the replacement of the Third World/U.S. racial binaries of the mid-twentieth century by the rise of Asian/ Global South relations in the decades to come. These observations only serve to underline the importance and value of this anthology to students and scholars of race in the twentyfirst century. Written in accessible language for undergraduate as well as graduate classes on race, ethnicity, and stratification, it marks the summation of almost a generation of engaged work undertaken during the collapse of liberal hopes and dreams for racial reconciliation. Living as we do in an unstable interregnum as a new, global racial regime is being forged, this collection and the questions its authors grapple with are all the more pressing.