The 1995 wave of the Add Health study is used to investigate the relative influence of parent gender and residence on patterns of parental involvement with adolescents. Adolescent reports (N=17,330) of shared activities, shared communication, and relationship quality with both biological parents are utilized. A multidimensional scaling analysis…

We aimed to further investigate the "hairlessness" norm that is the common practice of body hair removal among women. A sample of 198 undergraduate students (91 men, 107 women) completed questionnaires asking about attitudes toward women's body hair and the reasons women remove this hair, as well as a measure of disgust sensitivity. It was found…

This article analyses three normative accounts that can underlie educational policies, with special attention to gender issues. These three models of education are human capital theory, rights discourses and the capability approach. I first outline five different roles that education can play. Then I analyse these three models of educational…

In Australia, Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom there has been a resurgence in attention directed at boys and schooling. The media and public discourse describes it as a burgeoning moral panic. Mainly grounded in public concerns about achievement levels and violence in schools, the response has been to develop quick fixes and…

The "Lexicon", published in Italy under the auspices of the Papal Council for the Family, provides a dictionary of terms (such as gender, homosexuality, and homophobia) that the Vatican has found problematic in their use. This essay discusses implications as well as the consequences if the "Lexicon" is adopted as a reference…

In the context of boys' declining academic achievement in schools in relation to girls, this article highlights some critical issues arising from the debate on boys' education. The emphasis is on the contribution of feminist analysis and other perspectives to broaden and contextualize the debate. This includes, for example, the need to carefully…

Tracing the history of the term "squaw" offers insights into the positionings and politics of indigenous femininity in colonial America. Today, as throughout the colonization of Native America, imperial projects and projections have based themselves upon and imagined themselves through the lives, bodies, and images of indigenous women,…

This paper challenges notions of gendered game playing practice implicit in much research into young women's involvement with the computer gaming culture. It draws on a study of Australian teenagers playing "The Sims Deluxe" as part of an English curriculum unit and insights from feminist media studies to explore relationships between…

This article describes "The Power of Words," a free, online curriculum that explores common labels for ethnic groups, women and sexual minorities. From an activity exploring the roots of slang for immigrants to a lesson on recent attempts by marginalized groups to reclaim pejorative words, the curriculum's 10 lesson plans support content standards…

As a special topics course in composition, ENEX 495: "Women, Writing, and Rhetoric" is a program elective for graduate students in the English department, English majors, Gender and Women's Studies students, and a writing-intensive elective for non-majors at The University of Montana, a doctoral granting institution located in the Rocky…

Drawing on survey data, this paper explores the association between early adolescents' gender-role identity and sense of peer group acceptance, and how this association may vary as a function of the gender context of the school. Two indicators of gender-role identity were included in the analysis: in one measure the items reflect features of…

"Education for all" is a demand that keeps on appearing in various historical contexts and is not just a phenomenon of the modern age. Taking the demand for "education for all" as a normative principle, this paper pursues the questions of how this demand was reflected in pedagogical reform programmes and in what way, as well as…

While working in a one-year position at Grinnell College, I was assigned to teach two sections of Introduction to Gender and Women's Studies (GWS). Although I had never taught in the discipline before, I decided that my course would need a social-justice component in order to ensure that students would understand GWS as both an academic discipline…

This article examines how gender construction and the literacy experiences of Black adolescent females can be shaped and motivated by their interaction with specific multicultural texts. This discussion further explores how current theories of race, identity and gender construction, and literacy learning in English language arts classrooms inform…

In the face of mounting evidence that schools are losing alarming numbers of young black men, a small band of educators gathered recently in Brookline, Massachusetts, to bolster one response to the crisis: creating public schools designed to serve African-American males. Haunted by the specter of a bleak future for millions of young men--and aware…