Dance orients the performer’s body toward both environment and pleasure, yet the intersection of environmental and sexual attunement in dance practice remains an underexplored area of research. This article considers how environmental and sexual readings of dance practice can be brought together by proposing a queer ecological approach to modernist dance. Drawing on research in dance studies, feminist and queer science studies, and sexology studies, the article examines the work of Loïe Fuller, an early pioneer of modernist dance, to show how Fuller’s work engages with themes of both sex and nature and consequently introduces environmentally attuned thinking to early twentieth century sexual knowledge production. By examining the parallels and divergences between Magnus Hirschfeld’s early twentieth-century sexological writing about “transvestitism” and Loïe Fuller’s modernist dance, via the copycat dancer Henry Cyril Paget, I show that both dance and sexology rethought the relationship between sex and nature by grappling, to different extents, with a queer vision of nature, where nature loses its explanatory force and moral authority. This reveals the importance of nature and the nonhuman in the production of modern concepts of sex, gender, and sexuality and the important role that dance can play in illuminating the intersection of sex and nature. Contemporary dance movements explicitly engage with ways in which dance can connect with the nonhuman world, sometimes with the explicit aim to inspire sustainable action.3 Dance and choreography become methods for communicating and sensing the urgency of the climate crisis in the Anthropocene.In dance practice, the performer’s body is intimately linked to the space and the environment within which it moves. Environmental dance explores the relationship between bodies on stage and a wider environmental ethics, where movement is attuned to a wider ecosystem.Dancing Desires, Jane Desmond shows how dance histories and practices stand in close relationship to histories of sexuality and should be fruitfully considered together, and that the analysis of dance “as a form of material symbolic bodily practice” can advance queer and feminist theories.4 Judith Lynne Hanna argues that dance and sex both “involve the language of the body’s orientation toward pleasure,” making both inseparable.5 As a historically specific bodily practice, dance makes visible the relationship between social norms and categorizations and the bodies that inhabit these.6 Modernist dance, in particular, puts gender and sexuality center stage.7 At the turn of the twentieth century, dance as well as cinema as “art of motion” represented the ambiguous role of women as both spectacle for the male gaze and independent, sexual agents claiming both stage and attention.8 Here dance’s engagement with themes of gender and sexuality fits into larger cultural and scientific efforts to understand changing gender roles under the guise of the New Woman. In scientific as well as aesthetic explorations of female sexuality, femininity became a slippery concept, and fears of women as masculinized merged with anxieties about the third sex, a term that can be considered to include a variety of LGBTQ+ identities.9Dance and performance cultures also offer particularly rich opportunities for the visualization and embodiment of gender and sexuality. In 10 In this article, I want to consider how environmental and sexual readings of dance practice can be brought together by proposing a queer ecological approach to modernist dance. Specifically, this article focuses on the work of Loïe Fuller, an early pioneer of modernist dance. Drawing on research in dance studies, feminist and queer science studies, and sexology studies, I argue that Fuller’s dance engages with themes of both sex and nature and consequently introduces environmentally attuned thinking to early twentieth century sexual knowledge production. I investigate how both dance and the sexual sciences, to different extents, grapple with a queer vision of nature, where nature loses its explanatory force and moral authority.If dance is centrally oriented toward both environment and pleasure, the intersection of environmental and sexual attunement in dance practice remains an underexplored area of research.11 Stacy Alaimo argues that, as a consequence, “much queer theory has bracketed, expelled, or distanced the volatile categories of nature and the natural, situating queer desire within an entirely social, and very human, habitat.”12 Underlying this turn away from nature is a distinction between nature as inflexible and predetermined and culture as meaningful and productive.13 Questioning this dichotomy of nature/culture and human/nonhuman, Elizabeth Wilson argues that it should be possible to consider nature as productive in the same way as culture: “there is no intrinsic orthodoxy to biological matter .”14 Here, Wilson counters a gesture that excludes the biological as a site of feminist analysis. Wilson’s new materialist feminist approach argues against understanding the biological as inflexible, deterministic, and controlling, and instead argues that a turn to the biological cannot resolve arguments conclusively but requires sustained analysis.Sex and nature are uncomfortable bedfellows. Approaching the entangled history of sex and nature from a queer theoretical standpoint, which seeks to problematize essentialities of gender and sexual identity, recourse to nature is often considered reductive and re-essentializing.Queer Ecologies, Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands and Bruce Erickson discuss “knots of inquiry” where queer and ecological issues overlap. The first major knot concerns the intersection between histories of sexuality and ecology as “un/naturalizing the queer.”15 They summarize that “in the early twentieth century, sexuality became naturalized; an individual’s sexual desires were recoded as expressions of an inherent sexual condition, and that condition was understood in strongly biologized terms.”16 The issue raised here is that such sexual-scientific inquiries understood sex and sexuality in reprocentrist terms, attributing a function of either healthy population growth or control in strongly eugenicist terms.17 Mortimer-Sandilands and Erickson write that sexual politics is increasingly naturalized during this period, but that the meaning of “naturalization” was continually contested.18 If this is the case, then there is at least a possibility that sexual knowledge production destabilized the “evolutionary narrative that pits the perverse, the polluted and the degenerate against the fit, the healthy, and the natural.”19These queer and feminist provocations rethink the relationship between queerness and the natural and contribute to a queer ecological approach to both sex and nature. In their introduction to the landmark collection In this article, I offer a reading of Loïe Fuller’s modernist dance that brings out the queer ecological undertones of her work, which, I argue, propose a queer vision of nature that is not oriented toward naturalization as a method of normalizing queer desire. I trace the resonances of her work in sexual knowledge production in the early twentieth century in Germany, in particular to the sexological work of Magnus Hirschfeld. In doing so, I show how early twentieth-century sexual knowledge production can be read through a queer ecological lens. . By bringing modernist dance, the history of sexuality, and environmental humanities together in this way, I also hope to show how methods from environmental humanities, in particular queer ecology, can shed new light on the history of dance as well as the history of sexuality. At the same time, my findings advance the field of environmental humanities by showing how intricately understandings of nature and the natural are linked to concepts of sex, gender, and sexuality and how we must investigate how concepts of sex and nature developed in entangled networks of aesthetic and scientific production.Butterfly Dance, Serpentine Dance, and Lily Dance. During her performances, huge pieces of fabric were twisted and turned around Fuller’s body and light projected onto her dress to create the appearance of a butterfly or flower. Upon realizing her dream of dancing in Paris, Fuller rose to huge and absolute fame based on her performance at the Folies Bergère. By 1913, the year Fuller published her autobiography, she was world-famous, having performed in the United States, Jamaica, Mexico, China, Ireland, Romania, France, Germany, and Austria. Her dance became so popular that Fuller often arrived in new cities to find that copycats of her dance had already preceded her.20 Fuller was vexed by such copycat acts and unsuccessfully tried to attain copyright over her dance. At the same time, Anthea Kraut argues that Fuller explicitly disavowed any connection to other dance practices that influenced her choreography, including the skirt dance and Indian Nautch dance, making Fuller herself a kind of copycat dancer.21 After Fuller’s death in 1928, Fuller’s female partner of thirty years, Gab Sorère, took over her dance troupe.Loïe Fuller was an internationally known Paris-based American dancer who became famous in the early 1890s for her series of dances, including the 22 As Fuller writes in her autobiography, one little girl who saw Fuller’s performance and met her afterward asked, “Well, why does Jack wear girl’s clothes?”23 Here, the young audience member appears to misread Fuller’s gender, but this comment also alludes to widely popularized sexological ideas about homosexuality and trans-identifications as forms of sexual inversion. By the time Fuller published her autobiography in 1913, these theories were more widely popularized and her reference to this misreading might have been a veiled attempt to signal her own homosexuality to the initiated reader.The value and importance of Fuller’s work and her contribution to the development of modern dance in America and beyond has been widely documented, but the unique, somewhat understated contribution of her work to contemporary understandings of gender, sexuality, and queerness is an area where further scholarship and retrospective analysis are vital. As I argue in this section, Fuller quite specifically used the transformative power of costume to question the nature of gender and sexuality. Fuller started her career in the cross-dressing role of Jack Sheppard in the eponymous play. A contemporary review noted that Fuller “looks like a boy, as few women do in breeches, and she acts like one, which is still less frequently accomplished.”Butterfly Dance. In her autobiographical retelling of the origin story of her dance, Fuller first wears the skirt as an improvised costume in a performance of Quack, M.D., where she played a woman hypnotized by her doctor. As she flits around the stage, the audience cries “It’s a butterfly! A butterfly!” and later “It’s an orchid!”24 A theater manager who witnesses her performance