Articoli di riviste sul tema "African american women – ohio – fiction"

Background: When examining prenatal care utilization rates, African American women were more likely to receive inadequate prenatal care. Yet, research about African American women’s prenatal care experiences fails to account for how their experiences may vary by socioeconomic status and insurance type. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to provide African American women on Medicaid with the opportunity to speak to what they found to be meaningful during their interactions with their prenatal care provider using an intersectionality framework.Methods: Individual interviews were conducted with pregnant African American women (n = 20) receiving Medicaid who were in their second or third trimester of pregnancy. Participants aged 18 to 45 years were recruited from various health care systems located in Ohio. Researchers applied a thematic analysis approach during data collection and data analysis.Results: Two overarching themes emerged about what these African American women considered meaningful when they talked to their prenatal care provider during pregnancy: (1) conversations around my prenatal care and (2) equipping me with knowledge.Conclusion: The results obtained through the application of intersectionality theory allow researchers the opportunity to create effective solutions, interventions, and policies that can be implemented to improve infant health outcomes and reduce the risk of infant mortality among pregnant African American women receiving Medicaid. Implications also suggested that public health practitioners in Ohio should increase their awareness of what is important to this population to build patient's trust in provider recommendations and patient’s confidence in shared decision-making.

By looking carefully at the history of science fiction, we can notice that African American authors have been excluded from the scene for a long time due to the “whiteness” of the genre in terms of writing and publication. In addition to racism, sexism persists in the science fiction community. Hence, marginalized black women writers of science fiction try to include more black women characters in their literary works. Through Binti, Binti: Home, and Binti: The Night Masquerade, Nnedi Okorafor focuses on the experience of being black and woman in a technological society of the future. This study discusses how Okorafor provides sharp comments on the lives of black women in America in terms of “race” and “gender.” She challenges the stereotypical image of the black woman as “other” through the subversion of white norms and traditions. In this analysis, we use “Afrofuturism” and “black feminism” as a theoretical framework since “Afrofuturism” tackles African American issues related to twentieth-century technoculture, and “black feminism” deals with black women empowerment. The major character, Binti, proves that she deserves to reach a higher position as an empowered girl of the future, which gives her self-confidence to be autonomous and to have control over her own life.

Abstract Kenneth W. Warren’s What Was African American Literature? (2011) compelled literary historians to question deeply held assumptions about periodization and racial authorship. While critics have taken issue with Warren aligning African American literature with Jim Crow segregation, none has examined his account of what came after this conjuncture: namely, the market’s wholesale cooptation of Black writing. By following the career of African American popular novelist Omar Tyree, this essay shows how corporate publishers in the 1990s and 2000s redefined African American literature as a sales category, one that combined a steady stream of recognized authors with a mad dash for amateur talent. Tyree had been part of the first wave of self-published authors to be picked up by major New York houses. However, as soon as he was made to conform to the industry’s demands, Tyree was eclipsed by Black women writers who developed the hard-boiled romance genre known as urban fiction. As Tyree saw his literary fortunes fade, corporate publishing became increasingly reliant on Black book entrepreneurs to sustain the category of African American literature, thereby turning racial authorship into a vehicle for realizing profits.

The Bondwoman’s Narrative is a novel that functions as a story made up from Hannah Crafts’s experiences as a bondwoman and thus merges fact and fiction giving a thoroughly new account of slavery both committed to reality and fiction. Following and taking over the Gothic literary genre that spread in Europe as a reaction toward the Romantic spirit, Crafts uses it to denounce the degrading slavery system and, mainly, to scathingly attack the patriarchal roots that stigmatize black women as the ultimate victims. It is my contention that Hannah Crafts uses the female Gothic literary devices both to attack slavery and also to stand as a proper (African) American citizen capable of relating to the cultural outlets that American culture offered aiming to counteract the derogatory stereotypes that rendered African American women at the very bottom of the social ladder.

This article draws on various theories and studies about the color line, colorism, and racial passing in African American culture, history, and literature to examine the themes of colorism and passing for white in Brit Bennett’s 2020 novel The Vanishing Half. This article juxtaposes Bennett’s novel alongside earlier works written by twentieth-century African American women writers, underscoring Bennett’s intertextual influences, which include Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929), Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), and Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (1970), Sula (1973), and God Help the Child (2015). As Bennett revises and incorporates earlier novels into her own, she redeems tragic female characters such as Pecola Breedlove and Clare Kendry, highlights the persistence and damage of colorism, updates the passing narrative, and defies stereotypes about Black women. It concludes that in The Vanishing Half, Bennett proposes a fresh path for twenty-first-century African American fiction through the themes of colorism and passing for white in her rewriting of African American women’s literary tradition.

This essay is a feminist, historical exploration of body parts in short science fiction stories by women. In early-twentieth-century stories about prostheses, blood transfusion, and radioactive experiments, Clare Winger Harris, Kathleen Ludwick, and Judith Merril use body parts to explore fears of damage to masculine identity by war, of alienation of men from women, and of racial pollution. In stories from the last quarter of the twentieth century, the South American author Angélica Gorodischer depicts a housewife's escape from oppressive domestic technology through time travel in which she murders male leaders, while Eileen Gunn offers a critique of bioengineering and sociobiology, satirizing fears of women in modern business and of erasure of identity in global corporate structures. An end-of-the-century fiction by the African American Akua Lezli Hope imagines a black woman altered through cosmetic surgery to become a tenor sax and critiques technologies that transform women's bodies into cultural signifiers of social function and class.

Thwarted romances between Garrisoned American Soldiers and Young Filipinas, problems of translation in a multilingual contact zone, and the precarious masculine authority of the imperial agent irresistibly drawn to the mysterious women who surround him—these are the subjects of Frank R. Steward's short fiction about the American military occupation of the Philippines. But Steward's perspective as an African American military officer complicates efforts to interpret such familiar colonial scenarios. The stories' formal experimentation makes them a significant discovery in the archives of empire.

Background Onset of disability, risk for future falls, frailty, functional decline, and mortality are strongly associated with a walking speed of less than 1.0 m/s. Objective The study objective was to determine whether there were differences in slow walking speed (<1.0 m/s) between community-dwelling African American and white American adult women with osteoarthritis symptoms. An additional aim was to examine whether racial differences in walking speed can be attributed to age, obesity, socioeconomic factors, disease severity, or comorbidities. Design A cross-sectional design was used. Methods Community-dwelling adults were recruited from Baltimore, Maryland; Columbus, Ohio; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; and Pawtucket, Rhode Island. Participants were 2,648 women (23% African American) who were 45 to 79 years of age and had a self-selected baseline walking speed of 20 m/s in the Osteoarthritis Initiative Study. Mixed-effects logistic regression models were used to examine racial differences in walking speed (<1.0 m/s versus ≥1.0 m/s), with adjustments for demographic factors, socioeconomic factors, disease severity, and comorbidities. Results Walking speed was significantly slower for African American women than for white American women (mean walking speed=1.19 and 1.33 m/s, respectively). The prevalence of a walking speed of less than 1.0 m/s in this cohort of middle-aged women was 9%; about 50% of the women with a walking speed of less than 1.0 m/s were younger than 65 years. Women with a walking speed of less than 1.0 m/s had lower values for socioeconomic factors, higher values for disease severity, and higher prevalences of obesity and comorbidities than those with a walking speed of ≥1.0 m/s. After controlling for these covariates, it was found that African American women were 3 times (odds ratio=2.9; 95% confidence interval=2.0, 4.1) more likely to have a walking speed of less than 1.0 m/s than white American women. Limitations The study design made it impossible to know whether a walking speed of less than 1.0 m/s in women who were 45 years of age or older was a predictor of future poor health outcomes. Conclusions In this study, race was independently associated with a walking speed of less than 1.0 m/s in community-dwelling women who had or were at risk for osteoarthritis, with African American women having 3 times the risk for slow walking as white American women. This finding suggests that middle-aged African American women have an increased risk for poor health outcomes. Further longitudinal evaluations are needed to confirm the long-term health outcomes in a middle-aged population and to establish walking speed as a useful tool for identifying middle-aged women at high risk for poor health outcomes.

