“Don't Step on My Groove!”: Gender and the Social Experience of Rock

This article utilizes a symbolic interactionist framework to examine how gender is, and is not, salient in “depth‐listening” practices. Based on qualitative interviews with male and female fans of contemporary “angry” rock music by female performers, the author shows that men and women engage in similar processes of cultivation (especially with regard to emotion) in depth listening, but that they also employ gender as a socio‐semiotic resource to interpret their relationships to the music and artists differently and to evaluate what this music could mean in their daily lives. Gender identity is influential in how the music is constructed as personally transformative for informants and as having implications for social change.     

Cyclops Cave

Written in the post‐structural traditions of symbolic interactionism, Cyclops Cave is a biographic‐interview‐based and fact‐and‐fiction‐plotted ethnodrama of anti‐Semitism in Soviet higher education. This project is premised on the theories of the “social self”—namely, the “looking‐glass racialized self,” constructed by the dominant ethnic “supremacy,” and the theories of racial stigma as an outcome of the racialized “me” production. Showing the stigma experiences of former Soviet Jewish academics from 1970 to the 1980s, the play adds a new illuminative and self‐interpretive case of a race‐situated symbolic interaction and deconstructs the “root image” of Soviet anti‐Semitism through interpreting the informants' stigma incidents and interactional conflicts between their “selfhood” symbols.     

Confrontations and donations: encounters between homeless pet owners and the public

This study examines the interactions between homeless pet owners and the domiciled public with a focus on how the activities of pet ownership help construct positive personal identities. Homeless people are often criticized for having pets. They counter these attacks using open and contained responses to stigmatization. More often, they redefine pet ownership to incorporate how they provide for their animals, challenging definitions that require a physical home. Homeless pet owners thus create a positive moral identity by emphasizing that they feed their animals first and give them freedom that the pets of the domiciled lack. Through what we call “enabled resistance,” donations of pet food from the supportive public provide the resources to minimize the impact of stigmatization.     

Identity Dilemmas: Toward a More Situated Understanding

When are identity dilemmas—when people possess identities that conflict with one another and both are potentially stigmatizing—most likely to occur? Are they the result of generic social processes? A review of some of the extant research on “identity work” suggests that historical “misalignments” of culture and stratification, which we refer to as “lag,” create the greatest potential for stigma and the reproduction of inequalities. Lag is exacerbated by complex, intersecting axes of hierarchy, and amplified as symbolic environments globalize and subcultures multiply. Articulating culture and structure reveals how power plays out in interaction, and highlights the omnipresence of struggles for treatment as “fully human.” We consider whether “alignment” is even possible when multiple dimensions of social location intertwine, compete, and collide. Following Schwalbe and Mason‐Schrock (1996), we argue that “subcultural” or collective identity work that brings new meanings into dominant cultural narratives may offer the greatest hope, but in the interim all coping strategies are costly.     

Through a Glass,Darkly: The Dynamics of Fan‐Celebrity Encounters

Mass media influence interaction in important ways: fans of serial television use mass media to incorporate the fictional and the extraordinary into their real, ordinary, everyday lives. Using ethnographic and interview data, this article examines the activities through which certain fans seek face‐to‐face encounters with the celebrities they admire and how this intersection of the ordinary with the extraordinary creates problems of interpretation that fans attempt to solve. Fans make and take advantage of opportunities for prestaged encounters at official public appearances by their favorite actors. Some fans may also encounter their favorite celebrities by chance in the course of their daily rounds in “celebrity sightings,” or unstaged encounters. Certain fans, however, actively pursue actors, deliberately seeking them out and creating fan‐staged encounters. These efforts produce a distinctive interactional tension in which pursuing fans recognize the similarities between their behavior and that of “celebrity stalkers” and attempt to differentiate themselves from the stalkers celebrities fear. This article analyzes these interactions as a step toward a theory of fan‐celebrity interaction.     

