GLOBAL BLACK SELF-FASHIONINGS: HIP HOP AS DIASPORIC SPACE

This essay examines how the “black” racial significance of hip hop culture is received, interpreted, and redeployed within the Afro-Atlantic world. Beyond questions of cultural consumption and reproduction, it is argued that hip hop's expanding global reach has facilitated the contemporary making and moving of black diasporic subjects themselves. Here, African descendant youth in an array of locales use the performative contours of hip hop to mobilize notions of black-self in ways that are at one time both contestive and transcendent of nationally bound racial framings. Hip hop in this way can be seen as enabling a current global (re)mapping of black political imaginaries via social dynamics of diaspora. In pursuing this argument, this essay looks toward hip hop movements in Brazil, Cuba, and South Africa as compelling, yet varying examples of how transnationally attuned identities of blackness are marshaled in the fashioning of diasporic subjects through hip hop.     

Racial Formation Theory and Systemic Racism in Hip‐Hop Fans’ Perceptions

This work contributes empirical research to racial formation theory (RFT) and systemic racism (SR), demonstrating how these theories complement each other. There are few practical applications of these theories. This research examines RFT and SR from the perspective of hip‐hop fans. I qualitatively examine how 23 nonblack women articulate the relationships of race, class, and gender through discussion of hip‐hop music and videos that accompany it. Findings suggest that hip‐hop is a site of racial formation. Participants spoke from a color‐blind perspective and white racial frame so that they perpetuated ideals of systemic racism theory.     

Hip‐hop cultures and political agency in Brazil and South Africa

It is assumed in the article that the contemporary urban condition is marked by an increased pluralistic intensity in cities. Coupled to this shift in the nature of the urban context, one can also observe a proliferation of sites of political engagement and agency, some of which are formally tied to the various institutional forums of the state, and many that are defined by their insistence to stand apart from the state, asserting autonomy and clamouring for a self‐defined terms of recognition and agency. This article draws attention to the significance of one category of urban actors – hip‐hoppers – that can be said to occupy a ‘marginal’ location in relation to the state, but one uniquely relevant to the marginalised existence of most poor black youth in cities of the global South, particularly Rio de Janeiro and Cape Town. The article demonstrates that hip‐hop cultures offer a powerful framework of interpretation and response for poor black youth who are systemically caught at the receiving end of extremely violent and exploitative urban forces. The basis of hip‐hop's power is its complex aesthetical sensibility that fuses affective registers, such as rage, passion, lust, critique, pleasure and desire, which, in turn, translates into political identities, and sometimes agency (i.e. positionality), for its participants. In the final instance, the article tries to link conclusions about the potential of hip‐hop cultural politics to larger themes in urban studies, such as participation, public space, citizenship and security.     

Racial Authenticity in Rap Music and Hip Hop

This article reviews the history of scholarship on racial authenticity within studies of rap music and hip hop. The concept of authenticity currently enjoys a central place in sociological work on popular music, subcultures, and racial identity. As a music and cultural form that straddles all three of these fields, the debates surrounding authenticity within rap and hip hop are as contentious as any. Using the year 2000 as an arbitrary dividing line, this article presents the late 20th century foundations of research on authenticity and race within hip hop, then moves on to discuss more recent developments in the academic literature. Despite hip hop scholars’ increased emphases on discourses of space and place, and processes of culture and identity formation, the field continues to be framed through notions of essential blackness, and critical interrogations of white hip hop legitimacy. After providing an overview of the state of the field, it is argued that greater attention to language use among hip hop enthusiasts, and a particular emphasis on hip hoppers who fall outside the black–white racial binary will prove fruitful in reinvigorating these longstanding debates. Ethnographic studies of local underground hip hop scenes within the Unites States are recommended as a logical place to begin.     

