Constructing queer mother‐knowledge and negotiating medical authority in online lesbian pregnancy journals

Medical interactions around reproduction are increasingly extending beyond the physician's office and onto the Internet, where negotiation with medical authority occurs in complex and dynamic ways. Recently, scholars have noted the Internet's potential for creating spaces where women can dialogue with and reconstruct medical authority, yet this growing body of work is overwhelming heteronormative. This paper thus interrogates how lesbian women use the Internet to challenge, deploy, and rework medical authority around reproduction while navigating the transition to parenthood. I draw from 17 online journals authored by lesbian couples during the conception, pregnancy, and birth of their first child, each spanning between 18 months and 2 years, in order to understand how the transition process unfolds over time. I argue that lesbian couples engage with medical authority when seeking affirmation and normalisation yet discard and publicly reject the heteronormative assumptions that accompany reproductive medicine. Further, they chart a new process that I term ‘constructing queer mother‐knowledge’, in which they critique and balance knowledges from institutionalised medicine, their own bodies, and their queer communities. With this new concept, I complicate understandings of lesbian mothers‐to‐be and their interactions with medical authority as they build subversive families.     

Extended kinship analysis of historical remains using SNP capture

DNA-assisted identification of historical remains requires the genetic analysis of highly degraded DNA, along with a comparison to DNA from known relatives. This can be achieved by targeting single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) using a hybridization capture and next-generation sequencing approach suitable for degraded skeletal samples. In the present study, two SNP capture panels were designed to target ~ 25,000 (25 K) and ~ 95,000 (95 K) nuclear SNPs, respectively, to enable distant kinship estimation (up to 4th degree relatives). Low-coverage SNP data were successfully recovered from 14 skeletal elements 75 years postmortem using an Illumina MiSeq benchtop sequencer. All samples contained degraded DNA but were of varying quality with mean fragment lengths ranging from 32 bp to 170 bp across the 14 samples. SNP comparison with DNA from known family references was performed in the Parabon Fx Forensic Analysis Platform, which utilizes a likelihood approach for kinship prediction that was optimized for low-coverage sequencing data with cytosine deamination. The 25 K panel produced 15,000 SNPs on average, which allowed for accurate kinship prediction with strong statistical support in 16 of the 21 pairwise comparisons. The 95 K panel increased the average SNPs to 42,000 and resulted in an additional accurate kinship prediction with strong statistical support (17 of 21 pairwise comparisons). This study demonstrates that SNP capture combined with massively parallel sequencing on a benchtop platform can yield sufficient SNP recovery from compromised samples, enabling accurate, extended kinship predictions.     

Fetal male lineage determination by analysis of Y-chromosome STR haplotype in maternal plasma

The aim of this study is to determine the fetus Y-STR haplotype in maternal plasma during pregnancy and estimate, non-invasively, if the alleged father and fetus belong to the same male lineage. The study enrolled couples with singleton pregnancies and known paternity. All participants signed informed consent and the local ethics committee approved the study. Peripheral blood was collected in EDTA tubes (mother) and in FTA paper (father). Maternal plasma DNA was extracted by using NucliSens EasyMAG. Fetal gender was determined by qPCR targeting DYS-14 in maternal plasma and it was also confirmed after the delivery. From all included volunteers, the first consecutive 20 mothers bearing male fetuses and 10 mothers bearing female fetuses were selected for the Y-STR analysis. The median gestational age was 12 weeks (range 12–36). All DNA samples were subjected to PCR amplification by PowerPlex Y23, ampFLSTR Yfiler, and two in-house multiplexes, which together accounts for 27 different Y-STR. The PCR products were detected with 3500 Genetic Analyzer and they were analyzed using GeneMapper-IDX. Fetuses’ haplotypes (Yfiler format) were compared to other 5328 Brazilian haplotypes available on Y-chromosome haplotypes reference database (YHRD). As a result, between 22 and 27 loci were successfully amplified from maternal plasma in all 20 cases of male fetuses. None of the women bearing female fetuses had a falsely amplified Y-STR haplotype. The haplotype detected in maternal plasma completely matched the alleged father haplotype in 16 out of the 20 cases. Four cases showed single mismatches and they did not configure exclusions; 1 case showed a mutation in the DYS 458 locus due to the loss of one repeat unit and 3 cases showed one DYS 385I/II locus dropout. All mismatches were confirmed after the delivery. Seventeen fetuses’ haplotypes were not found in YHRD and one of them had a mutation, which corresponded to the paternity probability of 99.9812% and 95.7028%, respectively. Three fetuses’ haplotypes occurred twice in YHRD, which corresponded to paternity probability of 99.9437%. In conclusion, high discriminatory fetal Y-STR haplotype could be determined from maternal plasma during pregnancy starting at 12 weeks of gestation. All male fetuses could be attributed to the alleged father male lineage early in pregnancy. The high probability of paternity associated with each case suggests that the relationship is not random and this strategy can be use as an alternative for male fetal kinship analysis.     