Whiteness as Stigma: Essentialist Identity Work by Mixed-Race Women

Historically, in both the social sciences and the general public, racial mixing has been stigmatized. This stigmatization was fueled by whites' desire to protect their racial privileges as well as the belief that hybridization between “pure” and superior white racial stocks and inferior non-white stocks produces an inferior being. While this view has been challenged within the social sciences, the general public's sentiment toward racial mixing remains consistently negative. The low interracial marriage rate, particularly among blacks and whites, points to the lack of popular acceptance of racial mixing. This article reveals an unusual and creative reversal of the racial mixing problem by historically stigmatized mixed-race women. The women in this study reject dominant patterns of stigma by reassigning stigma to their European ancestry. Given this reversal, women articulate and embrace non-white identities. This article explains the reversal of the racial mixing problem as well as the identity work of women as they rearticulate the meaning of race and racial belonging within dominant racial logic. The identification of macro constraints and the illustration of individual agency in the negotiation of identity extends the symbolic interactionist perspective on identity formation.     

Identity and the Definition of the Situation in a Mass‐Mediated Context

The importance of identity and the definition of the situation for symbolic interactionist theory and research are discussed. These two concepts have been separated in much research since the 1970s, with identity being used in a variety of ways. This separation is partly attributed to paradigm shifts in social science, as well as to popular culture treatments of identity. Popular culture's emphasis on “collective” and “personal” identities is processed through entertainment formats that emphasize emotional and vicarious involvement, drama and action. Materials illustrate the presence of a mass‐mediated generalized other, media communities, and the significance this has for realist and postrealist ethnography. Suggestions are offered for a reintegration of identity and the definition of the situation in ethnographic work. Sex videos are total fantasy. But people have to realize that even in a fantasy you have to deal with reality. —Pornographic film actress     

Masculine Status,Sexual Performance,and the Sexual Stigmatization of Women

Collegiate hookup culture advances ideas of masculinity but contradicts notions of appropriate feminine sexuality. Drawing on focus group and interview data with college students, I examine how a group of class‐ and race‐privileged fraternity men face dilemmas as they enact a group constructed masculinity focused on sexual performance and the objectification of women. I employ a symbolic interactionist framework to illustrate how men, attentive to peer status yet anxious about the sexual stigmatization of women, draw on cultural ideas about appropriate feminine sexuality as they account for their approaches to sex and women (both with whom they interact sexually and how) along a range of intimacy—from hookups to committed relationships. I demonstrate that heterosexual interaction does not unequivocally link to masculine status and that men sometimes strive to limit the impact of casual sex or avoid it altogether.     

Contesting Community Online: Virtual Imagery among Dutch Orthodox Protestant Homosexuals

Whereas substantial scholarly attention has been paid to the online presentation of self, symbolic interactionist approaches are largely absent in the literature on virtual communities. Instead, recurrent questions are whether communities can exist online and whether specific online venues qualify as communities. This article aims to move beyond these dichotomous questions by studying how different meanings attached to an online venue can be understood from offline experiences. In a case study of a Dutch forum for orthodox Protestant homosexuals, two types of understanding of online community emerged from an analysis of fifteen in‐depth interviews. Users struggling with stigmatization in offline life seek empathic support and have an encompassing sense of online community—the forum as “refuge.” For users dealing with practical everyday questions, online contacts are part of so‐called personal communities and help ameliorate offline life—the forum as “springboard.” Apart from demonstrating that online forums can serve as Goffmanian backstages in two distinct ways, these results indicate it is fruitful to take a symbolic interactionist approach to uncover relationships between offline and online social life.     

Students Who Strip: The Benefits of Alternate Identities for Managing Stigma

We apply interactionist theories that highlight the contextual nature of stigma and the relational quality of stigmatization to the case of college students who work as topless dancers. We explore how the “toll of stripping” might be mediated by having an alternate, positive identity like “student.” Our analysis demonstrates that students who strip are distinctive from other strippers in important ways that stem from their salient, positive identity as students. Although they often feel as if they live a “double life” because they hide their occupation from family and friends, they benefit from sharing their student goals and ambitions with club customers. “Student” is a socially acceptable identity to share in routine social interactions and helps student strippers frame dancing as a transient occupation, offering them an opportunity to maintain a positive sense of self while buffering them from some of the negative effects of stripping.     

