Jessica Autumn Brown

Close Your Eyes and Think of England Pronatalism in the British Print Media

Faced with declining fertility rates, media in Britain are reacting with anxiety about cultural annihilation. To look at how nationalism inflects concerns over biological and cultural reproduction, the authors analyze coverage of falling fertility and rising immigration in Great Britain in major newspapers in 2000-2. They find pronatalist appeals to be commonand especially directed at women but varying in how women’s duty to the nation is framed. Appeals characterized as begging, lecturing, threatening, and bribing express different relationships between individual interest and the national good and offer positive and negative views of women. The political leanings of specific newspapers affect how they connect biological reproduction to the cultural threat seen in immigration. Even positive views of women as making rational reproductive choices are tainted by alarmist views of immigration as a threat to national survival.

The Incidental Orgasm: The Presence of Clitoral Knowledge and the Absence of Orgasm for Women

ABSTRACT Women report anorgasmia and other difficulties achieving orgasm. One approach to alleviating this problem is to teach women about the clitoris. This assumes that women lack information about the clitoris and that knowledge about the clitoris is correlated with orgasm. Using a non-random sample of 833 undergraduate students, our study investigates both assumptions. First, we test the amount of knowledge about the clitoris, the reported sources of this knowledge, and the correlation between citing a source and actual knowledge. Second, we measure the correlation between clitoral knowledge and orgasm in both masturbation and partnered sex. Among a sample of undergraduate students, the most frequently cited sources of clitoral knowledge (school and friends) were associated with the least amount of tested knowledge. The source most likely to correlate with clitoral knowledge (self-exploration) was among the most rarely cited. Despite this, respondents correctly answered, on average, three of the five clitoral knowledge measures. Knowledge correlated significantly with the frequency of womens orgasm in masturbation but not partnered sex. Our results are discussed in light of gender inequality and a social construction of sexuality, endorsed by both men and women, that privileges mens sexual pleasure over womens, such that orgasm for women is pleasing, but ultimately incidental.

‘We Must Demonstrate Intolerance toward the Intolerant’: Boundary Liberalism in Citizenship Education for Immigrants in Germany

Following the decline of ethnic notions of national identity, the extent to which immigrants are believed to have acceptably liberal values has become a site of boundary making in Western Europe. Much scholarly work has focused on ‘boundary liberalism’ in European media/policy discourse, and the ways that Muslim migrants in particular are framed as carriers of unacceptable ideologies. There has, however, been little exploration of how these ideas shape practice in the mandatory citizenship training that is an increasingly common feature of European integration regimes. This article examines boundary liberalism in citizenship education as it took place in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Attention is paid to how instructors interpret the mandate to enforce tolerance in others in light of Germany’s own problematic history, how curricula and classroom interactions define normative liberalism, and how lessons on these values still draw the symbolic boundaries of national and supranational identities to exclude Muslims.

Multilevel citizenship (democracy, citizenship, and constitutionalism)

in any official document or were recorded with faulty information. As Dunn’s book demonstrates, oral testimony is an essential way to correct records of racial violence that often are woefully incomplete and inaccurate. Yet, oral history is not without problems as a method of historical reconstruction since how people remember and recount the past is subject to a variety of distortion, biases, and omissions. The Beast in Florida does not advance a new interpretation of racial violence or Florida’s racial history. Like George C. Wright’s earlier study of Kentucky (Racial Violence in Kentucky, 1865–1940, LSU Press, 1996), it presents racial terrorism in a broad sense, as both incidents that were recorded as lynchings and other deaths of black Floridians that were attributed to racial animus. Unlike Wright, however, Dunn does not systematically trace legally sanctioned killings of blacks in Florida at the hands of white judges and juries. Nonetheless, Dunn’s efforts to compile evidence from documentary sources and oral testimonies of witnesses and others provide a foundation for future scholars to examine the extensive violence that has underlain black–white relationships in Florida’s history.

For These People It Is Almost Too Late

Following the post-Holocaust and post-colonial eras, models of nationhood grounded in racial and ethnic exclusionism have declined in popularity, while a concurrent multiculturalist trend led many Western immigrant-receiving nations to assert (or at least pay lip service to) the desirability of fostering cultural, racial and religious diversity. Although multiculturalism has itself increasingly come under attack, nativists now find it difficult to argue that outsiders should be excluded merely because they are racially or culturally different (Koopmans et al., 2006; Goldberg, 2009). Instead, advocates of restrictive immigration policies will often isolate one group (quite often the largest, most visible or newest migrant group) and make assertions for why that group in particular is uniquely problematic. Such speakers will often simultaneously single out other migrant populations for praise as “model minorities”, a tactic that both insulates the speaker from charges of xenophobia and provides “proof” that successful integration is possible for outsiders with the right values or attributes (Espiritu, 2007). Nativists thus increasingly class outsiders into two groups, those who are merely different, and thus acceptable, and those who are in some way deviant, and thus are not.

Work, Sex, and Cigarettes: Gender and the "Good Citizen" in Orientation Classes for Immigrants in Germany

The article, based on ethnographic and interview-based research in Germany, looks at how citizenship classes for adult immigrants use normative messages about gender practice and ideology to discipline prospective citizens and to draw symbolic boundaries that define the nation. These gendered practices and ideologies fall into three categories: those linked with work; those associated with sex, relationships, and body display; and those connected to smoking. Each of these sets of behaviors has become salient in response to Germany’s largest migrant group, Muslims, but each has also been used as a gendered resource in past citizen-making projects. The article thus explores how discipline and exclusion in modern Germany are twinned, historically situated processes that draw heavily on gender and racialized framings of religion and culture. It concludes with an examination of the strategic ways that immigrant students themselves use gendered rhetoric to make their own inclusion and exclusion claims, and a discussion of both the benefits and pitfalls of embracing feminist principles as features of national identity.