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Disabilities and the Life Course
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-80455-202-5

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Publication date: 31 July 2023

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Disabilities and the Life Course
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-80455-202-5

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Publication date: 6 February 2013

Heather E. Dillaway and Elizabeth R. Paré

Purpose – Within cultural discourse, prescriptions for “good” motherhood exist. To further the analysis of these prescriptions, we examine how media conversations about Republican…

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Purpose – Within cultural discourse, prescriptions for “good” motherhood exist. To further the analysis of these prescriptions, we examine how media conversations about Republican Vice-Presidential candidate Sarah Palin, Democratic Presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, and First Lady Michelle Obama during the 2008 presidential election campaign illustrate existing notions of good motherhood.Methods – Using qualitative content analysis techniques, we review media discourse about Palin, Clinton, and Obama during this campaign. We use existing feminist literature on motherhood and an intersectionality perspective to ground our analysis, comparing and contrasting discourse about these political figures.Findings – The 2008 campaign represented a campaign for good motherhood as much as it represented a campaign for the next president. Discourse on Palin, Clinton, and Obama creates three very different characterizations of mothers: the bad, working mother and failed supermom (Palin), the unfeeling, absent mother (Clinton), and the intensive, stay-at-home mother (Obama). The campaign reified a very narrow, ideological standard for good motherhood and did little to broaden the acceptability of mothers in politics.Value of paper – This article exemplifies the type of intersectional work that can be done in the areas of motherhood and family. Applying an intersectionality perspective in the analysis of media discourse allows us to see exactly how the 2008 campaign became a campaign for good motherhood. Moreover, until we engage in an intersectional analysis of this discourse, we might not see that the reification of good motherhood within campaign discourse is also a reification of hegemonic gender, race, class, age, and family structure locations.

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Notions of Family: Intersectional Perspectives
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-78190-535-7

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Publication date: 30 August 2008

Sarah Jane Brubaker and Heather E. Dillaway

Historically, a major focus of women's health research has been on the increasing medicalization of “natural” reproductive processes, with early feminist scholarship in this area…

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Historically, a major focus of women's health research has been on the increasing medicalization of “natural” reproductive processes, with early feminist scholarship in this area largely critical of this trend. Recently, feminist scholars have begun to explore the various ways that women actually experience medicalization. We suggest that current feminist scholarship on medicalization and childbirth remains limited in two ways: (1) much of this research still focuses on privileged women and neglects the experiences of women at various social locations, as well as how oppression and privilege shape those experiences and (2) existing literature does not operationalize what medicalization or “natural” reproductive processes mean for individual women. More specifically, feminist scholars have not investigated systematically how diverse women define and experience their births within the context of a taken-for-granted definitional dichotomy of “natural” versus “medical” birth that characterizes much of the classic and contemporary feminist literature. In this chapter, we explore women's different discussions of “natural” birth and, by default, learn about their definitions of medicalization as well. Drawing from a critical, comparative analysis of qualitative, empirical data gathered from three different groups of childbearing women in two studies – that is, middle-class Caucasian adult women birthing in a hospital setting, middle-class Caucasian adult women birthing in a birthing center setting, and poor African American teen mothers birthing in a hospital setting – we propose a new methodological and conceptual framework for re-examining the meanings of “natural” versus “medical” birth experiences and pushing beyond a strictly gender-based analysis.

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Advancing Gender Research from the Nineteenth to the Twenty-First Centuries
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-84855-027-8

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Publication date: 31 July 2023

Carrie L. Shandra and Fiona Burke

How people spend their time is an indicator of how they live their lives, with time use over the life course conditioned both by age and by participation in age-graded…

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How people spend their time is an indicator of how they live their lives, with time use over the life course conditioned both by age and by participation in age-graded institutions. This chapter uses nationally representative data from the pooled 2008–2020 American Time Use Survey (ATUS) to evaluate how time use in 12 activity categories varies by age, gender, and disability status among 137,266 respondents aged 15 and older. By doing so, we quantify the “disability gap” in time use between men and women with and without disabilities, identifying at what age and by how much people with disabilities experience time differentials in activities of daily living (ADLs), instrumental activities of daily living (IADLs), and other indicators of social participation. Results indicate that – at many ages – patterns of time use for people with disabilities deviate from those of people without disabilities, with more pronounced differences in midlife. Further, the magnitude of women's disability gaps equals or exceeds men's for sleeping, and nearly all ADLs and IADLs, indicating that disability gaps are also gendered.

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Disabilities and the Life Course
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-80455-202-5

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Publication date: 31 July 2023

Célia Bouchet and Mathéa Boudinet

This chapter draws on biographical interviews to analyze identity-based interpretations of inequalities by disabled people in France, as these understandings are formed and…

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This chapter draws on biographical interviews to analyze identity-based interpretations of inequalities by disabled people in France, as these understandings are formed and transformed over the course of their lives. We combined the material from two different studies to create a corpus of 65 life stories from working-age people with contrasting impairments in terms of type, degree, and onset, as well as various profiles in terms of gender, race, and class. When talking about the inequalities they face, respondents commonly made use of identity labels (gender, class, race, disability), among those available in their micro and macro environments. They usually presented these categories as separate and cumulative, and only a few upper-class disabled women developed reflections in line with an intersectional model. This fragmentation of identity categories translated into the framing of each inequality encountered through a single lens. Respondents mentioned race, class, or gender mainly when evoking topics and contexts that the public debate highlights as problematic, while their references to disability covered a variety of disadvantages. Although the interview situation might have fueled this framing, we also showed that certain earlier socialization processes led people to believe that their disability was the source of the inequalities they encountered. Lastly, we identified three turning points that encourage shifts in the interpretation of inequalities; these are the availability of a new label to qualify one's experience, a competing identity-based interpretation for a mechanism, and access to a different, intersectional model of inequality.

