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Emergent Masculinities in the Middle East

Marcia C. Inhorn

in The New Arab Man: Emergent Masculinities, Technologies, and Islam in the Middle East

This concluding chapter discusses the need to rethink masculinity not only in America but in the Middle East as well. This rethinking is especially crucial, because so many Americans are, in fact, ... More

This concluding chapter discusses the need to rethink masculinity not only in America but in the Middle East as well. This rethinking is especially crucial, because so many Americans are, in fact, Islamophobic, carrying with them pernicious stereotypes about Middle Eastern men as particularly dangerous, loathsome, and fanatical. The main goal of the book is to provide a more realistic and humanizing portrayal of Middle Eastern men's lives, through a form of person-centered, empirically based ethnography that elucidates men's reproductive life stories, as told in their own words. Through such stories, people can come to appreciate Middle Eastern men not only as men but as good men, who are facing the twenty-first century in thoughtful, respectful, and locally moral ways.Less

Introduction

Tony D. Williams

in Physiological Adaptations for Breeding in Birds

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's main themes. This book is primarily about physiological mechanisms, but it also addresses the specific question of what we know about the ... More

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's main themes. This book is primarily about physiological mechanisms, but it also addresses the specific question of what we know about the physiological, metabolic, energetic, and hormonal mechanisms that regulate, and potentially determine, individual, or phenotypic, variation in key reproductive life-history traits, trade-offs between these traits, and trade-offs and carry-over effects between different life-history stages. Initially, it focuses on the avian reproductive cycle (from seasonal gonadal development, through egg-laying and incubation, to chick-rearing), and then it expands this view to consider reproduction in the broader context of the annual cycle and over an individual's entire lifetime. Throughout the book develops two major themes: that we need to consider reproductive physiology and ecology from a female perspective and that we need to consider the causes and consequences of individual (phenotypic) variation in reproductive life-history traits.Less

Hormones and Mood

Meir Steiner and Elizabeth A. Young

in Sex Differences in the Brain: From Genes to Behavior

The role and potential relevance of estrogen and other sex steroids to psychiatric disorders is the focus of current scientific attention. Estrogen has been described as a 5-HT, NA and ACh agonist; ... More

The role and potential relevance of estrogen and other sex steroids to psychiatric disorders is the focus of current scientific attention. Estrogen has been described as a 5-HT, NA and ACh agonist; it also modulates DA2 receptors. This chapter reviews the implications to the reproductive life cycle of women. Specifically, it discusses the impact of hormonal fluctuations during menarche, premenstrually, during pregnancy and postpartum, and perimenopausally.Less

Get a Reproductive Life Plan!: Producing the Zero Trimester

Miranda R. Waggoner

in Zero Trimester: Pre-Pregnancy Care and the Politics of Reproductive Risk

This chapter details how pre-pregnancy care has been taken up clinically and culturally, especially through the emergence of the “reproductive life plan” as a clinical tool. Drawing on expert ... More

This chapter details how pre-pregnancy care has been taken up clinically and culturally, especially through the emergence of the “reproductive life plan” as a clinical tool. Drawing on expert interviews and an examination of medical pamphlets, professional literature, public health campaign materials, media depictions of pre-pregnancy care, and popular books, this chapter focuses on the individualized and gendered aspects of contemporary pre-pregnancy health ideas. Specifically, the pre-pregnancy care model is shown to reflect a neoliberal health ethos in which women are held individually responsible for the optimization of reproduction in America in the twenty-first century. This chapter makes the case that as reproductive knowledge and policy were produced, so were medicine, morals, and markets.Less

Rethinking Fertility, Time, and Aging

in Contingent Lives: Fertility, Time, and Aging in West Africa

This chapter uses ethnographic and demographic data from rural Gambia and presents a number of propositions about reproduction, aging, and social life that span disciplines in the social sciences, ... More

This chapter uses ethnographic and demographic data from rural Gambia and presents a number of propositions about reproduction, aging, and social life that span disciplines in the social sciences, medical sciences, and humanities. It scrutinizes a broad range of numerical and narrative data from rural Gambia on how women and men manage their conjugal and reproductive lives. Investing broadly and deeply in social relations is the cornerstone of the contingency scheme. Predominant in women's descriptions of husbanding their bodily resources are metaphors of economy: in wealth and bodily endowment (of muscles, strength, or an endowed number of child potentials) and in the saving and expenditure of moral capital. The most notable is that women in rural Gambia are using high-technology contraceptives to construct through careful cultural strategies what appear, in statistical analysis, to be birth spacing patterns created by “nature,” producing what demographic analyses term “natural fertility.”Less