Subjectification and Confession in Contemporary Memoirs of Abduction and Prolonged Captivity

A striking trend is emerging in the Canadian and American literary landscape, and memoirs with the following narrative trajectory are now widely read: a stranger abducts a young woman, and holds her captive for years. She endures sexual, physical, and emotional abuse, eventually escapes, and returns to her former life. The sole scholarly discussion about these memoirs frames them as empowering for the authors, but the social and economic factors that inform these texts remain unaddressed. Drawing from Michel Foucault's discussion of the confession, this article complicates and extends this analysis. First, it situates memoirs by Elizabeth Smart, Amanda Berry and Gena DeJesus, Jaycee Dugard, Michelle Knight, and Josefina Rivera as examples of the Foucauldian sexual confession. It then maps the ways memoirs enable the authors to voice their understanding of the social and economic factors that both gave rise to their plight and inform media discussions that blame them for their suffering. I will ultimately argue that memoirs function as a public venue to resist or reject dominant interpretive frames that shape a survivor's experiences, while simultaneously reaffirming the ubiquity of these lines of thinking.     

Maltreated Children in Out-of-Home Care: The Relation between Attachment Quality and Internalizing Symptoms

Maltreated children in out-of-home care are at high risk for poor relationships with caregivers (i.e., biological parents and substitute caregivers) and high levels of internalizing symptoms. It is unclear if these poor relationships are related to, and account for a large portion of the variance in maltreated children’s internalizing symptoms, above and beyond maltreatment type and out-of-home care factors. This study examined the relation between attachment quality with both biological parents and substitute caregivers and children’s internalizing symptoms within a sample of 493 maltreated children (aged 9–11; 51.0?% male) recently placed in out-of-home care. A series of hierarchical regression models indicated that greater child-reported attachment quality with both biological parents and substitute caregivers was associated with fewer child-reported anxiety (β?=??.15, p?<?.01; β?=??.29, p?<?.001, respectively) and depression symptoms (β?=??.14, p?<?.01; β?=??.28, p?<?.001, respectively) as well as fewer child internalizing symptoms (β?=??.12, p?<?.05; β?=??.14, p?<?.01, respectively). Attachment quality with the biological parent and substitute caregiver each explained a significant proportion of the variance in children’s internalizing symptoms, above and beyond child demographics, maltreatment type, and out-of-home care variables. The study also examined whether children’s attachment with substitute caregivers moderated the relationship between children’s attachment with biological parents and children’s internalizing symptoms. No statistically significant moderation effects were found. Future clinical work should focus on enhancing attachment quality between children and both biological parents and substitute caregivers, as these relationships appear to individually relate to the children’s internalizing symptomology.     

Empire and Muslim conversion: historical reflections on Christian missions in Egypt

This article considers Christian evangelization among Muslims in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries and traces its relationship to the global and local dynamics of Western imperialism. Focusing on Egypt, where Anglo-American Protestant missionaries were active, the article examines why missionaries encountered fierce resistance from Muslim audiences despite the small number of Muslim conversions and how they inadvertently galvanized Egyptian anti-colonial nationalist and Islamist movements. Reflecting on this history of cultural encounter from a postcolonial perspective, the article then discusses the challenge of assessing missionary motives, social influences, and long-term legacies given the sharp differences of interpretation that have often prevailed among Christian and Muslim scholars and polemicists. It draws special attention to an Arabic postcolonial genre of anti-missionary treatises that portray Christian missionaries as neo-Crusaders whose legacies have posed a continuing threat to the integrity of Muslim societies.     

Contingencies of Self-Worth

Abstract— We argue that the importance of self-esteem lies in what people believe they need to be or do to have worth as a person. These contingencies of self-worth are both sources of motivation and areas of psychological vulnerability. In domains of contingent self-worth, people pursue self-esteem by attempting to validate their abilities and qualities. This pursuit of self-esteem, we argue, has costs to learning, relationships, autonomy, self-regulation, and mental and physical health. We suggest alternatives to this costly pursuit of self-esteem.     

Traumatic stress, perceived global stress, and life events: prospectively predicting quality of life in breast cancer patients.

The authors investigated the relationship between stress at initial cancer diagnosis and treatment and subsequent quality of life (QoL). Women (n = 112) randomized to the assessment-only arm of a clinical trial were initially assessed after breast cancer diagnosis and surgery and then reassessed at 4 months (during adjuvant treatment) and 12 months (postadjuvant treatment). There were 3 types of stress measured: number of stressful life events (K. A. Matthews et al., 1997), cancer-related traumatic stress symptoms (M. J. Horowitz, N. Wilner, & W. Alvarez, 1979), and perceived global stress (S. Cohen, T. Kamarck, & R. Mermelstein, 1983). Using hierarchical multiple regressions, the authors found that stress predicted both psychological and physical QoL (J. E. Ware, K. K. Snow, & M. Kosinski, 2000) at the follow-ups (all ps < .03). These findings substantiate the relationship between initial stress and later QoL and underscore the need for timely psychological intervention.