Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Within the discourse of human sexuality there is a long tradition of documenting deviations from society’s sexual norms. There exists a copious amount of literature documenting such deviations. Sadomasochism has become a beacon of research concerning deviant sexuality. However, the majority of this literature focuses entirely on male (homo)sexuality or positions the female as the feminine, passive object and never the active subject. Although the research and literature regarding women as the subject of sadomasochism is slowly expanding, there remains vast numbers of questions that cannot be answered until they have first been asked. The preliminary goal of this article is to emphasize the lack of academic research and literature specific to female sadomasochism, and offer a small contribution in closing the gap. From here the article will demonstrate how female masculinity within a sadomasochistic context, contrasted with the misogynistic history of sadomasochism, produces interesting discourses regarding female sexuality and gender. This article will reveal, with regard to opposing feminist and queer theory, how female masculinity is produced by and incorporated into a sadomasochistic context.

Publication Type: Individual Poster
Abstract: Background & Aims: Children begin showing gender-stereotyped toy preferences in their second year, but it is unclear if they have explicit knowledge of these stereotypes. Gender stereotype knowledge (GSK) for activities & occupations is evident by 2.5 years & reaches ceiling levels between 5 & 7 years. Recently, GSK has been studied in younger children using paradigms such as preferential looking & inductive generalization. These studies have produced inconsistent results: some find GSK in only one sex; others find only feminine or masculine GSK. This inconsistency may be due to: 1) measures not engaging the attention of very young children, 2) requiring boys to use dolls to indicate responses, which some boys resist, or 3) past items tested being unfamiliar to young children (e.g., a drill). The sequential touching paradigm (ST) may resolve the first two issues; it is an active paradigm that does not require play with dolls. Item familiarity was addressed via pre-testing with 3.5-year-olds (close in age to our group, but old enough to test with more traditional measures).
Methods: Eleven children (5 females, 6 males; M age = 24 months, 21 days) participated in a sequential touching task. Each child was presented with 4 feminine & 4 masculine toys (e.g., teapot, helicopter), & given two minutes to play while videotaped. Coders recorded the order and specific items the child intentionally touched. The final sample will consist of 24 children (half girls) in 3 age groups: 18, 24, & 30 months. Testing will be completed by April 2006.
Key Results: Mean run length (MRL) was calculated, & Monte Carlo simulations were used to identify "categorizers" (see Mandler et al., 1987 for details on ST analyses). The MRL (M = 1.98; SD = 0.55), was compared to the run length expected by chance (1.75). Touching behavior did not differ from chance, t(10) = 1.41, p<.10. As a group, children showed no evidence of categorization by gender stereotypes. However, Monte Carlo simulations (cutoff value of p<.10; as used in prior research) revealed that 63.6% of the children were categorizers. Further analyses will be performed when testing is complete. With the larger sample, we will look for age effects, sex differences & differences between feminine & masculine GSK.
Conclusions: Over half the children categorized toys in a manner consistent with gender stereotypes. Thus, the ST paradigm appears to be a valid method of assessing emerging GSK in very young children.

Publication Type: Individual Poster
Abstract: David Rakison and colleagues examined the use of object parts to from categories (e.g., Rakison & Butterworth, 1998). They tested 14- to 24-month-olds with a combination of animal, vehicle and hybrid animal-vehicle toys, using a sequential touching task and found that infants’ apparent use of parts to form categories decreased with age: 14-month-olds always formed categories on the basis of parts, 18-month-olds sometimes formed categories on the basis of parts and sometimes on the basis of taxonomic structures, whereas 24-month-olds always formed categories on the basis of taxonomic kind (bodies). We examined the extent to which 18-month-olds would adapt their categorization of normal and hybrid stimuli as a function of context.

