Deborah L Tolman
Biographic Data
| ID | 263259 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Deborah L Tolman |
| GIVEN NAMES | Deborah L |
| FAMILY NAME | Tolman |
| SIGNATURE | TOLMAN D L |
| AFFILIATIONS | San Francisco State University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1932-2101 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 46 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 829 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 45 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1991 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 16 |
Asking an Unasked Question and the Radical Act of Listening
Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Deborah L. Tolman; Asking an Unasked Question and the Radical Act of Listening: A Story About Relationships. Harvard Educational Review 1 March 2024; 94 (1): 112–120. doi: https://doi.org/10.17763/1943-5045-94.1.112 Download citation file…
Boys’ Internalized Appearance-Related Norms from Different Socializers Uniquely, Negatively Relate to Wellbeing and Gender Beliefs
Much of the work on body image socialization masks the potentially unique influence of different socializers, yet clearer understanding of socialization mechanisms and ideological context aid intervention efforts. We explored how fathers, female peers, male peers, and adolescent boys themselves produce different levels of internalized appearance-related norms and how these socializer-specific norms differentially relate to wellbeing and beliefs r…
Opening the Black Box
Pathways to Pleasure and Protection
Sexual agency is a fundamental dimension of sexual subjectivity and well-being. Research and theory suggest that it functions in the service of both protection from harm and enabling sexual pleasure. However, sexual agency can be difficult for women to navigate in a social landscape in which femininity ideologies remain powerful social forces, operating in racialized ways. We examined how embodiment, sexual desire, and entitlement to sexual pleas…
Hot right now
In this paper, we draw upon group interviews in London and New York City to explore how differently classed and racialized groups of teen girls navigate media constructions of hot, sexy, femininity. We explore how cultural ideals of sexiness are shifting to include more skin shades and larger body parts in specific proportions which align to new sexualized and racialized ideals of femininity. Some celebrities embody these new forms of what is ter…
Constructing risk and responsibility
Teen sexuality has been portrayed as dangerous (i.e., risk of pregnancy, STIs, sexual victimization for girls) yet pervasive in a growing post-feminist culture of sexualization. Adolescents are tasked with negotiating the difficult terrain of desire and danger as adults persistently construct contradictory discourses and panics around teen sexuality. This study examines a sample of online news media through a feminist intersectional lens, conside…
Reviving a Positive Discourse on Sexuality within Social Work
Sexuality is not an invisible dimension within social work. Social workers are constantly engaged with aspects of sexuality across virtually all practice domains. Indeed, some of the most fundamental and frequent concerns of social workers involve sexual abuse, sexual violence, and HIV and other sexually transmitted infections. However, conversations about healthy sexuality, positive sexuality, or sexual well-being that are well ensconced in many…
That’s Just How It Is”
In this mixed-methods study, we adopted a feminist theoretical lens in conceptualizing gender as hierarchical and complementary ideologies—femininity and masculinity—that are fundamental constituents of institutionalized heterosexuality as a way to understand the persistence of gender inequity in adolescents’ heterosexual relationships. In Study 1, we conducted separate analyses for girls and boys to evaluate whether masculinity ideology for boys…
Mobilizing Metaphor
APA handbook of sexuality and psychology, Vol. 1
Embodying sexualisation
This interchange explores the role of girl (ages thirteen to twenty-two) activism in the USA organisation SPARK (Sexualization Protest: Action, Resistance, Knowledge). Some of the many initiatives and programmes SPARK has enacted with girls, including online forums, blog spaces, marches, and summits directly address recent calls to attend to the complexity in understanding and resisting 'sexualisation' with teen girls. Several of the girls' media…
Heterosexual Anal Intercourse among Black and Latino Adolescents and Young Adults
The purpose of this study was to gain a better understanding of the context of heterosexual anal intercourse (HAI) among adolescents. Black and Latino youth were recruited at an urban college and an inner-city adolescent clinic. Participants completed a sexual behavioral questionnaire and the Sexual Relationship Power Scale (SRPS). A total of 61 young people, all of whom were sexually experienced, completed the survey (53 females; 8 males). Of th…
Female Adolescents, Sexual Empowerment and Desire
Normative Sexuality Development in Adolescence