Abstract Introduction The effects of homelessness on pregnant women are substantial. We aim to identify key characteristics of a group of women identified as homeless and pregnant in order to understand their history of housing, family composition, health, and demographics as a first step for future intervention. Methods We present cross-sectional survey data on a sample of 100 women reporting homelessness and pregnancy in the prior year in Columbus, Ohio, identified through social service and housing not for profit agencies. Our analysis uses data collected from a survey of health behaviors, housing, employment status, and demographics. Continuous measures are described with means and standard deviations, and categorical variables are described with percentages. Results The majority (81%) of the women identified as African American. Over 95% of the women were single, and 74 women reported a prior pregnancy. Almost half of the women reported being behind on rent at least one time in the last 6 months, and 43% indicated that they had lived in more than three places in the last year. Approximately 34% of the sample reported cigarette use during pregnancy, while 12% and 30% reported alcohol and illicit drug use, respectively. Discussion Women who were pregnant and experiencing homelessness in our study reported a multitude of complex and severe problems ranging from high rates of substance use, longstanding housing insecurity and financial stress. Programs hoping to successfully support women will need to address a variety of service needs while recognizing the resilience of many women.

The present article analyzes Morrison's novels with emphasis on the conflicted emotions of fictional African-American mothers in relation to their children. Of special interest is Morrison's depiction of the mother's role in shaping the individuation process of her daughters in a matriarchal, father-absent context. Also examined is Morrison's treatment of intergenerational continuity and the unique role of the grandmother against a background of social change. Such change is interpreted by Morrison as involving conflict between the norms of traditional, rural, folkloric black culture, and the pressures of mainstream American society. Morrison's fiction, taken as a whole, is viewed as illustrating the key role of the African-American mother in maintaining survival strategies developed by black women historically. The fate of black men in Morrison's fictional universe is also considered, along with pertinent implications for understanding African-American patterns of socialization in the broadest sense.

[First paragraph]The Fiction of Paule Marshall: Reconstructions of History, Culture, and Gender. DOROTHY HAMER DENNISTON. Knoxville: University of Tennesee Press, 1995. xxii + 187 pp. (Paper US$ 15.00)Toward Wholeness in Paule Marshall's Fiction. JOYCE PETTIS.Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1995. xi + 173 pp. (Cloth US$ 29.50)Black and Female: Essays on Writings by Black Women in the Diaspora. BRITA LINDBERG-SEYERSTED. Oslo: Scandinavian University Press, 1994. 164 pp. (Paper n.p.)Literary history has not been very kind to Paule Marshall. Even in the early 1980s when literature produced by African-American women was gaining prominence among general readers and drawing the attention of critics, Marshall was still considered to be an enigmatic literary figure, somehow important in the canon but not one of its trend setters. As Mary Helen Washington observed in an influential afterword to Brown Girl, Brownstones, although Marshall had been publishing novels and short stories since the early 1950s, and was indeed the key link between African-American writers of the 1940s and those of the 1960s, she was just being "discovered" in the 1980s. While there has always been a small group of scholars, most notably Kamau Brathwaite, who have called attention to the indispensable role Marshall has played in the shaping of the literary canon of the African Diaspora, and of her profound understanding of the issues that have affected the complex formation and survival of African-derived cultures in the New World, many critics have found it difficult to locate her within the American, African-American, and Caribbean traditions that are the sources of her imagination and the subject of her major works. Marshall has embraced all these cultures in more profound ways than her more famous contemporaries have, but she has not gotten the accolades that have gone to lesser writers like Alice Walker. It is indeed one of the greatest injustices of our time that Walker's limited understanding of the cultures and peoples of the African Diaspora has become the point of reference for North American scholars of Africa, the Caribbean, and South America while Marshall's scholastic engagement with questions of Diaspora has not drawn the same kind of interest.

Although black American womanist literary perspectives and ethical literary criticism theory emerged from different socio-cultural contexts, a number of intersections between the two can be discerned. One of the objectives of this paper is to analyze the reasons for which some Chinese scholars and African-American women literary theoreticians are skeptical of mainstream Western literary criticism schools, which they view as insufficient for exploring works of literature derived from fusions of non-Western and Western cultural contexts. Secondly, the paper elucidates the particular value systems exhibited by fictional characters portrayed by the African-American women writers under survey. At this juncture, the means by which the writers challenge value systems based upon Western essentialist racial conceptualizations will be given primary attention. Also, the historical context of the development of womanist ethics and literary practice, particularly the manifestation of original social ethics in response to historical oppression, will be focused upon. Lastly, the didactic function of womanist literature will be considered because, more often than not, black American woman writers have endeavored to produce fiction that serves as guideposts towards conflict resolutions, involving, to a great extent, revaluation of mainstream values.

In the summer of 1943, race riots stirred waves of violence across several US cities, the largest taking place in Detroit, Harlem, and Los Angeles. During wartime, patriotic anger was aimed not only outward at the Axis powers, but also inward at US citizens. This article focuses on Los Angeles’s Zoot Suit Riots, exploring how in a surprising number of accounts of the alleged riot, movie theaters serve as backgrounds alongside white, Mexican American, African American, and Asian American women, who appear as minor, nameless characters. Finding instances in work from Beatrice Griffith and Carey McWilliams, in fiction from Fernando Alegría and Chester Himes, and in the canonical Chicano films Zoot Suit (1981) and American Me (1992), the article traces the supporting roles women and movie theaters serve in these diverse narratives, and how both come to visually and discursively represent dangerous wartime boundaries.

Ugly Ways (1993) by Tina McElroy Ansa has been overlooked as a significant contribution to African American feminist literary fiction. This paper performs a close reading examining the novel’s thematic intersection of Black feminist theory and trauma theory. Part one of this essay defines Black feminist theory and outlines key concepts of Black feminist thought. Parts two and three focus on the protagonist, Esther “Mudear” Lovejoy, and analyze her “change” through the lenses of Black feminist theory and trauma theory, respectively, highlighting the ways in which Ugly Ways articulates a conception of Black womanhood defined in equal parts by empowerment and psychic pain. Part four argues that Black feminist theory and trauma theory are not just compatible, but consonant. Ultimately, Ugly Ways depicts African American women as complex human subjects and moves beyond conventional historical, literary, and popular representations.

In Baltimore in 2015, Submersive Productions staged The Mesmeric Revelations! of Edgar Allan Poe, an immersive spectacle based on the women populating Poe’s fiction and personal life. Also in Baltimore in 2015, Freddie Gray, an African American man, was killed by Baltimore police, leading to mass protests and civil unrest. A striking coincidence between the two events suggests that immersive spectatorship intensifies our political experience of the social forces that make us subjects, indicating new ways for theatre to address a nation that has always been fractious and fractured.

The phrase “femme fatale” is a well-known figure in the literary and cultural representations of women. Associated with evil temptation, the femme fatale is an iconic figure that has been appropriated into folklore, literature, and mythology. In the twentieth century, the figure finds space in literary and cinematic endeavours, particularly in crime fiction and noir thrillers. The progenitors of the hard-boiled genre of detective fiction popularised the figure of a sexually seductive and promiscuous woman who betrays men for material gain. Walter Mosley, an African American detective fiction writer, adapted the hard-boiled formula popularised by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, but altered it to address socio-political issues concerning the condition of African Americans in the post-World War II era. Mosley followed Chandler’s lead in weaving a quest narrative around femme fatale Daphne Monet in his first novel, Devil in a Blue Dress (1990). The purpose of this paper is to look at Mosley’s treatment of the femme fatale figure in this novel. The methodology employed is a close analysis of the text, as well as an analysis of the figure of the femme fatale in its function as catalyst for men’s behaviour. The purpose of this study is to examine how the femme fatale was created, specifically what elements contributed to Daphne Monet’s transformation into a femme fatale.

Since the emergence of the Religious Right in the late 1970s, American evangelicalism has commonly been associated with conservative politics. An examination of nineteenth-century evangelicalism, however, suggests a different affinity. Antebellum evangelicals marched in the vanguard of social change with an agenda that almost invariably advocated for those on the margins of society, including women and African Americans. Evangelicals were involved in peace crusades and the temperance movement, a response to social ills associated with rampant alcohol consumption in the early republic. They advocated equal rights for women, including voting rights. Evangelicals in the North crusaded against slavery. Although Horace Mann, a Unitarian from Massachusetts, is the person most often associated with the rise of common schools, Protestants of a more evangelical stripe were early advocates of public education, including leaders in Ohio, Michigan, and Kentucky. Some evangelicals, including Charles Grandison Finney, even excoriated capitalism as inconsistent with Christian principles.

