Real Men,Real Women,Real Lives? Gender issues in learning disabilities and challenging behaviour

This article seeks to define gender issues and explores the significance of these issues for challenging behaviour in the field of learning disability. It is argued that lack of awareness about these issues contributes to the development of challenging behaviour and to difficulties in identifying the needs expressed through these behaviours, whatever their origin. Specific areas examined include models of residential provision for adults, prioritisation of service activities, attribution processes (needs identification), and the sexuality of people with learning disabilities. In each area issues are raised and the implications for service practice defined.     

Real Gender: Identity,Loss, and the Capacity to Feel Real

This article concerns gender and feeling real. Beginning with Judith Butler’s deconstruction of gender as an ontological category, it argues that the subjective experience of gender as real has been underaccounted for. By reviewing Butler’s work on gender melancholy and then elaborating psychoanalytic theories of identification and reality, this article links feeling real to the dual capacities to both separate from and connect with the object. To illustrate the implications for thinking gender identity and transformation, it concludes with a reading of Miles Walser’s poem about the name discarded in a gender transition.     

Social Work Function in a Caring Society: Abstract Value,Professional Preference,and the Real World

Social work, in its search for a professional foundation, has lost sight of its original social purpose, the need to take care to the weak and helpless groups in a new industrializing society: the severely disabled, neglected children, mentally ill, developmentally disabled, and the enfeebled aged. No other profession is qualified to, or seeks to satisfy this need. This article discusses how the profession could fulfill this social function as a base for its growth, adding other therapeutic, preventive, and social change functions as experimental frontiers rooted in a socially sanctioned foundation available to few other professions.     

Real life learning. Alternative to clinical skills development

1. Pressure from educational institutions on clinical facilities necessitates the creation of alternative strategies that enable students to develop clinical skills outside the artificial atmosphere of a nursing laboratory or the formal clinical setting. 2. Assignments covering grief and loss experienced by the elderly; problems in performing activities of daily living experienced by the non-elderly; and existential anxieties experienced by the elderly help students to realize that such problems are not confined to those residing in institutional settings. 3. Each of these assignments sensitizes students to the practical reality of a variety of theoretical frameworks, which provides students with the opportunity of applying theory to practice in a nonthreatening environment.     

Almost Like a Real Band: Navigating a Gendered Jazz Art World

Professional jazz has been organized around two contradictory cultures. Historically, the jazz art world has followed norms of meritocracy, which promote equality across boundaries of race and class. At the same time a culture of exclusivity, anchored in gendered essentialism, has severely limited female participation. By analyzing interview data with artists from the Hamilton College Jazz Archive, we illustrate how these contradictory cultures of inclusion and exclusion operate to channel women into feminized roles in the jazz world. We then discuss how women employ a number of strategies to work around the culture of exclusivity and capitalize on the norms and values of musical meritocracy. Despite institutional openings in professional jazz that emerged following the women’s movement, female jazz artists continue to face strong barriers toward full equality in the jazz world. Although female artists consistently demonstrate that they possess equal musical skills to male musicians according to the norms of meritocracy that guide professional jazz, women remain on the margins of the jazz art world.     

Real social analytics: A contribution towards a phenomenology of a digital world

This article argues against the assumption that agency and reflexivity disappear in an age of ‘algorithmic power’ (Lash 2007). Following the suggestions of Beer (2009), it proposes that, far from disappearing, new forms of agency and reflexivity around the embedding in everyday practice of not only algorithms but also analytics more broadly are emerging, as social actors continue to pursue their social ends but mediated through digital interfaces: this is the consequence of many social actors now needing their digital presence, regardless of whether they want this, to be measured and counted. The article proposes ‘social analytics’ as a new topic for sociology: the sociological study of social actors’ uses of analytics not for the sake of measurement itself (or to make profit from measurement) but in order to fulfil better their social ends through an enhancement of their digital presence. The article places social analytics in the context of earlier debates about categorization, algorithmic power, and self‐presentation online, and describes in detail a case study with a UK community organization which generated the social analytics approach. The article concludes with reflections on the implications of this approach for further sociological fieldwork in a digital world.     

Bike Messengers and the Really Real: Effervescence,Reflexivity, and Postmodern Identity

Out of more than two thousand bike messengers in New York City, a few hundred participate in alleycats—illegal races held in open traffic. Surrounding this racing scene is a vibrant messenger community. Messengers who race in or attend alleycats carry their messenger identity into all aspects of their lives. Through direct participant observation, this article proposes that alleycats function as Durkheimian rituals for these messengers. Alleycats express the central values of the social world. Lost in collective effervescence, the individual confronts these values as objectified truths, which allow messengers to form stable identities. Further, bicycles, messenger bags, and other objects become sacred symbols within this ritualization process. The ability of messengers to construct such nonreflexive identities is juxtaposed with theories about the self in postmodernity.     

Real sex/fake gender: a reply to Robert Willmott

A series of claims relating to the sociological problematic of sex/gender are made by Robert Willmott in a critique of my article Goodbye to Sex and Gender (Hood-Williams, 1996). In his account he claims that: sociology is ‘impossible’ and feminism ‘impotent’ without the sex/gender distinction; that sex belongs to an order of real world objects that is ontologically distinctly from, and irreducible to, gender and that to oppose this view is to favour conflation; that men are ontologically distinct from women. In reply I argue that it is absurd to say that sociology, which pre-dates the sex/gender distinction by two hundred years, or feminism (also historically prior), cannot function without it; that the distinction between the real and the ideational rests on an ontology that is itself discursive and that the critique of the general distinction made between sex and gender does not necessitate conflating the objects of biological and sociological discourses; that men and women are no more ontologically distinct than people with black skins are from those with white. The ‘real world’– an idea no longer of any use, not even a duty any longer – an idea grown useless, superfluous, consequently a refuted idea: let us abolish it! (Nietzsche)     

美国自驾车与乘公交车的经济对比

新的研究表明,公共交通的经济益处远比通常知道的要多。