Phylogenetic reconstruction of Bantu kinship challenges Main Sequence Theory of human social evolution

Kinship provides the fundamental structure of human society: descent determines the inheritance pattern between generations, whereas residence rules govern the location a couple moves to after they marry. In turn, descent and residence patterns determine other key relationships such as alliance, trade, and marriage partners. Hunter-gatherer kinship patterns are viewed as flexible, whereas agricultural societies are thought to have developed much more stable kinship patterns as they expanded during the Holocene. Among the Bantu farmers of sub-Saharan Africa, the ancestral kinship patterns present at the beginning of the expansion are hotly contested, with some arguing for matrilineal and matrilocal patterns, whereas others maintain that any kind of lineality or sex-biased dispersal only emerged much later. Here, we use Bayesian phylogenetic methods to uncover the history of Bantu kinship patterns and trace the interplay between descent and residence systems. The results suggest a number of switches in both descent and residence patterns as Bantu farming spread, but that the first Bantu populations were patrilocal with patrilineal descent. Across the phylogeny, a change in descent triggered a switch away from patrifocal kinship, whereas a change in residence triggered a switch back from matrifocal kinship. These results challenge “Main Sequence Theory,” which maintains that changes in residence rules precede change in other social structures. We also indicate the trajectory of kinship change, shedding new light on how this fundamental structure of society developed as farming spread across the globe during the Neolithic.Kinship is the key structure underlying human society: descent determines how wealth, land, and position are inherited across generations, whereas residence describes the rules governing where a couple should move to once they are married (1). In turn, descent and residence patterns determine other key relationships within society such as alliance, trade, and marriage partners (2). Contemporary hunter-gatherer societies, which are often considered a model for preagricultural human societies, are predominantly bilateral, tracing descent through both lines, and multilocal, with each couple choosing where to live (2–4, but see ref. 5), allowing for flexibility in those societies. In the last 10,000 years, however, a number of groups developed agriculture, which led to the expansion of food production techniques, cultures, and in some cases their populations too (6). The emergence of farming is thought to have coincided with more sex-biased dispersal and unilineal kinship (7).From their ancestral homeland in the Benue valley in Eastern Nigeria 3,000–5,000 BP (8, 9), possibly using a grassland corridor that opened up through the Cameroon rainforest (10, 11), the Bantu undertook one of the great farming expansions of the Neolithic (6). The history of their kinship is therefore key to debates about the fundamental processes that drove the evolution of human society during the Holocene. However, there are disagreements about the ancestral pattern of Bantu kinship and how this evolved through time.Vansina (12) suggests that proto-Bantu society had a bilateral descent and bilocal residence system (definitions in SI Appendix, Table S1) that was adaptive for expanding populations. Based on linguistic reconstruction, such as the proto-Bantu word for “house” being sex neutral, he argues that residence was flexible (13). Hunting required cooperation and mobility, and would be best served by males having a choice about their residence rather than being constrained by unilocality (12). Vansina suggests that only in the 18th or 19th century did unilineal descent and residence patterns begin to emerge, due to increased wealth and the disorder faced by some Bantu-speaking people (12).The second theory proposes a unilineal descent and unilocal residence system in the ancestral Bantu population (14). Hage and Marck argue, based on the linguistic reconstruction of kin terms, that the early Bantu speakers were, in fact, matrilocal and matrilineal (see also ref. 3), and dispute the sex neutrality of the proto-word for “house.” They also suggest that matriliny is consistent with a people that face an external threat experienced as populations expand and colonize new territory, arguing that absent males would trust their sisters, but not their wives, to look after their common lineage interests (15). Crucially, Marck and Bostoen (7) argue that matrifocal Bantu cultures dissolved with residence changing first from matrilocal to patrilocal, thus supporting Divale’s (16) proposal that changes in residence drive changes in inheritance patterns for a migrating population. This suggestion provides support for “Main Sequence