This review details a key innovation across the field of adolescent sexuality research over the last decade—conceptualizing sexuality as a normative aspect of adolescent development. Anchored in a growing articulation of adolescent sexuality as having positive qualities and consequences, we provide an organizing framework for understanding sexuality as normative and developmentally expected. Using this framework, we report on 3 specific areas of …
It’s Like Doing Homework”
Embodiment Feels Better
In a five-year longitudinal study, we investigated the role of body objectification in shaping girls' self-esteem and depressive symptoms over the course of adolescence. Multivariate Latent Growth Curve Modeling (MLGM) was used to test the association between body objectification and both self-esteem and depressive symptoms with data from 587 adolescent girls who began the study at age 13 and completed the study at age 18. Results revealed that b…
Dilemmas of Desire
Be sexy but not sexual. Don't be a prude but don't be a slut. These are the cultural messages that barrage teenage girls. In movies and magazines, in music and advice columns, girls are portrayed as the object or the victim of someone else's desire -but virtually never as someone with acceptable sexual feelings of her own. What teenage girls make of these contradictory messages, and what they make of their awakening sexuality - so distant from an…
Beyond Exposure
Research on adolescents' use of sexual media has been dominated by a variable‐oriented perspective, focusing on incremental effects of media exposure on sexual behavior. The present investigation examines the ways in which adolescents select and organize their television viewing. This study used cluster analysis to identify, validate, and describe distinct profiles of adolescent television use. Eight discrete clusters emerged, each with a unique …
Narratives of Desire in Mid-Age Women With and Without Arousal Difficulties
There is controversy about the nature of women's sexual desire. The aim was to explore narrative descriptions of sexual desire among mid-aged women in hopes of clarifying how women define and experience sexual desire, and how these might differ among women with and without female sexual arousal disorder (FSAD). Mid-aged women without (age: M = 45, n = 12) and with (age: M = 55, n = 10) FSAD took part in in-depth interviews that invited them to sh…
Girls' relationship authenticity and self-esteem across adolescence
Feminist psychologists have long posited that relationship authenticity (i.e., the congruence between what one thinks and feels and what one does and says in relational contexts) is integral to self-esteem and well-being. Guided by a feminist developmental framework, the authors investigated the role of relationship authenticity in promoting girls' self-esteem over the course of adolescence. Latent growth curve modeling was used to test the assoc…
From Sex to Sexuality
Although it is widely recognized that sexual content pervades television, research rarely examines how television's sexual messages are gendered and occur in a relational context. This study describes the development and implementation of a new coding scheme to evaluate sexual content from a feminist perspective. Merging scripting theory (Gagnon and Simon, 1987) with the theory of compulsory heterosexuality (Rich, 1980), we explicate a heteronorm…
In a different position
This chapter challenges forthcoming research on adolescent female sexuality to take more seriously the role of dominant cultural ideologies regarding heterosexuality and to consider its theoretical and methodological implications
Risky business
Through a lens of embodiment
APA Handbook of Sexuality and Psychology
From Sex to Sexuality
Although it is widely recognized that sexual content pervades television, research rarely examines how television's sexual messages are gendered and occur in a relational context. This study describes the development and implementation of a new coding scheme to evaluate sexual content from a feminist perspective. Merging scripting theory (Gagnon and Simon, 1987) with the theory of compulsory heterosexuality (Rich, 1980), we explicate a heteronorm…
Gender matters
This article illustrates the construction of a new model of adolescent sexual health, one that addresses the complex relationships between gender and adolescent sexuality. A review of sexual health models highlights the absence of gender; in contrast, research illuminates the significance of gender. This article describes the process of building a model of sexual health explicitly for girls, guided by feminist research on adolescent girls' sexual…
Female Adolescents, Sexual Empowerment and Desire
Doing Desire
Adolescence is a moment when sexuality, identity, and relationships are heightened; at adolescence women begin to be vulnerable to losing touch with their own thoughts and feelings. Reporting from a larger study of adolescent girls' experiences of sexual desire, the author focuses on how adolescent girls who have different sexual orientations describe their experiences of sexuality and their responses to their own sexual desire. Cultural contexts…
Narratives of Desire in Mid-Age Women With and Without Arousal Difficulties
There is controversy about the nature of women's sexual desire. The aim was to explore narrative descriptions of sexual desire among mid-aged women in hopes of clarifying how women define and experience sexual desire, and how these might differ among women with and without female sexual arousal disorder (FSAD). Mid-aged women without (age: M = 45, n = 12) and with (age: M = 55, n = 10) FSAD took part in in-depth interviews that invited them to sh…
