Based on participant observation and in-depth interviews with 10 college-level female bodybuilders, this paper focuses on several aspects of female bodybuilding that are underexplored in existing literature, including purposeful gender transgressions, gender attribution, racialized bodies, and the conflation of sex, gender, and sexual preference. We draw on critical feminist theory and the social constructionist perspective to enhance collective understanding of the subversive possibilities emerging from female bodybuilders’ lived experience. Collectively, female bodybuilders’ experiences affect somatic and behavioral gender norms in a wider Western-type industrialized society such as the United States.

No abstract

No abstract

The bulk of research on general strain theory has focused on determining the effect of experienced strain on the illegal or delinquent behaviors of juveniles or young adults. While much has been gained by this research, it is important to understand the role of experiencing and witnessing strain on adult, high risk populations (e.g., adult inmates). The current study examines the effect of experienced, vicarious, and anticipated victimization on inappropriate coping mechanisms of inmates. Specifically, it examines the effect of experiencing or witnessing physical victimization on inmates' use of violence and drug/alcohol. Survey data from 208 adult parolees show that, at least in controlled environments like prisons, witnessing violence increases the likelihood of engaging in violence and that experiencing and witnessing violence significantly increases the likelihood that inmates will use drugs or alcohol.

This article re‐centers an ecological model traditionally used to understand the experiences of interpersonal violence victims around the perceptions and experiences of victim advocates. We suggest that the development of such a model might shed light on rural‐urban differences in the accessibility and availability of support services in rural domains. To develop this model, we used results from a sample of rural advocates located within the Mississippi Delta Region. The study indicates that rural victim advocates recognize the presence of significant macrosystem and exosystem factors in their communities and experience them as creating greater challenges to their work. In particular, factors affiliated with economic disadvantage and cultural ideologies of individualism and victim blaming negatively affected the experiences of the respondents. In terms of the ecological model, results also indicate correlations across levels of analysis, implying a rural macrosystem milieu that may predict or affect the presence of exosystem support networks. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.