Fifty-two infants were tested using sequential touching on a set of 8 toys that could be partitioned as containing (1) the global level of animal, (2) the basic level of car, (3) objects having wheels, (4) objects having legs, (5) hybrid objects, or (6) as normal objects. Infants were randomly assigned to one of two prior context conditions in which they were shown some human dolls and trucks. In the Partonomic condition, the experimenter began by pointing out parts of the toys to the infants by bending the dolls at the waist and legs or by turning the trucks upside down and spinning their wheels. In the Taxonomic condition, the experimenter introduced the toys by “walking” the dolls (without bending the dolls at the waist or their legs) or by “driving” the trucks along the table.

Touch patterns were analyzed by fitting a finite mixture model to the data (Thomas and Dahlin; 2001). Many individual infants were found to categories in multiple ways. We then tabulated the number of infants that could be described as categorizing by parts, by taxonomic category, or by both. In the Taxonomic condition 22 categorized taxonomically, 2 categorized by parts, and 1 categorized both. In the Partonomic condition, 2 categorized taxonomically, 10 categorized by parts, and 0 categorized both. Categorization strategy was contingent on the familiarization context (Chi-squared (2) = 21.0, p<. 0001). The distribution of categorizers in the Partonomic context differed from chance, Chi-squared (2) = 14.0, p<. 001), with most of these infants forming categories on the basis of parts. The distribution of categorizers in the Taxonomic condition also differed from chance (Chi-squared (2) = 29.4, p<. 0001), with most of these infants forming categories on the basis of taxonomic information.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: The months following the attacks of September 11th, 2001 were characterized predominantly by a persistent attempt to maintain an atmosphere of national unity and good feeling. It thus is useful to consider the two most public “non-political” controversies that have arisen with regard to 9/11: the question of how to appropriately commemorate the deaths at the WTC, hashed out mostly in the court of public opinion, and the various legal controversies around insurance claims and payments. The first of these public debates has already been the subject of important intellectual consideration; the second, however, has been of interest mostly to industry analysts and economists. I want to suggest that there is a crucial link between the question of how to publicly remember national tragedy and the anxious attempt to rationalize the sentimental that is inherent to discourse on insurance. On the one hand, life insurance is a rationalization of affect, yet on the other hand, insurance has retained its mystery—and its value—precisely due to its investment in the incalculable: “It is almost as impenetrable as love,” as one 1935 writer on actuarial accounting put it.
Both commemoration and insurance capitalize on sentiment in the name of future security and stability. Memorialization requires that we remember past tragedy while continuing to move toward the future; the discourse of insurance—in its reliance on what I call “actuarial time”—is similarly vexed by the contradiction between the futurity of speculation or prediction and the trauma of (predicted but certain) death. Ultimately, it is through linking insurance to risk that we can see the link between speculative economic forms and the actions of the state or military industrial complex. Risk is both a necessary moment in and that which always threatens to undo the speculative: as the insurance industry faced the catastrophic fallout of 9/11, they were forced to make radical changes to underwriting and loss prevention principles. To save the industry, the government took over some of the burden (by passing the Terrorism Risk Insurance Act) and the industry, in turn, took over what might have in an earlier age been the governmental responsibility for ensuring global accountability.
This paper reads the legal battle surrounding 9/11 insurance claims alongside the debate about how to memorialize the dead to suggest that whether we are thinking through the relationship between insurance, security, and catastrophe, or considering how to mourn the deaths of thousands in and around the signal symbol of global finance capital, we are engaging the ineluctable relationship between risk and death, between speculation and oblivion.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Uncovering the foundations of power has been the major objective of exchange research for the past two decades and previous research has succeeded in identifying several structural dimensions that influence the use of power in exchange relations. Surprisingly, given that exchange theories perceive social interaction as an exchange of valued resources, the characteristics of resources themselves have been largely ignored as researchers have focused on variation along other dimensions. As a consequence of this omission, studies of exchange have not addressed resources such as information, one of the most commonly exchanged resources. This paper reviews the definitions of resources provided by major exchange theorists and explores several dimensions along which they can vary. I explain how resource movement and the relative power of positions in a network is contingent upon the nature of the resources exchanged. Finally, I outline how the impact of mechanisms known to generate power is mediated by resource characteristics and use simulations to make predictions of power use for different resource types. A laboratory experiment designed to test these predictions is currently underway.