Racial,Ethnic, and National Boundaries: Sexual Intersections and Symbolic Interactions

Sex and race are strained, if not strange, bedfellows. Sexual depictions and denigrations of racial, ethnic, and national “others” and the regulation of in‐group sexual behavior are important mechanisms by which ethnic boundaries are constructed, maintained, and defended. Race, ethnicity, and the nation are sexualized, and sexuality is racialized, ethnicized, and nationalized. The sexual systems that prop up ethnic boundaries and define ethnic identities and communities tend to be inherently conservative blueprints for ethnosexual living. These systems stress endogamy, heterosexuality and reproduction under the rubric of traditional, often patriarchal family life for ethnic group members and tend to demonize and denigrate the sexuality of those outside ethnic boundaries or of those within ethnic communities who do not conform to heteronormative, heteroconventional models of sexuality. I present several examples of the intersections of race, ethnicity, nationalism, and sexuality/ies from U.S. and international settings, and I argue that the symbolic interaction between ethnicity and sexuality is central to their mutual constitution.     

花木兰:经典叙事的风格颠覆与女青年主体重建

花木兰作为一种女性形象的经典叙事,同时也是一种意识形态国家机器,正是其存在才维系了社会性别单一化、主流化的趋势。面对镇压性国家机器的作用和对服从关系的依恋本能和需求,只有通过亚文化对花木兰形象的再赋义,才能形成符合女性青年群体自身的文化风格,才能感染受众,颠覆传统价值观念的约束和认知的改变,重建女青年群体的主体性。     

Social Theory Across Disciplinary Boundaries: Cultural Studies and Sociology

This essay proposes that sociology can learn from social theory developed in the humanities. In the face of recent challenges to sociological explanations of social outcomes (from rational choice and economic theory, cognitive psychological theories of intelligence, and communitarian social philosophy), social theory should specify the constitutive force of social signification. After identifying a key weakness in theoretical approaches currently available in sociology, the inadequacy of various conceptions of the social, I analyze three significant new works in cultural studies in order to sketch out alternative ways of defining and measuring the force of social signification. The essay concludes with an attempt to establish the basis of a dialogue between cultural studies and sociology.     

Shifting Symbolic Boundaries: Cultural Strategies of the Animal Rights Movement1

How do activists create cultural change? Scholars have investigated the development and maintenance of collective identities as one avenue for cultural change, but to understand how activists foster change beyond their own movements, we need to look at activists’ strategies for changing their targets’ mindsets and actions. Sociologists need to look at activists’ boundary work to understand both the wide‐sweeping goals and strategies that activists enact to generate broad‐based cultural changes. Using data from participant observation and interviews with animal rights activists in France and the United States, and drawing on research on ethnic boundary shifting, I show how activists used two main strategies to shift symbolic boundaries between humans and animals, as well as between companion and farm animals—(1) they blur boundaries through focusing and universalizing strategies and (2) they cross boundaries physically, discursively, and iconographically. This study contributes a new theoretical and empirical example to the cultural changes studied by scholars of social movements, and it also provides a useful counterpoint to studies of symbolic boundary construction and maintenance in the sociology of culture.     

Making Sense of Neoliberal Subjectivity: A Discourse Analysis of Media Language on Self-development

The influence of neoliberalism on culture and subjectivity is well documented. This paper contributes to understanding of how neoliberal ideology enters into the production of subjectivity. While subject formation takes place in multiple and contradictory ways and across multiple social sites, we focus on the increasingly popular media discourse of self-development, and examine it as a technology of neoliberal subjectification. Drawing on Foucauldian understandings, we analyze data from two different newspapers from two different national contexts, both of which are heavily influenced by neoliberalism. Based on our analysis, we detail four interrelated discourses—rationality, autonomy and responsibility, entrepreneurship, and positivity and self-confidence—demonstrating how these discourses constitute the neoliberal subject in ways consonant with neoliberal governmentality. There is no observable resistance to subject positions offered within these discourses. Self-development discourse instills stronger individualism in society, while constraining collective identity, and thus provides social control and contributes to preserving status quo of neoliberal societies.     

Female Authority and Dominion: Discourse and Distinctions of Heavy Metal Scholarship

From its inception, both outsiders and insiders have associated heavy metal with men and masculinity. Some have even maintained that metal culture is hostile territory for women. Despite this, a significant proportion of writers who have documented, analysed, and indeed celebrated heavy metal has been women, from the groundbreaking sociological studies of Deena Weinstein and Donna Gaines, to the recent ethnographic work of Emma Baulch. This article provides a preliminary investigation of this historical phenomenon and what it can reveal about the ever complex, constantly changing relationship between gender and power in metal.     