The Adolescent Femininity Ideology Scale
This article describes the development and validation of the Adolescent Femininity Ideology Scale (AFIS) through three studies with racially, ethnically, and socioeconomically diverse early, middle, and late adolescent girls. Distinguished from feminine personality trait and feminine gender role, the concept of femininity ideology represents the individual-level construct that links individual females to social constructions of femininity. The AF…
Dimensions of Desire
This study provides an example of how feminist psychology can bridge qualitative and quantitative methods while keeping lived experience at the center of an inquiry. The goal of the study was to begin to understand adolescent girls' experiences of sexual desire. We describe three separate and synergistically related analyses of interviews with 30 adolescent girls. We begin with a qualitative analysis of their voiced experiences of sexual desire; …
Late Adolescent Girls’ Sexual Experiences and Sexual Satisfaction
This study presented and tested a model of sexual satisfaction for late adolescent girls. In this model, sexual self-concept and approach sexual motives were tested as predictors of adolescent girls’ sexual satisfaction with their most recent experience of sexual intercourse. A total of 116 girls in 12th grade (ages 16-19) completed measures of sexual self-concept and sexual experiences. A smaller number of girls (n = 70) with intercourse experie…
Looking Good, Sounding Good
This study used a feminist psychodynamic developmental framework to test the hypothesis that internalizing conventional femininity ideologies in two domains—inauthenticity in relationships and body objectification—is associated with early adolescent girls' mental health. One hundred forty-eight eighth-grade girls completed measures of femininity ideology, self-esteem, depression, and demographic characteristics. In the first part of this study, w…
To Be Seen and Not Heard
Desegregating Sexuality Research
Scholarly investigations into male and female sexuality over the life course have long occupied two separate "camps": One focused on the biological aspects of sexuality and one focused on the sociocultural/political aspects. This bifurcated approach has been particularly ill suited for the study of sexual desire, a topic that has been generally undertheorized by sex researchers. A modern reappraisal of gender and sexual desire is proposed that ta…
Mobilizing Metaphor
Girls' relationship authenticity and self-esteem across adolescence
Feminist psychologists have long posited that relationship authenticity (i.e., the congruence between what one thinks and feels and what one does and says in relational contexts) is integral to self-esteem and well-being. Guided by a feminist developmental framework, the authors investigated the role of relationship authenticity in promoting girls' self-esteem over the course of adolescence. Latent growth curve modeling was used to test the assoc…
The Adolescent Masculinity Ideology in Relationships Scale
This article presents a new scale to measure adolescent boys'internalization of masculine norms as evidenced by their attitudes and beliefs about what constitutes appropriate behavior for males within interpersonal relationships. Framing masculinity ideology within a relational paradigm, the theoretical foundations of the Adolescent Masculinity Ideology in Relationships Scale (AMIRS) emphasize that it is through and within relationships that masc…
Female Adolescent Sexuality
In this paper, I explore the resonance between experiences that are labeled “sexual problems” among adult women and adolescent girls' normative descriptions of their sexual experiences. Noting that female adolescent sexual dysfunction is an oxymoron, I review the feminist phenomenological research on female adolescent sexuality to support this claim. This review demonstrates and underscores the ways in which becoming sexual as an adolescent girl …
That’s Just How It Is”
In this mixed-methods study, we adopted a feminist theoretical lens in conceptualizing gender as hierarchical and complementary ideologies—femininity and masculinity—that are fundamental constituents of institutionalized heterosexuality as a way to understand the persistence of gender inequity in adolescents’ heterosexual relationships. In Study 1, we conducted separate analyses for girls and boys to evaluate whether masculinity ideology for boys…
Reviving a Positive Discourse on Sexuality within Social Work
Sexuality is not an invisible dimension within social work. Social workers are constantly engaged with aspects of sexuality across virtually all practice domains. Indeed, some of the most fundamental and frequent concerns of social workers involve sexual abuse, sexual violence, and HIV and other sexually transmitted infections. However, conversations about healthy sexuality, positive sexuality, or sexual well-being that are well ensconced in many…
Constructing risk and responsibility
