Rape,Jokes, Consent

All jokes pose a problem of consent: what does it mean to hear them out; what does it mean to laugh? The problem is acute in the case of rape jokes. This paper discusses two concepts of consent raised by Vanessa Place’s “If I Wanted Your Opinion, I’d Remove the Duct Tape,” legal consent and aesthetic consent, and the relation between them.     

Racial Salience and the Consequences of Making White People Uncomfortable: Intra‐Racial Discrimination,Racial Screening,and the Maintenance of White Supremacy

Most sociological research on racial discrimination has had an “inter‐racial” focus. That is, researchers have been principally concerned with the disparate treatment that people of color receive relative to Whites in different social contexts. However, recent theoretical work emerging from legal studies suggests that an alternative conception of “intra‐racial” discrimination exists that extends beyond colorism. This theory of intra‐racial discrimination stipulates that many organizations in the “post‐racial” era desire some measure of racial diversity. Yet, in their efforts to achieve this racial diversity they screen people of color based on their degree of racial salience. Whether a given person of color is hired, promoted, or in the case of college admissions, accepted, is a function of whether or not Whites within the organization consider them racially palatable, or not overly concerned with race. This creates an incentive for people of color to work their identity to allay any concerns among Whites that they may be too racially salient. In this paper I critically review this work and attempt to further buttress its claims by highlighting how this process has clear historical precedent. I conclude by showing how the audit method can be used to empirically examine this practice contemporarily.     

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.     

The Economimesis of New Historicism (Or How New Historicism Displaced Theory in English Literature Departments)

The form of historicism that has had most impact in the context of literary theory in the Anglophone academy is new historicism. The label new historicism was applied to an initially American mode of literary study that emerged in the late 1970s in the context of “heated discussions” surrounding theorised forms of literary study like Marxism, feminism, psychoanalysis, structuralism, post‐structuralism and deconstruction. Having emerged in this context, however, new historicism — and the more broader forms of historicist study that have migrated across a variety of disciplines in the arts and humanities — has thrived in the Academy while interest in “theory” has declined since the 1990s. In this article I propose to look closely at the reasons for the survival and success of new historicism, even as other, more radical modes of analysis have become unfashionable.     

Fight Club,or the Cultural Contradictions of Late Capitalism

Most critical engagement with the film Fight Club tends to emphasize its relevance for the study of contemporary representations of gender and masculinity. These readings tend to primarily highlight the “reactionary” aspects of the film, which are seen as a response to structural sources of feminization experienced by men as they are embedded in the consumerist machine of the service‐oriented economy. In this paper I argue that these takes on Fight Club, while enlightening and indeed capturing a key aspect, miss what I think is its most essential contribution: its attempt to craft a transcendental “counter‐myth” capable with dealing with the cultural and societal contradictions of post‐industrial capitalism in the context of the transition to a service oriented economy. I draw on the work of Daniel Bell in order to offer a neo‐Weberian reading of Fight Club which makes sense of various aspects of the film which are rendered meaningless by the gender‐focused reading. I argue that Fight Club can be seen as an attempt to deal with the evacuation and exhaustion of the original form of value‐rationality from the realm of production in service work — grounded in the older ethic of ascetic Protestantism — as well as the failure of ideological interpellation in the consumer society — grounded in a domesticated version of the experience‐based counter‐Bourgeois ethic associated with aesthetic modernism — to provide an adequate substitute for it. I conclude that Fight Club can therefore be interpreted as an inchoate attempt to produce some version of a class consciousness and cognitive mapping in the late‐capitalist situation.     

