Olfactive frames of remembering: theorizing self,senses and society

By analysing sensorial aspects of social memory and emotions, this paper theorizes the social significance of olfaction and other senses towards reconfigurations of self and social interactions through embodied identity work. The research question that this paper addresses is: how is the self perceived through memories that are mediated by smells? Olfactive frames of remembering are employed in order to explicate sensory meta‐narratives including sensory relations (pertaining to familial and other ties), sensory memory, time and space, and sensoryscapes. This article also elucidates upon the various moral, cultural and aesthetic codes that may be discerned in biographical narrations of social actors drawn from narrative interviews. Furthermore, it highlights a need to consider sensorial‐bodily experiences in qualitative inquiry and thereby conceptualize how actors articulate their sense of self, and how they reformulate their experiences and relationships with others vis‐à‐vis emotional discourses of happiness, sadness and nostalgia in the maintenance and continuity of selfhood. The paper therefore contributes to sensuous scholarship by explicating how smells and memories operate in conjunction toward shaping self‐identity and social relations.     

‘Domestic friends’: women's friendships,motherhood and inclusive intimacy

Based on a qualitative, interview‐based study of friendship, this article examines the specificity of ‘domestic friendships’ between women. Forged from the particular experiences, emotions and challenges of motherhood, they are qualitatively different from most friendships which tend to be based on individualistic connection and self‐expression. Domestic friendships facilitate a specific form of ‘inclusive intimacy’ and shape an expansive experience of domestic life beyond the family or household. They help shape mothers’ sense of self as profoundly relational and interconnected with others, and channel a sense of biographical selfhood whose form and temporality is tied firmly to others’ lives.     

Just one of the guys until shower time: How symbolic embodiment threatens women's inclusion in the US military

The military constitutes a complex occupational field for women — one in which embodied masculinity is legitimized and rewarded, and women's bodies are often perceived as problems to the extent that they deviate from this masculine standard. Drawing from 33 in‐depth interviews with men and women who served on active duty in the US military between 2005 and 2015, we ask: How does female embodiment raise barriers to the full incorporation of women as equal workers in a total institution? Our analysis focuses on three primary aspects of what we call symbolic embodiment (female bodies as physically weak, as leaky/unclean and as sexually distracting), as they are rooted in the cultural imagination more than in any biological or experiential reality. We show how the symbolic embodiment of female workers effectively undermines individual claims of honorary masculinity by reasserting the pre‐eminence of naturalized capacities over individual performance and experience, and constructs women as second‐class workers within the masculine culture of the military. Our results extend the literature on the embodied self at work and reveal potential limits to Bourdieu's theory of the gendered habitus.     

The Naked Self: Being a Body in Televideo Cybersex

Unlike text‐based cybersex, televideo is an embodied experience. Participants present their bodies as an object to be looked at. Through in‐depth interviews this study examines the relationships among selfhood and the body and the context in which both are located. The body, much like the self, exists as both a viewed object and an experienced subject. Televideo cybersex participants manipulate this relationship by presenting themselves as only a body, the experience of which acts back in an erotic “looking glass” affecting how the self conceives of the body. While in some cases the medium serves to create a “disembodied” context for interaction, as this study illustrates, it may also serve to fully embody. The obvious relationships among self, body, and social situation made evident in any form of sexual experience are largely unexplored in sociology, yet fully within the realm of interest and theoretical models of symbolic interaction.     

Occupational Cultures and the Embodiment of Masculinity: Hairdressing,Estate Agency and Firefighting

Drawing on data from an Economic and Social Research Council‐funded project, this article explores the implications of different occupational cultures for men's masculine identity. With a focus on embodiment and individual agency, it explores the argument that it is within ‘scenes of constraint’ that gendered identities are both ‘done’ and ‘undone’. In this article we examine embodied experience in occupational cultures commonly stereotyped as ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’ (hairdressing, estate agency and firefighting), showing how men conform to, draw upon and resist the gendered stereotypes associated with these occupations. What we argue is that gendered conceptions of ‘the body’ need to be differentiated from individual men's embodiment. Instead, processes of identification can be shown to emerge via embodied experiences of particular kinds of gendered body, and in the ways in which men negotiate the perception of these bodies in different occupational contexts.     