Harriette Gordon Smythies’ overlooked sensation novel A Faithful Woman (1865) engages with two cultural formations instrumental in shaping the Victorians’ representations of race, and to a large degree, also their understanding of it: The Indian Rebellion of 1857 and minstrelsy. As its various symbolic appropriations of mutinous women show, the novel is highly critical of the easy and essentialising recriminations of ‘vile’ Indianness and offers a keen appreciation of the parallels between the Empire’s racialising oppressions abroad and its gendered oppressions at home. At the same time, however, its representations of African American characters seek to enshrine Britain’s moral superiority vis-à-vis the United States’ slavery system. Particularly, A Faithful Woman’s examinations of racialised imaginations of Indian Britons and African Americans – contrasting, for instance, British sculpture and portraiture with (allegedly) American minstrelsy – speak to its attempt to dissociate the practices of Empire from its former colonies across the Atlantic. Its critical examination of imperial notions of race in post-Rebellion sensation fiction, this article argues, helps to reaffirm the very colonial practices that it seeks to undermine.

Born in 1825, a free African American in Baltimore, Maryland, author Frances Ellen Watkins Harper devoted her life to the struggle for freedom. An abolitionist, and suffragist, the Bible figured prominently in Harper’s poetry, fiction, essays, and speeches. This essay considers how Harper’s poetry particularly challenged her nineteenth century reader to engage in more meaningful biblical interpretive strategies. Anticipating twentieth century Womanist interpretations, Harper disrupts and revises interpretive strategies that had been used to read against the biblical narrative’s message of liberation. Rereading commonly known texts with a different perspective or highlighting lesser known biblical stories, Harper’s biblical interpretations give voice to the voiceless women in the biblical text. Whether writing about women found in the biblical text or women in her own nineteenth century context, Harper’s poetry testifies to the mothers and “othermothers” who have struggled to ensure the dignity and rights of all people, in their own generations, as well as for generations to come.

African American Literature demonstrates that the Black Women's Feminism Caucus acknowledged that black women faced a dual patriarchal oppression from within their own community and from white society. This paper examines how Devil on the Cross portrays a Kikuyu woman striving for liberation and transformative change in Kenyan society. Employing a feminist perspective, the researcher contends that Ngugi Wa Thiong'o illustrates the plight of women in Kenyan society, interpreting feminism within its cultural framework. Building on this foundation, the study advocates for the designation of essential services such as police protection, justice, shelters, helplines, and community support services, ensuring they receive adequate support and resources to operate during pandemics and other public emergencies affecting women and girls. It emphasizes the necessity of involving women and women's civil society organizations in policy formulation, development, and implementation to integrate their knowledge, experiences, and needs into response strategies. Furthermore, it stresses the importance of prioritizing prevention and protection against gender-based and domestic violence in national responses by collecting detailed data on the prevalence of such violence and identifying which demographics of women and girls are most vulnerable. Keywords: Domestic violence, Feminist critique, Fiction, Women emancipation, Women portrayal

This article explores how antiracism cultivates happiness among white subjects and how that emotion alienates people of color. It argues that a cohort of twentieth-century African American writers critiqued this happy antiracism in their fiction, examining Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940) and Alice Walker’s Meridian (1976) as two representative examples. Both novels portray what Sara Ahmed calls an “affective economy,” specifically the unequal affective economy produced by antiracism’s circulation as a cultural object. Wright considers how antiracism occasions happiness in white subjects by bolstering their sense of their own virtue, and how this happiness alienates African Americans, for whom antiracism is embedded in the experience of ongoing racial violence. Writing in the heyday of second-wave feminism, Walker examines how, even as antiracism shores up happy feeling, it can also compromise the agency of white women, whose activism is mediated by the persistence of nineteenth-century ideals of sentimentalism and domesticity.

The article is devoted to the formation of Harriet Tubman's image in the US literature. Two books belonging to the spread of Afrocentrism and the second wave of feminism — A. Petrie's non-fiction novel A Girl Called Moses: The Story of Harriet Tubman and M. Heidish's novel A Woman Called Moses — are chosen as the material for analysis. The article analyzes the main qualitative characteristics identified as early as in S. Bradford's book Harriet, Moses of Her People that form the discourse of race and gender in the mentioned narratives about Tubman, and identifies the main transformations of these characteristics. Thus, the work of African-American author A. Petrie reflects to a greater extent the sentiments of all her fellow women in the 1950s-60s Black Civil Rights Movement in the United States: while remaining within the generally accepted gender framework of feminine virtues, at the same time, the black woman was stepping out of her allotted racial limits. Furthermore, she shows that slavery is a cultural trauma that still defines how the African American community sees itself and its place in the society and how slavery is remembered as a means of self-identification within the African American community. Created by the white writer M. Heidish in the mid-1970s, during the rise of the second wave of the feminist movement, the novel reflects the very sentiments that characterized this movement and shows the view of a sympathetic Other on the issue of race. Thus, the article establishes the fact that Harriet Tubman plays a very important role in the African-American and women's discourse in the United States as an image that is given the necessary functions and qualities for its time based on the socio-cultural context contemporary to the interpreter.

Objectives We explored barriers to healthcare as perceived by members of medically and socially disenfranchised communities. Methods. We conducted focus groups with 28 women and 32 men from Northeast Ohio who identified themselves as African-American, Hispanic/Latino, lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgendered, and/or Russian immigrant. Results Participants described their experiences of waiting, things they won't tolerate, when they won't participate, and what they want from providers. They described behaviors, actions and relationship characteristics that they want from their providers and characteristics that they prefer in health systems. Conclusions The themes of Wait, Won't, and Want have healthcare practice and policy implications. Patient-provider interactions are known to be significant determinants of healthcare outcomes and these exploratory findings suggest that they might also affect patient self-management strategies. Future efforts should focus on developing and testing patient-centered strategies that address the themes identified to increase engagement to increase self-management of health.

This article explores Toni Morrison's preoccupation with, and reimagining of, the landscape of the so-called New World. Drawing on scholarship that has investigated dominant discourses about freedom, bounty, and possibility located within the Americas, it identifies various counternarratives in Morrison's fiction, tracing these through the earlier Song of Solomon (1977), Tar Baby (1981), and Beloved (1987), but primarily arguing for their centrality to A Mercy (2008). The mapping of seventeenth-century North America in the author's ninth novel both exposes colonial relations to place and probes African American experiences of the natural world. In particular, A Mercy is found to recalibrate definitions of “wilderness” with a sharpened sensitivity to the position of women and the racially othered within them. The dynamic between the perspectives towards the environment of Anglo-Dutch farmer and trader Jacob Vaark and Native American orphan and servant Lina, is examined, as well as the slave girl Florens's formative encounters in American space. Bringing together diverse narrative views, A Mercy is shown to trouble hegemonic settler and masculinist notions of the New World and, especially through Florens's voicing, shape an alternative engagement with landscape. The article goes some way towards meeting recent calls for attention to the intersections between postcolonial approaches and ecocriticism.

Ever since the West’s initial contact with the East, Muslim women haveoccupied center stage as highly politicized subjects who the West hasclaimed to liberate from the oppressive East and who the East has claimedto protect from the hedonistic West. Despite their central role as pawns inthis political struggle, women have been strikingly silent subjects. Thisbook belongs to an emerging collection of books that seek to give voice tothese silent subjects. Nawal El Saadawi, in her emotionally charged“Foreword,” captures the book’s tone quite well in her expression that “thepersonal is political” (p. x). Through personal stories, this anthology seeksto dissociate Islam from both terrorism and the oppression of women.Fawzia Afzal-Khan’s anecdotal introduction reveals that her goal istwofold: first, to connect various strands of conversation between MuslimAmerican women from different backgrounds since 9/11, and, second, toenlighten both Muslim and non-Muslim readers of the varied realities of the“Muslim Woman.”This anthology is divided into six sections. Section 1, “Non-Fiction,”contains several personal accounts of Muslim American women’s encounterswith 9/11. In her piece “Unholy Alliances,” Afzal-Khan vents her frustrationon several targets, including Israel, American foreign policy, SalmanRushdie, women who choose to wear the hijab, as well as the MontclairUniversity Muslim Students’ Association and the Global Studies Institute.Nadia Ali Maiwandi, Zohra Saed, and Wajma Ahmady reflect on theresponses they encountered and experienced amidst the Afghan-Americancommunity in the aftermath of 9/11. Eisa Nefertari Ulen’s genuinely tolerantarticle encourages Muslim and non-Muslim women to work together.Writing from her perspective as an African-American convert, she identifiesissues of gender and religion as mere smokescreens used by the “oppressor”to separate women (p. 50). Humera Afridi’s witty and refreshing work functionsas a social commentary on the climate of New York City after the 9/11attacks. One of the most edifying pieces is Rabab Abdulhadi’s “Where isHome?” This piece, written as a series of journal entries, captures the strugglesof identity faced by an exiled Palestinian woman as she tries to make ahome in New York City in the aftermath of 9/11 ...

