The Boundaries of Difference: Negotiating Gender in Recreational Sport*

There is a pervasive belief that meaningful gender differences structure the abilities and desires of bodies. These gender differences are presented as categorical imperatives, despite the prevalence of a range of abilities and desires across genders. How are beliefs about gender differences maintained in light of increasing challenges? Adult recreational sports provide an interesting subworld in which to investigate this question. Through an ethnography of coed softball, reactions to women's demonstrations of excellence is examined to reveal a complicated situation in which belief systems surrounding ideologies of gender difference are often simultaneously challenged and reinvigorated. The work problematizes understandings of difference as perpetuating systems of inequality. The article closes with a discussion of challenges to conceptions of difference and offers a way to move beyond “boundaries of difference.”     

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.     

The Future of ‘Gender and Organizations’: Connections and Boundaries

‘Gender and organizations’, a fruitful connection between two previously separate areas of study, has had a relatively short but bountiful history. Much of the research and theorizing within the general rubric of ‘gender and organizations’ has required the breaking of conceptual boundaries and the forging of new connections that go beyond the coalescence of two fields of inquiry. We have not exhausted the possibilities suggested by broken boundaries and new connections. This may be a particularly auspicious time to be breaking boundaries, for the apparent worldwide changes in work and organizing are not well enough understood with many of our old intellectual tools. In this paper I discuss briefly what our studies of gender and organization have, in my view, accomplished so far, and then review some issues and questions stimulated by thinking about broken boundaries and new connections, possibilities that, for me, represent part of the future for ‘gender and organizations.’     

Inside Rebellion: The Politics of Insurgent Violence

The public demonstrations by Thailand's Red Shirts in early 2010 have been explained as a labour-based movement resisting Bangkok's entrenched elite, or as a mob mobilized by the deposed prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra in order to destabilize the current government. This profile looks into the protests' origins and nature. It argues that there are elements of truth to both explanations, but also that the protestors adopted powerful forms of symbolism of poverty and victimhood to draw attention to their needs, and to delegitimize the force used against them. This symbolism allowed both Thaksin and the protestors to gain political ground.     

Policing the Boundaries of Sex: A Critical Examination of Gender Verification and the Caster Semenya Controversy

On August 19, 2009, Caster Semenya, South African track star, won a gold medal in the women's 800-meter event. According to media reports, on the same day, the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) ordered Semenya to undergo gender verification testing. This article critically assesses the main concepts and claims that undergird international sport organizations' policies regarding “gender verification” or “sex testing.” We examine the ways in which these policies operate through several highly contested assumptions, including that (a) sex exists as a binary; (b) sport is a level playing field for competitors; and (c) some intersex athletes have an unfair advantage over women who are not intersex and, as such, they should be banned from competition to ensure that sport is a level playing field. To conclude, we make three recommendations that are consistent with the attainment of sex and gender justice in sport, which include acknowledging that myriad physical advantages are accepted in sport, recognizing that sport as a level playing field is a myth, and eliminating sex testing in sport.     

Religion as Cultural Power: The Role of Religion in Influencing Americans’ Symbolic Boundaries around Gender and Sexuality

In this article, we describe recent research that explores the power of religion to influence understandings of gender and sexuality in the United States. We argue that sociologists of religion should draw from symbolic boundaries theory, a theoretical innovation in the sociology of culture. In particular, we discuss a rich body of research in the sociology of religion to show how Americans use religious tools to draw boundaries around ideal and stigmatized gender norms, family forms and sexual identification. We combine symbolic boundaries literature and this literature to show that religion is a source of cultural power that assigns meaning to, and draws boundaries around, certain cultural categories. We end by describing some productive directions for future research in this area.     

The Primal Scene: The Enigma of Knowing

ABSTRACT

This article explores the ways in which the privileging of the Oedipus complex in psychoanalysis has signaled a forgetting of the primal scene. Through a close reading of Bion’s Cogitations (1992) and Pasolini’s film Oedipus Rex (1967), this article examines the Oedipus myth in relation to the primal scene as represented by Oedipus’s encounter with the Sphinx, hence establishing the Oedipus myth as the ultimate story about the acquisition of knowledge. Drawing on Bion, Laplanche, Faimberg, and others, this article grapples with the paradoxes involved in the process of “getting to know something,” querying the limits of knowing and not knowing, and the nature of such knowledge.     

精神的边界－－网德教育视野中“黑客精神”的解读

几年来,“黑客”情结一直在纠缠青少年网民,难以理顺。本文通过对黑客精神的哲理分析,进一步揭示其实质内涵,以提高青少年网络意识。     

Fathers Don’t Cry: On Gender,Kinship, and the Death Drive

ABSTRACT

A while ago, I was asked whether psychoanalysis had anything special to say about tears. Thinking through this question, it became clear to me that we cannot think about tears in psychoanalysis without thinking about gender—more specifically, the particular view of gender that psychoanalysis has been built upon, and for the most part retains, because this particular view solves for psychoanalysis some basic problems that it does not have the conceptual repertoire to address. This article goes on a journey through the story of boys, Samson from the Hebrew bible, a young New York boy who falls of his bike, Freud’s three sons and his theoretically adoptive son Karl Abraham, and one of my patients. It is a journey through the civilization-long prohibition on parents and boys to attach, a prohibition that I argue serves the arch-value of sacrifice by which patriarchy is driven. I also trace in this journey the story of the controversial and powerful analytic concept of the death drive. And I argue that this concept, born during and after World War I, bears the mark of the frightened, homo-attachment-phobic impulse that has taken over a psychoanalysis unable to cope with the madness of a world war without blaming the victim. I offer toward the end a glimpse of an alternative.     