GENDER MATCHING AND COMPETITIVENESS: EXPERIMENTAL EVIDENCE

This paper experimentally investigates if and how people's competitiveness depends on their own gender and on the gender of people with whom they interact. Participants are given information about the gender of the co‐participant they are matched with, they then choose between a tournament or a piece rate payment scheme, and finally perform a real task. As already observed in the literature, we find that significantly more men than women choose the tournament. The gender of the co‐participant directly influences men's choices (men compete less against other men than against women), but only when the gender information is made sufficiently salient. A higher predicted competitiveness of women induces more competition. Giving stronger tournament incentives, or allowing the participants to choose the gender of their co‐participant, increases women's willingness to compete, but does not close the gender gap in competitiveness. (JEL C70, C91, J16, J24, J31, M52)     

Gender in academic STEM: A focus on men faculty

In this study, we explore how men faculty understand the role of gender in shaping faculty experiences in academic science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) and how they position themselves in relation to inequalities disfavouring women. Our data reveal diversity among men in their understandings regarding challenges facing women in STEM. The majority of our participants revealed gender‐blind perspectives and argued that the egalitarian structure of academia does not allow gender to impact attainments in STEM in any significant way. However, a considerable number of them felt privileged compared to women and described subtle ways in which gender shapes opportunities. Our findings show the important implications of men's sensitivity to gender in the ways they perform their professional roles as, for example, mentors, colleagues and teachers in relation to women in STEM. They further call for attention to men's perceptions of gender issues when designing institutional interventions for improving women's conditions in STEM.     

Disparities in Human Papillomavirus Vaccine Literacy and Vaccine Completion Among Asian American Pacific Islander Undergraduates: Implications for Cancer Health Equity

Abstract

Purpose: Low rates of human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination among young Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) women need to be addressed, particularly given the high incidence of cervical cancer in this population. The current study aims to investigate predictors of HPV vaccination in young AAPI and non-Latina white (NLW) women. Methods: A secondary data analysis was conducted of a health survey administered to college-aged women (N = 2,270) at a large public university in the Midwest. Andersen's behavioral model of health services utilization guided the study theoretically, and hierarchical logistic regression analysis was conducted to investigate research aim. Results: NLW women had a significantly higher rate of vaccine completion than AAPI women (NLW = 60.7%; AAPI = 38.6%). NLW women also scored higher on all 5 measures of HPV vaccine literacy than AAPI women. Both groups of undergraduate women reported that increasing age, knowledge about HPV, greater use of gynecological services, and knowing someone who had cancer were significant factors related to HPV vaccination completion. In the NLW group, father's income was also found to be a predictor of HPV vaccination completion. Conclusions: Rate and predictors of HPV vaccination completion vary between NLW and AAPI women. Greater promotion of HPV literacy and gynecological service use should be made to young AAPI women to increase their HPV uptake. Further research should examine sociocultural factors that could hinder or promote HPV vaccination in young AAPI women.     

Hollywood power brokers: Gender and racial inequality in talent agencies

As the US labour market shifts towards project‐based, contractual and contingent work, the importance of intermediary brokerage organizations will continue to grow. In this article, I use Joan Acker's theory of gendered organizations to examine Hollywood talent agencies as one case of these powerful intermediary organizations. The power structures, promotion process, mentoring networks and discourses described by the talent agents I interviewed privilege white men. The agents interviewed for this study described their top management as being overwhelmingly composed of men, they discussed the patrimonial systems of mentorship and exclusive male networks that advantage white men, and talked about colleagues and clients in ways that valorized elite masculinity and disparaged femininity. Thus, the organizational structures and culture of these talent agencies collectively create an environment that reproduces itself, encouraging white men to join and persist, and presenting barriers to women and racial minority men. Although the focus of this article is on Hollywood talent agencies, the findings from this research help explain how inequality is reproduced in the non‐traditional work arrangements that characterize the new economy.     

Man Up,Man Down: Race–Ethnicity and the Hierarchy of Men in Female‐Dominated Work

Scholars have largely overlooked the significance of race and socioeconomic status in determining which men traverse gender boundaries into female‐dominated, typically devalued, work. Examining the gender composition of the jobs that racial minority men occupy provides critical insights into mechanisms of broader racial disparities in the labor market—in addition to stalled occupational desegregation trends between men and women. Using nationally representative data from the three‐year American Community Survey (2010–2012), we examine racial/ethnic and educational differences in which men occupy gender‐typed jobs. We find that racial minority men are more likely than white men to occupy female‐dominated jobs at all levels of education—except highly educated Asian/Pacific Islander men—and that these patterns are more pronounced at lower levels of education. These findings have implications for broader occupational inequality patterns among men as well as between men and women.     

