Mary Louise Adams
Biographic Data
| ID | 815496 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Mary Louise Adams |
| GIVEN NAMES | Mary Louise |
| FAMILY NAME | Adams |
| SIGNATURE | ADAMS M L |
| AFFILIATIONS | Queen's University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9952-7547 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 17 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 99 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 17 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1989 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Development and validation of the Safe (Socially Ascribed intersectional identities For Equity) questionnaire
Traditional questionnaires do not capture the complexity of how people are viewed by others and grouped into categories on the basis of what is inferred (or not) about them. This is critical in applying an intersectionality framework in research because people are negatively impacted because of "who they are" but also based on "how others see them." The purpose of this project was to develop and validate a questionnaire, grounded in intersectiona…
Feminist Softball as Everyday Utopia
In 1987, Susan Birrell and Diana Richter wrote “Is a Diamond Forever?” a study of feminist softball teams and their players’ efforts to use sport as a vehicle of political transformation, one of several pieces in which Birrell takes up sport as a feminist strategy. In this essay, I discuss the article as a historical artifact, contextualizing it in relation to intersectional critiques of second-wave feminism that readers might bring to it today. …
The construction of authority and authenticity in Islamic discourse(s): Contrasting and historicizing contemporary narratives from English Sunni narratives
Step-counting in the “health-society”: Phenomenological reflections on walking in the era of the Fitbit
Feminist Cultural Studies: Uncertainties and Possibilities
This collection of commentaries emerged from ongoing conversations among the contributors about our varied understandings of and desires for the sport studies field. One of our initial concerns was with the absence/presence of feminist thought within sport studies. Despite a rich history of feminist scholarship in sport studies, we have questioned the extent to which feminism is currently being engaged or acknowledged as having shaped the field. …
No Taste for Rough-and-Tumble Play
In popular and professional discourses about effeminacy or sissyness, boys' feelings about sport and their actual athletic abilities have been represented both as symptoms of gender deviance and as targets for clinical intervention. The assumption has been that knowing something about a boy's feelings for sport tells us considerably more than that about him. This article looks at the special role played by sport in what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick once…
From Mixed-Sex Sport to Sport for Girls: The Feminization of Figure Skating
The history of women's sport is often written as a history of gender segregation and women's subordination. This article, however, demonstrates the historical contingency of gendered sport categories and argues that gender segregation has not always been fundamental to the organization of competitive sports. Drawing on the history of figure skating, the article illustrates how a once 'manly exercise' went through a relatively gender-balanced peri…
Stories of fracture and claim for belonging: Young migrants' narratives of arrival in Britain
This article brings an anthropological approach to bear on the question of ‘children's voices’ and, particularly, on the stories told by some young migrants about their recent arrival as asylum-seekers in Britain. Young migrants' narratives are examined as situated and self-conscious claims to a certain identity as child refugee. The question of why a particular narrative of ‘arrival in Britain’ was offered by a diverse group of young migrants an…
Playful places, serious times: Young women migrants from a peri-urban settlement, Zimbabwe
This article builds on recent anthropologies of youth and childhood in contemporary Africa to incorporate perspectives on gender, age, maturation, and life course, particularly as these engage a politics of place and historically specific experiences of emplacement. The ethnography focuses on events surrounding teenage girls' involvement in city work and travel in the peri-urban areas of Harare, Zimbabwe, at a time when women's bodies and behavio…
The manly history of a ‘girls' sport’: Gender, class and the development of nineteenth-century figure skating
Now widely perceived as a ‘girls' sport’, figure skating was once the exclusive pastime of upper-class men. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, skating allowed privileged men to exhibit their grace and elegance, essential characteristics of a refined manly character. But notions of manliness change over time and, with the rise of Victorianism, definitions of grace and elegance narrowed to fit better with middle-class ideas abou…
