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Feminist scholars have critically scrutinized women's gendered citizenship and the ways in which civil law re-produces gendered inequalities in a variety of contexts. However, the Turkish civil law remains to be celebrated as the emblem of Turkish modernization and of emancipation of Turkish women, and as a progressive and secular exception in the Islamic Middle East. This celebration has been sustained by an exclusive focus on the written law, and by a lack of exploration of the actual ways in which gender inequalities are reproduced in legal institutions. In response, I decided to examine women's legal status as it is constructed and contested in the everyday workings of courts. In my master's research, I looked at thirty four child custody court files concluded in Istanbul, Turkey between 1996 and 2002. This research allowed me to question the terms of the ongoing discussion by dissecting the categories "legal status" as well as "Turkish Women." Instead of defining my subject as the legal status of women and imagining it as a static phenomenon to be read from the written law, I approached the legal institution as a discursive terrain where the relationships among parents, children, and the state are constructed and contested. In place of "Turkish Women," in other words, instead of presuming a pre-existing category of women, I explored the ways in which women and men are entitled with rights and responsibilities with regards to their children in the legal sphere. My main finding is that being a good parent is adjudicated on the basis of gender specific prescriptions in child custody contestations in Turkey. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives: The purpose of this study is to compare the effects of income and employment status on the relationship between diabetes and mortality in the older Mexican population living in the United States and Mexico.Methods: Using the Mexican Health and Aging Survey (MHAS-Mexico) and the Hispanic Established Population of Epidemiologic Studies of the Elderly (Hispanic EPESE-United States), logistic regression models are run to predict mortality by diabetes status controlling for income, employment status, and migration. Results: The results indicate that diabetes only significantly predicts mortality in Mexico. In addition, significant moderating effects of both employment status and income could only be observed in Mexico.Conclusions: The type of effect that economic resources have on mortality is country specific for older Mexicans. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]