Rehearsals in Citizenship: BBC Stop‐Motion Animation Programmes For Young Children

This paper examines new managerial discourses and practices in which the dialectic of labour is reconstructed as a series of acts of self‐understanding, self‐examination and “self‐work”, and through which the “self qua self” is constituted as the central object of management technologies. We interrogate concepts such as “excellence”, “total quality”, “performance”, “knowledge”, “play at work” and “wellness” in order to decipher the ways in which managerialism deploys what we term therapeutic habitus, and projects a new horizon of “human resourcefulness” as a store of unlimited potentialities. We invoke management’s wider historical–cultural context to situate managerialism within the framework of modernity as a cultural epoch whose main characteristic is what we term “derecognition of finitude”. It is the modern synthesis — with the “self” at the centre of its system of values — that provides the ground for current elaborations of subjectivity by managerialism. The paper examines how current vocabularies and practices in organizations use “work” to rearticulate discursively the human subject as an endless source of performativity by configuring work as the site of complex and continuous self‐expression. Management thus acquires a new discursive outline: instead of appearing as an authoritarian instance forcing upon workers a series of limitations, it now presents itself as a therapeutic formula mediating self‐expression by empowering individuals to work upon themselves to release their fully realized identity.     

Ideological Primary Groups in Contemporary Cultural Movements

Abstract

This paper argues that “post-modern” societies generate movements for cultural change in models “of” and “for” identity and consciousness, rather than traditional kinds of social movements aiming at structural changes in institutional arrangements. The distinctive and crucial unit in comtemporary cultural movements is what we have termed the “ideological group.” These groups are similar to the “ideological informal groups” which recruited members of traditional social movements on the basis of personal contacts and confidence, and which rested on shared “inner convictions.” Like other, earlier, ideological groups, they focus on the construction and legitimation of a shared symbolic interpretation, and ideology of a dissatisfying reality as well as their own personal and collective identity in relation to it. However, contemporary movement groups have been influenced considerably by the sensitivity training-encounter-group dynamics techniques associated with the intensive group movement. The result is a new interest in artificial primary relations among sociologically homogeneous peers for joining socio-cultural analyses with psychological interpretations of common personal experiences. The processes generated in these ideological primary groups lead to the collective construction of new or modified ideological interpretations of reality which contain different, more satisfying, models “of” and “for” personal and group identity, and “consciousness.”     

The New Normal1

The Great Recession has caused many Americans to reevaluate their consumption‐rich way of life. In response to the shrinking economy, they have spent less, saved more, and simplified their lives. This essay asks whether people will seek a return to their prerecession lifestyles—in particular a return to making the acquisition and consumption of consumer goods a major source of meaning and contentment—as soon as their economic condition allows or whether they will make their more austere lives their “new normal.” It evaluates existing research on contentment and suggests that if instead of choosing to return to their “old normal,” Americans learn to derive satisfaction from nonconsumerist sources, in particular social relations and transcendental activities (i.e., religious, contemplative, and cultural activities), they may find the new normal quite acceptable.     

Olympic Films and Public Memory

How is our memory of mega‐events structured? This article investigates the relationship between cinema and the Olympic Games. To this end, it first unravels the historical origins of the strong link between the two, as both are symbolic products of the 20th century. The Olympics reaffirm the image of the modern nation‐state; the cinematic medium visually represents the Games as spectacle. Leni Riefenstahl's film, Olympia (1938), recorded at the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games, supplies the most enduring imagery of this type. In addition to Riefenstahl's thoughts and methods, this study delves into Kon Ichikawa's Tokyo Olympiad (1965), which was influenced by Olympia. Ichikawa's film, which reflects his artistry and showcases his various skills, won critical acclaim and, intriguingly, precipitated the “document or art” controversy that involved the Japanese state and the mass media. Whether document or work of art, this film has supplied the public with imagery for the 1964 Tokyo Olympic Games—various images that most of us recognize—and thereby played a key role in constituting our memory of them. Therefore, our experience of the Games is a mediated experience through the construction of our public memory. Our memory culture is composed of “prosthetic memories” that are technologically assembled through cinema and act as Freudian “screen memories.”     

Negotiating race and place in the Garifuna Diaspora: Identity formation and transnational grassroots politics in New York City and Honduras

This paper is an exploration of the relations between the politics of identity and the socio‐economic and political processes of the current era of globalization. Using ethnographic material from the transnational grassroots organizations of the Garinagu—an Afro‐Indigenous population living in transnational communities between Central America and the US—I show the multiple ways that they articulate their identity between and among the tropes of “autocthony,” “blackness,” “Hispanic,” “diaspora,” and “nation.” This construction and negotiation of identity is intimately connected to the negotiation of rights vis‐à‐vis nation‐states and international political bodies, where ideologies of race, ethnicity, nation, and citizenship carry with them different implications for rights and belonging. I argue that the complexities of this case point to the uneven processes of globalization, within which the power to define the ideological terrain of economic and political struggles is still profoundly unequal.     