shortly after calls it “the Serpentine Dance.”25 Here, Fuller presents her dance practice as being borne out of a moment of convincing transformation, from Fuller the stage girl to butterfly, orchid, and serpent.26 Femininity and its disappearance or disavowal is already central to this transformation. Fuller’s dance embodied the transformative power of dress in the realm of gender.The transformative power of costume to give expression to sexuality featured as a significant trope early on in Fuller’s career. Fuller tells various stories about how she first discovered her 27 Beyond these broader statements that understand Fuller’s dance as bringing to life the organic sculptural and decorative forms of art nouveau, however, I want to propose that Fuller’s dance actively intervened in a more specific concern of the art nouveau movement, which sought to depict erotic nature as amoral, predatory, homoerotic, and androgynous via the figure of the fallen or sinful woman. This is in stark contrast to the pastoral and sanitized version of her dance as simply bringing the decorative style of art nouveau to life. In Art Nouveau and the Erotic, Ghislaine Wood describes art nouveau as “dependent on nature not only for its energy and forms, but also on the notion of nature as an amoral realm, distinct from culture, where instinct and bestial urge determined behaviour. Nature was an obvious locus for the free rein of erotic fantasies, and Art Nouveau designers used it to signify sex.”28 This sexualized and eroticized understanding of nature was often represented by male artists who focused on biblical motifs that aligned women with sin and seduction. See for example Franz von Stuck’s The Sin, showing Eve embraced by a serpent, and Aubrey Beardsley’s depictions of Salome as seductress. Here, nature and nonhuman animals are used to depict the eroticism of woman as part of fin-de-siècle fears about the New Woman and a changing image of modernized womanhood. Such readings of Fuller as temptress and seductress abound29.Fuller’s rise to fame in the 1890s coincided with the art nouveau movement, which produced decorative artwork that combined an interest in nature with erotic sensuality. Fuller scholars have shed light on the central importance of Fuller in the art nouveau movement, with its swirling motion and pastoral design depicting flowers and butterflies, which she not only embodied but also significantly inspired.30 This enshrouding of the female body is largely in contrast with the vaudeville performances of the time, which showed women in various stages of undress.31 Nonetheless, in both reviews, the body, although almost entirely absent, is the focus of the viewer’s gaze: in one, the focus is on speculations about Fuller’s entire body, now disappearing, whereas in the second example the imminent disappearance becomes a source of rapture. Here, the body offers a moment of final longing and desire precisely because it is about to be withdrawn from view. Fuller’s disappearance teases the viewer to speculate what her “entire body” might look like. As such, it is highly sexualized precisely in its absence. At the same time, the dress becomes the body; as Coffman writes about Stéphane Mallarmé review of Fuller’s performance: “Mallarmé described Fuller’s silky costume as if it were a second skin, playing, as McCarren notes in her translation, off the similarities in sounds between soi (herself) and soie (silk). The movement of the material was inseparable from the movement of her body.”32 Julie Townsend goes even further and sees the “folds and contours of labia” in Fuller’s dress.33 One contemporary viewer confirms this vaginal reading of Fuller’s dance: after attending her Fire Dance, Belgian symbolist poet Georges Rodenbach writes an enraptured poem in which he uses vaginal imagery to describe Fuller’s dance as a “flower-shaped wound.”34Fuller’s dance, I suggest, engages with art nouveau’s concern for women’s erotic nature by reclaiming this amoral and androgynous side of nature as the very place of sexuality. To understand this, we need to first explore how Fuller’s dance expresses sexuality. As contemporary reviewers noted, Fuller’s dances are often based on the complete erasure of the dancer’s body: Fuller manipulated her huge circular dress with long bamboo sticks, which enabled her to lift the material high above her head. At times Fuller’s body disappeared completely . One con35 This powerful sexualized identity is enacted precisely by projecting sexuality into nature. The disappearance of her body, which engenders voyeuristic ways of viewing and sexualizes her dance, also catapults Fuller’s dance into the realm of the nonhuman. In her autobiography, Fuller explicitly comments on the animal nature of her dance, reflecting that in dancing “the human body should, despite conventional limitations, express all the sensations or emotions that it experiences. The human body is ready to express, and it would express if it were at liberty to do so, all sensations just as the body of an animal.”36 Fuller’s dance brings the surface of the dress into dialogue with the human body underneath and, in doing so, erodes and confuses this boundary. Images of nature and nonhuman animals, such as butterflies, orchids, and serpents, are central to the execution of such an erosion of boundaries.Townsend’s reading of Fuller is particularly important because she links the sexual morphology expressed in her dress to Fuller’s sexuality. Commenting on the materiality of Fuller’s dress and its relationship to the body underneath, she argues that “although her costumes may have given her a means by which to cover and transform herself into an ungendered figure, they may also have been a vehicle for reconfiguring a powerful sexualized identity.”are you.”37 Later on, he adds, with regard to his butterflies: “This is nature as no one can paint it exactly. She has succeeded in it. She is a painter of nature.”38 In Gab Sorère’s first review of Fuller’s dance, she writes: “The inanimate becomes animate. … She is the butterfly.”39 Most famously, Mallarmé reviewed Fuller’s performance in detail, writing: 40That is to say the dancer is not a woman who dances, for the combined reasons that she is not a woman, but a metaphor summing up one of the elementary aspects of our form, sword, cup, flower, etc., and that she does not dance, suggesting, through a miracle of shortcuts and dashes, with a bodily writing, what would take in the composition several paragraphs of dialogue or descriptive prose to express: [she is] a poem freed from any instrument of the writer.Contemporary reviewers understand Fuller as both representing nature and becoming it. When a certain M. Groult shows Fuller his collection of eighteen thousand butterflies, which impressed Fuller greatly, he comments: “These colours 41 Importantly, it does so by abstracting it into nature, at once intimately linked to the body and dress that express such sexual nature but also abstracted in such a way that it can be viewed in its “elementary aspects of form.” At the very metamorphic moment that holds all the sexual energy of the dance—the moment at which the body disappears—the nonhuman also bursts through the human. At the moment where the dancer’s body disappears underneath the silk wings, supported by long bamboo sticks, the dress appears to be animating itself and the dress becomes the body. Between the human and nonhuman, there is no distinction; the human is projected into nature as nature. Importantly, the dance shape-shifts between the two in seamless sequence so that rather than a moment we must speak of a metamorphic continuum. Rather than consisting of a human and nonhuman, or sexualized and desexualized stage of the dance, Fuller’s art of motion queers the binary opposition of both by incorporating them into a continual metamorphosis that absolutely blurs the boundaries between corporeality and incorporeality, human and nonhuman, sexualization and desexualization.In becoming the metaphoric butterfly on stage, Fuller’s dance “abstracts ‘the feminine.’”42 This dissolution of boundaries and categories, Coffman argues, was an idiosyncratic modern anxiety.43 Between the dancer in her human form, the silk as organic material, and the natural objects evoked, the audience is asked to reflect on the meaning of nature and naturalness with a new sense of sublime wonder and horror.. The natural world is both beautiful and terrifying, knowable and utterly unknowable. Contemporary critics of Fuller’s work described it as “supernatural,” “satanic” and “demonic,” and “witchcraft” and were similarly horrified and captivated by the bestial potential that arose from her work as it transgressed the boundaries between human and nonhuman.44Some viewers inevitably experienced this erosion of boundaries as profoundly unsettling. As Karpenko writes about Fuller’s disappearing figure, it “showcases a highly unstable moment—one in which Fuller appears both human and plant (indeed perhaps more plant than human)—and a moment that could be cast as terrifying.”Grounded #114) in Dana Luciano’s and Mel Chen’s Queer Inhumanisms. The self-portrait shows Aguilar’s body next to a similarly shaped boulder in a desert landscape. Luciano and Chen argue that the inversion of flesh and stone in this photograph also speaks to sexuality: there is something queer in the manner by which conventional boundaries between human and nonhuman dissolve in the image. Based on this dissolution, Luciano and Chen come to an important  political claim about queer sexualities: “To say … that there is no clear division between the natural world and the human body, is also to say that there is no natural law to oppose human deviance.”45 This, Wilson argues, erodes the opposition between human and natural world and therefore interrupts the logic of deviance: “there is no foundation or origin … from which certain behaviours and bodies could be said to have strayed. … We can now think of the natural world as an ally for progressive sexual politics.”46 But Wilson does not agree with this conflation of nature and neat progressive sexual politics. She argues that Luciano and Chen’s reading “under-read[s] the negativity and confusion that queer entails, and so it renders nature, and the politics we might extract from it, more palatable than perhaps they should be.”47 Luciano and Chen project negativity elsewhere in the image—here the desert landscape of the US Southwest, which signifies histories of occupation, displacement, colonization—so that a pastoral vision of an untroubled oneness with the nonhuman, or nature, is maintained.Such readings of Fuller’s dance via dark magic represent both the spectrality of her shape-shifting dance but also incorporate her once more into representations of the New Woman as dangerous seductress via bestial images of nature and the nonhuman. However, by centering her own body on stage in a metamorphic continuum, Fuller’s dance reclaims this amoral and androgynous side of nature as the very site of her own