Environmental Degradation,Disproportionality, and the Double Diversion: Reaching Out,Reaching Ahead,and Reaching Beyond

Abstract Rather than seeking ivory‐tower isolation, members of the Rural Sociological Society have always been distinguished by a willingness to work with specialists from a broad range of disciplines, and to work on some of the world's most challenging problems. What is less commonly recognized is that the willingness to reach beyond disciplinary boundaries can contribute not just to the solution of real‐world problems, but also to the advancement of the discipline itself. This point is increasingly being illustrated in studies of environment‐society relationships. Most past discussions of humans' roles in environmental problems have focused on overall or average human impacts, but rural sociologists have played leading roles in identifying what I have come to call “the double diversion.” First, rather than being well‐represented by averages, environmental damages are often characterized by high levels of disproportionality, with much or most of the harm being created by the diversion of environmental rights and resources to a surprisingly small fraction of the relevant social actors. The dispropor‐tionality appears to be made possible in part through the second diversion, namely distraction—the diversion of attention, largely through the taken‐for‐granted but generally erroneous assumption that the environmental harm “must” be for the benefit of us all. There are good reasons why rural sociologists would have been among the first to notice both of these “diversions”— and why they will give even greater attention to both in the future.     

Estimation of International Migration in Post‐Soviet Republics

When annual migration data lack reliability, scholars apply alternative methods for estimating international migration. Yet, researchers note that alternative approaches have primarily been tested on developed countries, rather than developing countries that usually have dramatic migration shifts. I close this research gap. I use the example of 15 former Soviet republics to demonstrate several conclusions. First, I show that such alternative approaches as immigration‐by‐origin data of receiving countries do not result in reliable and valid estimates of post‐Soviet migration, given the large variation that exists in how former Soviet republics define “migrant”. Second, I demonstrate that population censuses, while a more superior alternative, fail to capture temporary migrants. In developing countries, the international emigration is mainly due to temporary (undocumented labour) migration. Third, I suggest that scholars and policy‐makers should apply household surveys as a possible alternative. However, while this method seems promising, given the limited use of household surveys in migration measurement in the post‐Soviet republics, future research by both scholars and applied researchers should explore the advantages and limitations of household surveys as an alternative source for estimation of migration. Finally, I outline methodological guidelines that researchers and scholars can advance on migration issues in the post‐Soviet region.     

Trust,scepticism, and social order: A contribution from the sociology of scientific knowledge

The sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK), which studies the organisation and content of science, has made two original contributions to the understanding of social order at large. First, SSK scholars regard social order as a problem of establishing “cognitive order” and knowledge. A wealth of case studies has demonstrated that interpersonal trust is necessary to achieve agreement and shared perception among particular collectives of specialists. Second, SSK scholars insist that all types of cognitive order and knowledge, whether “scientific” or “lay,” are the result of socially organised scepticism being parasitic upon existing trust and background expectations (an argument that I call “the Parasitic View of Scepticism”). Sociologists with an interest in today's so‐called “knowledge” and “information” societies, and more specifically, in the social distribution and political uses of doubt and unknowns (including “post‐truth”), would benefit from adopting the Parasitic View of Scepticism and investigating the corrosive and generative consequences of scepticism on the trust relations and the cognitive/social order upon which it is based, in line with insights from the emerging fields of agnotology and the sociology of ignorance.     

Rural Migration,Rapid Growth,and Fear of Crime*

Abstract Although much research on rural “boomtowns” explores differences between rapid‐growth communities and more stable communities, it is logical to consider that residents within rural boomtowns experience community transitions in different ways. We examine a specific outcome, fear of crime, across three categories of community residents with different migration histories: lifetime residents, migrants who joined the boomtown community during its period of rapid growth, and post‐boom period migrants. This perspective is particularly interesting, given the likelihood that these three different categories of residents have had substantially different community experiences. Making use of survey data from two intermountain West communities that represent resource‐dependent transitions during the 1970s and 1980s (Evanston, Wyoming and Delta, Utah), we find that boom migrants express greater fear of crime than longer‐term residents or post‐boom migrants. The findings suggest that the longer‐term decline in fear of crime in “post‐boom” periods is not equal among residents.     

Conflating Apples and Oranges: Understanding Modern Forms of Racism

Social scientists generally agree that the post‐Civil Rights form of racism is different from that which existed in the Jim Crow‐era in the United States. However, beyond this agreement, what exactly modern racism is and “looks like” is debatable. With this in mind, a surprising and somewhat disturbing trend frequently occurs among social scientists that can have real consequences within academia and the general public: conflation. In naming a newly developed concept as “racism”, social scientists often conflate three interrelated concepts: racial prejudice, racial discrimination, and racism. This paper clarifies these three interrelated concepts and the problems with conflating them. Additionally, this paper describes many of the alternative conceptions of racism in the post‐Civil Rights era, identifying where conflation exists in each concept. In closing, the paper describes the implications of conflation for social science research and the American public.     