Guerrilla selfhood: imagining young people's entrepreneurial futures

In this paper, we argue that complex forms of selfhood emerge in relation to rapid economic and social changes unfolding in the early stages of the twenty-first century. We draw on literature that explores youth at risk, entrepreneurial selfhood and neoliberalism to argue that young people are developing modes of transition that allow them to acclimatise to economic and social insecurity. It is an insecurity borne of a paradoxical reliance on, and failure of, neoliberal forms of economics and society. In the context of a post-Global Financial Crisis (post-GFC) world, we explore how young people take responsibility for their uncertain futures. Via our critique of how young people are supposed to manage their lives from education to employment, we argue that a form of selfhood emerges as they are challenged by limited education and employment opportunities. We call this selfhood the guerrilla self. We use this term to designate types of identity that require participation through resistance, institutionalisation through the appearance of not being institutionalised, and individualism in the midst of a failure of individualism. In making this case, we draw on stories told by young people in the USA planning for a future in a post-GFC world.     

“She was buried in her purple dress and her red hat and all of our members wore full ‘Red Hat Regalia’ to celebrate her life”: Dress, embodiment and older women's leisure: Reconfiguring the ageing process

There is a significant literature on women's dress and clothing, women's dress and identity, and women's dress and body image. However, the way that dress shapes the self, gives public meaning to the body, and situates it within culture—its embodiment—is understudied. Older women's voices on how dress-up in leisure contexts is linked to embodiment are absent. Using data from an online survey of the Red Hat Society®, a leisure-based social group with over 1 million members, we examined the relationship between older women's dress and embodiment. Data analysis revealed three themes: 1) Dress and embodiment, doing “dress-up”; 2) Dress and embodied subjectivity, linking the personal with the social; and, 3) Dress and perceptions of ageing, fashioning to freedom. We extend the embodiment and leisure literatures by: (a) including older women's viewpoints on dress; (b) understanding linkages between embodiment and older women's leisure; and, (c) illustrating how public displays of dress contribute to older women's development.     

Digital identities – overcoming visual bias through virtual embodiment

ABSTRACT

This study sheds new light on the role of identity in virtual environments when virtual representation of self is in support of disabled individuals and the potential impact of their virtual identity on work opportunities. It is widely understood that individuals who live with disability often experience a lifetime of bullying, exclusion, marginalization and rejection. They often experience workplace bias and discrimination. Yet, when they can create an identity and experience embodiment in virtual environments, the results can be extraordinarily powerful – even life-changing. This research builds on nearly a decade of ethnographic research in 3D online immersive social virtual worlds; seven of those years working with disability communities to answer the following: RQ1: In a virtual world where one can choose any avatar form, how does that visual sense of self-representation influence one’s ability to gain access to a social network, to be a leader in that network, and to find work? RQ2: How does realism in representation influence work experiences in these digital worlds? The results reveal the importance of choice in online representation of avatars in creating work and online social engagement. Implications contribute to our understanding of visual bias in the workplace and how emerging virtual reality technologies may open new avenues for meaningful work and social interactions for people with disabilities.     

An African-American woman with disabilities: the intersection of gender, race and disability

This qualitative study explores the educational experiences of an African‐American adult woman with disabilities. The intersections of gender, race and disability are theorized through the lenses of disability, feminist and critical theory. Specifically, I address the following three questions. What are the experiences of an African‐American woman with disabilities in schools? How might these experiences be theorized? Do these experiences offer new ways of understanding oppression that may contribute to empowering individuals labeled with multiple, intersecting identities?     

Making Sense of Muscle: The Body Experiences of Collegiate Women Athletes*

Using ethnographic research, this paper explores the experiences of elite women athletes on a Division‐I college soccer team. I draw on existing literature in the sociology of sport, sociology of the body, and interactionism to inform my analysis. With this approach, I illustrate the complicated relationship women athletes have with their bodies in relation to physical competition and dominant notions of femininity today. Key reference groups influenced the players’ self‐perceptions and encouraged the women to closely monitor their own appearances and actions. While undoubtedly affected by these inter‐actions as well as their place in the gender hierarchy, many women athletes subtly resisted notions of idealized bodies and constructed their own meanings about their bodies and experiences. Investigating the day‐to‐day body awareness and negotiations of women athletes reveals the gendered nuances of sport and the complicated relationship between cultural ideals and female embodiment.     