sexuality. In “Acts Against Nature,” Elizabeth Wilson investigates how the concept of nature is used, again and again, to sanitize forms of sexuality that are considered unacceptable. Wilson presents a reading of Laura Aguilar’s photograph . He developed a theory of sexual intermediacy, which claims that Geschlecht (sex/gender) can appear anywhere on a continuous scale between the opposing poles of male and female. Hirschfeld combined his scientific work with lifelong activism against the criminalization of male homosexuality in Germany.52 In addition to this, dance, theater, and costume balls were central to queer culture in Berlin, not just during the heyday of queer Weimar Germany but decades earlier, as Hirschfeld described his forays into the subculture of Berlin’s “third sex” just after 1900, featuring drag performances and private dances.53 One depiction of such dance events even forms a pivotal scene in Anders als die Andern , often called the first gay rights film in Germany.54Sexological work often drew on aesthetic production, including literature and visual art.55 Dance also formed part of the global investigations of sexology.56 Hirschfeld, for example, was fascinated by the Japanese onnagata, female impersonators in Kabuki theater.57 This interest in global expressions of sexuality led Hirschfeld to form interdisciplinary connections with anthropological and ethnographic research. This led to genuine intercultural and reciprocal exchange, but also tied Hirschfeld and other sexologists into Germany’s colonizing project in parts of Africa and Asia, the perpetuation of German Orientalism, and other forms of racialization, the latter of which Hirschfeld also experienced as a gay Jewish man.58Dance and performance culture offered particularly rich opportunities for the visualization and embodiment of ideas around gender and sexuality.59 It is no wonder, then, that Fuller’s dance would attract the attention of Berlin-based sexologists. In 1910, Hirschfeld published Die Transvestiten. Eine Untersuchung über den erotischen Verkleidungstrieb (Transvestites: An Investigation into the Erotic Drive to Cross-dress). In this important work, Hirschfeld coined the term transvestitism, a term that would become a key component of his sexological oeuvre. In his monograph, Hirschfeld mentions the Welsh aristocrat Henry Cyril Paget, the 5th Marquess of Anglesey. What draws Hirschfeld’s attention is the fact that Paget dances in the style of Loïe Fuller’s Serpentine or Butterfly dance. Hirschfeld then couches Fuller’s and Paget’s dance in the language of transvestitism. In Die Transvestiten, Hirschfeld cites at length from an unnamed English newspaper: “Indeed the now twenty-five-year-old nobleman … had the appearance of a beautiful woman dressedin male attire. … It was the favourite activity of the young Marquess to perform on the vaudeville stage as a serpentine dancer, an art form in which he was in no way inferior to the gracefulLoie Fuller “60 Henry Cyril Paget, who Hirschfeld presents as having copied Fuller’s dance, was a British aristocrat whose alleged homosexuality led to his inclusion as a case study in various sexological publications. The above passage from Die Transvestiten had already appeared in almost identical form in the third volume of the Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen  in 1901, where the marquess is presented as a famous example of aristocratic homosexuality.61 In Das Geschlechtsleben in England , sexologist Iwan Bloch once again uses Paget to exemplify famous cases of homosexuality in England.62Fuller herself performed in Berlin in 1892 and 1902, the former performance taking place at the Wintergarten variety theater, a center of performance culture in Berlin.63 Paget’s outrageous and flamboyant lifestyle, his taste for cross-dressing, and the annulment of his marriage due to lack of consummationhave led many to assume that he was gay.64 In more overtly homophobic tones, newspapers commented on Paget’s “effemina[cy] to the verge of tears.”65 For Hirschfeld, Paget offered a perfect example to show not only that sexual intermediacy was present in working-class individuals but that it affected all people, including royalty and aristocracy.66 Connecting sexual intermediacy to aristocracy in this way linked it to respectability, and further supported his aim to make male homosexuality, which was partially criminalized by law, more acceptable.Paget was well known for spending a huge amount of his inheritance on costumes and jewelry see . He convYearbook, in 1910 Paget served as a case of “transvestitism.” This definitional shift highlights the importance of Hirschfeld’s Die Transvestiten. Late nineteenth-century sexological studies considered both cross-gender identification and same-sex desire under the concept of sexual inversion. Hirschfeld’s work, in particular Die Transvestiten, contributes to a larger reconceptualization of gender and sexuality as distinct phenomena.67 By the 1920s, the term transvestite circulated both within public discourse and within early transgender political organizations.68 Those who identified as transvestites made use of such sexological terminology but also pushed against its definitional remit.69Although Hirschfeld describes Paget as homosexual in his 1901 Butterfly Dance or Serpentine Dance. Viv Gardner suggests that this was a popular theme for Paget—as indeed it was for Fuller. Gardner’s work revealed that the Marquess played with gender reversal in several plays he staged at his Gaiety Theatre, including a performance of A Runaway Boy (1901), which featured the marquess as the eponymous runaway boy, a play on A Runaway Girl .70 His theater itself was likely named after the Gaiety Theatre in London, and Paget’s performance recalls the stage performances of the Gaiety Girls, a dancing corps of young women in fashionable clothing who maintained an air of respectability and politeness as an expression of ideal womanhood and a counterimage to the more sexually revealing burlesque and vaudeville dancers.71Paget’s performance of Fuller’s butterfly dance marks him as a “cross-dresser” in the most explicit way: traditionally, Fuller’s dance was performed by herself and other female copycat acts. The marquess took on a female role by performing the 72 In Die Transvestiten, Hirschfeld describes the phenomenon as a “Geschlechtsverwandlungstrieb,” literally the drive (Trieb) for the transformation or metamorphosis of Geschlecht (sex/gender).73 Elsewhere in the text, transvestitism is defined as a Kostümtrieb (desire to wear a costume)74 or, as the title says, Verkleidungstrieb (desire to dress up). Hirschfeld’s understanding of transvestitism was in accordance with the then popular theory of the drive as an irresistible urge.75 For Hirschfeld, transvestitism designates a specifically erotic desire because, as he argues based on the case material selected, the Metamorphose allein (metamorphosis itself) causes libidinal desire.76 Borrowing from the language of zoology, metamorphosis relegates transvestitism to the realm of nature, and transvestite metamorphosis parallels the developmental stages of butterflies and moths, in whose sexual development Hirschfeld was highly interested.77 Here, Fuller’s dance provides the material for transvestitism: her metamorphosis, as I have shown, heavily relied on the libidinal investment in and the erotic charge of dress and costume.This play with such dressing up in different gender roles is key to Hirschfeld’s writing about transvestitism.Die Transvestiten, Hirschfeld makes explicit that “transvestitism” is a natural part of human sexual variation: throughout, Hirschfeld and his patients refer to their “männliche Natur”  or “weibliche Natur” . While “Natur” can be translated as “being,” “essence,” or “character,” I want to argue that it is specifically used to link Geschlecht (sex/gender) to nature and naturalness. The development of Hirschfeld’s ideas around sexual intermediacy and transvestitism relied strongly on casting these as natural and therefore immutable phenomena and then using this as evidence that gender and sexuality cannot be changed and will not be affected by criminalization.78 In a post-Darwinian context, biologists readily used Darwin’s theory of sexual selection to apply evidence from animal research to human sexual behavior.79 Indeed, Darwin’s work and its attention to nonreproductive sexuality has been considered as laying the foundation for modern sexological thought.80 Arguments around nature and naturalness remained central to thinking about gender and sexuality during this period.In his introduction to 81 Looking for guidance from nature then means to conflate “is” with “ought” (Hume) and commit what Lorraine Daston calls “value-trafficking,” projecting values onto nature only to then extrapolate them.82 But as Daston points out, “naturalization is in fact a weaker strategy than its critics fear: there are natural orders aplenty to support (or subvert) any and all norms.”83 Consequently, the meaning of nature for sexual and gender diversity and its moral authority is far from settled and could be put to different uses.The meaning of “nature” and “naturalness” in Hirschfeld’s argumentative chainperforms several functions. On an institutional level, grounding sex in nature provided a basis on which to argue for the legitimacy of sexology as science. This included arguing that sexology’s object of study – gender and sexuality – could not be considered immoral, as it was an object of natural-scientific study. According to Hirschfeld and others fighting for homosexual emancipation, this meant that sexuality was fixed, could not be changed by external factors and could therefore not be criminalized. This also ties sexological understanding of nature to a much longer history, reaching back to the pre-modern period, of nature as a form of guidance for morality. As Waltraud Ernst argues, this understanding “conflate[s] the distinction between descriptive statement and moral prescription.”Die Freundschaft (Friendship) sought to achieve  homosexual emancipation by appealing to values of respectability and rights.84 In order to achieve this, Fassnacht shows, they appealed to nature and forests, fields, lakes, and mountains as spaces where homosexuality and homoeroticism could be lived free from the constraints of the city. In marshaling nature in this way, they relied on pastoral association between nature, homoeroticism, German nationalism, and Romanticism, thereby proposing “a place in the German national community for a certain type of queer person—masculine men who love each other—at the expense of other sexual, gender, and ethnic minorities.”85 In this elite, masculinist approach to homosexuality, nature functions to normalize homosexuality for some, while explicitly excluding theories of the third sex, such as Hirschfeld’s.Hirschfeld, for example, was not alone in focusing on nature as a setting for homosexual emancipation. Max Fassnacht explores how the journal Unlike these masculinist and