Performance and Performativity: Undoing Fictions of Women Business Owners

This article explores the representation of women small business owners in three contemporary novels; Chocolat, The Shipping News and Back When We Were Grownups. The primary contribution is to demonstrate how fiction can both challenge and collude in dominant constructions of entrepreneurship, which is more generally gendered as male and masculine. Judith Butler's thinking on performativity with regard to gender and sexual desire is applied to women's identities and extended to include their behaviour as entrepreneurs. The article demonstrates that these novels both ‘do’ and ‘undo’ gender and business ownership. They portray women who are successful in business while displaying culturally accepted norms of femininity but who are set apart from other female characters. However, their partial and conflictual identification with norms of gender and entrepreneurship could lead a reader to question those norms and through the undoing of the protagonists, the novels offer alternative performances and performativities of doing gender and of doing business.     

'You've gotta learn how to play the game': homeless women's use of gender performance as a tool for preventing victimization

As a masculinist space, ‘the streets’ present a variety of dangers to homeless women, a fact that has received too little attention within the social science literature. This study utilizes data drawn from interviews with homeless women and service providers in Edinburgh, San Francisco, Vancouver, Montreal and Ottawa, to explore the complex survival strategies that homeless women develop to prevent criminal victimization. Through women's words, we see that gender is understood strategically as performance. Four gender performances are identified and discussed: the ‘femininity simulacrum’, the ‘masculinity simulacrum’, ‘genderlessness’ and ‘passing’. We discussed how each of these performances is employed in the pursuit of safety and security in frequently violent and chaotic social spaces.     

Understanding Sexual Minority Health Disparities in Rural Areas

This article reviews research from several disciplines including sociology, psychology, and public health to examine recent inconsistencies in findings of rural/urban health disparities among sexual minority populations. Previous work has found that sexual minorities (lesbian, gay, and bisexual individuals) report worse health than their heterosexual counterparts on many physical and mental health measures. To understand this occurrence, scholars have situated these findings most often within either minority stress or fundamental cause frameworks. These theories attribute health differences to unique stressors and stigmatization experienced by sexual minorities within a heteronormative social climate. This review provides an overview of specific health disparities by gender and sexual orientation, critically examines research on rural/urban health differences among sexual minorities, and offers three avenues for future research to help remedy the inconsistent results of previous rural/urban sexual minority health disparities research. Discussions of the ‘rural effect,’ rural social support resources, and the importance of geographic region for health are included as opportunities to further social scientific research on sexual minority health disparities.     

Predictors of Family Support and Well-Being Among Black and Latina/o Sexual Minorities

ABSTRACT

Sexual minorities are receiving an increasing amount of attention within sociological research on families. However, much of the existing work on these families has been limited to largely White, middle-class, and highly educated individuals. Using national data from the Social Justice Sexuality Project, this study fills a much-needed gap by exploring predictors of family support and the relationship between family support and well-being among Black and Latina/o sexual minorities. We find that sexual identity, how out one is to one's family, and relationship status predict levels of family support. In addition, we find that among Black and Latina/o individuals, family support is an important factor influencing health and well-being. Other social statuses such as gender identity, sexual identity, and relationship status are associated with happiness and self-rated health as well. Our work suggests that sexual minorities of color have unique family dynamics that should be studied from an intersectional perspective. Further investigation into the family dynamics of sexual minorities of color should pay particular attention to individuals' positionality within systems of gender, racial, and sexual identity disadvantage to help understand their health and well-being.     

Legal discourse and the cultural intelligiblity of gendered meanings1

This paper considers the methodological challenges that ‘post-modern’ approaches to gender ( Cameron 2005 ) pose for the field of language and gender. If we assume that gender cannot be ‘read off’ the identities of speakers, but rather is a social process by which individuals come to make cultural sense, then how do we best investigate this process? As Stokoe (2005) and Stokoe and Smithson (2002) have argued, it is problematic within such frameworks to conduct research that pre-categorizes individuals as women and men, since it is individuals' constitution as women or men that should be the issue under investigation. Indeed, for Butler (1990: 145), to understand ‘identity as a practice … is to understand culturally intelligible subjects as the resulting effects of a rule-bound discourse’ (emphasis in original). This suggests that we attend to cultural norms of intelligibility (i.e. the ‘rule-bound discourse’) and their effects. Following Blommaert (2005) and Woolard (forthcoming) , in this paper I investigate a speech event, a courtroom trial dealing with sexual assault, where understandings of social identities and categories (i.e. ‘norms of intelligibility’) are not only evident in the local talk of speakers and hearers, but also in the recontextualizations of this local talk by powerful institutional representatives (i.e. judges). By examining such recontextualizations of courtroom talk, gender is not ‘read off’ the identities of individuals (i.e. courtroom participants) but rather investigated as it appears in the cultural sense-making frameworks of judges. Moreover, given that judges are the ultimate interpreters of the linguistic representations of courtroom talk, this paper also demonstrates some of the social consequences associated with the performance of culturally intelligible and unintelligible gendered identities.     