Political Position and Social Knowledge1

The nature of social cognition—how we “know about” the social world—is one of the most deceptively obvious problems for sociology. Because we know what we know, we often think that we know how or why we know it. Here, we investigate one particular aspect of social cognition, namely, what we will call “political ideology”—that is, people’s self‐placement on a dimension on which persons can be arrayed from left to right. We focus on that understanding that is in some ways the “ur‐form” of social cognition—our sense of how we stand by others in an implicit social formation whose meaning is totally relational. At the same time, these self‐conceptions seem to be of the greatest importance for the development of the polity and of civil society itself. Our question is, when citizens develop such a “political ideology,” what does this mean, and what do they do with it? We examine what citizens gain from their subjective placement on the dimension from liberalism to conservatism by using the results of a survey experiment that alters aspects of a hypothetical policy.     

Houellebecq,or, the Carnival of Spite

Despite their significance in social reality and in fiction, ressentiment and especially spite are surprisingly under‐researched topics. As the repressed other of the contemporary post‐political society, they often combine political impotence and enjoyment in passivity, two experiences that are closely related to the increasing transformation of the “city” into the state of nature, of politics to bio‐politics (or post‐politics) and of the “social” into the simulacra (the society of spectacle). The article discusses ressentiment and spite in Houellebecq's fiction, by taking point of departure in the way he depicts the contemporary society, combining this with a discussion of his artistic position and the affective economy of ressentiment and spite in his work. Finally it asks whether it is possible to imagine a sociality, a “city,” without spite.     

Irregular Migration and Informal Economy in Southern and Central‐Eastern Europe: Breaking the Vicious Cycle?

The flexible and cheap labour that European “post‐industrial” economies are in need of is often facilitated by undeclared labour. The undocumented migrant, from his/her part, relatively easily finds work that suits his ‐‐ at least initial ‐‐ plans. What lies behind this nexus between irregular migration and informal economy? To what extent can this nexus be attributed to the structural features of the so‐called “secondary”, as opposed to “primary”, labour market? And how does migration policy correlate with this economic context and lead to the entrapment of migrants in irregularity? Finally, can this vicious cycle of interests and life‐strategies be broken and what does the experience of the migrants indicate in this respect? This paper addresses these questions via an exploration of the grounds upon which irregular migration and the shadow economy complement each other in southern Europe (SE) and central and Eastern Europe (CEE) (two regions at different points in the migration cycle). In doing so, the dynamic character of the nexus between informal economy and irregular migration will come to the fore, and the abstract identity of the “average” undocumented migrant will be deconstructed.     

Farm Boys and Wild Men: Rurality,Masculinity, and Homosexuality*

Abstract In this paper I explore cultural constructions of “rural gay masculinity,” focusing first on the stereotype of the “rustic sodomite” seen in a number of Hollywood movies; second, on the construction of an idyllic Eden in the gay imaginary; and third, on gendered and sexualized performances among members of the men's movement and the “radical fairies.” In doing so, I suggest how the rural/urban divide is meshed, in complex and distinct ways, with homosexual/heterosexual and masculine/feminine dichotomies in cultural texts and practices. Set against these representations, of course, are the lives of homosexual men born and raised in the country: I discuss accounts of the lives of “farm boys” as a way of contextualizing and complexifying the dominant modes of representation outlined. In all of these portrayals, “rural gay masculinity” is figured in distinct ways, especially in relation to urban effeminacy. I end by calling for further exploration of these issues in an effort to more fully theorize the cultural meanings and experiences of “rural gay masculinity.”     