Response to Helstein’s “Seeing Your Sporting Body: Identity, Subjectivity, and Misrecognition”
Death to the Prancing Prince: Effeminacy, Sport Discourses and the Salvation of Men's Dancing
For much of the 20th century, dance writers and critics regularly bemoaned a shortage of male dancers. As one writer put it, the average American father would rather see his son dead than performing on stage in tights. This article looks at commentary about male dancing as a means of understanding popular conceptions of effeminacy. It addresses the way discourses about sport, physical prowess and hard bodies have been appropriated in attempts to …
The Trouble with Normal: Postwar Youth and the Making of Heterosexuality
Lesbian Motherhood: An Exploration of Canadian Lesbian Families
The Trouble with Normal: Postwar Youth and the Making of Heterosexuality
In the years after the Second World War, economic and social factors combined to produce an intense concern over the sexual development and behaviour of young people. In a context where heterosexuality and 'normality' were understood to be synonymous and assumed to be necessary for social and national stability, teenagers were the target of a range of materials and practices meant to turn young people into proper heterosexuals.In this study, Mary…
Almost Anything Can Happen: A Search for Sexual Discourse in the Urban Spaces of 1940s Toronto
Mary Louise Adams, Almost Anything Can Happen: A Search for Sexual Discourse in the Urban Spaces of 1940s Toronto, The Canadian Journal of Sociology / Cahiers canadiens de sociologie, Vol. 19, No. 2, Special Issue on Moral Regulation (Spring, 1994), pp. 217-232
There's No Place like Home: On the Place of Identity in Feminist Politics
Fifteen or so women crowded the tiny front room of the women's crisis centre. We sat in a circle, as far as that was possible, propped against cushions on the floor, perched precariously on the rickety sofa or swaddled in the effluent of overstuffed chairs. A facilitator had been imported for the occasion; she started the meeting with a simple exercise that quickly evolved to a type of ritual. The climate in the room became intense, it was an atm…
The Trouble with Normal: Postwar Youth and the Making of Heterosexuality
In the years after the Second World War, economic and social factors combined to produce an intense concern over the sexual development and behaviour of young people. In a context where heterosexuality and 'normality' were understood to be synonymous and assumed to be necessary for social and national stability, teenagers were the target of a range of materials and practices meant to turn young people into proper heterosexuals.In this study, Mary…
Lesbian Motherhood: An Exploration of Canadian Lesbian Families
Stories of fracture and claim for belonging: Young migrants' narratives of arrival in Britain
This article brings an anthropological approach to bear on the question of ‘children's voices’ and, particularly, on the stories told by some young migrants about their recent arrival as asylum-seekers in Britain. Young migrants' narratives are examined as situated and self-conscious claims to a certain identity as child refugee. The question of why a particular narrative of ‘arrival in Britain’ was offered by a diverse group of young migrants an…
There's No Place like Home: On the Place of Identity in Feminist Politics
Fifteen or so women crowded the tiny front room of the women's crisis centre. We sat in a circle, as far as that was possible, propped against cushions on the floor, perched precariously on the rickety sofa or swaddled in the effluent of overstuffed chairs. A facilitator had been imported for the occasion; she started the meeting with a simple exercise that quickly evolved to a type of ritual. The climate in the room became intense, it was an atm…
Feminist Cultural Studies: Uncertainties and Possibilities
This collection of commentaries emerged from ongoing conversations among the contributors about our varied understandings of and desires for the sport studies field. One of our initial concerns was with the absence/presence of feminist thought within sport studies. Despite a rich history of feminist scholarship in sport studies, we have questioned the extent to which feminism is currently being engaged or acknowledged as having shaped the field. …
No Taste for Rough-and-Tumble Play
In popular and professional discourses about effeminacy or sissyness, boys' feelings about sport and their actual athletic abilities have been represented both as symptoms of gender deviance and as targets for clinical intervention. The assumption has been that knowing something about a boy's feelings for sport tells us considerably more than that about him. This article looks at the special role played by sport in what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick once…