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.     

"Are You an African?" The Politics of Self-Construction in Status-Based Social Movements

Current debates over identity politics hinge on the question of whether status-based social movements encourage parochialism and self-interest or create possibilities for mutual recognition across lines of difference. Our article explores this question through comparative, ethnographic study of two racially progressive social movements, "pro-black" abolitionism and "conscious" hip hop. We argue that status-based social movements not only enable collective identity, but also the personal identities or selves of their participants. Beliefs about the self create openings and obstacles to mutual recognition and progressive social action. Our analysis centers on the challenges that an influx of progressive, anti-racist whites posed to each movement. We examine first how each movement configured movement participation and racial identity and then how whites crafted strategic narratives of the self to account for their participation in a status-based movement they were not directly implicated in. We conclude with an analysis of the implications of these narratives for a critical politics of recognition. Keywords: identity politics, social movements, race, self, hip hop.     

Signifyin' Cinema: Rudy Ray Moore and the Quality of Badness

This article engages the limits of both film and race studies in their approach to heterogeneous and “low” forms of African American cultural production through an analysis of the films of Rudy Ray Moore. While Moore’s films have been almost entirely overlooked in both film studies and black studies, they were extremely popular among black youth of the 1970s and have exerted a powerful influence on today’s hardcore hip hop artists (and their understanding of how to turn black market entrepreneurship into global enterprise). The theory of “signifying”, advanced most rigorously by black literary theorist Henry Louis Gates Jr, helps explain how and why Moore has slipped through various critical nets — and grounds a claim for why we should take “bad” black film seriously. Close film and context analysis illustrates how Moore’s low‐budget films “signify” on Hollywood and the system of expectancies that go with putatively “good” filmmaking and reveals the extent to which they constitute a hybrid cultural and multimedia practice. As vehicles designed to elaborate on the badman of black folklore, Moore’s films contribute to the long history and rich language of “toasting” in African American oral culture and music. As such, far from being emblematic of black filmmaking’s impoverished relationship to mainstream cinema (as a cinema manqué), these films constitute vital precursors to the hip hop music video.     

Intermarriages Between Western Women and Palestinian Men: Multidirectional Adaptation Processes

This article addresses cultural adaptation of Western‐Palestinian intermarried couples. Using in‐depth interviews, information was gathered from 16 participants, 7 Western women and 9 Palestinian men, living in Palestinian cities in the West Bank. Adaptation strategies are typified by the extent to which each spouse embraces the partner's culture. The data suggest that intermarriage engenders a multidirectional adaptation process. Patriarchy and East‐West power relations affect mainly the women, having to face marginalization on the basis of their gender and their foreignness. The men undergo a double process of cultural adaptation: to the Western culture and to their native culture after their return. Both the husbands’ extended family and the Israeli‐Palestinian conflict were found to affect both partners’ adaptation.     

“If I Can Offer You Some Advice”: Rapport and Data Collection in Interviews Between Adults of Different Ages

Reflexively analyzing interactions between myself (young adult woman) and 150 adult research participants, I explore how interviewees responded to the interviewer's perceived age in combination with other social identity categories. Addressing a gap in scholarship on adult‐adult interview interactions, this article examines how age gradations, in combination with other axes of similarity or difference, affect researcher‐interviewee rapport and data acquisition. Racial similarity, regardless of age, unlocked access to the topic of race/ethnicity. Age intersected with gender such that women within a decade of the woman interviewer's age assumed similarity and were communicative. In interviews with similarly‐aged heterosexual men, awareness of sexuality inhibited answers around intimacy. With older interviewees, gender similarity bridged the age chasm with women. In contrast, age and gender difference inspired older men to act paternalistically and give unsolicited advice. Even among adults, interviewees' classification of the interviewer's age contours the interactional dynamic, impacts data acquisition, and reproduces social distinctions.     

