Dwight B. Billings

THE SOCIO-MEDICAL CONSTRUCTION OF TRANSSEXUALISM: AN INTERPRETATION AND CRITIQUE*

This article examines transexualism and its treatment by sex-reassignment surgery. Physicians have drawn upon their previous experience with hermaphrodites and the psychological benefits of elective surgery to legitimate sex-change surgery for what they view as a distinct patient population, transexuals. We demonstrate that transexualism is a socially constructed reality which only exists in and through medical practice. Furthermore, we contend that sex-change surgery reflects and extends late-capitalist logics of reification and commodification, while simultaneously reaffirming traditional male and female gender roles.

FAMILY STRATEGIES IN A SUBSISTENCE ECONOMY: Beech Creek, Kentucky, 1850-1942

In this study of landownership, life-cycle effects, and household composition in a rural Appalachian community, we examine the nature of family strategies in a subsistence-oriented economy. Baseline ethnographic data from 1942 are linked through genealogical information to data on households from the manuscript agricultural and population censuses of 1850, 1860, 1870, 1880, 1900, and 1910. The great variability in household composition over this period indicates the necessity of observing household arrangements at many points in time. In 1880 and 1900 there was a relationship between landownership and household composition, controlling for age of the head of household, with young owners twice as likely to head complex households as young nonowners. This suggests that the family strategy of bringing additional kin into the household—usually as farm laborers—was a privilege of property ownership. Data on surplus food production show that this strategy of family extension primarily represented a way to stave off economic disaster rather than a response to increased economic opportunity. In addition, strong family group networks, observed in the 1942 ethnography, provided another survival strategy, making possible the reproduction of marginal and below-subsistence-producing farms through interhousehold economic cooperation.

Poverty and Income Inequality in Appalachia

In a region that continues to be highly dependent upon federal spending (Gatrell & Calzonetti, 2003), public money matters.The contention that free market forces in and of themselves are sufficient to lift lagging regions out of poverty has gained great currency over the past two decades. Efficiency-enhancing measures and infrastructure investments have helped some Appalachian communities but not others. The abrupt reversal of declining income inequities between metro and nonmetro counties in the 1980s suggests that both income maintenance and investments in economic efficiency remain necessary for many rural Appalachian counties. In Central Appalachia, despite significant infrastructure investments, many communities still lack basic “nuts-and-bolts” infrastructure such as sewer and water systems. Continued federal involvement and income maintenance for rural counties are difficult propositions to advance in the current policy climate but appear to remain vital tools for the reduction of currently increasing subregional and metro/nonmetro economic differentials.

Social origins of Appalachian poverty: markets, cultural strategies, and the state in an Appalachian Kentucky community, 1804–1940

Appalachian poverty has typically been interpreted as the result of either persistent economic isolation or, conversely, absentee corporate capitalist exploitation. Instead, by stressing the interplay of slave-based manufacturing and commerce, and the self-exploitation and exploitation of family labor in subsistence farming, we locate the social origins of Appalachian poverty in the indigenous development of the mountain economy prior to the advent of capitalist industrialization. By examining the interplay of markets, cultural norms, and the local state in nineteenth-century Clay County, Kentucky, we picture the diversity and complexity of non-capitalist class processes in Appalachia prior to the modern era of coal mining and show how these contributed to the pattern of dependent capitalist development and poverty for which the region is well-known.

Violence and local state formation : A longitudinal case study of Appalachian feuding

We investigate the causes of protracted violent conflict by examining the dynamics of a so-called family feud in one Appalachian county in the 19 th century. Using data from the civil and criminal court docket and sociohistorical sources, we find that protracted local violence was neither an alternative to dispute resolution through the courts nor a simple function of economic development. Rather, feud violence reflected the social and economic relations and cleavages that accompanied local state building. We discuss the implications of these findings for a historically specific understanding of the relation between local governance and protracted disputing

Race Differences in the Origins and Consequences of Chronic Poverty in Rural Appalachia

Much of what is known about how Appalachians cope with chronic poverty is the result of the landmark Beech Creek studies, a series of investigations of an impoverished, geographically isolated group of neighborhoods in eastern Kentucky (Brown 1952a, 1952b, 1988 [1950]; Schwarzweller et al. 1971; McCoy 1986). In 1942 James Brown purposefully selected a remote, nonmining area in rural Clay County, Kentucky, to document a way of life that was less deeply affected by the penetration of commodity, labor,

Class and class politics in the southern Populist movement of the 1890s

Interpretations of the class basis and interests of the southern Populist movement of the late 19th century vary greatly. This paper presents a class‐dialectical analysis of the Populist movement that contests previous conservative, liberal, and romantic‐radical interpretations. Biographical analysis of Populist leaders in North Carolina, analyses of Populist delegations in the North Carolina state senate, and statistical analyses of legislative voting behavior suggest that elected Populist officials, though reform oriented, represented the interests of larger farmers and planters in North Carolina to the neglect of poor black and white farmers and farm tenants upon whose votes they were dependent. Their political demise was a result of this class contradiction, which was at the heart of the Populist movement.

States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China.

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Worlds Apart: Why Poverty Persists in Rural America

This work takes us to three remote rural areas in the USA to hear the tales of the residents - the poor, the rich, and those in between - as they talk about their families, work, hard times, and their hopes. It provides an insight into the dynamics of poverty, politics and community change.

Planters and the Making of a "New South": Class, Politics, and Development in North Carolina, 1865-1900.

Billings disputes the assumption that an incipient merchant class built the states cotton mills; he reveals that a majority of the early mills was owned by prominent planters and agrarians. He shows the persistent hegemony and support for industrialization among the landed upper class and describes several generations of five powerful North Carolina families who spread plantation paternalism to the mill-village system. Billings compares this with similar cases in Germany and Japan.A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.