The manly history of a ‘girls' sport’: Gender, class and the development of nineteenth-century figure skating
Now widely perceived as a ‘girls' sport’, figure skating was once the exclusive pastime of upper-class men. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, skating allowed privileged men to exhibit their grace and elegance, essential characteristics of a refined manly character. But notions of manliness change over time and, with the rise of Victorianism, definitions of grace and elegance narrowed to fit better with middle-class ideas abou…
Death to the Prancing Prince: Effeminacy, Sport Discourses and the Salvation of Men's Dancing
For much of the 20th century, dance writers and critics regularly bemoaned a shortage of male dancers. As one writer put it, the average American father would rather see his son dead than performing on stage in tights. This article looks at commentary about male dancing as a means of understanding popular conceptions of effeminacy. It addresses the way discourses about sport, physical prowess and hard bodies have been appropriated in attempts to …
Playful places, serious times: Young women migrants from a peri-urban settlement, Zimbabwe
This article builds on recent anthropologies of youth and childhood in contemporary Africa to incorporate perspectives on gender, age, maturation, and life course, particularly as these engage a politics of place and historically specific experiences of emplacement. The ethnography focuses on events surrounding teenage girls' involvement in city work and travel in the peri-urban areas of Harare, Zimbabwe, at a time when women's bodies and behavio…
Step-counting in the “health-society”: Phenomenological reflections on walking in the era of the Fitbit
From Mixed-Sex Sport to Sport for Girls: The Feminization of Figure Skating
The history of women's sport is often written as a history of gender segregation and women's subordination. This article, however, demonstrates the historical contingency of gendered sport categories and argues that gender segregation has not always been fundamental to the organization of competitive sports. Drawing on the history of figure skating, the article illustrates how a once 'manly exercise' went through a relatively gender-balanced peri…
The Trouble with Normal: Postwar Youth and the Making of Heterosexuality
Almost Anything Can Happen: A Search for Sexual Discourse in the Urban Spaces of 1940s Toronto
Mary Louise Adams, Almost Anything Can Happen: A Search for Sexual Discourse in the Urban Spaces of 1940s Toronto, The Canadian Journal of Sociology / Cahiers canadiens de sociologie, Vol. 19, No. 2, Special Issue on Moral Regulation (Spring, 1994), pp. 217-232
There's No Place like Home: On the Place of Identity in Feminist Politics
Fifteen or so women crowded the tiny front room of the women's crisis centre. We sat in a circle, as far as that was possible, propped against cushions on the floor, perched precariously on the rickety sofa or swaddled in the effluent of overstuffed chairs. A facilitator had been imported for the occasion; she started the meeting with a simple exercise that quickly evolved to a type of ritual. The climate in the room became intense, it was an atm…
Almost Anything Can Happen: A Search for Sexual Discourse in the Urban Spaces of 1940s Toronto
Mary Louise Adams, Almost Anything Can Happen: A Search for Sexual Discourse in the Urban Spaces of 1940s Toronto, The Canadian Journal of Sociology / Cahiers canadiens de sociologie, Vol. 19, No. 2, Special Issue on Moral Regulation (Spring, 1994), pp. 217-232
The Trouble with Normal: Postwar Youth and the Making of Heterosexuality
In the years after the Second World War, economic and social factors combined to produce an intense concern over the sexual development and behaviour of young people. In a context where heterosexuality and 'normality' were understood to be synonymous and assumed to be necessary for social and national stability, teenagers were the target of a range of materials and practices meant to turn young people into proper heterosexuals.In this study, Mary…
Lesbian Motherhood: An Exploration of Canadian Lesbian Families
The Trouble with Normal: Postwar Youth and the Making of Heterosexuality
Death to the Prancing Prince: Effeminacy, Sport Discourses and the Salvation of Men's Dancing
For much of the 20th century, dance writers and critics regularly bemoaned a shortage of male dancers. As one writer put it, the average American father would rather see his son dead than performing on stage in tights. This article looks at commentary about male dancing as a means of understanding popular conceptions of effeminacy. It addresses the way discourses about sport, physical prowess and hard bodies have been appropriated in attempts to …