Theory,” which proposes that worldwide there is a pattern of change with residence rules driving change in other social structures (2). In particular, Murdock argues “when any social system undergoes change, such change regularly begins with a modification in the rule of residence” (ref. 2, p. 221). Changes in descent follow and are always consistent with the change in residence. Changes in kinship terminology are affected by changes in both residence and descent and may follow some considerable time afterward (2).There is therefore no agreement among researchers about the ancestral states or patterns of change in kinship traits among Bantu societies based on historical linguistic methods. There are a number of problems with relying solely on reconstructions of ancestral vocabulary to infer social organization in the past. First, although linguists use systematic methods of reconstructing proto-forms based on regular sound changes (13, 14), there is still an element of subjectivity in this approach, which can lead different researchers to suggest contradictory results based on the same words (7, 13, 14). Furthermore, the inference of social organization in a past society is a further step removed from this process and assumes a direct relationship between particular words and particular forms of organization. Although it may be possible to reconstruct the sound of a particular lexical item, the meaning of such a word is less clear because of the possibility of semantic shifts (17).Phylogenetic comparative methods, adapted from evolutionary biology, offer an alternative way of reconstructing the evolutionary history of cultural traits such as kinship structures. These techniques map the traits of interest (in this case descent and residence) onto a phylogenetic tree, which represents the way societies are related to each other historically. The likely forms of these traits in past societies can then be inferred by using an explicit statistical model of trait evolution. Importantly, these reconstructions are probabilistic, meaning it is possible to assess how much confidence to place in any particular reconstruction. The likelihood of alternative hypotheses for the pattern of evolution of traits over the tree can then be estimated. Furthermore, performing analyses over a sample of phylogenetic trees can explicitly incorporate uncertainty about the historical relationships between societies. These methods can be used to estimate the cultural history of a language family, even where historical records or archaeological evidence are absent, and have been used to examine the history of residence patterns in both the Indo-European and Austronesian language families (18, 19).The Bantu speaking people of sub-Saharan Africa represent one of the major early farming expansions; the advantage of agricultural food production allowed a single language group to displace and expand into the lands of previous hunter-gatherer populations (6). This process has allowed for language phylogenies of Bantu societies to be generated (9, 20–22), which can be combined with comprehensive data on extant kinship patterns across a large number of Bantu cultures (23, 24) to infer historical patterns of cultural evolutionary change. A previous attempt to infer the ancestral state of descent for the original Bantu population (25, 26) was inconclusive, possibly because of the small sample size, the single phylogeny (20), or the maximum likelihood methods used.Here, we advance previous attempts to reconstruct the kinship traits across the Bantu language family by applying Bayesian phylogenetic comparative methods (27–29) to a dataset of 122 Bantu ethnolinguistic groups to infer the ancestral state and evolutionary trajectory of Bantu kinship patterns. Analysis of basic vocabulary items (30) has enabled the phylogenetic relationships among more than 500 Bantu languages to be inferred (9), which has increased the scope for the number of different Bantu cultures that can be analyzed and enabled the incorporation of groups that were underrepresented in previous analyses. In particular, the current sample includes a number of additional societies from the “Northwest” and “Forest West” regions, which may be particularly important in inferring trait states at the earliest nodes in the trees. Furthermore, Bayesian phylogenetic methods, which can incorporate uncertainty about the phylogenetic relationships between cultures, provide a more accurate picture of the inferences that can be drawn from comparative data. In this way, it is possible to infer the ancestral states of kinship traits and, hence, reconstruct the cultural history of the Bantu expansion, which means it is possible to estimate the likely order of trait change and test whether changes in residence rules precede changes in inheritance patterns as proposed by Main Sequence Theory (2, 7, 16).     