Turkish and Moroccan Dutch professionals in social work

This article describes the perspective of newly started female Turkish and Moroccan Dutch professionals in social work and explores how they connect to the social work profession. Social work in the Netherlands attracts many of these young ‘new’ professionals. These second-generation women from a Muslim background are considered a ‘progressive force’ within their communities and can play an important role in ‘remaking the mainstream’. Increasing diversity and complexity go hand in hand with high expectations and claims. Muslim, gender, ethnic and professional identities have to be combined and demand high flexibility in doing boundary work.     

Outness among LGBTQ Social Work Students in North America: The Contribution of Environmental Supports and Perceptions of Comfort

This study examines various environmental factors that may impact a lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or queer (LGBTQ) social work student's level of ‘outness’ (disclosure) with regard to their sexual orientation or gender identity. An internet-based survey was conducted, comprised of LGBTQ undergraduate and graduate students from social work programs across North America (n = 1,018). Utilizing Pearson's chi square analysis, significant associations correlated between outness and the following six areas: (1) LGBTQ student perception of other students' overall level of comfort with their sexual orientation or gender identity within the program; (2) the number of faculty that know about their sexual orientation or gender identity; (3) the number of students that know about their sexual orientation or gender identity; (4) how supported they felt with regard to their LGBTQ identity within the program; (5) the percent of faculty that are supportive of LGB and Q issues; and (6) awareness of openly LGBTQ administrators or staff members. Implications for social work education and practice are examined, as are suggestions for continued research.     

Gendered Identities in the Work of Overseas Tour Reps

Gender construction within the tourism and leisure industry is under‐researched. In this article, we draw on empirical research on overseas tour reps to consider the ways in which men and women working alongside each other in the same feminized role ‘do gender’. In particular we explore how these workers deal with the particular dilemmas of the sexualization of women at work and the men reps’ potential threat to their heterosexuality, in a role where the boundaries between work and play are ambiguous. We argue that reps reveal masculinities and femininities that comply with traditional expectations. Young men reps are portrayed in ‘laddish’ terms in relation to their engagement with alcohol and sexual relationships with guests. Women reps emphasize their role as providers of emotional labour and taking control of guests’ perceptions and report refraining from sexual relationships with guests. Even within the same work role in this case study, men and women appear to construct different work identities.     

Race and the beauty premium: Mechanical Turk workers’ evaluations of Twitter accounts

ABSTRACT

Race, gender, and physical attractiveness strongly affect perceptions of trustworthiness and subsequent face-to-face interactions. This study examines how social media users’ perceived gender, race, and physical attractiveness can impact their standing online. We test these broad hypotheses by having Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) workers evaluate a sample of 816 Twitter accounts. Our results show a ‘beauty premium,’ where MTurk workers say they are more likely to follow Twitter accounts with attractive pro?le photos, and attractive photos are positively associated with evaluations of trust. However, very attractive Black male and female Twitter accounts are associated with lower evaluations of trust compared to their White counterparts. These findings suggest that social media users’ social characteristics, perceived from their username or profile image, can replicate offline inequality online.     

A Serious Researcher or Just Another Nice Girl?: Doing Gender in a Male-Dominated Scientific Community

This paper explores how we as female researchers are constructing our professional identities in a male-dominated scientific world. In particular, we focus on the extent to which patriarchal articulations of professional identities influence female academics' self-concept and consciousness of their own abilities. We believe that the business school in which we work reproduces certain inequalities systematically, if unintentionally. We are especially interested in the way in which we, as part of the scientific community, are ourselves discursively producing and reproducing the gender division based on differences of sex. In other words, how we ‘do gender’ in a particular organizational setting and when assuming a particular organizational role. The argument of this paper rests on the belief that the social construction of gender identities is not taking place only in the interaction of persons but also in the discourses within which those interactions occur. Identity and the meaning it implies are located here especially in language use. Discourses not only constitute meanings for terms and practices, but they also engender personal identities. Identity is not seen as fixed but rather as actively negotiated and transformed in discourse.     