The manly history of a ‘girls' sport’: Gender, class and the development of nineteenth-century figure skating
Now widely perceived as a ‘girls' sport’, figure skating was once the exclusive pastime of upper-class men. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, skating allowed privileged men to exhibit their grace and elegance, essential characteristics of a refined manly character. But notions of manliness change over time and, with the rise of Victorianism, definitions of grace and elegance narrowed to fit better with middle-class ideas abou…
Response to Helstein’s “Seeing Your Sporting Body: Identity, Subjectivity, and Misrecognition”
Stories of fracture and claim for belonging: Young migrants' narratives of arrival in Britain
This article brings an anthropological approach to bear on the question of ‘children's voices’ and, particularly, on the stories told by some young migrants about their recent arrival as asylum-seekers in Britain. Young migrants' narratives are examined as situated and self-conscious claims to a certain identity as child refugee. The question of why a particular narrative of ‘arrival in Britain’ was offered by a diverse group of young migrants an…
Playful places, serious times: Young women migrants from a peri-urban settlement, Zimbabwe
This article builds on recent anthropologies of youth and childhood in contemporary Africa to incorporate perspectives on gender, age, maturation, and life course, particularly as these engage a politics of place and historically specific experiences of emplacement. The ethnography focuses on events surrounding teenage girls' involvement in city work and travel in the peri-urban areas of Harare, Zimbabwe, at a time when women's bodies and behavio…
From Mixed-Sex Sport to Sport for Girls: The Feminization of Figure Skating
The history of women's sport is often written as a history of gender segregation and women's subordination. This article, however, demonstrates the historical contingency of gendered sport categories and argues that gender segregation has not always been fundamental to the organization of competitive sports. Drawing on the history of figure skating, the article illustrates how a once 'manly exercise' went through a relatively gender-balanced peri…
No Taste for Rough-and-Tumble Play
In popular and professional discourses about effeminacy or sissyness, boys' feelings about sport and their actual athletic abilities have been represented both as symptoms of gender deviance and as targets for clinical intervention. The assumption has been that knowing something about a boy's feelings for sport tells us considerably more than that about him. This article looks at the special role played by sport in what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick once…
Feminist Cultural Studies: Uncertainties and Possibilities
This collection of commentaries emerged from ongoing conversations among the contributors about our varied understandings of and desires for the sport studies field. One of our initial concerns was with the absence/presence of feminist thought within sport studies. Despite a rich history of feminist scholarship in sport studies, we have questioned the extent to which feminism is currently being engaged or acknowledged as having shaped the field. …
The construction of authority and authenticity in Islamic discourse(s): Contrasting and historicizing contemporary narratives from English Sunni narratives
Step-counting in the “health-society”: Phenomenological reflections on walking in the era of the Fitbit
Feminist Softball as Everyday Utopia
In 1987, Susan Birrell and Diana Richter wrote “Is a Diamond Forever?” a study of feminist softball teams and their players’ efforts to use sport as a vehicle of political transformation, one of several pieces in which Birrell takes up sport as a feminist strategy. In this essay, I discuss the article as a historical artifact, contextualizing it in relation to intersectional critiques of second-wave feminism that readers might bring to it today. …
Development and validation of the Safe (Socially Ascribed intersectional identities For Equity) questionnaire
Traditional questionnaires do not capture the complexity of how people are viewed by others and grouped into categories on the basis of what is inferred (or not) about them. This is critical in applying an intersectionality framework in research because people are negatively impacted because of "who they are" but also based on "how others see them." The purpose of this project was to develop and validate a questionnaire, grounded in intersectiona…
Sociology (16 works) · Gender Studies (14 works) · Gender Studies (10 works) · Political science (9 works) · Art (8 works) · Aesthetics (7 works) · Law (6 works) · Psychology (6 works) · Sports, Gender, and Society (6 works) · Epistemology (5 works)