Wearable tech,bodies, and gender

New forms of wearable technology are blurring the lines between technology and bodies, raising questions about personhood, selfhood, and what it means to be human. Consequently, scholars are examining these iterations of body/machine interface and human machine communication from a variety of angles. While fashion scholars focused primarily on garments and celebrating potential techno‐futures, media and communication scholars more critically examined how wearable tech mediates bodies and relationships. Social scientists are concerned with issues of labor, privacy, data ownership, and value, drawing on ethnographic studies of the Quantified Self (QS) community and the phenomenon of self‐tracking more generally. This scholarship is rooted in studies and theorizations of ubiquitous computing, feminist science and technology studies (STS), and fashion and dress as both ornament and second skin. Generally, it asks how wearable technology can augment the human body, how it affects human relationships to self and other, and whether wearable technology can promote human autonomy, when it is locked into commercial and power relationships that don't necessarily have the users' best interests at heart. The essay ends by briefly outlining of directions for further research, urging further investigation into wearable tech exhibiting gendered attitudes toward “femme” women, and calling for increased attention to issues raised by wearable technology's coming merger with the growing fields of biotech and synthetic biology.     

The Self as Public Property: Made in Israel

This article examines the connection between state order and self‐understandings in everyday life through a case study of the “Boarding School for Gifted Disadvantaged” in Israel. It includes content analysis of governmental protocols that documented the establishment of the boarding school (governmental constitution of a new self‐concept) and interviews with sixty of its graduates (self‐understandings in everyday life). The findings reveal how the new cultural order invented a new selfhood, “gifted disadvantaged,” previously unknown in Israel. This category is based on structural distinctions between being “naturally” gifted versus the governmental constitution of gifted status. Interviews with graduates indicate that they experience selfhood as a philanthropic gift bestowed on them by the state of Israel and voice their gratitude toward the state. The concluding discussion suggests that the graduates experience their selfhood as “public property.” The self, perceived as having been constructed from outside, is in a continuous dialectic between the presence and the absence of certain personal qualities.     

The Emergence of the Emotional Self: A Developmental Theory

G.H. Mead (1934) offers a set of stages of development which describes how infants transform into mindful and self-reflexive social beings through social interaction. He does not, however, provide any parallel set of stages in the development of emotionality. This paper attempts to extend Mead's model by specifying seven stages in emotional development which are interdependent with Mead's stages of development of mind and self. These stages specify how individuals learn to share emotions with others, and learn to identify and interpret their own and others' emotional selves. Fundamental to this analysis is that self development and emotional development are inextricably linked. A framework is offered for the analysis of emotions that (1) recognizes emotions as processual; (2) notes the hierarchial relations among emotions; and (3) presumes that cognition and emotion are not mutually exclusive. The framework illustrates its utility by answering the question, “How does an infant transform from a being who experiences sensations into a being who experiences emotions?”     

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.     

Bare Bodies: Nudity,Gender, and the Looking Glass Body1

This article examines the role of nude embodiment as it affects sexuality, intimacy, and pleasure when people seek to align their nude body with cultural values. This research, based on open‐ended and closed‐ended data from 184 young heterosexual adults attending a large Midwestern university, finds the experience of nude embodiment and its effects to be strongly gendered. For example, among both men and women, comfort with one’s nude body is associated with a sexually expansive point of view, but it is only found to be associated with sexual behavior and pleasure among the women. For women, too, feelings of objectification in nude embodiment are shown to be mitigated through positive relationships with their male partner. Throughout we emphasize the “lived experience” of the body, especially as experienced in the body techniques used in the pursuit of sexual intimacy and pleasure. Discussion relates these results to objectification theory and how wider social changes may impinge on sexual embodiment in general.     