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Disabilities and the Life Course
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-80455-202-5

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Publication date: 31 July 2023

Kenzie Latham-Mintus and Scott D. Landes

The purpose of this chapter is to reconsider the five principles of Elder et al.'s (2003) life course theory while centering disability status as an axis of inequality. We use…

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The purpose of this chapter is to reconsider the five principles of Elder et al.'s (2003) life course theory while centering disability status as an axis of inequality. We use existing research from the fields of the sociology of disability, disability studies, and aging and the life course to reflect on ways in which each life course principle can better attend to the experiences of disabled people. We start with the principle of time and place and discuss how cohort and period effects facilitate a deeper understanding of disabled people's experiences historically. Next, we analyze the principle of timing with an emphasis on cumulative dis/advantage to establish how disability status is an axis of inequality that contributes to the accumulation of social disadvantage and intersects with other axes of inequality (e.g., race, class, and gender). Then, we discuss the two principles of agency and linked lives and employ the concept of “bounded agency” to describe how ableism limits the agency of disabled people. Finally, we examine the principle of life-span development and discuss how adaptation and resilience are contextual and an ordinary part of human experiences. We conclude by offering recommendations for both life course and disability scholars to consider in hopes of broadening our theoretical and empirical knowledge about the lives of disabled people at every stage of the life course and the mechanisms by which resources are stratified by disability and age.

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Publication date: 31 July 2023

Louise C. Palmer

Multiple sclerosis (MS) is a chronic condition with variable physical, cognitive, and quality of life impacts. Little research has investigated how MS outcomes vary by social…

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Multiple sclerosis (MS) is a chronic condition with variable physical, cognitive, and quality of life impacts. Little research has investigated how MS outcomes vary by social identity (race, gender, disability, age, sexual orientation, and nationality) and social location (place within systems of power and privilege). However, emerging evidence points to racial and ethnic group disparities in MS outcomes. This chapter integrates core concepts from the life course perspective and an intersectional feminist disability framework to interrogate the role of diagnosis pathways in determining differential MS outcomes. MS diagnosis pathways (the time from symptom onset to the point of diagnosis) are a logical place to begin this work given the varying nature of symptom onset and the importance of a quick diagnosis for optimal MS outcomes. Whereas the life course perspective provides a framework for understanding disability transitions and pathways across the life span, an intersectional feminist disability framework centers disability within an axis of overlapping social identities and locations. The combination of both frameworks provides an approach capable of examining how MS disparities and inequities emerge in different contexts over time. The chapter begins with an overview of MS and current knowledge on disparities (mainly racial) in MS prevalence, diagnosis, and outcomes. The chapter proceeds to describe the utility of key concepts of both the life course perspective and intersectional frameworks when researching health disparities. Finally, the chapter ends with a theoretical application of an intersectional feminist disability life course perspective to investigate disparities in MS diagnosis pathways.

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Publication date: 31 July 2023

Robyn Lewis Brown

This study examined changes in work precarity (i.e., job insecurity and income insecurity) and involuntary job loss following the start of the Great Recession in 2007 among people…

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This study examined changes in work precarity (i.e., job insecurity and income insecurity) and involuntary job loss following the start of the Great Recession in 2007 among people with and without disabilities. Using five waves of nationally representative data from the Americans' Changing Lives (ACL) panel study, the findings demonstrated that people with disabilities who had early experiences of income insecurity were more likely to experience later income insecurity than people without disabilities. Those who had a functional disability and experienced job insecurity and income insecurity at W1, in 1986, were also significantly more likely to experience involuntary job loss following the start of the Great Recession. These findings highlight the disproportionate impact of early work precarity for people with disabilities and are discussed as an application of the life-course concept of cumulative disadvantage.

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Disabilities and the Life Course
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-80455-202-5

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Publication date: 31 July 2023

Anna Penner

Twelve percent of families in the United States have a child with a disability, yet little is known about the long-term consequences of growing up with a disabled sibling. This…

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Twelve percent of families in the United States have a child with a disability, yet little is known about the long-term consequences of growing up with a disabled sibling. This study builds on previous research regarding disability effects on families and offers an additional view on the linked lives of families and, in particular, siblings. Using secondary data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 Children and Young Adults, this study examines the odds of college completion among young adults with a disabled sibling during childhood. Specifically, I examine the gender differences among those who had a sibling with a disability. Women are more than 35% less likely to complete college if they had a disabled sibling during childhood; there is no significant difference by sibling disability status for boys. To understand whether children in low-resourced families are particularly penalized by having a disabled sibling, I examine whether various family resources attenuate the low graduation odds among those who had a disabled sibling. I find that having stably married parents during childhood largely eliminates the college completion gap between those with and without a disabled sibling. However, increases in mothers' education or family income do not attenuate the college completion gap. By identifying this gender disadvantage in college completion, this study shows that disabilities have consequences not just for disabled individuals but for their siblings as well, shining a light on a hidden cost of disability on families.

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Disabilities and the Life Course
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-80455-202-5

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