Diagnosis Murder: The Death of State Death Taxes

Since 1976, more than 30 states have eliminated their "death" taxes and many others have reduced them. This unexplored case of interstate tax competition presents a unique opportunity to develop a new, more satisfying definition of competitor based on historical elderly migration patterns. Using data from 1967 onward, we outline the recent history of state death tax competitio n and present a spatial econometric analysis. Interstate tax competition is evident and grows stronger when using migration-based definitions of competitors. The article concludes with still more evidence of interstate tax competition—the recent movement by states to effectively revive their death taxes.     

The Boundaries of Europe: Deconstructing Three Regional Narratives

The shifting boundaries of Europe as lines of enclosure and mobility restriction in the ‘longue duree’are analysed here at the European/supranational level through the deconstruction of three regional narratives on “Europe” and its reborderings in different millennia. These narratives have had a lasting significance in identity construction and spatialities around the Mediterranean and are evidence of the historically specific and constructed nature of the boundaries of Europe, as well as the power relations involved in changing spatialities. Europe is a cultural construct that emerged around the Mediterranean in a captivating Greek myth, much earlier than the period of written history. The notion of Europe then ‘shifted’ to the northwest as a colonial cultural–religious construct of ‘Christendom’ during the Middle Ages, before nation-states emerged. Much later, European integration—in the context of globalization after the end of bipolarity—not only did not melt borders, but in fact created some new and often bizarre hierarchies supported by a bureaucratic narrative and an institutional discourse for unification after two devastating world wars. Unpacking these narratives is important in understanding sociopolitical constructions of ‘Europe’ and its boundaries, their hardening or relaxation, and criticizing essentialism, as well as commenting upon the ambivalent placing in the European Union of certain candidate and neighboring nations.     

Rescaling Gender Relations: The Influence of European Directives on the German Gender Regime

During the 1960s–1990s, a gradual yet definite shift inthe organization of gender politics in the European Union (EU)and member states has become apparent. This shift began withthe implementation of the early gender directives of the 1970sand has since evolved to include a partial "rescaling" of policy-makingfrom national to transnational spaces and a gradual redefinitionof gender regimes and policies at the national level. As a result,gender policy cannot be viewed as either predominantly transnationalor national but arises through interaction of multiple and coexistingpolicy spaces. In this article, I use a multiscalar analysisto highlight this complex interaction. I draw on (West) Germanyas a specific case study to offer a historical analysis of theimplementation of the early European gender directives and themanner in which these developments have contributed to the redirectionof the German gender regime and the emergence of a new "hybridregime."     

The Boundaries of Professionalization: The Case of North American Funeral Direction

This article examines the relationship between occupational and individual professionalization through the example of funeral direction. It is based upon an ethnographic study of an accredited mortuary science program at a community college. It compares and contrasts the socialization of aspiring funeral directors in that program to previous case studies of socialization into other self-styled professions. This analysis suggests that the success of occupational socialization in fostering a personal sense of professional distinction depends not so much on an occupation's professional prestige but upon its definitive claim to a distinctive occupational jurisdiction.     

Placing Gender in Social Work: The Local and National Dimensions of Gender Relations

This paper argues that as well as being sensitive to wider discourses of gender relations, social workers need to consider the ways in which gender is localised. It is argued that to some extent gender practices vary according to local culture, that gendered identities are often localised and that social workers tend to construct their clients according to images of local men and women. These images tend to be stereotypical but some do also reflect dominant local gendered practices. The paper draws on data from qualitative interviews with social workers and probation officers, as well as the experience of teaching social work students, to illustrate these arguments. Whilst it is argued that the localising of gender is of general relevance, the data come from Wales alone. The author's conclusion is that (amongst other things) anti‐oppressive practice involves recognising the important influence of local stereotypes and challenging them, whilst also acknowledging that gendered practices do vary from place to place.     

The Islamic Soccer League in Israel: Setting Moral Boundaries by Taming the Wild

This article strives to use the institutional and discursive strategies employed by the Islamic Movement in Israel in the soccer sphere to illustrate wider theoretical arguments about setting boundaries of inclusion and exclusion in the public sphere. The Islamic Movement uses an isolationist strategy, by creating the independent Islamic Soccer League. In contrast, social agents who strive to promote integration in Israeli society or, alternatively, Arab-Palestinian national pride encourage the involvement of Arab teams and players in the Israeli Football Association. The article argues that the isolationist strategy is inherent in the attempts of a religious movement to articulate a definition of collective identity that is based on a sacred moral code. Then, relying mainly on the contents of the sports sections of the Islamic press, the article analyzes the inevitable tensions stemming from the use of an institution with a strong secular orientation for the purpose of reproducing religious identity.