Racist humor: then and now

While recent scholarship has examined the capacity of race‐based humor to “upend” racial inequalities, or has focused on comedic “heroes” who use humor “subversively” to challenge racism, less attention has been paid to the evolution of racist humor and its continued role in supporting dominant racial ideologies. This article reviews key works on the historical and current functions of racist humor in the United States, in order to situate racist humor as a social practice that has contributed to the development, maintenance, and contestation of an ideology of white supremacy. First, I review the historical role of racist humor in supporting pro‐slavery ideology, in order to see that racist humor played a critical role in racial formation and domination. I focus on literature that examines the way racial ridicule operated in the pre‐civil rights era (e.g., blackface) and the way such race‐based comedy was used as a cultural form of racialization that supported the development of an ideology of white supremacy throughout this period. Then, I point to how the widespread use of racist humor of the pre‐civil rights era was challenged by the civil rights movement, and how this changed the ways in which racist humor was perceived/operated, in public and private, in the post‐civil rights era. Finally, I conclude by suggesting some areas where an examination of racist humor is in need of critical attention and analysis in the current era of “color‐blindness.”     

The impossibility of loving: blanchot,community, sexual difference

This paper aims to clarify Blanchot's notion of community and his practice of communism through, first, an account of his involvement in the Events of May 1968 and, second, an exploration of The Unavowable Community, in which Blanchot reads a short novel by Marguerite Duras, which recounts the tropisms of a brief relationship between a young woman and a homosexual man. As I show, Blanchot's affirmation of what he calls “the impossibility of loving”, which emerges from his reading of Duras, is linked to what he calls “worklessness [désoeuvrement]”; that is, the active process of loosening or undoing that contests any attempt to establish a community around a shared essence. I will claim that it is by attending to the relationship to worklessness that one might attend to what Blanchot calls the “spaces of freedom” that open around us: to those happenings which are not enclosed by prevailing determinations of the social space. A further aim of this paper is to address the concerns of Jacques Derrida, for whom Blanchot's writings on community betray what he calls in Politics of Friendship a “schematic of filiation”, in which the relation to the brother is the privileged model for the relation to the Other. I also provide an account of Blanchot's negotiation of Levinas's account of the relationship between ethics and eros as it is presented in Totality and Infinity.     

“As Far as They Knew I Came from France”: Stigma,Passing, and Not Speaking about the Holocaust

Today we recognize that storytelling plays an important role in helping survivors of traumatic episodes such as sexual abuse, military combat, or genocide refashion a sense of self and “work through” their traumatic experiences. But before the Holocaust was named and widely acknowledged and the diagnosis of post‐traumatic stress had emerged, survivors of Hitler's genocidal policies struggled to tell their stories in a world that did not particularly wish to hear them. While most accounts of Holocaust survivors’ postwar experiences focus on themes of redemption, adjustment, and integration, my analysis of interviews with Holocaust survivors suggests during their first two decades living in the United States they were often silenced by individuals they encountered. I use Goffman's analysis of stigma to document how and why this silencing occurred, and with what consequences, providing an account of the interactions survivors had with family members, neighbors and acquaintances, and the strategies of identity management that survivors devised.     

Fame,Social Media Use,and Ethics

This essay addresses two journalists' very public criticism of a blog that chronicles a woman's fight with cancer. I examine the role of fame in this controversy. Are the expectations for maintaining “privacy” actually stricter for people who are not famous? How do shifting boundaries between private and public (exacerbated by social media, which allow anybody to have a “public” persona) and shifting understandings of what constitutes “fame” affect the traditional understandings of what is appropriate to share?     

On Moralism and Ethics: Associations to Henry Abelove’s “Freud,Male Homosexuality,and the Americans”

Henry Abelove (1986) writes that Freud was troubled by what he saw as moralistic leanings pervading the theory and practice of early American psychoanalysis. Drawing on Erikson’s (1976) distinction between moralism and ethics, my associations to Abelove’s still very timely paper explore the psychological “deals” we all tend to make between moralism and ethics. I begin with Freud’s less than progressive views of female homosexuality. I then focus on the way that what I have called normative unconscious processes enter contemporary theory and practice. I draw attention to a continued presence in our theories of a straight/gay binary (which, according to Abelove, Freud contested), and I give an example of the effects of an unconscious adherence to neoliberal cultural norms. I conclude with the suggestion that, although fraught, it is nonetheless crucial to think about what is “the good.”