nationalist approaches to nature as particularly German and therefore respectable and aspirational, Hirschfeld’s recourse to nature focused on a much wider spectrum of identities. The central claim of Hirschfeld’s work on sexual intermediate types is that humans are divided into male and female, but that this division is not absolute. On the contrary, many intermediate types between male and female exist. Transvestitism, he argued, is one such type. That such intermediate types are part of natural sexual variation was the crux of Hirschfeld’s sexological theory and the major point of criticism from other sexologists and medical practitioners who understood any deviation from the male and female norm as pathological or abnormal.Die Transvestiten, Hirschfeld writes that “as we penetrate more deeply into the innumerable phenomena of nature, nature appears increasingly unpredictable and challenges us to rethink what we know.”86 On the one hand, this confirms Hirschfeld’s desire to discover the “laws on nature,” which was also the title of his monograph Naturgesetze der Liebe, published the same year that the second volume of Die Transvestiten was published, in 1912. Hirschfeld then uses such natural laws to bolster social acceptance and to counter the pathologization of what he called sexual intermediates. Nature here is the focus of a sensationalist discovery of surprising facts about sexuality and desire. Natural phenomena, and here Hirschfeld includes the transvestite as one such phenomenon, can be visually and often anatomically studied in order to yield information about general laws of nature.Commenting on his observations of sexuality in nature in Naturgesetze der Liebe, Hirschfeld discusses the myth of Salome: 87No observer can miss the fact that love’s battle can last until the bitter end, not only in the animal kingdom, but also for the cultured person of today. Even if fateful tragedies such as that of Salome are not everyday occurrences, even today some women feel the urge to kiss those dead lips that they were previously denied. This violence of love, this hateful love, stems directly from the ego drive which wants to make the desired object its own.On the other hand, this investigation into the natural transvestite also has queerer undertones in that it disrupts existing knowledge and projects an uncategorizable number of sexual expressions onto nature, which, despite Hirschfeld’s efforts, seems to prevent the re-ordering of knowledge. In one example from 88 Hirschfeld likely did not intend to create larger social acceptance of necrophiliacs here, but his reference to Salome as sadistic dancer disrupts his mission to order the natural laws of nature.Here, Hirschfeld attempts to naturalize Salome’s necrophilic desire to kiss the severed head of John the Baptist by showing a similarity in the “Liebeskampf” of humans and nonhuman animals. He understands Salome as sadist but overall tries to show how sadism, too, is part of natural sexual variation. In naturalizing sadistic and necrophilic behavior, however, Hirschfeld instead reveals the unpredictable and challenging results of nature, which he had pointed out two years earlier. Such transgressive forms of necrophilic sexuality that break with human morality run counter to readings of Hirschfeld’s work as privileging order over transgression.89 Nonetheless, objects such as dress, hat, veil, jewelry, and so on here become the object of desire and the way by which transvestitism is expressed. This is visualized in the accompanying illustrated volume, published in 1912, where images focus almost exclusively on clothes as costumes.90 The volume features “female impersonators” , a “male impersonator”  in different social roles and professions , or “male prostitutes” (plate 53). Transvestitism, these images imply, is about the metamorphosis enacted via costume.Another example of how Hirschfeld’s erratic work introduces subtle disturbances is his focus on dress as an expression of nature. Hirschfeld does not claim that dress is the determining factor of transvestitism. Rather, it is one symptom of a larger adoption of a social gender role.Geschlecht to nature. In his conclusion to Die Transvestiten, Hirschfeld draws a parallel between human and nonhuman animal behavior that turns on the role of dress. To counteract his readers’ assumptions that military uniforms, with their decorative and colorful details, are anything other than an expression of masculinity, Hirschfeld argues that “in the animal kingdom the male distinguishes itself from the female through the radiance and colour of fur or plumage.”91 He then immediately claims that there are examples of the transgression of such gendered coloring—”Haar-oder Federkleid,” literally “hair of feathered dress”—in the animal kingdom. His choice of words creates a parallel between the dress of the transvestite and the fur or plumage of nonhuman animals. Ostensibly, the dress of the transvestite is here naturalized by revealing it to be a natural phenomenon that can be seen across the animal kingdom.Importantly, in Hirschfeld’s understanding, the transvestite links eroticism, dress, and Chantecler, in which the female main character plays a female pheasant who presents herself in the plumage traditionally associated with male pheasants. Hirschfeld adds that such a phenomenon, described by Rostand’s play, appears in not only birds but also insects and most other animal species. Such occurrences, Hirschfeld claims, appear as “transvestite phenomena” but are in fact expressions of “Androgynie,” because they apply only to the physical body, not the psyche (Seelenleben).92 Throughout Die Transvestiten, such a dedication to dress in both body and soul is key to Hirschfeld’s understanding of transvestitism. Earlier in the text, he cautions his readers “that we should not consider clothes as a coincidental, whimsical Thing, as lifeless tissue, but an obvious intentional sign of an inner strive.”93 In this referential chain, Hirschfeld at once compares gendered human dress to fur and plumage, then claims that nonhuman animal reversals of such gendered characteristics show the universality—and thus acceptability—of such reversal by using Rostand’s play as evidence, and finally withdraws the comparison by distinguishing Androgynie from Transvestitismus. Nature’s authority loses its footing in this associative chain. At the same time, Hirschfeld’s conceptualization of transvestitism shows theater and performance to be key components in the creation of sexual knowledge. For Hirschfeld, the performance of the cross-dressing pheasant in Chantecler reflects the natural diversity of Geschlecht in the animal kingdom.Hirschfeld, however, offers a remarkable example to evidence his claim. He lists Edmond Rostand’s play Die Transvestiten, from the Salome myth to Rostand’s Chantecler and, via Paget, Fuller’s modernist dance, Hirschfeld projects sexual expression onto nature with surprising results. Key to this projection is the sexualized nature of costume, which carries the notion of transvestitism as erotic desire to cross-dress. Via Paget, Fuller’s dress is sexualized precisely by hiding the body underneath, implying a juxtaposition between body and dress but never fully revealing this body. At the same time, the dress becomes a kind of second skin, or fur/plumage, that brings the surface of body and dress into dialogue, eroding and confusing the boundary.In drawing on a wide variety of references to aesthetic work in 94 Fuller’s dance could be seen to anticipate sexology’s attempts to project sexual expression onto nature in two ways: Her dance embodies an understanding of sexual nature that turns on its head any binary assumptions about normal and abnormal and instead presents human-animal nature as a metamorphic continuum. But Fuller also anticipates and deflects the voyeuristic, scientific, and penetrative view of sexual nature by counteracting this male gaze on the female body. In a particularly apt counter to depictions of Eve with serpent à la Stuck, Fuller lovingly describes her partner, Gab, as moving like a snake or a young adder.95 Here Fuller reclaims misogynistic and homophobic understandings of the sexuality of the New Woman as promiscuous, hypersexualized, and sinful by claiming the snake as embodiment of the New Woman as the very object of female same-sex desire.If it is the dress itself that is understood to reveal the transvestite’s innermost sexual nature, such vestral projection defines Fuller’s dance, both literally, as images and light are projected onto her dress, and figuratively, as ideas around femininity and sexuality are projected onto her revolutionary dance by contemporary audiences, critics, and copycat dancers such as Paget. Garelick calls Fuller’s dance “theatre history’s most successful Rorschach test.”96 Sexual knowledge production, via both aesthetic and scientific means, takes place by disrupting “dominant pairings of nature and environment with heteronormativity and homophobia.”97 This is enacted not only by inverting this relation—from nature and heteronormativity to nature and sexual diversity—but by dwelling on the complexities and surprises of queer natures and by using nature as a playing field to queer knowledge about gender and sexuality. Hirschfeld uses the natural world to naturalize gender and sexual diversity, but the examples from theater, dance, and performance that he draws on confuse and confound his theoretical framework, as they erode the boundaries between nature and culture, body and soul, human and nonhuman animal. Although this was not the main intention of Hirschfeld’s work, following the traces of Fuller’s dance and other examples of aesthetic production in Hirschfeld’s sexological work shows the disturbing role they played in sexological knowledge production that sought to unearth the nature of sex.In both Hirschfeld’s sexological work and Fuller’s modernist dance, we can see the emergence of a tentative queer ecological way of thinking. Applying Mortimer-Sandilands and Erickson’s understanding of queer ecology, we can see that both unsettle the separation of “the perverse, the polluted and the degenerate” and “the fit, the healthy, and the natural.”By approaching modernist dance as part of sexual knowledge production via a queer ecological framework, as I have done in this article, I have shown that concepts of nature and the nonhuman were central to the development of modern concepts of sex, gender, and sexuality in turn-of-the-century Germany and beyond. Both aesthetic and scientific inquiries understood nature and the nonhuman as potent yet unpredictable sites to explore emerging ideas about gender and sexuality. To understand the meaning of nature and the nonhuman in this historical context, it is important to consider how these terms have been put to use in scientific and aesthetic production. Through my reading of Hirschfeld and Fuller, the interdisciplinary history of sexuality emerges as a crucial archive for inquiries in the environmental humanities.