Volunteering and Civic Action: Boundaries Blurring,Boundaries Redrawn

VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations - The aim of this introduction to the special issue is to call into question the presumed conceptual divide between...     

Race, Risk, and the Emergence of Gender Boundaries: Kids Crossing Boundaries in Summer Camps

My study explores how children established and crossed gender boundaries in four recreational settings with different racial compositions and patterns. Children generally marked boys' gender boundary crossing as more deviant than girls' crossing. However, the amount of gender salience structured into each setting and the salience of race in each setting affected campers' perceptions of the risks from gender boundary crossing and, thus, their strategies for crossing. My findings suggest that the perceived race of the actor may be less important than the race of the audience. Also crucial are the ways in which race category membership gives meaning to gender boundaries and to gender deviance in a particular situation.     

Cultural Discourse in Action: Interactional Dynamics and Symbolic Meaning

Cultural sociology has recently developed new tools with which to understand and analyze meaning in terms of cultural discourse. Specifically, this paper further develops the Alexanderian form of discourse analysis through application on the micro-level. Utilizing extensive ethnographic data, the mythopoetic men's movement is examined in terms of how its participants construct political meaning that motivates and guides their action. In empirical detail, these actors can be seen as creating a cultural discourse that constitutes the social movement at a fundamental level while at the same time the discourse is continually negotiated, contested, and reconfigured. Exposed is the “discourse of liberational masculinity” which is used by movement participants to challenge and confront hegemonic masculinity in American society. Examining the mythopoetic men's movement from this perspective demonstrates the analytic utility of this approach through revealing in unique ways the dynamics of morality, political belief, and perceived hegemony within this popular contemporary social movement.     

Sexual Abuse,Professional Boundaries,and the Rural World

ABSTRACT

Blurred boundaries and confused roles are underlying characteristics of sexual abuse in incestuous families and family-like systems. When the professionals responding to sexual abuse disclosures exhibit a parallel process of role confusion, inadequate communication, secrecy and denial, the victims and their families are further traumatized. The nature of rural communities has attributes that may contribute to these factors. Creating an effective multidisciplinary professional team, with a protocol that clearly defines roles and ensures that ongoing team meetings occur to keep communication open and boundaries clear, is essential to prevent incestuous families and others from being further victimized by the professional system.     

Cultural Constructions of Female Homelessness in Taiwan1

Abstract

Although both individual and structural perspectives have been utilized to explain female homelessness in Taiwan, a slight difference regarding women's social role has been revealed in this study. More than half of homeless females were divorced after not being able to give birth to a son. Homeless women still struggle to survive with little support from family, government and non-governmental systems. However, the results of this study should not be overgeneralized as a prevailing phenomenon across all population segments in Taiwan, because all participants in this study are from urban areas implying that female homelessness could be an urban phenomenon in Taiwan.     

LOSING SAMSON: Nature,Crime, and Boundaries

This article examines a community's reaction to the poaching of a large elk. Extending the Durkheimian approach to nature, crime, law, and social control, this study discusses the anguish and anger provoked by the infraction, tributes to the fallen animal, calls for more severe and certain sanctions for poaching, and the boundaries affirmed in the incident's aftermath. The implications of this communal response to a wildlife offense for criminalization and conceptions of community are considered.     

Sexuality,Boundaries, Professional Ethics,and Clinical Practice

Abstract

Gay male therapists often practice in milieus where it is virtually impossible not to have contacts with clients outside of the therapy room. The necessity of maintaining appropriate boundaries can be strained when client-therapist contacts occur in situations that are overtly or even potentially sexual. This Practice Note addresses professional challenges and various approaches to these situations while maintaining necessary therapeutic appropriateness.     

Discourse,affect and affliction

While much recent theorizing into affect has challenged the primacy of discourse in understanding social life, this paper is premised on the intertwining of affective experience with discursive meaning. Furthermore, appreciating the entwining of affect and discourse facilitates broader understanding into the illness experience, medical decision‐making and experiences of healing. Today, the biomedical discourse carries particular affective weight that can saturate experiences of affliction. Cultural understandings of disease similarly shape affect that may emerge in affliction. Social meaning, more specifically stereotypes pertaining to identities, interweave with emotion also in the context of medical practice. The doctor‐patient relationship is an affect‐laden encounter where the entwining of affect with social assumptions carries important, yet poorly understood, repercussions for treatment decisions and for the furthering of health inequalities. Both the elusiveness and the power of affect that unfolds in relation to discursive meaning rest on the way in which affect dwells in and resounds through the body.