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This article theorizes the experience of using a coach to assist with a baby or young child’s sleep “training” as occurring at the intersection of three broader phenomena: the increasing use of paid experts to advise on intimate life; the porosity of the domestic sphere; and ideologies of mothering that impact sleep. It draws on the vernacular of a growing critical literature on children’s sleep, which understands its practice and representation as symptomatic of culturally and historically specific demands on the organization of space and time, as well as understandings of the child as a site of future potential and human capital. To do so, it draws on a qualitative study of sleep coaches and the mothers who hire them. The authors conducted semi-structured, open-ended interviews with thirty women in Western Canada. The interview data revealed that the sleep deprivation entailed in having a new baby is both a dramatic (and often under-estimated) feature of human facticity and a socially mediated crisis. Paradoxically, the overabundance of expert advice on children’s sleep made mothers more likely to recruit a coach for customized support. The advice coaches provided, and how mothers interpreted it, balanced the pragmatic and the ideological, among other things, revealing poorly evidenced but pervasive anxieties about attachment, independence, mental health, and future well-being.

Roberts examines contests over the US Army's management of sexual activity between American soldiers and French women in American-occupied France at the end of World War II. She reveals the stark inequality between a French government trying to reestablish itself after Nazi occupation and an American government bidding to impose its political culture on occupied Europe. These conflicts over sexual regulation throw open new windows into the social relations of military occupation, but above all into the French government's process of national redefinition.

In this new collection of thirteen essays, Arlie Russell Hochschild—author of the groundbreaking exploration of emotional labor, The Managed Heart and The Outsourced Self—focuses squarely on the impact of social forces on the emotional side of intimate life. From the “work” it takes to keep personal life personal, put feeling into work, and empathize with others; to the cultural “blur” between market and home; the effect of a social class gap on family wellbeing; and the movement of care workers around the globe, Hochschild raises deep questions about the modern age. In an eponymous essay, she even points towards a possible future in which a person asking “How’s the family?” hears the proud answer, “Couldn’t be better.”

Michaels interrogates France as a way station in the transit of the famous \"Lamaze method\" of childbirth preparation from its origins in the Soviet Union to its remarkable popularity in the US. Championed by French communists sympathetic to the Soviet Union, the Lamaze method added fuel to the fire of 1950s political rivalries within France.

Surkis concentrates on the analytical relationship between the transnational and the national in the study of sexualities, as well as on the historical relationship between intimate sexualities and formal politics. In attending to how sexed bodies are implicated in a simultaneously national and transnational field of power relations, she seeks to reframe the linkages between sexual knowledge and power, on the one hand, and corporeality and political sovereignty, on the other. Among others, she concludes that such cross-border thinking about sexual politics still has vital urgency today. In France and throughout Europe, the perception of eroded sovereignty has led states to re-find and re-found national identities in explicitly gendered and sexual terms. Transnational histories, alongside postcolonial ones, provide one powerful way to unsettle the reified conceptions of national sexual cultures on which contemporary political discussions, most notably regarding Islam and immigration, so often insist.

The Second Sex (1949) is a big book, but it was a small part of Simone de Beauvoir's intellectual production. Beauvoir wrote essays and fiction; she kept notebooks and diaries that she revised (significantly) for volumes of memoirs; she sent thousands of letters to her friends, lovers, and fellow intellectuals. She wrote tirelessly--creating, presenting, and reworking her self. It was a high-profile act, and, her critics notwithstanding, an enormously popular one. Moreover, she received thousands of letters from her readers, now gathered in a rich but virtually unexplored collection at the Bibliotheque nationale in Paris. The letters to Beauvoir offer rare close-up views of women and men in the 1950s struggling to write about a range of difficult subjects: work, the travails of a writer, marriages gone bad, unwanted pregnancies and unwanted children, frustrated or confusing desires and feelings, including homosexuality, childhood experiences, and so on. Here, Coffin examines the outpouring of confessional correspondence to Beauvoir in response to her publication of The Second Sex in 1949.

We use incidence data from the 1980 Census and 2008 American Community Survey to track recent trends in interracial marriage. Intermarriage with Whites increased rapidly among Blacks but stalled among Asians and American Indians. Black-White intermarriage increased threefold over 1980-2008, independent of changing socioeconomic status, suggesting declining social distance between Blacks and Whites. Marriages between the U.S.-and foreign-born populations also grew rapidly. Marriages to immigrants increased fivefold among U.S.-born Asian women and doubled among U.S.-born Latinas since 1980. Out-marriage to Whites also was higher among self-identified biracial than monoracial individuals, but these differences were smallest among Blacks. Interracial couples were overrepresented among cohabiting couples. Finally, log-linear models provide evidence of growing racial exogamy, but only after adjusting for changing demographic opportunities for intermarriage. Marriages between U.S.- and foreign-born coethnics have been driven by new immigration while slowing the upward trajectory of interracial marriage in America.

Background: While there is no doubt that parental intimate partner homicide is associated with strong grief and post-traumatic stress reactions among the children who have been bereaved, there is little in-depth insight into how children and young people see and describe their circumstances and needs. Objective: Our aim was to shed light on children's and young people's perspectives on their life after parental intimate partner homicide. In particular, we were interested in how they experienced their living arrangements, social environment, and general well-being. Method: We conducted semi-structured interviews with 23 children and young people (8-24 years old; 15 females and eight males) who had been younger than 18 years when one of their parents killed the other (21 children lost their mother, two children lost their father). We used thematic analysis to synthesize the findings. Results: While most participants were fairly content with themselves and their living arrangements, they also expressed substantial and persistent difficulties, including distress, conflicts between family members, and feelings of unsafety. Most importantly, children's self-image, their perspectives on their biological parents, and their views on their broader (family) environment varied considerably from participant to participant, and also between siblings. Conclusions: It is unlikely that straightforward guidelines can be given with regard to where the children should live after parental homicide, or whether they should be in contact with the perpetrating parent. Rather, this study's findings underline the need to explore children's individual viewpoints carefully during decision-making processes.

Transactional sex, or the exchange of money and gifts for sexual activities within nonmarital relationships, has been widely considered a contributing factor to the disproportionate prevalence of HIV/AIDS among young women in sub-Saharan Africa. This study applied social exchange theory to premarital relationships in order to investigate the linkages between a variety of young women's resources—including employment and material transfers from male partners—and sexual behaviors. Data on the first month of premarital relationships (N = 551 relationships) were collected from a random sample of young adult women ages 18-24 in Kisumu, Kenya, using a retrospective life history calendar. Consistent with the hypotheses, results showed that young women's income increases the likelihood of safer sexual activities, including delaying sex and using condoms consistently. Material transfers from the male partner displayed the opposite effect, supporting the view that resources obtained within the relationship decrease young women's negotiating power.

In contemporary culture, existing audiovisual recordings are constantly reused and repurposed for various ends, raising questions regarding the ethics of such appropriations, particularly when the recording  depicts actual people and events. Every reuse of a preexisting recording is, on some level, a misuse in that it was not intended or at least anticipated by the original maker, but not all misuses are necessarily unethical. In fact, there are many instances of productive misuse that seem justified. At the same time, there are other instances in which the misuse shades into abuse. Documentary scholars have long engaged with the question of the ethical responsibility of documentary makers in relation to their subjects. But what happens when this responsibility is set at a remove, when the recording already exists for the taking and repurposing? Reuse, Misuse and Abuse surveys a range of contemporary films and videos that appropriate preexisting footage and attempts to theorize their ethical implications.