Risk management refers to the process of adopting policies to accept, identify, evaluate, control, minimize or reduce the assessed risks. Risk management is described in five activities: communicating and counseling, creating background, risk assessment, Monitoring and review. Among these five activities, risk assessment is the most complex one and it includes identifying, analyzing and evaluating risk. Risk Assessment Method, FMEA  was first presented by the US Army for the aerospace industry in 1960s; it was also considered as the basis for managing pre-incident crisis management issues in healthcare systems. Its benefits include anticipating and preventing problems, reducing costs, shortening the time to improve quality, and achieving secure and highly reliable processes. Considering the increasing rate of suicide and its adverse effects on family and society, a prospective approach can be employed for psychological improvement, and evaluate risky cases before the event, and take the necessary interventions to reduce the risk and the likelihood of committing suicide. This is a research project in the form of safety prospective approach on vulnerable groups. In this project, it is recommended to clinic psychologists at health centers to use a standard questionnaire on probability of suicide in a scheduled program for all high schools in Marand city and assess the students psychologically and evaluate the probability of having suicidal thoughts and finally identify risky students. In the next step, counseling and psychology sessions will be held for identified students; then involved, predisposing factors and inhibitors will be identified in these students. Then, according to the score gained from assessment, students will be prioritized and individual psychology sessions will be held in order to accurately assess the problems of these students and enhance their defense mechanisms. Also, in order to improve the ability to cope with the stress and crisis, some educational sessions will be held for the families of these students and appropriate psychological strategies for proper communication with children, increasing self-esteem, reducing family pressures and ... can be provided for them. In order to implement this plan, a session should be held for all the psychologists of the center, and the objectives of the meeting should be explained to them, and then the action plan must be developed in the form of a Gantt chart. In the next step, the prioritization of schools must be done according to specific areas with high suicide rates. The necessary coordination should also be provided with schools. All data must be used for accurate assessments of managers and teachers. Also, after t identification in improving the mental health of students, teachers can play a very useful role. In this regard, the training teachers seems necessary considering the purposes. Given the importance of a prospective approach in safety, FMEA method is a suitable way for identifying and prioritizing the risks of the society, especially schools. By managing these risks and planning properly, the possible risks can be managed at the time of happening. Also, holding life skills workshops, training adaptive stress skills, training to control stress and anxiety, and using spiritual issues can be helpful to improve the mental health of vulnerable people and to manage possible psychological risks.Psychological safety, FMEA, Suicide probability, Students


Conclusion: Women have favorable views about breastfeeding and prefer being in charge about decisions to breastfeed. Background: Breastfeeding rates are low in many communities in the United States and require attention to come up with ideas that will help increase breastfeeding. This study investigated the effects of income, age, race and education on mothers’ perceptions about breastfeeding and whose needs and views should be considered in a women’s breastfeeding journey. Methods: A survey was distributed via email and Facebook to 525 participants; 453 participants (86.3%) responded to the survey. Results: Younger adults were more likely to agree that fathers should have some say about breastfeeding. Those earning USD 0–USD 50,000 were more likely to agree relative to those with higher incomes on children being entitled to mother’s milk, and children’s needs over-riding those of others. There was a statistically significant difference by education about women's wishes about breastfeeding being considered more important than those of their spouses. However, there was no statistically significant difference for any demographic group for breastfeeding decisions coming from women only. On women’s breasts being primarily for infant's nutrition, people who earned USD 0–USD 50,000 were more likely to agree relative to those who earned more than USD 50,000; younger adults were significantly more likely to agree. Those who earned USD 0–USD 50,000 were more likely to agree relative to those in other income brackets that extended family members should have input regarding babies being breastfed; minority participants were significantly more likely to agree relative to white participants; those with less than 4-year college education were more likely to agree relative to those with a minimum of four-year college education. Younger adults were more likely to agree that employers must provide extended maternity leave to make it easier for mothers to breastfeed. On  The process of breastfeeding is based on habits, standards, and behaviors existing in each society . On famiFurthermore, research has demonstrated that fathers who are educated and support breastfeeding perform an important role in women’s breastfeeding journeys . Indeed,In a study on parental attitudes toward breastfeeding and the extent to which such attitudes are predictive of the method of infant feeding at discharge from hospital, Shaker and colleagues noted that parental attitudes toward breastfeeding are stronger predictors of infant feeding choice than sociodemographic factors . As suchOn breastfeeding in public, research on fathers’ thoughts on breastfeeding and its implications for a theory-based intervention found that although participants value breastfeeding's healthful benefits, they are uncomfortable with women breastfeeding in public and therefore see feeding with infant formula as a more convenient mechanism as compared to traditional breastfeeding . In a study that explored the dimension of maternal sexuality to clarify the role of fathers influence, the researchers revealed that the breastfeeding behavior of women is in direct response to both the presence of men when breastfeeding in public and partner interrupted intimacy, defined as how children’s breastfeeding behavior interrupts parents’ intimacy . This, aAn observation of the above literature points to discussions about maternal sexuality as well as fathers, societies, and families’ influence on breastfeeding. What is missing in the existing literature is a single study that examines whose needs should be viewed as most important when considering breastfeeding as well as how and the extent to which the demographic variables of age, income, education, and race, influence mothers’ perception about breastfeeding. The aim of this study, therefore, is to fill the above-mentioned gap.A questionnaire on breastfeeding was developed to survey women’s opinions on breastfeeding. The questionnaire administration was carried out between August and November of 2018 after an approval from the authors’ Institutional Review Board with an IRB approval number 1808902769. To participate in this study, a respondent had to be 18 years of age and older, and a resident of the United States. Participants were recruited via email and Facebook through snowballing; a non-probability data gathering method. It involved purposive sampling whereby we began with a small population of Facebook friends and co-workers who were known to us. We subsequently increased the number of the research participants by asking those already recruited to identify other participants to participate in the study. Using the snowballing and purposive sampling method gave us the opportunity to have an expanded sample that we could not have otherwise reached. In order to obtain authentic representative data, we also sent e-mails to participants (the Facebook friends and our co-workers) in different age groups and backgrounds. The email addresses were obtained from our Facebook friends and co-workers.Strongly Disagree to Strongly Agree with 1 being Strongly Disagree and 5 being Strongly Agree. The survey was pilot tested for clarity by 30 respondents.The survey instrument consisted of two main sections: respondent’s demographics and the main variables of interest. Demographic data were collected for age, income, race, and education. Respondents were asked to indicate agreement on 10 items on breastfeeding culture. With five point response options ranging from Qualtrics Survey Software was used to implement the survey online, and it was distributed via email and Facebook in the research teams’ social networks. The web-based survey provided us the opportunity to obtain large numbers of respondents across the country versus traditional sampling techniques with respect to paper forms and geographical location. Survey responses were downloaded from Qualtrics for analysis in R software. Descriptive statistics were calculated and compared for each demographic variable. We performed overall mean Standard Deviation (SD) for each research statement/question. In the results, we have star(s) denoting the differences over all groups of each characteristic with the letters  denoting the significant differences on post-hoc pairwise analysis. The threshold for declaring statistical significance is a p-value of less than 0.05.Four hundred and fifty-three people responded to the survey. The recruitment method resulted in a sample that was 82% White and highly educated (77%) with or more years of college education. Twenty-four percent (24%) of the respondents were aged between 18–29, 48% between 30–39, 19% between 40–49 and 8% between 50–69. On income: 20% earned between USD 0–USD 50,000; 35% between 50,001–USD 95,000; and 44.3% earned USD 95,001 or more. Participants demographics and responses about perceptions on breastfeeding are shown in Perceptions on each of the statements/questions about breastfeeding were compared by race, education, income, and age with results presented in a baby’s father should have some say about breastfeeding for a baby; there was a statistically significant difference between the age groups (p < 0.001). Post-hoc pairwise comparison revealed that younger adults (18–29 years) were significantly more likely to agree compared to those between 30 and 39 years of age as well as middle-aged adults (40–49 years). There was no statistically significant difference by race, income or education. Regarding whether “A child is entitled to mother’s milk, and her/his needs must over-ride those of others” there was a statistically significant difference by income (p < 0.001), age (p < 0.5) and education (p < 0.001). Post-hoc pairwise comparison revealed that those who had an income of USD 0–USD 50,000 were more likely to agree relative to those with income USD 95,001 or more. Likewise, those with income between USD 50,001 and USD 95,000 were significantly more likely to agree relative to those with income USD 95,001 or more. Regarding age, younger adults (18–29 years) were significantly more likely to agree compared to