Femininity Ideology and Sexual Health in Young Women: A focus on Sexual Knowledge,Embodiment, and Agency

ABSTRACT

Traditional femininity ideology is associated with diminished sexual agency in women; yet we know little about its connection to sexual knowledge or experiences of one's body during sex. This study examined how femininity ideology related to sexual health knowledge, body comfort during sex, condom self-efficacy, and sexual assertiveness in college-age women. Femininity ideologies were related to decreased sexual-risk knowledge and lowered body esteem during sex. Femininity ideologies were also related to decreased sexual assertiveness and condom use self-efficacy. Results highlight the importance of understanding the association between femininity ideologies and sexual knowledge acquisition as an aspect of sexual agency, as well as sexual embodiment, in addition to the more commonly studied sexual self-efficacy and assertiveness.     

Thinking with the Mind,Syncing with the Body: Ballet as Symbolic and Nonsymbolic Interaction

Symbolic interactionist theory describes self‐consciousness as arising through symbolic interaction. I use one empirical case, ballet training, to suggest that symbolic interaction can, by producing self‐consciousness, cultivate unself‐consciousness. Using in‐depth interviews with twenty‐three individuals reporting on training experiences in six countries and twenty‐three American states, I show that dancers can learn, through self‐conscious symbolic interaction, how it feels to embody what an audience sees, as they strive to train their bodies to portray an institutionalized aesthetic. The embodiment of technique facilitates a markedly unself‐conscious “flow” experience while performing. In contrast, having an acute awareness of embodying an incompatible physiology inhibits flow and often motivates dancers to self‐select out of ballet. These interactionist sources of “nonsymbolic” interaction both evoke and suppress “mind” through social interaction.     

Response to “Becoming Visible: The Case of Collette”

The clinician’s experiences of race outside of the treatment room contribute to the formation of a racialized self, which influences clinical work with all clients notwithstanding race. Multiracial individuals at times must balance their external physical presentation—and the corresponding race-related categories that others place on them—with their own internally constructed racial identifications. The mechanisms of identification and disidentification can provide safety for the multiracial individual. How can clinicians effectively acknowledge their own identifications and disidentifications as lenses for seeing the multiracial person’s racialized self and selves so as to more effectively work with the multiracial?     

Cultures of embodied experience: technology, religion and body pedagogics

Two trends have dominated recent sociological analyses of embodiment. There has, on the one hand, been a proliferation of analyses identifying bodies as the experiential vehicles through which we exist and interact in the world. On the other hand, this has been accompanied by a large growth in studies suggesting that technological advances have both increased our exposure to instrumental rationality and radically weakened the boundaries between humans and machines. Considered together, these trends raise an important question which has, however, been marginalised in the literature: if bodies are increasingly shaped and even constituted by the performative demands and invasive capacities of technology, what implications does this have for our lived experience of ourselves and our social and natural environment? In addressing this issue, our paper revisits Heidegger's discussion of the technological ‘enframing’ of humans and asks two questions. First, what have we lost experientially by being positioned as a ‘standing reserve’ for technologically driven demands for efficiency in contemporary society? Second, can the analysis of religious attempts to reframe human experience provide us with a perspective from outside this technological culture that enables us to appreciate the embodied experiences, dispositions and potentialities of humans in fresh ways? Our approach to these issues proceeds via a comparative study of the ‘body pedagogics’ of modern technological culture and two, very different, religious cultures.     

Goffman Against Postmodernism: Emotion and the Reality of the Self

Goffman has been read as arguing that selves are no more than images created in conformity with situational expectations. I read Goffman as saying that the reality of selfhood is not an image, but a psychobiological proces shaped by signs and symbols. Seen in this way, the reality of the self is evident, as Goffman suggested, not in conformity but in moments of feeling, resistance, and choice. Drawing out what is implicit in Goffman, this article proposes that all forms of signifying behavior, including self-presentations, are means to sustain the coherence of the self. For this to work, however, people must, as Goffman pointed out, trust each other to respect the rules governing signifying behavior and must care about the feelings attached to selves. The article argues that the inequalities of so-called postmodern society are undermining the trust and care on which the interaction order and coherent selfhood depend. Goffman's ideas about the self are used to develop an optimistic critique of the conditions that have produced these pernicious trends.