‘Show us your frilly,pink underbelly’: Men administrative assistants doing masculinities and femininity

Research on men tokens (or numerical minorities) at work has focused on the processes by which men try to claim hegemonic masculine identities for themselves and how workplace interactants support or reject these attempts. In contrast to masculinity studies, token theory has paid less attention to non‐hegemonic masculinities. Using interviews with men administrative assistants, I develop a more comprehensive understanding of men tokens' gender performances and their significance for gender inequality. I present a four‐part typology: hegemonic masculinity, alternative masculinity, critical masculinity and male femininity. The categories are differentiated along two axes: support for hegemonic masculinity and support for hierarchical, binary gender.     

User‐generated online queer media and the politics of queer visibility

In this article, we review sociological research on the politics of queer self‐presentation and visibility in user‐generated online media, such as personal homepages, blogs, YouTube vlogs, and queer‐specific social networking sites. Using an intersectional lens to attend to multiple axes of identity, the review offers a deeper understanding of how online queer media impact self‐presentation and visibility, while also privileging certain racial, sexual, and gender identities and practices over others. Online platforms can serve as spaces of resistance wherein queer people not only make themselves visible but also redefine dominant conceptions of identity, as well as the boundaries between public and private life. However, our review also finds that online spaces of queer self‐presentation often become another space for the reinforcement of dominant norms pertaining to various axes of one's identity. Given that the advent of user‐generated media and the Internet has facilitated the mobilization of queer people worldwide, an understanding of queer self‐presentation in online media demonstrates how new iterations of sex, gender, and sexuality are constructed in a technological era by queer‐identified people themselves, and how people can both resist and reify dominant social hierarchies across boundaries of space and time.     

Mixed Messages: Inconsistent Parental Mediation Indirectly Predicts Teens’ Online Relational Aggression

Although the predictors of off-line relational aggression have been examined in prior work, less is known about the factors that contribute to online relational aggression perpetration and victimization. This study examined parental restrictive and active mediation of teenagers’ social media use as potential predictors of these outcomes. We were particularly interested in understanding whether parental agreement about media rules and the consistency with which mediation was implemented had implications for teens’ social media use, conflict with parents, and experience with online relational aggression. We conducted an online survey of 814 adolescents from the United States (14- to17-year-olds), asking about perceived agreement between parents about media rules, parental mediation styles, the teens’ social media use, and their experiences with online relational aggression. Results showed that parental rule agreement negatively predicted inconsistent parental mediation. Inconsistent parental mediation predicted more adolescent social media use and more parent-teen conflict over media rules, which in turn, predicted both online victimization and perpetration.     

Sexual Orientation,Gender, and Gender Identity Microaggressions: Toward an Intersectional Framework for Social Work Research

ABSTRACT

Professional ethics compel social workers to address all forms of discrimination and oppression. Microaggressions can contribute to health disparities for marginalized groups; yet, little is known about the frequency, mechanisms, and impact of microaggressions on sexual minorities, cisgender women, and gender minorities—particularly for those with intersecting marginalized identities. This article extends microaggression literature by exploring interrelated constructs of sexual orientation, gender, and gender identity microaggressions, and offering recommendations for future research using an intersectional lens to foster an integrated and complex understanding of microaggressions. Implications of an intersectional microaggression framework for social work education and practice are discussed.     

Digital photographic practices as expressions of personhood and identity: variations across school leavers and recent retirees

Over the last two decades, digital photography has been adopted by young and old. Many young adults easily take photos, share them across multiple social networks using smartphones, and create digital identities for themselves consciously and unconsciously. Is the same true for older adults? As part of a larger mixed-methods study of online life in the UK, we considered digital photographic practices at two life transitions: leaving secondary school and retiring from work. In this paper, we report on a complex picture of different kinds of interactions with visual media online, and variation across age groups in the construction of digital identities. In doing so, we argue for a blurring of the distinctions between Chalfen’s ‘Kodak Culture’ and Miller and Edwards’ ‘Snaprs’. The camera lens often faces inwards for young adults: tagged ‘Selfies’ and images co-constructed with social network members commonly contribute to their digital identities. In contrast, retirees turn the camera’s lens outwards towards the world, not inwards to themselves. In concluding, we pay special attention to the digital social norms of co-creation of self and balancing convenience and privacy for people of varying ages, and what our findings mean for the future of photo-sharing as a form of self-expression, as today’s young adults grow old and retire.     