精神疾病患者未成年一级亲属病耻感与情绪行为问题的关系

目的探讨精神疾病患者未成年一级亲属病耻感与情绪行为问题的关系,以及自我效能和心理弹性在病耻感与情绪行为问题关系中的中介效应。方法选取山东省某精神卫生中心前来门诊就诊及住院的精神疾病患者未成年子女104人作为研究对象,采用Link贬低-歧视感知量表、一般自我效能量表(GSES)、心理弹性量表(RS)、长处和困难问卷(SDQ)进行调查。结果精神疾病患者未成年一级亲属的情绪行为问题分别在性别、居住地、就读学校和是否独生子女上存在显著差异性(P0.05,P0.01);精神疾病患者未成年一级亲属SDQ总分与病耻感呈显著正相关(P0.01),与自我效能和心理弹性均呈显著负相关(均P0.01);病耻感分别与心理弹性和自我效能均呈显著负相关(均P0.01);心理弹性与自我效能呈显著正相关(P0.01);自我效能和心理弹性在病耻感与情绪行为问题之间起到完全中介作用(P0.05,P0.01)。结论感知到病耻感的精神疾病患者未成年一级亲属存在情绪行为问题,而自我效能和心理弹性在病耻感与精神疾病患者未成年一级亲属情绪行为问题关系中起完全中介作用。     

Mental Health and the Maintenance of Kinship in South Africa

ABSTRACT

At the turn of the millennium, people with mental disturbance often lived in circumstances of economic marginalization in South Africa. The historical material of one low-income urban area reveals the place of kin relations and reciprocity in enabling negotiation of a more fluid set of responses to mental illness. In this sociocultural context, “stigma” was not an inevitable reaction to mental illness, and a more complex set of social dynamics could mitigate marginalization. Research on how changing informal care practices relate to state-based community care continues to be important to inform contemporary health reforms.     

Negotiating the Interpretation of Depression Shared Among Kin

ABSTRACT

Kinship processes contribute to the experience and interpretation of depression—generating empathy as well as silencing. We explore intersubjective experiences of depression among kin with the aim of understanding how depression can reveal kinship expectations and evolving concepts of distress. In interviews with 28 low-income rural Appalachian women about their depression, participants articulated depression as a social process that neither starts nor ends in themselves. Yet kinship obligations to recognize family members’ depression limited women’s ability to admit distress, let alone request care. The intersubjective experience of depression among kin can challenge the individual expression of distress.     

Jesus is in Favor: Catholicism and Assisted Reproduction in Italy

While religion is part of the modernities of assisted reproductive technologies (ART), this has mainly been investigated in non-Western or non-Christian contexts. In this article, I argue that in contemporary Italy, Catholicism affects not only law- and policymaking processes but also (prospective) parents’ experiences of ART and donor conception in contradictory and unexpected ways. Officially, the Roman Church strongly opposes ART, but Catholic principles, affiliations, and rituals are mobilized in ways that contribute to legitimizing and making sense of ART as a means to create kinship and reproduce Italian national identity.     

Impact of parental relationships in maximum lod score affected sib-pair method

Many studies are done in small isolated populations and populations where marriages between relatives are encouraged. In this paper, we point out some problems with applying the maximum lod score (MLS) method (Risch, [1990] Am. J. Hum. Genet. 46:242-253) in these populations where relationships exist between the two parents of the affected sib-pairs. Characterizing the parental relationships by the kinship coefficient between the parents (f), the maternal inbreeding coefficient (alpha(m), and the paternal inbreeding coefficient (alpha(p)), we explored the relationship between the identity by descent (IBD) vector expected under the null hypothesis of no linkage and these quantities. We find that the expected IBD vector is no longer (0.25, 0.5, 0.25) when f, alpha(m), and alpha(p) differ from zero. In addition, the expected IBD vector does not always follow the triangle constraints recommended by Holmans ([1993] Am. J. Hum. Genet. 52:362-374). So the classically used MLS statistic needs to be adapted to the presence of parental relationships. We modified the software GENEHUNTER (Kruglyak et al. [1996] Am. J. Hum. Genet. 58: 1347-1363) to do so. Indeed, the current version of the software does not compute the likelihood properly under the null hypothesis. We studied the adapted statistic by simulating data on three different family structures: (1) parents are double first cousins (f=0.125, alpha(m)=alpha(p)=0), (2) each parent is the offspring of first cousins (f=0, alpha(m)=alpha(p)=0.0625), and (3) parents are related as in the pedigree from Goddard et al. ([1996] Am. J. Hum. Genet. 58:1286-1302) (f=0.109, alpha(m)=alpha(p)=0.0625). The appropriate threshold needs to be derived for each case in order to get the correct type I error. And using the classical statistic in the presence of both parental kinship and parental inbreeding almost always leads to false conclusions.