those between 30 and 39 years of age as well as middle-aged adults (40–49 years).For the statement, p < 0.05). There was also no significant statistically difference for any demographic group for the statement, “Breastfeeding decisions should come from the woman only”.With respect to women's wishes about breastfeeding being considered more important than those of their spouses or partners, there was no significant statistically difference for any demographic group except education , age group (p < 0.001) and education (p < 0.001). Post-hoc pairwise comparison revealed that those who had an income of USD 0–USD 50,000 were more likely to agree relative to those with income USD 95,001 or more. Likewise, those with an income between USD 50,001 and USD 95,000 were significantly more likely to agree relative to those with income USD 95,001 or more. Relative to other age groups, younger adults (18–29 years) were significantly more likely to agree. Furthermore, relative to middle-aged adults (40–49 years), those between the ages of 30–39 years were significantly more likely to agree.On the statement, “Extended family members should have an input regarding the babies being breastfed by their mothers”, there were statistically significant differences by income (p < 0.001), race (p < 0.01) and education (p < 0.05). Post-hoc pairwise comparison revealed that those who had an income of USD 0–USD 50,000 were more likely to agree relative to those in other income brackets. Likewise, those with income between USD 50,001 and USD 95,000 were significantly more likely to agree relative to those with income USD 95,001 or more. Regarding race, minority participants were significantly more likely to agree relative to White participants. Likewise, those with less than 4-year college education were significantly more likely to agree relative to those with a minimum of four-year college education. Regarding the assertion, “p < 0.001) for the statement, “Employers must provide extended maternity leave to make it easier for mothers to breastfeed”. Post-hoc pairwise comparison revealed that, relative to middle-aged (40–49 years) and adults (50–69 years), younger adults (18–29 years) were significantly more likely to agree. Likewise, those between the ages of 30–39 years were significantly more likely to agree relative to middle-aged adults and older adults. An observation of the data showed that there was no statistically significant difference for any demographic group except age . Post-hoc pairwise comparison revealed that younger adults (18–29 years) were significantly more likely to agree relative to older adults. Likewise, those between the ages of 30–39 years were significantly more likely to agree relative to older adults. Furthermore, middle-aged adults were significantly more likely to agree relative to older adults. On the question of whether a woman can do whatever she wants with her own breasts, regardless of what other people think”, there was a statistically significant difference by income (p < 0.05) and education (p < 0.05) but not by age or race. Post-hoc pairwise comparison revealed that respondents with an income of USD 95,001 or more were more likely to agree relative to those who earned USD 50,001–USD 95,000. Respondents with less than 4 years of College education were more likely to agree to the statement. Finally, with respect to the statement, “This study broadly examined mothers’ perceptions about breastfeeding. Particularly, it investigated the effects of income, age, race and education on mothers’ perceptions about breastfeeding. On the question of a baby’s father having some say about breastfeeding, our overall findings indicated neither agreement nor disagreement. Previous researchers, however, confirmed male partners’ support for and favorable attitude towards breastfeeding as being an important, and, sometimes, their being the most important factor associated with breastfeeding initiation and sustenance . Furtherbaby's extended family should ensure that the baby's mother is breastfeeding”, our findings, on the whole, indicated neither agreement nor disagreement across the board. However, there was a statistically significant difference by income, race and education. This finding is significant given that there are many studies that point to input of spouses, other family members and friends as impacting breastfeeding initiation and sustenance [With regards to the statement, “stenance ,7,12,13.stenance . Given tchildren are entitled to mother’s milk, and the children’s needs over-riding those of others” our overall findings did not indicate agreement nor disagreement among all the participants. An observation of past research supports the assertion regarding children’s entitlements to breast milk. Specifically, research has shown that infants have the right to be free from hunger, have safe access to breast milk, and must therefore have adequate food [children are entitled to mother’s milk”, and the “children’s needs over-riding those of others”) relative to those with higher incomes. We showed further that those with less than 4 years of college education were more likely to agree than those with 4 years of college education or higher. What our findings suggest is that a lot more education is needed to improve the perception of mothers in the high income levels, women older than thirty and women with 4 years of college education and over with regards to children’s entitlement to mothers’ breast milk.On the statement, “ate food . Howeverate food ,16,17. Mwomen should have the right to breastfeed in public places, there was no statistically significant difference for any demographic group  except age. Our findings support those by researchers who demonstrated a fear of breastfeeding in public in young women, low income women, and immigrant women in Western countries [On the question of whether ountries ,18. Howeountries . Furtherountries . Indeed,ountries . Other rountries . What is important, though, is that in the United States many states have adopted laws asserting the right to breastfeed in public view, whereby ‘public’ includes places frequented by the general public (privately or publicly owned), restaurants, shopping malls, stores, and sports stadiums. In our study, younger, adults (18–29 years) were significantly more likely to agree relative to older adults that women should have the right to breastfeed in public places. The clinical implications of our study taking cognizance of our findings and of the above cited studies suggest that despite objections that may be raised by some regarding public breastfeeding, it is concomitant for mothers and the general public to consider the nutritional needs of infants as superseding any such objections. States must also do more to protect women from possible harassments to help ensure that infants are properly nourished when needed and to avoid infant hunger and malnourishment ,21. a woman's breasts are primarily for infant's nutrition. With regards to this question, there were statistically significant differences by income, age, and education but not by race. Our findings are different from those in the literature. Indeed, research has shown that the sexualization of the breast in the western world created a situation where breasts were viewed as not primarily for infant feeding. Findings from our study, however, suggest that respondents with an income of USD 0–USD 50,000 were more likely to agree relative to those in the other income groups; also, adults between the ages of 30–39 were significantly more likely to agree than over forty years of age. Furthermore, those with less than 4-year college education were more likely to agree than those with a longer-than-4-year college degree; there was, however, no effect of race. The clinical implications of the difference regarding age, education and income as well as what obtains in the literature are as follows: attempts aimed at bolstering breastfeeding, and especially at influencing perceptions of the breast, must emphasize the nutritional, and more especially, the health benefits of breast milk. Such attempts ought to deemphasize sexualization of the breast. These attempts must target women of all ages, income brackets, and educational levels.The above discussion has relevance for the question regarding whether a woman should be able do whatever she wants with her own breasts, regardless of what other people think”, our overall finding indicated neither agreement nor disagreement. There was a statistically significant difference by income and education but not by age or race. Research in this area is found in those that sexualize the breast, explore whether a father must have some say about breastfeeding, investigate whether a woman's breasts are primarily for infant's nutrition, among others. A systematic observation of the literature in the above mentioned areas points to restrictions, both implicit and explicit about what women can and cannot do with their breasts. Restrictions on the breast are based on stereotypes about women’s breasts, religious beliefs, and male preferences [a woman should be able do whatever she wants with her own breasts, regardless of what other people think”, respondents with an income of USD 95,001 or more were more likely to agree relative to those who earned USD 50,001–USD 95,000 or less. Furthermore, respondents with less than 4 years of college education were more likely to agree to the statement. The above-cited literature and the results of our study have implications for clinical practice. In particular, the absence of freedom to do whatever they want with their breasts presupposes coercion that women are subjected to which in turn negatively impact their ability to freely nurse their infants, especially in public. Viewed within the context of our study, it could be argued that clinicians, public health experts, social workers, and other stakeholders, ought to pay attention to problems or issues faced by women of the various demographics identified in this study with the view to working with them to mitigate the problems they face in breastfeeding their babies in various social and sociological ecologies.On the statement, “ferences . Researcferences . From tha child’s needs and entitlement to mother’s milk ought to override those of others, we discovered a statistically significant difference by income, age and education but not in race. Our study supports those by researchers who showed behavioral perceptions and attitudes (positive and negative) about breastfeeding impacting breastfeeding initiation and sustenance [On the issue of whether stenance ,13. Theistenance ,25. Despstenance ,27. Furthermore, research has shown that younger women, particularly <20 yrs, less educated women, and women with low-income and socioeconomic status are less likely to breastfeed and would benefit from increased support . The conbreastfeeding decisions should come from the women only. Research has shown that in the United States women who choose breastfeeding tend to be more often married, White or Hispanic, 30 years or older, college educated, and living in the Pacific Northwest or New England [Another important observation of our study was the fact that there was no significant statistically significant difference regarding whether  England . Another England . Even thwhether women’s wishes about breastfeeding was more important than those of their spouses where we discovered a statistically significant difference by age. Our study bolsters those that showed that maternal, not