From Work as Sex to Sex as Work: Networks, ‘Others’ and Occupations in the Analysis of Work

While once upon a time the social science of work and organization neglected or marginalized gender and sexuality, we have now lost sight of what people actually do, that is to say the activity of work. Gender and sexuality have been identified as crucial to organizational dynamics and, notwithstanding different theoretical emphases, this paradigm has become increasingly influential. We argue (contrary to most of its protagonists) that — within this model — the significance of sex and gender for organization rests principally on their role in the production of identities rather than in what they can tell us about production or work in any wider sense. The article highlights parallels with the ways in which prostitution is now generally understood, whether the emphasis is on subordination or agency. This literature also emphasizes gender relations and identities, even where the focus is on re–writing ‘sex as work’. We argue that this focus neglects the wider networks in which all work, whether mainstream or otherwise, is embedded and that a full analysis must take due account of both these networks and the discursive production of identities. Examples — of work in the finance and sex industries — are used to substantiate this argument and a case is made for the importance of the Chicago School’s analysis of occupations.     

Facebook Bras and #digitalharems: Fantasies of Mimesis and the Transgressions of Aliaa Elmahdy and Amina Sboui

Abstract

This article presents a horizontal reading of Aliaa Elmahdy's and Amina Sboui's corporeal interventions alongside the efficacy of digital platforms in order to consider how algorithmic and normative protocols related to content filtering on social media amplify certain forms of political communication while prohibiting others. I argue that readings of Elmahdy's and Sboui's bodily politics through the lens of liberal feminism rely on what I call discourses of mimetic networking, where particular mediated events become reterritorialized as part of an archival knowledge of ‘Arabness’. This is done through the organization of data via hashtagging and content moderation, and through rhetorics of techno-optimism that mirror ‘first contact’ narratives which gender, racialize, and flatten complex and fluid engagements with new media in non-US/European contexts. The article concludes with a consideration of how the persistence of their corporeality relays with both normative and programmatic parameters online to make alternative visions of communication possible.     

Performances of social class,race and gender through youth subculture: putting structure back in to youth subcultural studies

This paper aims to advance debates in youth studies about the contemporary relevance of social structures of class, race and gender to the formation of youth subcultures. I demonstrate how drawing on a cultural class analysis and education literature on learner identities and performativity can be productive in theorising the continued significance of class, and indeed also race and gender in young people's lives. In examining school-based friendships and (sub)cultural forms through empirical research in urban schools, I argue that not only are young people's subcultural groups structured by class, race and gender but also they are integral to the production of these identities. By examining the discursive productions of two school-based subcultures as examples: the ‘Smokers’ and the ‘Football’ crowd, I further argue that these identity positions embody resources or capitals which have differing value in the context of the urban school and thus demonstrate how race, class and gender privilege are maintained and reproduced through youth subculture.     

Evidence‐loving rock star chief medical officers: Female leadership amidst COVID‐19 in Canada

This article presents a feminist poststructuralist inquiry perspective on how news and social media discourse around the COVID‐19 pandemic is presenting a potential shift in hegemonic representations of masculine leadership. I am informed by organizational rules and sensemaking theories, and consider how Canadian and international female leaders are showing resilience, emotion and vulnerability as they help lead their countries through these uncertain times. I reflexively ground my observations in my own sensemaking and personal experiences. Despite reservations, I am hopeful. There are indications that the ‘rules of the game’ are starting to be challenged, and feminine frameworks that question traditional gender roles are disrupting conceptions around ‘business as usual’.     

Sexuality and the city: exploring the experience of minority sexual identity through storytelling

This article explores the discursive construction of sexual identity through organizational storytelling, in the London office of a global investment bank, InvestCo. Work on the identity of sexual minorities in work organizations is rare, and even more so in the context of an institution such as a bank. Minority sexual identities have largely been ignored by the organizational studies and diversity literatures, but organizations and the researchers who study them, are starting to turn their attention to this previously silenced population. A major difficulty for researchers in this area, and one which has been well researched and documented in other areas of identity construction, is how to access and research this area. This article puts forward the idea that storytelling is an effective way of exploring this still sensitive topic. The results of the research are presented according to different ways in which minority sexual identity is constructed in organizations. This includes a discussion of social identities, displayed and hidden identities, changing identities, accepted and castigated identities and finally congruent and incongruent identities. The article also identifies themes which emerge from the stories about the stories themselves; themes of hidden identities, mistakes, victimhood and resistance. Although of relevance to those interested in the experience of sexual minorities in organizations, the storytelling discursive approach opens up the subject's experiences to a wider audience interested in diversity, discourse theory, ethnography and organizational life in general. The level of access is unusual and the double level story telling research approach could be of use in other areas.