Growing Up Punk: Negotiating Aging Identity in a Local Music Scene

Punk music, in its thirty‐odd‐year history, is traditionally conceived of as a youth subcultural phenomenon. As one of many ways to rebel, kids might choose or find in punk rock an anti‐authoritarian, destructive, or anarchistic ideology that helps them manage the tumult of adolescence. But what happens next? In this conceptual article, the author is interested in how punks negotiate their identity as punks, as they age. She examines this by looking at people's experiences in a local punk scene. Based on these observations, she argues that “aging identity” and “the scene” are theoretical tools in a dialectic relationship with one another, which highlights the fluidity of both. This theory helps promote “the scene” as a more useful concept than subculture. Furthermore, looking at the local punk rock music scene as a scene—rather than a subculture—illustrates how identity forms over time as a cumulative process, synthesized in the relationship between changing self and other. From her research on a punk scene, the author argues that to construct a long‐term conception of scene involvement, punk scene members look to real and idealized others to demonstrate what they see as successful and unsuccessful ways of aging in connection with the music scene.     

Ethnic minorities' reactions to newcomers in East London: Symbolic boundaries and convivial labor

In much public discourse on immigrants in Western Europe, perceptions towards newcomers are discussed in relation to what white national majorities think. However, today, new migrants often move into places which are already settled by previous migrants. This article investigates the local experiences, perceptions, and attitudes towards newcomers among long-established ethnic minorities in an area which they have made their home, and where they predominate not just in numbers but also by way of shops, religious sites, school population, and so on. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in East London (UK), it looks at long-established ethnic minority residents’ attitudes towards newcomers from Eastern Europe, and how these are shaped by their own histories of exclusion. By bringing together theories on symbolic boundary making with the concept of “convivial labor,” it shows how experiences of stigmatization impact on perceptions of white newcomers, and how these perceptions are characterized by a combination of empathy and resentment.     

Recollection and Relocation in Immigration: Russian‐Jewish Immigrants “Normalize” Their Anti‐Semitic Experiences

This study conceptualizes the relationship between recollection of the past and relocation in the context of immigration. Combining symbolic interactionist and narrative paradigms, it explores how immigrants'representations of past experiences inform their identity construction and the process of entering the host society. Our interpretive analysis of personal narratives related spontaneously by eighty‐nine Russian‐Jewish immigrants in Israel and Germany reveals that they choose to “normalize” their anti‐Semitic experiences by representing them as secondary, expected, and “normal.” They do so via four narrating tactics of normalization: obscuring, self‐exclusion, vindication, and essentializing stigma. Each tactic devalues the cultural depiction (grand narrative) of anti‐Semitic experiences as transformative and traumatic. By normalizing their past, the immigrants deconstruct and resist the authority and moral commands of the national narrative they encounter in both societies. Putting forward normalization as an alternative interpretation, the immigrants claim ownership of their biography and cultural identity.     

Privacy,Publicity, and Accountability of Self‐Presentation in an On‐Line Discussion Group*

Although the anonymous condition of on‐line interaction seems to provide space for the experiment of decentered, fluid, and multiple forms of identity, the disembodied on‐line identity often entails the fallout of accountability of self‐presentation. This article explores the nature of self‐presentation in cyberspace by conducting a case study of an on‐line discussion group. Specifically, it deals with the issue of disembodiment and accountability of on‐line identity in a close connection to the feature of the obliteration of the public/private boundary in the group. This study inquires into the following questions: “What techniques, if any, do members of the group employ to conceal their identity information?”; “Under what circumstances do members voluntarily disclose their identity information?”; “How do participants probe others’ identity cues and thus construct pattern knowledge about them?”; and “How should differences/similarities between on‐line self‐presentation and face‐to‐face identity styles be addressed?” In doing so, this article, on the one hand, tries to integrate the dynamics of participants’ active “identity probing” as an important interaction dimension to the study of on‐line self‐presentation that has so far heavily worked on the processes of identity concealment and self‐disclosure. On the other, referring to literatures on identity styles in off‐line settings, it addresses similarities of and differences between patterns of on‐line/off‐line self‐presentation.