Decoupling touch from sex: gender(ed) representations of physical intimacy in the cuddle industry.

The present study explores the resistance to and potential transformation of hegemonic gender norms regarding intimacy and sexuality through an instrumental case study of the so-called "professional cuddlers", a category of body workers that have proliferated in Europe since 2015 offering paid sessions of non-sexual physical intimacy. Despite efforts to frame the service as a form of therapy, professional cuddling is often misunderstood as a front for prostitution, and practitioners must frequently deal with unwanted sexual advancements. Drawing from a 3-year online ethnographic study of cuddling services, the dataset includes 10 in-depth interviews informed by a previous qualitative analysis of 46 newspaper articles, 16 forum discussions, and 25 websites related to such practices. Findings demonstrate that the representational limbo experienced by practitioners could be better understood as a product of the "sexusociety". Though it is unclear whether professional cuddling has any significant impact on hegemonic gender norms, results show that it nonetheless deconstructs the normative landscape through the enactment of alternative scripts.

Representation of Women in Video Games: A Systematic Review of Literature in Consideration of Adult Female Wellbeing.

This study aims to provide a comprehensive systematic review of the literature relating to the representation of women within video games in consideration of adult female wellbeing. The research question of the study assessed whether the representation of women in video games leads to female self-objectification and negative body image in adult women. The Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) review method was used; comprising a thorough keyword database search, followed by literature screening and data extraction. Adult women were the focus of the study, with video games as the study exposure. Only 2 of the 22 studies directly assessed female wellbeing in relation to video game play. Results showed that women do report self-objectification and low levels of self-efficacy, as a result of exposure to objectified female content within video games, compared with participants exposed to nonobjectified content. Male and female belief in real-life female competence was jeopardized after exposure to objectified content of women within video games. Results demonstrated that female characters within video games are unevenly represented compared with male characters, with female characters mostly shown as subordinate to the male hero of the game, objectified, and hypersexualized with disproportionate body parts. The review also uncovered the propensity for men exposed to objectified and sexualized female characters within video games to hold sexist attitudes toward women in a real-life setting, and being more lenient to accept cultural rape myths.

Desplazamiento forzado y empoderamiento femenino: el caso de la presa Picachos en el sur de Sinaloa, México / Forced Displacement and Women's Empowerment: The Case of Picachos Dam in the Southern Region of Sinaloa, Mexico

Resumen A través de la resistencia es posible dar un nuevo sentido a las representaciones sociales de género, creando relatos alternos a la victimización de comunidades desplazadas. El objetivo es exponer un caso de empoderamiento femenino, como respuesta a la experiencia del desplazamiento forzado. Es la historia de San Marcos en el municipio de Mazatlán, al sur del estado de Sinaloa, México. Uno de los seis pueblos inundados por la presa Picachos, cuya construcción a partir de 2006 detonó un largo conflicto entre comuneros y gobierno estatal.

Abstract Through resistance it is possible to give a new sense to social gender representations, creating alternative accounts to the victimization of displaced communities. The objective is to present a Women's Empowerment case, as a response to the forced displacement experience. This is the history of San Marcos in the Municipality of Mazatlan, in the south of the State of Sinaloa, Mexico. One of the six flooded towns by Picachos Dam, whose building as of 2006, triggered a long conflict between commoners and the state government.

Assessing the Formation of Experience-Based Gender Expectations in an Implicit Learning Scenario.

The present study investigates the formation of new word-referent associations in an implicit learning scenario, using a gender-coded artificial language with spoken words and visual referents. Previous research has shown that when participants are explicitly instructed about the gender-coding system underlying an artificial lexicon, they monitor the frequency of exposure to male vs. female referents within this lexicon, and subsequently use this probabilistic information to predict the gender of an upcoming referent. In an explicit learning scenario, the auditory and visual gender cues are necessarily highlighted prior to acqusition, and the effects previously observed may therefore depend on participants' overt awareness of these cues. To assess whether the formation of experience-based expectations is dependent on explicit awareness of the underlying coding system, we present data from an experiment in which gender-coding was acquired implicitly, thereby reducing the likelihood that visual and auditory gender cues are used strategically during acquisition. Results show that even if the gender coding system was not perfectly mastered (as reflected in the number of gender coding errors), participants develop frequency based expectations comparable to those previously observed in an explicit learning scenario. In line with previous findings, participants are quicker at recognizing a referent whose gender is consistent with an induced expectation than one whose gender is inconsistent with an induced expectation. At the same time however, eyetracking data suggest that these expectations may surface earlier in an implicit learning scenario. These findings suggest that experience-based expectations are robust against manner of acquisition, and contribute to understanding why similar expectations observed in the activation of stereotypes during the processing of natural language stimuli are difficult or impossible to suppress.

Experience-Based Probabilities Modulate Expectations in a Gender-Coded Artificial Language.

The current study combines artificial language learning with visual world eyetracking to investigate acquisition of representations associating spoken words and visual referents using morphologically complex pseudowords. Pseudowords were constructed to consistently encode referential gender by means of suffixation for a set of imaginary figures that could be either male or female. During training, the frequency of exposure to pseudowords and their imaginary figure referents were manipulated such that a given word and its referent would be more likely to occur in either the masculine form or the feminine form, or both forms would be equally likely. Results show that these experience-based probabilities affect the formation of new representations to the extent that participants were faster at recognizing a referent whose gender was consistent with the induced expectation than a referent whose gender was inconsistent with this expectation. Disambiguating gender information available from the suffix did not mask the induced expectations. Eyetracking data provide additional evidence that such expectations surface during online lexical processing. Taken together, these findings indicate that experience-based information is accessible during the earliest stages of processing, and are consistent with the view that language comprehension depends on the activation of perceptual memory traces.

Selling Gender: Associations of Box Art Representation of Female Characters With Sales for Teen- and Mature-rated Video Games.

Content analysis of video games has consistently shown that women are portrayed much less frequently than men and in subordinate roles, often in "hypersexualized" ways. However, the relationship between portrayal of female characters and videogame sales has not previously been studied. In order to assess the cultural influence of video games on players, it is important to weight differently those games seen by the majority of players (in the millions), rather than a random sample of all games, many of which are seen by only a few thousand people. Box art adorning the front of video game boxes is a form of advertising seen by most game customers prior to purchase and should therefore predict sales if indeed particular depictions of female and male characters influence sales. Using a sample of 399 box art cases from games with ESRB ratings of Teen or Mature released in the US during the period of 2005 through 2010, this study shows that sales were positively related to sexualization of non-central female characters among cases with women present. In contrast, sales were negatively related to the presence of any central female characters (sexualized or non-sexualized) or the presence of female characters without male characters present. These findings suggest there is an economic motive for the marginalization and sexualization of women in video game box art, and that there is greater audience exposure to these stereotypical depictions than to alternative depictions because of their positive relationship to sales.