This paper aims to deconstruct Toni Morrison’s selected novels through the lenses of ecocriticism. It looks at her work from an ecocritical angle. Sula has traditionally been read as a story about female friendship ;Song of Solomon has been critically acclaimed for its vivid capture of African American cultural heritage ; Tar Baby is regarded as a masterpiece because of its high folkloric resonance ; Beloved is perceived as a survey of the horrors of slavery ; Paradise is regarded as the narrative of contemporary communities confronted with great social changes, while A Mercy is considered to be a story of black women slaves’ struggles to gain freedom in America in the 1600s. Historically, critics have attempted to perceive Morrison’s fiction from the socio-historical lens that has little to do with Nature. However, Nature serves as a background to Morrison's work. It not only serves as imagery but more of a living being that reacts to human exploitation. Morrison's selected novels highlight diverse aspects of this human versus nature relationship that deserves an in-depth analysis. In fact, these novels provide ample evidence that the author sees ecosensitivity and ecological consciousness as possible ways to curb environmental degradation. This paper posits the nonhuman world encoded in Morrison’s novels. It maintains that Morrison’s fiction could raise awareness about ecological wisdom which is key to understanding and solving the current environmental challenges.

Abstract Deprivation indices (DIs), constructed from area-level socio-economic indicators, attempt to allow for the acknowledged relationship between socio-economic status and health outcomes. Segregation indices (SIs) address the area-level divisions in ethnicity and socio-economic status. In this study we evaluated the effects of deprivation and segregation on ovarian cancer survival among African-American women in a Bayesian hierarchical joint mediation framework. Deprivation and segregation effects considered were the most commonly used: 4 dimensions of Kolak social determinants of health, Yost index, Singh index, the percentage of people below the poverty line, ICE income and race segregation measures, and the concentrated disadvantage index. We analyzed a cohort (n=559) of African-American ovarian cancer patients from the states of Alabama, Georgia, Illinois, Louisiana, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas and the metropolitan area of Detroit, as part of the African American Cancer Epidemiology Study (AACES). We evaluated the effects of mediation via stage at diagnosis, histology and delayed diagnosis and examined confounding variables: age, current BMI, income, smoking status, and physical activity level, using Bayesian Gibbs variable selection to select the confounders for the final models. Our main result, with the stage as the mediator, showed that increased urbanization, mobility, socio economic status of Kolak dimensions and decreased deprivation measured by Yost index have positive effects on overall survival. 1 unit decrease of deprivation measured by Yost index will lead to 26% decrease of the hazard for ovarian cancer (CI: 0.56,0.91). Similarly, increased urbanization gives positive effect for the overall survival. 1 unit increase of urbanization lead to 27% decrease of hazard (CI: 0.57,0.95). Similar results are found for histology and diagnosis delay: when histology is the mediator, increase of urbanization and socio-economic status, and decreased deprivation measured by Singh, Yost and concentrated disadvantage indices have positive association with overall survival. When delayed diagnosis was our mediator, increased urbanization, socio-economic status and mobility, and decreased deprivation measured by Yost, ICE income and concentrated disadvantage indices have the positive association with overall survival. The results of mediation analyses revealed that Kolak dimensions and decreased deprivation was associated with increased survival from ovarian cancer . In summary, these results indicate that several measures of area-level deprivation, when mediated by intermediate pathway variables, are associated with survival among African-American women diagnosed with ovarian cancer. Their particular direction and level of impact varies with DI or SI chosen. Citation Format: Joanne Kim, Andrew B. Lawson, Joellen Schildkraut, Edward S. Peters, Courtney E. Johnson. Deprivation/segregation indices and survival in the AACES ovarian cancer cohort: A mediation analysis [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the 15th AACR Conference on the Science of Cancer Health Disparities in Racial/Ethnic Minorities and the Medically Underserved; 2022 Sep 16-19; Philadelphia, PA. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev 2022;31(1 Suppl):Abstract nr C091.

This article considers the dynamics of an iconographic literacy event that functions as a tool for explorations of literacy practices and fragmented selves, particularly in relationship to the literate lives of marginalized individuals in the post 9/11 era. The author examines what happened when a group of 10 African American women in an urban area employed new literacies in the teaching/learning spaces of their personal lives (i.e. individual homes, familiar eateries, communicative digital technologies) to explore and respond to stories in post 9/11 popular culture narratives. The study employed ethnographic methods (interviews, journaling, email and instant message writing and critical observations) with members of the inquiry over the course of two years. The author investigated critically the meeting of biography, fiction and autoethnography as a literacy event used to couch the literacies and fragmented selves of these women in the post 9/11 era. Findings regarding the nature of their post 9/11 literacies, as expressed through fragmented selves, are shared, along with implications for new literacies research and teaching. Findings show that the women’s post 9/11 literacies include a range and variation of critical sensibilities that include, but are not limited to, multiple levels of sociolinguistic integration, sociocultural criticality and heightened awarenesses.

e22529 Background: The incidence of breast cancer in high-income countries has risen by over 20% in the past two decades, with higher incomes relating to higher incidence rates of breast cancer. Racial disparities relating to breast cancer have also been observed, with African American women being diagnosed with more aggressive and advanced-stage breast cancer. We aimed to study how racial disparities and household income relate to breast cancer staging at the time of diagnosis. Methods: A retrospective cohort study was conducted on 1000 breast cancer patients in Aultman hospital cancer center in Canton, Ohio. Patients with a diagnosis of breast cancer diagnosed between 2010-2020 were included in the study. Data including age, zip code, race, and tumor stage at the time of diagnosis was collected. Further, zip code information was used to estimate median household income by searching available US income statistics. For statistical analysis, the Pearson correlation and linear regression model were used, with p< 0.05 defining statistical significance. Results: Patients ranged from 25-95 years old. The percentage of patients with breast cancer staging of 0, I, II, III, and IV was 1.9%, 47.7%, 26.2%, 6.1%, and 18.1% respectively. When separated by income bracket, 86.6% of the study population was found to be within the $44,251-$88,450 income bracket. Regarding income and breast cancer stage, a correlation coefficient of -0.019 (p 0.557) was found. Further, the population of study was found to be 51.4% Caucasian, 2% African American, 0% Hispanic, 0.3% Asian, and 46.3% other races. Regarding race and breast cancer stage, a correlation coefficient of -0.174 (p < 0.01) was found. Conclusions: This study found no significant relationship between income and stage at the time of diagnosis. A limitation to our study was the use of estimated household income rather than exact patient reported income. However, a significant relationship was found between race and breast cancer staging, with earlier stage breast cancer detected among Caucasian women, and later stages among other races at the time of diagnosis. These findings emphasize the need to address racial disparities and access to care to improve upon breast cancer screening and early-stage detection.

Purpose of study: This study tries to figure out whether Adrienne Kennedy’s play “Funnyhouse of a Negro” was direct and clear or indirect and implicit when she expresses a black woman’s struggle with identity. Methodology: This study adopts a mix mode approach of Martin and white (2005) attitudinal category of Appraisal theory so as to analyze, frame, and to answer the research questions by which is proposed for this full research paper. Main Findings: The inscribed instances have exceeded the invoked ones in the whole corpus of “Funnyhouse of a Negro”, concerning how did Sarah; the protagonist, as well as her split figures, have portrayed her white mother and a black father. The outcomes suggest that Kennedy was very clear and direct to deliver her moral judgment to her audiences/readers regarding the status of African American women in American based on analyzing the discourses of the main characters in the play. Implications/Applications: Therefore, this play has gained very much respect and admiration from critics, readers, and audiences because of the playwright’s direct descriptions of Sarah and her parents in the American arena as well as her attempt to form new status as an individual human being who have a right to live such as any white American civilian. Originality/Novelty of Study: The appraisal approach is a fairly new extension in the area of Systemic Functional Linguistics. It has been applied mainly to non-fictional discourse, particularly to certain texts with an argumentative task such as journalistic and political speeches. There is an increasing interest in the utilization of this theory to the analysis of literary texts, involving narrative fiction (Alsanafi&Mohd Noor, 2019). The researcher does not find any study employs Appraisal category to discover the clearness of expressions to describe woman’s oppression in Adriane Kennedy’s “Funnyhouse of a Negro”.