paternal, infant feeding attitude more significantly predicted the choice of feeding method used by mothers in the antenatal period [Furthermore, given the preponderance of literature on the sexualization of breasts in Western societies ,9, and tl period . Such stl period .employers should provide extended maternity leave to make it easier for mothers to breastfeed”, most of our respondents strongly agreed to the statement. There was a statistically significant difference by age (p < 0.001) but not by income, race or education. Research has shown that among other factors, a higher education level is a significant predictor of continued breastfeeding for more than 6 months after returning to work [Finally, for the statement “ to work . Particu to work . Moreove to work . Further to work  and that to work .employers should provide extended maternity leave to make it easier for mothers to breastfeed”) relative to those aged between 30–39, middle-aged adults, and older adults. What the above-cited studies and our findings suggest is that age, income, and education are associated with mothers quest for employers to grant extended maternity leave to enable them breastfeed for longer periods of time. Thus, to encourage longer periods of breastfeeding, employers must provide extended maternity leave and create conducive work environment that help to promote breastfeeding among the young adult mothers in particular, and nursing mothers of all ages, income, racial and educational backgrounds, in general.In our study, we indicated that post-hoc pairwise comparison revealed that younger adults (18–29 years) were significantly more likely to agree to the statement  were more likely to agree relative to white participants on extended family’s input being needed or necessary regarding the decision to breastfeed.These and the other findings are very important, because efforts to get mothers to breastfeed must be geared primarily at women in general and mothers in particular. However, this is not to suggest that fathers and the other family members and the community have no role in breastfeeding intervention and promotion; as we learned from the results and discussion, fathers, family members and the community have a role to play but these should be situated within the limits set by the mothers. Thus, any attempt to force mothers not to breastfeed or to breastfeed against their will could be catastrophic, since this study shows women recognize themselves as the mainstay or basis in their breastfeeding journey. Additionally, this also implies that mothers’ views must be respected and be made part of any intervention strategies or models to ensure optimal health results for infants. Indeed, it could be argued that one of the most important contributions of this study to the field of Public Health relates to women’s rights regarding their breastfeeding journey. Thus, based on the results of our study, although mothers respect and may sometimes even seek the opinions and perspectives of their spouses as well as those of other family and their communities on breastfeeding, they should be the main and final decision makers in breastfeeding initiation and sustenance as well as where to breastfeed.Future research will target culturally congruent strategies that will be feasible and effective in different communities in the United States. In addition, interventions that attempt to encourage mothers not to close their eyes/ears to effective and appropriate suggestions from others in the breastfeeding ecology must be conscientiously promoted to help improve, increase and sustain breastfeeding. Such interventions must take cognizance of mothers’ views, their comfort, and the welfare of the breastfeeding child, to avoid miscommunication and failure.


In the second part, carried out in 2017–2018, the participants (n = 200) also filled out a questionnaire, this time evaluating modern Russian leaders. A principal component analysis was performed on each of the data sets, revealing that two categories—namely, morality and professional characteristics—are present in both factor structures, whereas other factors are different. Several important theoretical and practical implications are discussed.The present study aimed to determine the composition of factors that underlie the images of foreign and domestic political leaders among Russian youth and therefore play a major role in shaping social representations. The research was conducted within the theoretical and methodological framework of the psychosemantic approach, which seeks to reconstruct systems of meanings, both individual and collective, through the investigation of implicit as well as explicit categories of perception. The study comprised two stages, in which participants were administered a psychosemantic questionnaire to evaluate political leaders according to some professional and personal characteristics. The first part was conducted in 2015–2016 with a student sample ( Political leaders nowadays are often regarded as celebrities, with their personalities and private lives becoming the center of media and public attention. This increased interest in individual politicians is associated with the term “personalization”, which is used to describe a major trend in today’s politics, placing personality aspects above ideological positions and policy choices . As a coAdditionally, the issue of political perception seems to prove instrumental in bridging the theoretical and methodological divide in certain areas of political psychology research, such as the study of elite political behavior and the study of mass political behavior .From this perspective, the study of the perception of political leaders emerges as one of the topical fields of psychological research. In recent decades, the study of political leaders in international relations has undergone substantial transformations, with political psychologists’ interest moving away from the study of operational codes or personality profiles . TogetheThe crucial task set by political psychologists is to identify the key dimensions that are employed in political perception. Research in political communication has accumulated  a relatIn their study of how a fictitious political leader’s image influences their home country’s image, S. Klein and D. Ingenhoff  organizeThe study of a political leader’s image, therefore, is of utmost importance for political psychology. Analysis of criteria that determine the way political leaders are perceived and assessed is a necessary step to a better understanding of this psychological and political construct. There is no consensus on which categories are most significant, they are different in different countries and depend on socio-demographic, personality, and value characteristics ,7.Our objective was to identify the key dimensions according to which political leaders are perceived in a student sample. We operated within the conceptual framework of psychosemantics. Building on the insights into thought and speech processes gained by Soviet psychologists , and the methodological frameworks of George Kelly’s and Charles Osgood’s research, psychosemantics seeks to reconstruct the systems of meaning, both individual and collective. Psychosemantic techniques provide access to implicit categories of consciousness, where reflection is rarely experienced. As conscious and unconscious processes play an equally influential role in political perception, application of psychosemantics enables researchers to analyze a wide variety of political phenomena and processes ,9,10, anIn line with the commonly applied understanding of the political leader’s image as “a set of ideas and beliefs regarding the politically relevant characteristics” , we regaThe study design had two parts. In each part, respondents were administered the psychosemantic questionnaire “Political Leader’s Image”, which has been successfully used in previous studies on political perception . This teRussia is a very big country with divergent opinions. As there is a huge political divergence among different regions of Russia, we decided to focus on a region which is “average” in social and political aspects. The level of material wellbeing and results in political elections are similar to average Russian statistics. Political preferences in the Kirov region are relatively homogenous and consistent with wider national preferences .University students are educated individuals with an arguably relatively high level of political sophistication. Their answers are more thoughtful and consequently less random and more likely to provide noise-free data. At the same time, they represent the views of people surrounding them. They are not an elite or narrow group with specific opinions.University students studying social and political science from the Kirov region of Russia took part in both parts of the study. Focusing on this particular sample, we were guided by the following considerations:n = 147) evaluated 15 world leaders  in the questionnaire, as well as to the categories (factors) that are produced by combining these items and form the semantic space.n = 200) were asked to assess 16 contemporary Russian political figures   with principal component analysis .The analysis has revealed four major factors (components) that explain 18.50, 9.75, 7.01, and 6.22% of the variance respectively. We provide the following interpretation of the factors (factor load for each item is put near this item):morality”—includes such characteristics as:His/her works contribute to higher morality in society0.78He/she works for the good of all humankind0.74Personally, I like him/her0.71He/she pursues peaceful policies0.70The first factor—“In most studies, a similar factor is typically referred to as “integrity”—although the precise interpretation may differ —or “sanA positive attitude towards Russia is also associated with morality. Service to the people is viewed as a significant component of moral conduct. Personal charm, wit, and physical attractiveness all contribute to this factor. It is worth noting that the set of characteristics that comprise the morality factor and are thus likely to be popular as policies include a focus on domestic resources, peace, and human rights. The “ideal leader” image gained a maximum score on this factor, which signifies the total approval of a leader’s moral conduct.charisma”. It included such items as:He/she is a well-known politician0.68He/she makes bold decisions0.58He/she has a strong personality0.57He/she promotes the interests of the military–industrial complex0.55He/she has a magnetic personality0.55The second factor was defined as “According to studies in leadership, the emotional links between the leader and his/her followers have a strong impact on the political leader’s image. This is characteristic of the so-called charismatic leadership, based on emotions, in contrast to instrumental transactional leadership, which is characterized by a calculated notion of the leader’s efficiency. Charismatic leadership is prevalent in the majority of modern societies . It mighFrom the point of view of the respondents, to be perceived as charismatic, a leader must be well-known. A lack of information about a political leader correlates with the perceived lack of charisma.authoritarianism and dictatorship ”, with characteristics including:His/her political work leads to dictatorship0.67He/she is a proponent of communist  ideology0.56He/she is a proponent of a “firm hand policy”0.56He/she is a militarist0.55He/she is a proponent of a command