Masculinity and Non‐Traditional Occupations: Men's Talk in Women's Work

Occupation segregation is a persistent aspect of the labour market, and scholars have often researched what happens when women and men enter into what are seen to be ‘non‐traditional’ work roles for their sex. Research on men within women's roles has concentrated mainly on the challenges to a masculine identity, while research on workplace language has focused on women's linguistic behaviour in masculine occupations. To date, there has been relatively little research into the linguistic behaviour of men working in occupations seen as women's work (e.g., nursing, primary school teaching). To address this gap, this article focuses on men's discursive behaviour and identity construction within the feminized occupation of nursing. Empirical data collected by three male nurses in a hospital in Northern Ireland is explored using discourse analysis and the Community of Practice paradigm. This paper discusses how the participants linguistically present themselves as nurses by performing relational work and creating an in‐group with their nurse colleagues by actively using an inherently ‘feminine’ discourse style.     

Nobody’s business? White male privilege in media coverage of intimate partner violence

ABSTRACT

Portrayals of celebrities perpetrating Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) are ideal for understanding the association between gender and racial privilege in representations of social problems. Unlike prior scholarship on framing of IPV, with celebrity perpetrators, race can be analyzed as an important aspect. Using 330 news articles about 66 celebrities, I find patterns of reporting consistent with male privilege that sanctions men’s violence against women, whereas the differential treatment of Black men fosters a racialized interpretation that pathologizes Black men. Black men's IPV is more often criminalized, with criminal imagery included 3 times more often in articles about Black celebrities than White celebrities. By presenting violence as an escalation of mutual conflict and excusing it due to mitigating circumstances, such as inebriation, White men's violence is justified 2½ times more often than Black men's IPV. These findings contribute to sociological understandings of racial privilege in the social construction of IPV.     

The genealogical imagination: the inheritance of interracial identities

The aim of this article is to examine ethnographically how ideas of descent, biology and culture mediate ideas about the inheritance of racial identities. To do this, the article draws upon interviews with the members of interracial families from Leicester, a city situated in the East Midlands region of England. The article focuses upon the genealogical narratives of the female members of interracial families who live in an ethnically diverse inner‐city area of Leicester. Attention is paid to the ways in which the women mobilise and intersect ideas about kinship, ancestry, descent, belonging, place, biology and culture when they think about the inheritance of their own and/or their children's interracial identities. The article's emphasis upon the constitution of interracial identities contributes to the sociological study of race and genealogy by exploring the racialised fragmentation of ideas of inheritance and descent across racial categories and generations.     

Exploring the use of hip hop music in participatory research studies that involve youth

This article explores the use of hip hop in participatory research studies. The article was informed by a research process that explored the identity construction process of female late adolescents who identified strongly with hip hop music. Hip hop music constituted an integral component of the research process, as it was used to stimulate participation. It was also used to prompt reflection and engagement with the Self. Participatory research methods, namely drawings and lyric inquiry, were used in conjunction with hip hop music to elicit narrative data. The findings illustrate that the use of hip hop music was beneficial as it prompted profound engagement with the Self. Hip hop music provided the participants with spaces within which they could reflect on and articulate the continual, interactional and situational dimensions of their lives. These reflections ultimately initiated agency, as it prompted them to contemplate empowerment and liberation. As such, we argue that hip hop music can serve as transformative data-generation stimulus in participatory research projects involving adolescents who identify with this genre.     

Social Support to Parents‐in‐Law: The Interplay of Gender and Kin Hierarchies

Using data from a representative sample of middle‐aged married persons, we compare men's and women's contact and assistance to older parents‐in‐law and parents. Women have more visits and phone contact with their parents than do men, and men talk on the phone more with their in‐laws than do women. There are no gender differences in assistance patterns. Multivariate analysis shows that women contact and help parents more than in‐laws, whereas for men there are no such differences. There is little direct evidence that the presence of one set of parents affects relations with the other. Our findings suggest that although women clearly give priority to relations with their own parents, men experience pulls in both directions.