OBJECTIVES/GOALS: Pregnant African American (Black women) have higher rates of adverse pregnancy outcomes compared to other races and routine monitoring of lipid levels is not currently in practice in prenatal care. We hypothesized that lipid profiles would show variation across pregnancy indicative of specific requirements during gestation and fetal development. METHODS/STUDY POPULATION: We used an untargeted lipidome analysis approach to investigate lipid metabolism with the progression of pregnancy. Pregnant Black women were recruited at prenatal clinics in Midwest (Metro Detroit, Michigan and Columbus, Ohio), women under 18 or above 45 years of age were not enrolled due to metabolic changes associated with these age groups. Women signed the consent forms and plasma samples were collected at 8-18 weeks at (T1), 22-29 weeks (T2) and 30-36 weeks (T3) of pregnancy. Samples from sixty-three women (mean age 27.41 ± 5.61 years) who had term birth (completed 37 weeks of pregnancy) were subjected to “shotgun” Orbitrap high resolution/ accurate mass spectrometry. Mixed-effects models were used to quantify systematic changes in relative lipid abundances over time using R lme4 and ggplot2 packages. RESULTS/ANTICIPATED RESULTS: Total lipids and some major lipid classes showed a significant increase with the progression of pregnancy. Phospholipids and glycerolipids exhibited a gradual increase throughout pregnancy, while sphingolipids and total sterol lipids displayed a more pronounced increase at the T3 timepoint. Acylcarnitines, hydroxy acylcarnitines and Lyso phospholipids levels significantly decrease from T1 to T3. One of the interesting finding was that non-esterified fatty acids decreased from T1 to T2 and increased again from T2 to T3, suggesting a possible role for these lipids during the later stages of pregnancy. The fatty acids showing this trend included key fatty acids- Linoleic Acid, Arachidonic Acid, Alpha-linolenic acid, Eicosapentaenoic acid, Docosapentaenoic acid, Docosahexaenoic acid. DISCUSSION/SIGNIFICANCE: Mapping lipid trends during pregnancy could lend support to a precision health approach to reduce perinatal health disparities among pregnant Black women. The findings from this study will be used to identify biomarkers and study associations with social and environmental factors responsible for adverse perinatal outcome in pregnant Black women.

Black death in contemporary cinema requires understanding how film blackness always means provoking new entangled measures of the aesthetic, political, social, and cultural capacities of black visual and expressive culture. As a result, the critical consequence of film blackness always entails issues of affect, narrativity, visual historiography, and genre/modalities. Black death, then, signifies both the violent injustice of African American deaths and the rendering of death in cinema. Three short films by black women filmmakers represent an ever-growing archive of recent works that merit critical attention as they advance cinematic practices that point to new political philosophies and circuits of knowledge related to black death and film form. Taken together as a “cinema in the wake,” the three—Leila Weefur's Dead Nigga BLVD (2015), Frances Bodomo's Everybody Dies! (2016), and A. Sayeeda Clarke's White (2011)—pose a range of formal propositions about black death that include animation, the racial grotesque, and speculative fiction. With distinct and compelling conceptions of black death, these three short films are deeply located in their contemporary American moment. Thinking with these films involves thinking through performing objects, the racial grotesque, and the futurity of social deletion. Together these films exquisitely suspend, disrupt, and disturb constituting distinct visual historiographies and strategies. As cinema in the wake, these films are stirred by incitements of film form, materiality, temporality, and conceptions of black being. But, more importantly, to think through black death across the formal experimentation and critical capacities of this work is to contend with an enduring urgency, the precarity of black life.

In this article I investigate transtextuality in Vrou en feminist (Woman and Feminist, 1921) by Marie du Toit in order to demonstrate how she grafted first-wave transnational feminism onto the Afrikaans context. Du Toit’s book is approached as a space of contact between progressive European and North American thought and a South African, particularly Afrikaner, mindset. Du Toit relied on a multiplicity of late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries discourses to support her argument that Afrikaner women become part of the feminist movement. Due to the numerous quotations from scientific papers and literary fiction, mostly English but also Dutch, her book can be described as a heteroglot text. Utilizing the histoire croisée approach, I discuss Du Toit’s text on the macro and micro scale: I locate it in a historical perspective as a literary document and focus on the ways in which diverse voices intersect and converse with one another. I argue that the book was an unsuccessful attempt at inviting the Afrikaans reader into a transnational imagined community of suffragettes because of prejudice against the English language and culture. English sources, which Du Toit extensively quoted, deterred potential Afrikaans supporters, and consequently prevented transfer of feminist thought. Even though she also supported her views with some texts in Dutch in wanting to appeal to her reader’s associations with a more familiar Dutch culture, this tactic was insufficient to tip the balance.

OBJECTIVES/SPECIFIC AIMS: To determine the association of participant’s characteristics and socio-cultural factors including acculturation, community identity and discrimination with the adherence to cancer screening guidelines and participants’ quality of life. METHODS/STUDY POPULATION: As part of the Cancer Disparities Research Network pilot cohort, the study recruited 333 participants across four sites: Boston Chinatown, African American communities in Philadelphia, and Hispanic communities in Columbus, and rural white communities in Appalachia, Ohio. Enrolled participants were eligible if they were 40 to 74 years old, did not live in a nursing home or other facility, and had no prior invasive cancer diagnosis. Additionally, each participant met at least one of the following criteria: living in a medically underserved area, having low literacy, low income (defined as 100% of the 2015 Federal Poverty Level FPL according to 2015 FPL Guidelines), or being uninsured or receiving subsidized health insurance coverage. Participants completed a baseline survey of demographic data, health status, including health behaviors and risk factors to cancer, Primary Care Physician (PCP) status and most recent breast, cervical, prostate, skin and colorectal cancer screenings. Information related to discrimination, acculturation or adaptation, and sense of belonging to their community was collected using validated instruments. RESULTS/ANTICIPATED RESULTS: Of the 333 participants enrolled in the study, 65.5% were women, 14.1% were 40-50 years of age, 59.8% were 51-64 years, and 26.1% were 65-74. The cohort was racially and ethnically diverse: 8.4% of participants identified as Hispanic, 30.3% as non-Hispanic White, 31.2% as non-Hispanic Black, 29.4% as non-Hispanic Asian, and 0.6% as Other. 62.2% spoke English, 8.1% Spanish, and 29.7% Chinese as their primary language. Low incomes were common: 33.6% reported incomes $15,000 or less, and 25.8% reported incomes between $15,000 and $24,999. Overall adherence to USPSTF guidelines on cancer screening rates was 77.9% for breast cancer, 71.1% for cervical cancer, and 67.7% for colorectal cancer. Analyses will present the association of acculturation, community identity, and discrimination with cancer screening and quality of life measures. DISCUSSION/SIGNIFICANCE OF IMPACT: This study will promote the increase of cancer disparities research, and reinforce the importance of inclusion and increased recruitment of diverse populations in future studies. By determining the potential factors associated with cancer disparities among minority populations, it may provide new information for clinicians to have more cultural sensitivity addressing potential disparities in the clinical setting. It will also promote the creation of more tailored interventions and programs to deliver adequate healthcare among these populations.

