The Regulatory Relationships Between the Gonad-Inhibiting Hormone and Insulin-Like Androgenic Gland Hormone-Binding Protein Genes in the Eyestalk-Androgenic Gland-Testis Axis of Macrobrachium rosenbergii

Gonad-inhibiting hormone (GIH) belongs to a family of neuropeptides that are released from the eyestalks of male crustaceans and plays key roles in gonadal maturity, reproduction, and molting. However, the detailed mechanisms underlying the effects of GIH on sexual regulation have yet to be elucidated. In the present study, we aimed to demonstrate how GIH mediate the activity of the androgenic gland (AG) to affect sexual regulation. To do this, we cloned and characterized a GIH sequence from Macrobrachium rosenbergii (MrGIH). The open reading frame (ORF) of MrGIH was 360 bp and codes for a polypeptide of 119 amino acids and a putative protein of 13.56 KDa. Tissue analysis showed that MrGIH is widely expressed in a range of tissues but particularly, the eyestalk, intestine, and nerve cord. Following the dsRNA silencing of MrGIH for 24 h, the expression levels of MrGIH were down-regulated in both the eyestalk and AG when compared with the negative control, but significantly increased the expression of Macrobrachium rosenbergii insulin-like androgenic gland hormone-binding protein (MrIAGBP) in AG, thus suggesting that MrGIH is an inhibitory factor for MrIAGBP. In addition, we found that eyestalk removal on certain days led to increased expression levels of MrIAGBP expression. The expression levels of MrIAGBP peaked at 2 d in the AG after unilateral and bilateral eyestalk ablation, exhibiting a 7.27- and 6.03-fold increase, respectively. Afterward, the expression of GIH protein levels were down-regulated and IAGBP protein levels were up-regulated after GIH silencing using immunohistochemistry method, combined with the increase of IAGBP protein levels after eyestalk ablation, confirming that MrGIH is an inhibitory factor that can moderately regulate AG development and IAGBP expression. Collectively, our findings enriched the mechanisms that control the sexual regulation pathway of male M. rosenbergii, and provided significant information for further explorations of the mechanism underlying sex regulation in other decapod crustaceans.

Antihomosexuality and Nationalist Critique in Late Colonial Jamaica

This essay examines discourses of homosexuality in late colonial Jamaica through an analysis of the 1951 Police Enquiry, which leveraged accusations of homosexuality among Jamaica’s foreign police officers as a key component of its investigative work. With information from Jamaican state records, news media, literature, and social science studies, the essay argues that the inquiry mobilized divergent discourses of homosexuality across the Atlantic to enact an anticolonial nationalist form of sexual regulation. The inquiry drew not only from Jamaican figurations of homosexuality as the preserve of wealthy white foreign men but also from the Wolfenden Committee proceedings that led to the decriminalization of homosexuality in England and from the “Lavender Scare” that purged homosexuals from federal government employment in the United States. Despite its failing to reform Jamaica’s police force, the inquiry nevertheless foregrounds how sexual regulation operates through the interconnected workings of race, class, gender, and nation.

Introduction

The introduction describes the book's main arguments of how media representations of mixed-black women manage blackness— through its erasure, its sexual regulation, and by presenting an acceptable blackness with a goal to whiten the population. Stepping into contemporary debates surrounding a postracial United States and Brazilian racial democracy, the book illustrates overlapping racial ideologies that are only visible when Brazilian and U.S. cultural productions are read alongside one another. The introduction lays out the hemispheric framework, explains why and how the book uses the terms mulatta in the United States and mulata in Brazil, and defines concepts of racial management and racial intimacies. Finally, the introduction justifies the media archive and the time period of the 2000s.

Staging Crossings

This article examines the dynamic interactions between Mexican women who sought to circumvent their sexual regulation at the U.S.-Mexico border, and U.S. immigration officials who enforced these regulations and policed these women's bodies in the early twentieth century. Using the transcripts of the board of special inquiry (BSI)—a panel that deliberated over the admission of excludable immigrants and oversaw accompanying interrogations—I contend that, while the BSI operated to encode corporeally Mexican female immigrants as sexually deviant, it simultaneously served as a stage for them to respond with their own performances of crossing. In the interrogation room, women performed a slew of admissible identities, including the devoted mother, aggrieved woman, and hard-working laborer. When those attempts to cross failed, women did not simply return home. Instead, many re-crossed until they reached their intended destination. Thus, the BSI served as a site for Mexican female border crossers to both uphold and challenge the production of heteropatriarchal notions of marriage. These findings contribute to the growing literature on U.S. border enforcement in the early twentieth century and uncover the (dis)order of a growing U.S. bureaucratic infrastructure based on sexual and gendered regulation.

The periodicity of male nocturnal emission

Mental health diagnosis has become separated from theoretical models (Suris, 2016). Masturbation is a response to (imaginary) stimuli indicative of the environment of evolutionary adaptedness for copulation. Given that culture (including clothing) exists to limit experience of this environment to private, proprietary relations, it is possible that masturbation has become unwittingly normalised in sexually saturated (overstimulated) societies. If so, we would expect nature to exhibit alternate, unconscious systems of sexual regulation. It was first hypothesised (H1) that conscious sexual activity was not an inevitable behaviour for males, in that it could be entirely replaced by nocturnal emission (wet dreams). It was further hypothesised (H2) that periodicity in nocturnal emission would be exhibited, and based on preliminary data (H2B) that the periodicity observed would match the female menstrual cycle. The preliminary data set comprised a qualitative 1390 day observation and 210 day record of nocturnal emission. The primary data set comprised a 2641 day record featuring a total 471 instances of nocturnal emission. All hypotheses were confirmed. It is concluded that care must be taken to partial out societal changes (constraints) before reframing psychological health.

Lusty Women and Loose Imagination: Hume’s Philosophical Anthropology of Chastity

The theme is sexual regulation, and its necessity in the light of the dynamics of sex and reproduction, as outlined in Hume’s philosophy. The focus is on his treatment of chastity. The analysis uncovers some more general anthropological assumptions and their bearing upon what Rawls calls the ‘circumstances of justice’. The interplay between chastity as an artificial convention and its natural foundations is developed. Hume’s version of the ‘double-standard’ is identified and the role of socialisation emphasised.

‘The pictures I really dislike are those where the girls are naked!’ Postfeminist norms of female sexual embodiment in contemporary Italian digital culture

This article engages with the postfeminist debate on girls’ sexuality in contemporary Italy. The huge popularity among adolescents of social network sites (SNSs), which involve a vast mobilisation of personal images, has given rise to new concerns and a moralising gender panic about girls’ sexuality. Drawing on critical girls’ studies, and based on the outputs of a qualitative research project, the article discusses the gender discourses that emerge from Italian girls’ digital practices on SNSs, with specific reference to girls’ online self-representation through posting and sharing photos on Facebook and other SNSs. The article explores how sexual regulation works among girls in the digital context by analysing the postfeminist norms of female sexual embodiment in contemporary Italian digital culture. In doing so, the article hopes to contribute to the transnational academic debate in media and cultural studies by showing the discursive and visual conditions of possibility which shape girls’ digital sexual subjectivity on social network sites.