Support for Same-Sex Marriage at Record High, but Key Segments Remain Opposed

As the Supreme Court prepares to decide a key case involving states' requirements to recognize same-sex marriage, public support for allowing gays and lesbians to marry legally continues its rapid rise: A 57%-majority of Americans now favor allowing same-sex marriage and 39% oppose. As recently as five years ago, more opposed (48%) same-sex marriage than supported it (42%).This is the highest level of support measured for same-sex marriage in nearly 20 years of Pew Research Center polling of the issue. Yet even as support for same-sex marriage has increased among nearly all segments in the public, some groups remain broadly opposed to gay marriage.The Pew Research Center survey, conducted May 12-18 among 2,002 adults, finds that partisans are as divided on this issue as ever: Today, 65% of Democrats and an identical percentage of independents favor gay marriage; only about one third (34%) of Republicans do so. Growing shares of all three groups support same-sex-marriage, yet the differences between Democrats and Republicans are as wide today as they were a decade ago

Festive medical myths

In the pursuit of scientific truth, even widely held medical beliefs require examination or re-examination. Both physicians and non-physicians sometimes believe things about our bodies that just are not true. As a reminder of the need to apply scientific investigation to conventional wisdom, we previously discussed the evidence disputing seven commonly held medical myths.1 The holiday season presents a further opportunity to probe medical beliefs recounted during this time of the year. We generated a list of common medical or health beliefs related to the holidays and winter season and searched Medline for scientific evidence to support or refute these beliefs. If we couldn’t find any evidence in the medical literature, we searched the internet using Google

Non-linear enhancement of laser generated ultrasonic Rayleigh waves by cracks

Laser generated ultrasound has been widely used for detecting cracks, surface and sub-surface defects in many different materials. It provides a non-contact wideband excitation source which can be focused into different geometries. Previous workers have reported enhancement of the laser generated Rayleigh wave when a crack is illuminated by pulsed laser beam irradiation. We demonstrate that the enhancement observed is due to a combination of source truncation, the free boundary condition at the edge of the crack and interference effects. Generating a Rayleigh wave over a crack can lead to enhancement of the amplitude of the Rayleigh wave signal, a shift in the dominant frequency of the wideband Rayleigh wave and strong enhancement of the high frequency components of the Rayleigh wave

Black Victorians, British television drama and the 1978 adaptation of David Garnett’s The Sailor’s Return

The under-representation of Black British history in British film and television drama has attracted significant public debate in recent years. In this context, this article revisits a critically overlooked British film adaptation featuring a woman of African origin as a protagonist in a drama set in Victorian England. The Sailor’s Return (1978), directed by Jack Gold, is an adaptation of a historical fiction written by David Garnett and first published in 1925. This article aims to situate the novel and its adaptation in three important contexts: set in rural Dorset in 1858, the narrative can be considered in the context of Victorian attitudes to people of African origin; written by a member of the Bloomsbury circle, the novel is informed by modernist perspectives on the legacies of the Victorian era; broadcast to a popular audience in the late 1970s, the film can be located in a politically progressive tradition of British television drama. Approached in this way, this multiply mediated cultural representation serves to generate insights into the treatment of racism in liberal left cultural production, from early twentieth century modernist milieus to the anti-racism of the British left in the 1970s. These contexts will inform close textual analysis of two motifs — the depiction of the countryside, and the role of costume — which have proved central to ongoing debates about racialized constructions of national identity in British historical film genres. This article will argue that the 1978 film adaptation of The Sailors Return presents a significant precedent when considering what Stephen Bourne has termed the “invisibility” of Black British history in British historical film.</p

Transgender and the Literary Imagination:Changing Gender in Twentieth-Century Writing

Transgender and the Literary Imagination is the first full length study to revisit twentieth century narratives and their afterlives, examining the extent to which they have reflected, shaped or transformed changing understandings of gender. Grounded in feminist scholarship, informed by queer theory and indebted to transgender studies, this book investigates the ways in which transgender identities and histories have been 'authored by others', with a focus on literary fiction by British, Irish and American authors, life writing and adaptation for stage and screen

Retrospective Sex::Rewriting Intersexuality in Jeffrey Eugenides's Middlesex

This article examines the representation of intersexuality in Jeffrey Eugenides's Pulitzer Prize-winning 2002 novel Middlesex. It situates the depiction of intersexuality within the context of current scholarship on sexed identity within the field of gender and sexuality studies. It argues that while a fictional focus on ambiguously sexed identity might appear to be aligned with queer critiques of fixed categories of "sex," Eugenides's narrative remains implicated in heteronormative assumptions. More specifically, it will explore the narrative strategies which frame Calliope Stephanides's intersexed body, focussing on the relationship between the male-identified adult Cal, "author" of this fictional autobiography, and his remembered teenage girl self. It will suggest that the retrospective logic at work in this narrative is complicit in a heteronormative temporality which reinforces the causal relationship between sex, gender and sexuality which queer theorists have sought to interrogate

Rethinking generational history:Queer histories of sexuality in neo-Victorian feminist fiction

In The Victorian Woman Question in Contemporary Feminist Fiction, Jeanette King suggests that historical fiction by women can be placed in the context of a "wider project, pioneered by second wave feminism, of rewriting history from a female perspective, and recovering the lives of women who have been excluded or marginalized" (3-4). Such fiction could be understood, then, as a generational endeavor; the project of "recovering" the past is one which both produces a feminist history and confirms a feminist present as the location from which such a project is possible. However, Judith Roof has questioned the way in which generational thinking "creates a perpetual debt to the past" (71). The past to which such projects of recovery are understood to be indebted can itself be understood as the effect of feminist historiography and its narrative forms rather than its cause; indeed, the history discovered by a return to the past will perhaps necessarily be shaped in advance by the imperatives motivating the return. Such a complex and productive (rather than simply restorative) relationship to the past is, however, obscured by what Roof has termed the "reproductive familial narrative" of "generation" which assumes a "linear, chronological time where the elements that come first appear to cause the elements that come later" (71). In this essay I aim to suggest the ways in which a non-generational historiography might allow for an encounter with the past other than as origin or legacy; I will do so by exploring the complex historicizing of non-reproductive sexuality in Sarah Waters's 1999 neo-Victorian historical fiction Affinity