Background: Immune mediated thrombotic thrombocytopenic purpura (iTTP) is defined by thrombocytopenia and microangiopathic hemolytic anemia caused by severely deficient ADAMTS13 activity (&lt;10%). After resolution of their initial episode, patients remain at risk for relapse. Relapse is most common during the first year, but can occur at any point in their lives. In asymptomatic patients, severely deficient ADAMTS13 activity in remission has been shown to be a risk factor for relapses and can guide consideration of preemptive therapy with Rituximab. However, severely deficient ADAMTS13 activity alone does not uniformly lead to relapse, and patients with non-deficient ADAMTS13 activity in remission may still relapse in the following months. The aim of this study was to develop a multivariable model to identify patients at high risk of relapse, using other biomarkers known to have a role in the pathophysiology of iTTP. Patients/Methods: This analysis utilized samples from patients enrolled in the Ohio State University TMA registry beginning in 2003 until 2014. Patients were followed every 3 months to monitor for relapse and for the development of long-term complications. Clinical data (CBC, chemistry, LDH, ADAMTS13 biomarkers) were obtained on each visit to confirm remission in addition to research samples. Clinical and demographic data in addition to biomarkers of complement activation that were performed on banked samples were used to develop a model to quantify the risk for relapse in the following 3 months. A Lasso logistic regression model (Tibshirani et al 1996) with relapse in the following 3 months as the response variable using the R package glmnet (https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/glmnet/index.html) was used to identify those variables most predictive of relapse from the 17 studied (Table 1). The data from all subjects were split into training data (75%) and testing data (25%) to develop and subsequently test the performance of the model. The final predictors were then standardized to develop the final model and the program to predict the risk of relapse (%) in the following 3 months. Results: Data from a total of 131 patient encounters from 42 patients in a clinical remission were included in the study to develop the statistical model (Table 2). 31(75.6%) were White and 10 (24.4%) were African American. The average age was 42 (18-69), and 31 (75.6%) were women. The median number of encounters from each patient was 2 (range, 1 to 10). From these 131 encounters, 39 relapses occurred in 20 patients over the next 3 months following their clinic visit. The 39 relapse encounters were compared to the 92 encounters where no relapse occurred to develop the model. The performance of both the 11-factor and 6-factor models are shown in Table 3. Given the comparable data in terms of the AUC, sensitivity and specificity to the 11-factor model to predict relapse, the 6-factor model was judged to be more practical given the fewer number of variables. Both the 11-factor and 6-factor models performed better than the ADAMTS13 activity alone. In this model, the presence of ULVWF multimers, increased levels of LDH, complement activation as measured by C3a (log transformed), a lower ADAMTS13 activity (log transformed), ADAMTS13 antigen (log transformed), and younger age increased the risk for relapse. These variables would be entered into the model with the result being read out as a percent risk for relapse in the following 3 months as described in the hypothetical examples in Table 4. Conclusion: Utilizing a model that includes a combination of biomarkers in asymptomatic patients in remission from iTTP provides more accurate identification of patients at increased risk of relapse in the next 3 months, when compared to using the ADAMTS13 activity alone. This model would allow physicians to initiate preemptive therapy with rituximab to patients at the greatest risk for relapse, and potentially avoiding therapy in patients whose risk may be lower than what would be predicted by the ADAMTS13 activity alone. Disclosures Cataland: Ablynx/Sanofi: Consultancy, Research Funding; Alexion: Consultancy, Research Funding.

Historically, African American women have experienced racial disparities in miscarriage, stillbirth, and infant mortality rates. Yet, little attention has been given to stressors that African American women may experience prior to, during, and after experiencing fetal/infant loss. This study provided an opportunity for African American women to describe their lived experiences of stressors prior to, during, and after experiencing each type of fetal/infant loss. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with seven African American women. Each participant experienced miscarriage, stillbirth, and infant mortality and were 18 years of age or older. Recruitment occurred in 2019 in a county in Northeast Ohio and data were analyzed using descriptive coding and thematic analysis. Four themes identified how these African American women navigated stressors prior to, during, and after experiencing each type of fetal/infant loss: (a) social support, (b) grief, (c) internal conflict, and (d) pregnancy, delivery, and death of child. Our findings expand the literature by being an innovative study may bring awareness and influence programs that assist African American women during their experience with fetal/infant loss.