Teen sexuality has been portrayed as dangerous (i.e., risk of pregnancy, STIs, sexual victimization for girls) yet pervasive in a growing post-feminist culture of sexualization. Adolescents are tasked with negotiating the difficult terrain of desire and danger as adults persistently construct contradictory discourses and panics around teen sexuality. This study examines a sample of online news media through a feminist intersectional lens, conside…
Sowing the Seeds of Violence in Heterosexual Relationships
In this paper, we explore how early adolescents' descriptions of their romantic relationships produce evidence of how precursors to violence are woven into the fabric of such relationships from the very beginning of their experiences of “heterosociality.” We identified Rich's (1983) concept of compulsory heterosexuality as an interpretive framework for analyzing these relationship narratives, examining qualitative data from two samples (combined …
Pathways to Pleasure and Protection
Sexual agency is a fundamental dimension of sexual subjectivity and well-being. Research and theory suggest that it functions in the service of both protection from harm and enabling sexual pleasure. However, sexual agency can be difficult for women to navigate in a social landscape in which femininity ideologies remain powerful social forces, operating in racialized ways. We examined how embodiment, sexual desire, and entitlement to sexual pleas…
Adolescent Girls, Women and Sexuality
No abstract available for this article
Hot right now
In this paper, we draw upon group interviews in London and New York City to explore how differently classed and racialized groups of teen girls navigate media constructions of hot, sexy, femininity. We explore how cultural ideals of sexiness are shifting to include more skin shades and larger body parts in specific proportions which align to new sexualized and racialized ideals of femininity. Some celebrities embody these new forms of what is ter…
Heterosexual Anal Intercourse among Black and Latino Adolescents and Young Adults
The purpose of this study was to gain a better understanding of the context of heterosexual anal intercourse (HAI) among adolescents. Black and Latino youth were recruited at an urban college and an inner-city adolescent clinic. Participants completed a sexual behavioral questionnaire and the Sexual Relationship Power Scale (SRPS). A total of 61 young people, all of whom were sexually experienced, completed the survey (53 females; 8 males). Of th…
Risky business
It’s Like Doing Homework”
Adolescent Girls, Women and Sexuality
No abstract available for this article
Economic impacts of TEDs on the shrimp production sector
The economic impact of the effects of the Turtle Excluder Devices (TEDs) used in the Gulf of Mexico to control the numbers of turtles caught in shrimp trawl nets is analyzed. This is a major concern to the shrimp fishing economy due to the potential loss of shrimp. A simulation modeling technique is used which estimates the changes in landings, revenues, costs, and the economic rents. A base scenario in which no TEDs are used is compared with fiv…
Listening for Crises of Connection
No abstract available for this article
Doing Desire
Adolescence is a moment when sexuality, identity, and relationships are heightened; at adolescence women begin to be vulnerable to losing touch with their own thoughts and feelings. Reporting from a larger study of adolescent girls' experiences of sexual desire, the author focuses on how adolescent girls who have different sexual orientations describe their experiences of sexuality and their responses to their own sexual desire. Cultural contexts…
Transforming Psychology
Transforming psychology, the title of this volume, refers to the personal and social transformations that take place through the work we do, as well as to our goal of transforming the field of psychology itself through the inclusion of the interpretive and participatory methods described here. In this volume we examine how these methods have been and continue to be incorporated into the field of psychology and the challenges researchers have face…
Engaging the Process of Transformation
The contributions included in this issue demonstrate the variety of ways in which participatory and interpretive methods are transforming the field of psychology and clarify the integration of the personal and political commitments of the authors within their research. A number of issues remain to be negotiated, however, before these methods take their full place in the field. This conclusion considers a few of these issues, including an examinat…
Dimensions of Desire
This study provides an example of how feminist psychology can bridge qualitative and quantitative methods while keeping lived experience at the center of an inquiry. The goal of the study was to begin to understand adolescent girls' experiences of sexual desire. We describe three separate and synergistically related analyses of interviews with 30 adolescent girls. We begin with a qualitative analysis of their voiced experiences of sexual desire; …
The Adolescent Femininity Ideology Scale
This article describes the development and validation of the Adolescent Femininity Ideology Scale (AFIS) through three studies with racially, ethnically, and socioeconomically diverse early, middle, and late adolescent girls. Distinguished from feminine personality trait and feminine gender role, the concept of femininity ideology represents the individual-level construct that links individual females to social constructions of femininity. The AF…