economy0.52The third factor was interpreted as “Thus, for Russians, authoritarianism seems to be unrelated to morality. Additionally, along with authoritarianism and democracy as such, this construct includes nationalism and militarism, as well as socialist ideology, which for many respondents is associated with the totalitarian Soviet past. As the respondents clearly do not want an ideal political leader to possess this characteristic, it can be considered negative. These results are consistent with the results of other studies confirming that a positive attitude towards authoritarian leaders is more determined by individual traits and not by the cultural characteristics of the country .orientation toward globalism (with the orientation to the interests of inner elite circles)” included such characteristics as:He/she promotes the interests of foreign capital0.59He/she advocates integration in world economy0.56He/she is a populist (promises a lot)0.52He/she believes that the development of the country should be based on external help0.51His/her political work leads to societal fragmentation, division of society into rich and poor0.50The fourth factor—“Although the factor is unipolar, an implicit opposite pole can be interpreted as “isolationism”. Globalism implies following political and economic trends of the developed world powers, as well as promoting democracy and a market economy. The respondents might believe that such an orientation makes a political leader less autonomous, and its political implementation never does any good, as it is lucrative only for officials and widens the gap between the rich and the poor. This pole is formed by personal characteristics with negative connotations, demonstrating that the participants distrust this kind of person and therefore disapprove of this orientation: populism and grandstanding. For many Russians, liberal values have obtained negative connotations as a result of negatively viewed outcomes of the privatization of state-owned enterprises and the ensuing disproportionate economic inequality. The “ideal leader” image score on the fourth factor corresponds to mild isolationism, which indicates that the respondents are unwilling to live in a “global village”. This attitude is probably influenced by the official media positioning Russia in opposition to the West “with its desire to ensure its dominance and weaken Russia as the only state capable of challenging this hegemony”. It should also be noted that the variance of an ideal leader’s scores on the globalism factor is quite large, suggesting that the respondents’ opinions on this issue are not uniform.Four major factors (components) were obtained from the analysis, explaining 25.4, 6.0, 4.0 and 3.5% of the variance respectively. Factor loads are given in the brackets.morality”. It includes such characteristics as:He/she is able to sacrifice his/her own interests0.76His/her work improves the spirit of Russian society0.75His/her work contributes to scientific and cultural advances0.75He/she is honest0.73Similarly to the first study, the first factor was interpreted as “political adventurism”—comprises two seemingly antonymous characteristics:He/she is prone to snap decisions0.59He/she has a mind of his/her own0.58The second factor—“One explanation for this rather strange mix could be derived from the body of studies focused on identifying the peculiarities of the political decision-making process—for example, the application of Kahneman and Tversky’s prospect theory to political context has demonstrated that the political decision-making process differs from commonly observed patterns . Althougcharisma”, with such characteristics as:He/she can influence the masses, grip the audience (a charismatic leader)0.54He/she has a strong personality0.53He/she makes bold decisions0.53He/she has a magnetic personality0.52The third factor was interpreted as “It should be noted that according to the results of our survey, a political leader must have a forceful, magnetic personality and stand their ground rather than submit to someone else’s authority. The notion of strength is one of the key parameters utilized for the assessment of political leaders in the political culture of post-Soviet Russia .statism”—includes such characteristics as:He/she promotes the interests of the military–industrial complex0.66He/she promotes the interests of the top bureaucracy0.56His/her work improves the country’s defense capabilities0.52In his/her political activity, he/she emphasizes the primacy of the state’s interests0.51The fourth factor—“The ability to protect the interests of one’s country tends to be favorably regarded in the political culture of post-Soviet Russia as a representation of personal and political strength .morality” (Factor 1 in both studies) and “charisma” . To demonstrate how political leaders are perceived in comparison to one another, we identified the positions  of political leaders in a multidimensional psychosemantic space. To provide a meaningful comparison, we chose two factors that were present in both categorial structures—“morality” and “charisma”. These findings partially reproduce the data from previous research in the psychosemantics of political perception [authoritarianism and dictatorship” and “globalism”, Russian leaders were evaluated on “political adventurism” and “statism” categories. Overall, the results support the idea of the predominance of personality traits over political stance and party membership in the political leader’s image.Thus, the results have demonstrated that the semantic spaces that describe the perception of the world and national political leaders include two similar factors—“rception ,10, as wrception ,5. HowevThe categories of morality and charisma have positive connotations: they are ascribed to the image of an ideal political leader. The categories of authoritarianism, globalism, political adventurism, and statism have a weaker or negative connotation; their moderate presence is either tolerated  or regarded as beneficial, but only to a certain degree.According to the survey’s results in early 2018 , Vladimir Putin’s image was perceived among university students as positive, close to ideal. Studies by other political psychologists, both Russian and foreign, confirm this fact .In the majority of cases, evaluation of images matches the evaluation of these political leaders in the official media. For example, Obama’s negative image on the main characteristics, including morality, is formed by Russian media. At the same time, for many years these media outlets have been creating the image of Putin as an iron man with a big heart, capable of flying planes and riding horses, but also willing to respond to cries for help of those who have found themselves in a difficult situation.It is worth noting that external attractiveness does not make a significant contribution to the assessment of the image and is not necessarily a component of charisma (compared with data obtained in other countries ). FindinThese days many political scientists, social analysts, and political journalists predict a rise in the perceived importance of professional qualities after the pandemic. This may result in actual professionals becoming leaders. There has been an increased demand for professional competence, as well as for scientific knowledge. However, the 2018 cross-section captured that charisma is perceived as being of higher significance. Moreover, it is people’s implicit perception that a charismatic leader is highly professional and competent. In Russia, the public is yet to see a professional become a public leader.Additionally, we note that the shifting trends in the statism factor in summer 2018 should also have resulted in a decline in Putin’s approval rating.Since morality and charisma are the main parameters in the perception and assessment of leaders in Russia, their decline may cause the approval ratings to dip. Many Russians see the raising of retirement age and disregard for people’s health for the sake of political interests as going against moral values. At the same time, members of the Russian opposition score political points by promoting the idea of justice and criticizing the authorities as amoral. It is thus possible, by studying the structure of Russian citizens’ political preferences, to predict who will succeed or fail.This study, however, has some limitations. First of all, it is not based on a very big sample . However, psychosemantic research has its specificity. It enables researchers to identify deeper implicit perceptions and is less susceptible to social desirability bias, which is highly typical of political research in Russia. The flip side of this is that psychosemantic methods are closer to an in-depth interview, rather than a social survey, hence the sample volume limitations.The second limitation is that the conclusions are limited to student samples, i.e., educated individuals with an arguably relatively high level of political sophistication. However, they are a suitable group in terms of relevance. These are future social sciences educators in schools, who will influence the political views of Russian citizens in the immediate future, so our results also possess a certain prognostic value. Furthermore, their answers are more thoughtful and consequently less random and more likely to provide noise-free data. Additionally, it was our conscious decision to choose a typical regional center, more representative of Russians’ political sentiments.As there is a huge political divergence among different regions of Russia, between the two well-known capitals and the rest of Russia, which has even produced the notion of “two different Russias”, we intended to show the Russian “hinterland” in this study. A comparison of the perceptions of respondents in capitals and farther regions would be the aim of a separate study.The third question is how representative is the set of items: how to ensure that the items of the questionnaire cover the entire phenomenology, and include all possible aspects of a leader’s image . Certainly, there’s always a risk of failing to provide the full picture. We can always assume that something has been missed out. This is a methodological and philosophical problem. We create models, which are inherently incomprehensive and can always be expanded and improved. However, model designers always strive to maximize the explaining and predicting potential of a model based on their professional experience and expertise. We had been developing our list of questions for more than 20 years. The questions were selected through the analysis of the current political discourse in Russia and updated in each study so that they are relevant to the task of assessing political leaders’ images, reflect the actual range of opinions among respondents and represent the phenomenology of the perception of political leaders most adequately.In conclusion, our findings have important theoretical and practical implications. Firstly, the results can improve our understanding of political processes by introducing an explanatory framework of political leaders’ perception. Secondly, from a practical standpoint, the obtained results may prove useful for public relations practitioners, particularly in the context of using political discourse as a vehicle for promoting power. With the aim of such common PR methods as framing being understood as “to select some aspects of a perceived reality and make them more salient in a communicating text to set a certain agenda” , the pra