Introduction Crime fiction is one of the world’s most popular genres. Indeed, it has been estimated that as many as one in every three new novels, published in English, is classified within the crime fiction category (Knight xi). These new entrants to the market are forced to jostle for space on bookstore and library shelves with reprints of classic crime novels; such works placed in, often fierce, competition against their contemporaries as well as many of their predecessors. Raymond Chandler, in his well-known essay The Simple Art of Murder, noted Ernest Hemingway’s observation that “the good writer competes only with the dead. The good detective story writer […] competes not only with all the unburied dead but with all the hosts of the living as well” (3). In fact, there are so many examples of crime fiction works that, as early as the 1920s, one of the original ‘Queens of Crime’, Dorothy L. Sayers, complained: It is impossible to keep track of all the detective-stories produced to-day [sic]. Book upon book, magazine upon magazine pour out from the Press, crammed with murders, thefts, arsons, frauds, conspiracies, problems, puzzles, mysteries, thrills, maniacs, crooks, poisoners, forgers, garrotters, police, spies, secret-service men, detectives, until it seems that half the world must be engaged in setting riddles for the other half to solve (95). Twenty years after Sayers wrote on the matter of the vast quantities of crime fiction available, W.H. Auden wrote one of the more famous essays on the genre: The Guilty Vicarage: Notes on the Detective Story, by an Addict. Auden is, perhaps, better known as a poet but his connection to the crime fiction genre is undisputed. As well as his poetic works that reference crime fiction and commentaries on crime fiction, one of Auden’s fellow poets, Cecil Day-Lewis, wrote a series of crime fiction novels under the pseudonym Nicholas Blake: the central protagonist of these novels, Nigel Strangeways, was modelled upon Auden (Scaggs 27). Interestingly, some writers whose names are now synonymous with the genre, such as Edgar Allan Poe and Raymond Chandler, established the link between poetry and crime fiction many years before the publication of The Guilty Vicarage. Edmund Wilson suggested that “reading detective stories is simply a kind of vice that, for silliness and minor harmfulness, ranks somewhere between crossword puzzles and smoking” (395). In the first line of The Guilty Vicarage, Auden supports Wilson’s claim and confesses that: “For me, as for many others, the reading of detective stories is an addiction like tobacco or alcohol” (406). This indicates that the genre is at best a trivial pursuit, at worst a pursuit that is bad for your health and is, increasingly, socially unacceptable, while Auden’s ideas around taste—high and low—are made clear when he declares that “detective stories have nothing to do with works of art” (406). The debates that surround genre and taste are many and varied. The mid-1920s was a point in time which had witnessed crime fiction writers produce some of the finest examples of fiction to ever be published and when readers and publishers were watching, with anticipation, as a new generation of crime fiction writers were readying themselves to enter what would become known as the genre’s Golden Age. At this time, R. Austin Freeman wrote that: By the critic and the professedly literary person the detective story is apt to be dismissed contemptuously as outside the pale of literature, to be conceived of as a type of work produced by half-educated and wholly incompetent writers for consumption by office boys, factory girls, and other persons devoid of culture and literary taste (7). This article responds to Auden’s essay and explores how crime fiction appeals to many different tastes: tastes that are acquired, change over time, are embraced, or kept as guilty secrets. In addition, this article will challenge Auden’s very narrow definition of crime fiction and suggest how Auden’s religious imagery, deployed to explain why many people choose to read crime fiction, can be incorporated into a broader popular discourse on punishment. This latter argument demonstrates that a taste for crime fiction and a taste for justice are inextricably intertwined. Crime Fiction: A Type For Every Taste Cathy Cole has observed that “crime novels are housed in their own section in many bookshops, separated from literary novels much as you’d keep a child with measles away from the rest of the class” (116). Times have changed. So too, have our tastes. Crime fiction, once sequestered in corners, now demands vast tracts of prime real estate in bookstores allowing readers to “make their way to the appropriate shelves, and begin to browse […] sorting through a wide variety of very different types of novels” (Malmgren 115). This is a result of the sheer size of the genre, noted above, as well as the genre’s expanding scope. Indeed, those who worked to re-invent crime fiction in the 1800s could not have envisaged the “taxonomic exuberance” (Derrida 206) of the writers who have defined crime fiction sub-genres, as well as how readers would respond by not only wanting to read crime fiction but also wanting to read many different types of crime fiction tailored to their particular tastes. To understand the demand for this diversity, it is important to reflect upon some of the appeal factors of crime fiction for readers. Many rules have been promulgated for the writers of crime fiction to follow. Ronald Knox produced a set of 10 rules in 1928. These included Rule 3 “Not more than one secret room or passage is allowable”, and Rule 10 “Twin brothers, and doubles generally, must not appear unless we have been duly prepared for them” (194–6). In the same year, S.S. Van Dine produced another list of 20 rules, which included Rule 3 “There must be no love interest: The business in hand is to bring a criminal to the bar of justice, not to bring a lovelorn couple to the hymeneal altar”, and Rule 7 “There simply must be a corpse in a detective novel, and the deader the corpse the better” (189–93). Some of these directives have been deliberately ignored or have become out-of-date over time while others continue to be followed in contemporary crime writing practice. In sharp contrast, there are no rules for reading this genre. Individuals are, generally, free to choose what, where, when, why, and how they read crime fiction. There are, however, different appeal factors for readers. The most common of these appeal factors, often described as doorways, are story, setting, character, and language. As the following passage explains: The story doorway beckons those who enjoy reading to find out what happens next. The setting doorway opens widest for readers who enjoy being immersed in an evocation of place or time. The doorway of character is for readers who enjoy looking at the world through others’ eyes. Readers who most appreciate skilful writing enter through the doorway of language (Wyatt online). These doorways draw readers to the crime fiction genre. There are stories that allow us to easily predict what will come next or make us hold our breath until the very last page, the books that we will cheerfully lend to a family member or a friend and those that we keep close to hand to re-read again and again. There are settings as diverse as country manors, exotic locations, and familiar city streets, places we have been and others that we might want to explore. There are characters such as the accidental sleuth, the hardboiled detective, and the refined police officer, amongst many others, the men and women—complete with idiosyncrasies and flaws—who we have grown to admire and trust. There is also the language that all writers, regardless of genre, depend upon to tell their tales. In crime fiction, even the most basic task of describing where the murder victim was found can range from words that convey the genteel—“The room of the tragedy” (Christie 62)—to the absurd: “There it was, jammed between a pallet load of best export boneless beef and half a tonne of spring lamb” (Maloney 1). These appeal factors indicate why readers might choose crime fiction over another genre, or choose one type of crime fiction over another. Yet such factors fail to explain what crime fiction is or adequately answer why the genre is devoured in such vast quantities. Firstly, crime fiction stories are those in which there is the committing of a crime, or at least the suspicion of a crime (Cole), and the story that unfolds revolves around the efforts of an amateur or professional detective to solve that crime (Scaggs). Secondly, crime fiction offers the reassurance of resolution, a guarantee that from “previous experience and from certain cultural conventions associated with this genre that ultimately the mystery will be fully explained” (Zunshine 122). For Auden, the definition of the crime novel was quite specific, and he argued that referring to the genre by “the vulgar definition, ‘a Whodunit’ is correct” (407). Auden went on to offer a basic formula stating that: “a murder occurs; many are suspected; all but one suspect, who is the murderer, are eliminated; the murderer is arrested or dies” (407). The idea of a formula is certainly a useful one, particularly when production demands—in terms of both quality and quantity—are so high, because the formula facilitates creators in the “rapid and efficient production of new works” (Cawelti 9). For contemporary crime fiction readers, the doorways to reading, discussed briefly above, have been cast wide open. Stories relying upon the basic crime fiction formula as a foundation can be gothic tales, clue puzzles, forensic procedurals, spy thrillers, hardboiled narratives, or violent crime narratives, amongst many others. The settings can be quiet villages or busy metropolises, landscapes that readers actually inhabit or that provide a form of affordable tourism. These stories can be set in the past, the here and now, or the future. Characters can range from Edgar Allan Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin to Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade, from Agatha Christie’s Miss Jane Marple to Kerry Greenwood’s Honourable Phryne Fisher. Similarly, language can come in numerous styles from the direct (even rough) words of Carter Brown to the literary prose of Peter Temple. Anything is possible, meaning everything is available to readers. For Auden—although he required a crime to be committed and expected that crime to be resolved—these doorways were only slightly ajar. For him, the story had to be a Whodunit; the setting had to be rural England, though a college setting was also considered suitable; the characters had to be “eccentric (aesthetically interesting individuals) and good (instinctively ethical)” and there needed to be a “completely satisfactory detective” (Sherlock Holmes, Inspector French, and Father Brown were identified as “satisfactory”); and the language descriptive and detailed (406, 409, 408). To illustrate this point, Auden’s concept of crime fiction has been plotted on a taxonomy, below, that traces the genre’s main developments over a period of three centuries. As can be seen, much of what is, today, taken for granted as being classified as crime fiction is completely excluded from Auden’s ideal. Figure 1: Taxonomy of Crime Fiction (Adapted from Franks, Murder 136) Crime Fiction: A Personal Journey I discovered crime fiction the summer before I started high school when I saw the film version of The Big Sleep starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. A few days after I had seen the film I started reading the Raymond Chandler novel of the same title, featuring his famous detective Philip Marlowe, and was transfixed by the second paragraph: The main hallway of the Sternwood place was two stories high. Over the entrance doors, which would have let in a troop of Indian elephants, there was a broad stained-glass panel showing a knight in dark armour rescuing a lady who was tied to a tree and didn’t have any clothes on but some very long and convenient hair. The knight had pushed the visor of his helmet back to be sociable, and he was fiddling with the knots on the ropes that tied the lady to the tree and not getting anywhere. I stood there and thought that if I lived in the house, I would sooner or later have to climb up there and help him. He didn’t seem to be really trying (9). John Scaggs has written that this passage indicates Marlowe is an idealised figure, a knight of romance rewritten onto the mean streets of mid-20th century Los Angeles (62); a relocation Susan Roland calls a “secular form of the divinely sanctioned knight errant on a quest for metaphysical justice” (139): my kind of guy. Like many young people I looked for adventure and escape in books, a search that was realised with Raymond Chandler and his contemporaries. On the escapism scale, these men with their stories of tough-talking detectives taking on murderers and other criminals, law enforcement officers, and the occasional femme fatale, were certainly a sharp upgrade from C.S. Lewis and the Chronicles of Narnia. After reading the works written by the pioneers of the hardboiled and roman noir traditions, I looked to other American authors such as Edgar Allan Poe who, in the mid-1800s, became the father of the modern detective story, and Thorne Smith who, in the 1920s and 1930s, produced magical realist tales with characters who often chose to dabble on the wrong side of the law. This led me to the works of British crime writers including Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, and Dorothy L. Sayers. My personal library then became dominated by Australian writers of crime fiction, from the stories of bushrangers and convicts of the Colonial era to contemporary tales of police and private investigators. There have been various attempts to “improve” or “refine” my tastes: to convince me that serious literature is real reading and frivolous fiction is merely a distraction. Certainly, the reading of those novels, often