Desegregating Sexuality Research
Scholarly investigations into male and female sexuality over the life course have long occupied two separate "camps": One focused on the biological aspects of sexuality and one focused on the sociocultural/political aspects. This bifurcated approach has been particularly ill suited for the study of sexual desire, a topic that has been generally undertheorized by sex researchers. A modern reappraisal of gender and sexual desire is proposed that ta…
A Perspective on the New Perspectives
Female Adolescent Sexuality
In this paper, I explore the resonance between experiences that are labeled “sexual problems” among adult women and adolescent girls' normative descriptions of their sexual experiences. Noting that female adolescent sexual dysfunction is an oxymoron, I review the feminist phenomenological research on female adolescent sexuality to support this claim. This review demonstrates and underscores the ways in which becoming sexual as an adolescent girl …
Improving Women's Sexual Assertiveness
Sowing the Seeds of Violence in Heterosexual Relationships
In this paper, we explore how early adolescents' descriptions of their romantic relationships produce evidence of how precursors to violence are woven into the fabric of such relationships from the very beginning of their experiences of “heterosociality.” We identified Rich's (1983) concept of compulsory heterosexuality as an interpretive framework for analyzing these relationship narratives, examining qualitative data from two samples (combined …
Gender matters
This article illustrates the construction of a new model of adolescent sexual health, one that addresses the complex relationships between gender and adolescent sexuality. A review of sexual health models highlights the absence of gender; in contrast, research illuminates the significance of gender. This article describes the process of building a model of sexual health explicitly for girls, guided by feminist research on adolescent girls' sexual…
I. Found(ing) Discourses of Desire
This special feature takes stock of the current landscape of theory, practice and research on female adolescent sexuality in the wake of Michelle Fine’s seminal 1988 Harvard Educational Review article, ‘Sexuality, Schooling, and Adolescent Females: The Missing Discourse of Desire’. Using a bevy of feminist analyses of how the oppression of female sexuality functions as a primary force in the overall oppression of women, Fine’s paper opened many n…
There is more to the story
IX. Supporting Subjectivity
The Adolescent Masculinity Ideology in Relationships Scale
This article presents a new scale to measure adolescent boys'internalization of masculine norms as evidenced by their attitudes and beliefs about what constitutes appropriate behavior for males within interpersonal relationships. Framing masculinity ideology within a relational paradigm, the theoretical foundations of the Adolescent Masculinity Ideology in Relationships Scale (AMIRS) emphasize that it is through and within relationships that masc…
In a different position
This chapter challenges forthcoming research on adolescent female sexuality to take more seriously the role of dominant cultural ideologies regarding heterosexuality and to consider its theoretical and methodological implications
Risky business
Through a lens of embodiment
Late Adolescent Girls’ Sexual Experiences and Sexual Satisfaction
This study presented and tested a model of sexual satisfaction for late adolescent girls. In this model, sexual self-concept and approach sexual motives were tested as predictors of adolescent girls’ sexual satisfaction with their most recent experience of sexual intercourse. A total of 116 girls in 12th grade (ages 16-19) completed measures of sexual self-concept and sexual experiences. A smaller number of girls (n = 70) with intercourse experie…
Looking Good, Sounding Good
This study used a feminist psychodynamic developmental framework to test the hypothesis that internalizing conventional femininity ideologies in two domains—inauthenticity in relationships and body objectification—is associated with early adolescent girls' mental health. One hundred forty-eight eighth-grade girls completed measures of femininity ideology, self-esteem, depression, and demographic characteristics. In the first part of this study, w…
To Be Seen and Not Heard
From Sex to Sexuality
Although it is widely recognized that sexual content pervades television, research rarely examines how television's sexual messages are gendered and occur in a relational context. This study describes the development and implementation of a new coding scheme to evaluate sexual content from a feminist perspective. Merging scripting theory (Gagnon and Simon, 1987) with the theory of compulsory heterosexuality (Rich, 1980), we explicate a heteronorm…
Psychology (42 works) · Sociology (32 works) · Gender Studies (28 works) · Human sexuality (24 works) · Social Psychology (24 works) · Developmental psychology (23 works) · Gender Studies (22 works) · Gender Roles and Identity Studies (19 works) · Social Psychology (19 works) · Adolescent Sexual and Reproductive Health (18 works)