The Career Mystique or Bearing Witness

The Career Mystique: Cracks in the American Dream

Author: Phyllis Moen

The Career Mystique examines taken-for-granted rules of the career game--that continuous, full-time, hard work pays off--deeply embedded in the American Dream. Possibilities of fulfilling the career mystique are dwindling, given insecurities and risks of a global economy, strains and double demands on the job and at home, uncertainties and ambiguities around retirement. This outdated myth stands in the way of fashioning innovative policies more in keeping with life in 21st century America.

Table of Contents:

1	The career mystique	1
2	Learning the career mystique : where do values and expectations come from?	26
3	Do young adults still believe in the career mystique?	41
4	If real work is paid work, can new parents follow the career mystique?	60
5	Living the career mystique : making it, giving up, or slipping behind?	94
6	Life midcourse : are retirement or second acts inevitable, desirable, or even possible?	129
7	Policies and practices : maintaining the status quo or challenging the career mystique?	158
8	Beyond the career mystique : recasting the lockstep life course	187

Book about: Comparing Designing and Deploying VPNs or AppleScript for Dummies

Bearing Witness: Gay Men's Health Crisis and the Politics of AIDS

Author: Philip M Kayal

The untold story in the AIDS crisis is that of the mobilization of the gay community. Bearing Witness is a study of how a community-based initiative - Gay Men's Health Crisis in New York - overcame the formidable obstacles of homophobia and fear of AIDS, and the resulting lack of an adequate response from political and health organizations. Philip Kayal shows how volunteers at Gay Men's Health Crisis (GMHC) confront their deepest fears about being homosexual. Rather than shun People with AIDS, they identify with them and neutralize the immobilizing power of homophobia. The volunteers have the courage to bear witness to the suffering of People with AIDS, suffering that in many ways is their own. Kayal explores the why and how of the gay community response to AIDS from his perspective as both a sociologist and GMHC volunteer. The author's own experience allows him to illuminate the social and political meanings of volunteerism by showing how gay/AIDS volunteerism is radical political and religious work. Through collective altruism, GMHC helps to integrate the gay community and establish new concepts of what is sacred. In Bearing Witness, Kayal explores the relationship between personal motives for volunteering and the broader political, social, and religious contexts in which People with AIDS have been largely abandoned. He shows how the mixing of morals, medicine, and American volunteer ideology sets both the tone of the politics of AIDS and influences the evolution of volunteer organizations such as GMHC. AIDS brings that which is deeply private into the public domain, and Kayal offers a compelling analysis of this intersection in his new study of gay/AIDS volunteerism.

Publishers Weekly

Kayal, professor of sociology at Seton Hall University (N.J.), volunteered from 1983 to 1986 at Gay Men's Health Crisis in New York City, and his experience in this pioneer mobilization against AIDS informs his disorganized but sometimes insightful book about volunteerism and cultural transformation. While Kayal offers a first-person account, his analysis is primarily sociological, and his history of GMHC is rather sketchy. He praises gay volunteerism because it is a means of self-affirmation, just as the term ``People with AIDS'' is more humanizing than the term ``AIDS victims.'' However, his castigation of the mainstream media for ignoring the ``remarkable contribution of the gay community to the care of People with AIDS'' seems dated. Kayal warns that ``Gays need to claim AIDS again'' because democratization of the disease will result in a diminution of gay identity that has arisen in response to the epidemic, and that community-based agencies like GMHC may lose their autonomy. Criticizing activists like playwright Larry Kramer for ``fighting hate with hate,'' Kayal argues for recognition that gay volunteerism is a way to join ``the sacred, the political and the personal.'' (May)

Library Journal

In the summer of 1981, gay playwright Larry Kramer met in New York City with a group of friends to discuss a frightening new illness that was killing friends and loved ones. Angered by the inaction of mainstream medical and government health agencies, this group formed what became known as the Gay Men's Health Crisis, now one of the largest and most influential independent agencies committed to AIDS education, research, and assistance. Kayal tells the story of this struggle and of the thousands of volunteers who comfort and care for those living and dying with AIDS. He concentrates on the work of these volunteers--their motivations and rewards--and also discusses the difficulties facing health workers battling the disease when confronted with barriers of racism, homophobia, and the marginalization of the poor and disenfranchised, i.e., those presently most at risk. Recommended primarily for academic collections or larger public libraries with informed lay readers.-- Jeffery Ingram, Newport P.L., Ore.