described as classics, provide perfect combinations of beauty and brilliance. Their narratives, however, do not often result in satisfactory endings. This routinely frustrates me because, while I understand the philosophical frameworks that many writers operate within, I believe the characters of such works are too often treated unfairly in the final pages. For example, at the end of Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, Frederick Henry “left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain” after his son is stillborn and “Mrs Henry” becomes “very ill” and dies (292–93). Another example can be found on the last page of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four when Winston Smith “gazed up at the enormous face” and he realised that he “loved Big Brother” (311). Endings such as these provide a space for reflection about the world around us but rarely spark an immediate response of how great that world is to live in (Franks Motive). The subject matter of crime fiction does not easily facilitate fairy-tale finishes, yet, people continue to read the genre because, generally, the concluding chapter will show that justice, of some form, will be done. Punishment will be meted out to the ‘bad characters’ that have broken society’s moral or legal laws; the ‘good characters’ may experience hardships and may suffer but they will, generally, prevail. Crime Fiction: A Taste For Justice Superimposed upon Auden’s parameters around crime fiction, are his ideas of the law in the real world and how such laws are interwoven with the Christian-based system of ethics. This can be seen in Auden’s listing of three classes of crime: “(a) offenses against God and one’s neighbor or neighbors; (b) offenses against God and society; (c) offenses against God” (407). Murder, in Auden’s opinion, is a class (b) offense: for the crime fiction novel, the society reflected within the story should be one in “a state of grace, i.e., a society where there is no need of the law, no contradiction between the aesthetic individual and the ethical universal, and where murder, therefore, is the unheard-of act which precipitates a crisis” (408). Additionally, in the crime novel “as in its mirror image, the Quest for the Grail, maps (the ritual of space) and timetables (the ritual of time) are desirable. Nature should reflect its human inhabitants, i.e., it should be the Great Good Place; for the more Eden-like it is, the greater the contradiction of murder” (408). Thus, as Charles J. Rzepka notes, “according to W.H. Auden, the ‘classical’ English detective story typically re-enacts rites of scapegoating and expulsion that affirm the innocence of a community of good people supposedly ignorant of evil” (12). This premise—of good versus evil—supports Auden’s claim that the punishment of wrongdoers, particularly those who claim the “right to be omnipotent” and commit murder (409), should be swift and final: As to the murderer’s end, of the three alternatives—execution, suicide, and madness—the first is preferable; for if he commits suicide he refuses to repent, and if he goes mad he cannot repent, but if he does not repent society cannot forgive. Execution, on the other hand, is the act of atonement by which the murderer is forgiven by society (409). The unilateral endorsement of state-sanctioned murder is problematic, however, because—of the main justifications for punishment: retribution; deterrence; incapacitation; and rehabilitation (Carter Snead 1245)—punishment, in this context, focuses exclusively upon retribution and deterrence, incapacitation is achieved by default, but the idea of rehabilitation is completely ignored. This, in turn, ignores how the reading of crime fiction can be incorporated into a broader popular discourse on punishment and how a taste for crime fiction and a taste for justice are inextricably intertwined. One of the ways to explore the connection between crime fiction and justice is through the lens of Emile Durkheim’s thesis on the conscience collective which proposes punishment is a process allowing for the demonstration of group norms and the strengthening of moral boundaries. David Garland, in summarising this thesis, states: So although the modern state has a near monopoly of penal violence and controls the administration of penalties, a much wider population feels itself to be involved in the process of punishment, and supplies the context of social support and valorization within which state punishment takes place (32). It is claimed here that this “much wider population” connecting with the task of punishment can be taken further. Crime fiction, above all other forms of literary production, which, for those who do not directly contribute to the maintenance of their respective legal systems, facilitates a feeling of active participation in the penalising of a variety of perpetrators: from the issuing of fines to incarceration (Franks Punishment). Crime fiction readers are therefore, temporarily at least, direct contributors to a more stable society: one that is clearly based upon right and wrong and reliant upon the conscience collective to maintain and reaffirm order. In this context, the reader is no longer alone, with only their crime fiction novel for company, but has become an active member of “a moral framework which binds individuals to each other and to its conventions and institutions” (Garland 51). This allows crime fiction, once viewed as a “vice” (Wilson 395) or an “addiction” (Auden 406), to be seen as playing a crucial role in the preservation of social mores. It has been argued “only the most literal of literary minds would dispute the claim that fictional characters help shape the way we think of ourselves, and hence help us articulate more clearly what it means to be human” (Galgut 190). Crime fiction focuses on what it means to be human, and how complex humans are, because stories of murders, and the men and women who perpetrate and solve them, comment on what drives some people to take a life and others to avenge that life which is lost and, by extension, engages with a broad community of readers around ideas of justice and punishment. It is, furthermore, argued here that the idea of the story is one of the more important doorways for crime fiction and, more specifically, the conclusions that these stories, traditionally, offer. For Auden, the ending should be one of restoration of the spirit, as he suspected that “the typical reader of detective stories is, like myself, a person who suffers from a sense of sin” (411). In this way, the “phantasy, then, which the detective story addict indulges is the phantasy of being restored to the Garden of Eden, to a state of innocence, where he may know love as love and not as the law” (412), indicating that it was not necessarily an accident that “the detective story has flourished most in predominantly Protestant countries” (408). Today, modern crime fiction is a “broad church, where talented authors raise questions and cast light on a variety of societal and other issues through the prism of an exciting, page-turning story” (Sisterson). Moreover, our tastes in crime fiction have been tempered by a growing fear of real crime, particularly murder, “a crime of unique horror” (Hitchens 200). This has seen some readers develop a taste for crime fiction that is not produced within a framework of ecclesiastical faith but is rather grounded in reliance upon those who enact punishment in both the fictional and real worlds. As P.D. James has written: [N]ot by luck or divine intervention, but by human ingenuity, human intelligence and human courage. It confirms our hope that, despite some evidence to the contrary, we live in a beneficent and moral universe in which problems can be solved by rational means and peace and order restored from communal or personal disruption and chaos (174). Dorothy L. Sayers, despite her work to legitimise crime fiction, wrote that there: “certainly does seem a possibility that the detective story will some time come to an end, simply because the public will have learnt all the tricks” (108). Of course, many readers have “learnt all the tricks”, or most of them. This does not, however, detract from the genre’s overall appeal. We have not grown bored with, or become tired of, the formula that revolves around good and evil, and justice and punishment. Quite the opposite. Our knowledge of, as well as our faith in, the genre’s “tricks” gives a level of confidence to readers who are looking for endings that punish murderers and other wrongdoers, allowing for more satisfactory conclusions than the, rather depressing, ends given to Mr. Henry and Mr. Smith by Ernest Hemingway and George Orwell noted above. Conclusion For some, the popularity of crime fiction is a curious case indeed. When Penguin and Collins published the Marsh Million—100,000 copies each of 10 Ngaio Marsh titles in 1949—the author’s relief at the success of the project was palpable when she commented that “it was pleasant to find detective fiction being discussed as a tolerable form of reading by people whose opinion one valued” (172). More recently, upon the announcement that a Miles Franklin Award would be given to Peter Temple for his crime novel Truth, John Sutherland, a former chairman of the judges for one of the world’s most famous literary awards, suggested that submitting a crime novel for the Booker Prize would be: “like putting a donkey into the Grand National”. Much like art, fashion, food, and home furnishings or any one of the innumerable fields of activity and endeavour that are subject to opinion, there will always be those within the world of fiction who claim positions as arbiters of taste. Yet reading is intensely personal. I like a strong, well-plotted story, appreciate a carefully researched setting, and can admire elegant language, but if a character is too difficult to embrace—if I find I cannot make an emotional connection, if I find myself ambivalent about their fate—then a book is discarded as not being to my taste. It is also important to recognise that some tastes are transient. Crime fiction stories that are popular today could be forgotten tomorrow. Some stories appeal to such a broad range of tastes they are immediately included in the crime fiction canon. Yet others evolve over time to accommodate widespread changes in taste (an excellent example of this can be seen in the continual re-imagining of the stories of Sherlock Holmes). Personal tastes also adapt to our experiences and our surroundings. A book that someone adores in their 20s might be dismissed in their 40s. A storyline that was meaningful when read abroad may lose some of its magic when read at home. Personal events, from a change in employment to the loss of a loved one, can also impact upon what we want to read. Similarly, world events, such as economic crises and military conflicts, can also influence our reading preferences. Auden professed an almost insatiable appetite for crime fiction, describing the reading of detective stories as an addiction, and listed a very specific set of criteria to define the Whodunit. Today, such self-imposed restrictions are rare as, while there are many rules for writing crime fiction, there are no rules for reading this (or any other) genre. People are, generally, free to choose what, where, when, why, and how they read crime fiction, and to follow the deliberate or whimsical paths that their tastes may lay down for them. Crime fiction writers, past and present, offer: an incredible array of detective stories from the locked room to the clue puzzle; settings that range from the English country estate to city skyscrapers in glamorous locations around the world; numerous characters from cerebral sleuths who can solve a crime in their living room over a nice, hot cup of tea to weapon wielding heroes who track down villains on foot in darkened alleyways; and, language that ranges from the cultured conversations from the novels of the genre’s Golden Age to the hard-hitting terminology of forensic and legal procedurals. Overlaid on these appeal factors is the capacity of crime fiction to feed a taste for justice: to engage, vicariously at least, in the establishment of a more stable society. Of course, there are those who turn to the genre for a temporary distraction, an occasional guilty pleasure. There are those who stumble across the genre by accident or deliberately seek it out. 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Among women with breast cancer, delays in diagnosis and earlier presentation have been documented among minority women. Consequently, initiation of breast cancer screening at a later age may disproportionately harm minority groups. This study seeks to determine whether minority women face a higher proportional risk of younger age breast cancer than their White peers. Using publicly available data from the Ohio Department of Public Health Data Warehouse, we constructed a database allowing for retrospective evaluation of all breast cancer patients in the state of Ohio from 1996 to 2020. White women represented the bulk of total breast cancer cases in each age group and overall; however, the proportion of cancers attributable to White women increased in each successively older cohort group: 80.7% of cases under age 40 up to 91.3% of the 80 or older group. By a significant margin, the opposite is true in minority groups with African American women accounting for 15% of cases under the age of 40, trending down to 7.8% of the 80 and older group. Comparison of the proportions of these groups demonstrates statistically significant proportional decreases among minority groups and statistically significant increases among White women. Our findings suggest that women of color in the Ohio population face a disproportionately high risk of being diagnosed with younger age breast cancer and support the findings of other authors who recommend tailoring breast cancer screening by racial cohort. Efforts should be made to promote younger-age screening for minority women to prevent disproportionate harm.