Now and again: Eventful experience as a resource in senior activism

ABSTRACT

Shared memories shape relations among social movement participants and their organizations. However, scholars often ignore how experience operates as a means of solidifying attachment in group contexts. In contrast, I argue that activism depends on how participants publicly recall events. In this, I integrate a social memory perspective with the examination of activist movements. Through narrative, participants build engagement by presenting the self-in-history as a model for collective action. I refer to this as eventful experience, utilizing memorable moments as a resource for generating commitment. Movements depend upon members communicating the critical moments of their lives, embedding personal timelines in group culture. The linkage of personal experience and public events is a strategy by which individuals motivate collective action. Drawing on a thirty-month ethnography of a progressive senior citizen activist group in Chicago, I examine how members use an awareness of temporality to build a culture of action. Each movement group uses the past experiences of participants to build their culture – what Jasper refers to as taste in tactics, incorporating past successes, present plans, and imagined futures into a call for direct action.     

Bringing our bodies and ourselves back in: reflections on a past, present, and future "medical sociology"

This paper is a revision of an address given upon receipt of the Leo G. Reeder Award for Distinguished Scholarship in Medical Sociology. It was presented on August 14, 1990 to The Medical Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association during its annual meetings, held in Washington, DC. Herein I reflect on the structured silence of personal bodily experience and on the unfinished paradigmatic challenge of feminism as a way of leading to a new praxis in medical sociology.     

Story-telling, women's authority and the "Old Wife's Tale": "The Story of the Bottle of Medicine"

The focus of this article is a single personal narrative – a Shetland woman's telling of a story about two girls on a journey to fetch a cure for a sick relative from a wise woman. The story is treated as a cultural document which offers the historian a conduit to a past that is respectful of indigenous woman-centred interpretations of how that past was experienced and understood. The "story of the bottle of medicine" is more than a skilful telling of a local tale; it is a memory practice that provides a path to a deeper and more nuanced understanding of a culture. Applying perspectives from anthropology, oral history and narrative analysis, three sets of questions are addressed: the issue of authenticity; the significance of the narrative structure and storytelling strategies employed; and the nature of the female performance. Ultimately the article asks what this story can tell us about women's interpretation of their own history.     

"THERE ARE SURVIVORS": Telling A Story Of Sudden Death

This article is a personal narrative of a family drama enacted in the aftermath of my brother's death in an airplane crash. "True" stories such as this fit in the space between fiction and social science, joining ethnographic and literary writing, and autobiographical and sociological understanding. My goal is to reposition readers vis a vis authors of texts of social science by acknowledging potential for optional readings and encouraging readers to "experience an experience" that can reveal not only how it was for me, but how it could be or once was for them. This experimental form permits researchers and readers to acknowledge and give voice to their own emotional experiences and encourages ethnographic subjects (co-authors) to reclaim and write their own lives.     

Globalization and the increase in transnational care work: The flip side

Abstract

I argue that to understand the reality of who is (or is not) accessing care globally, we must examine the flip side of the flows of women migrating transnationally to perform caring labor. The flip side includes the levels of care the migrants experience and that attained by their families in their absence. Most migrants endure a care deficit, working in physically and emotionally stressful situations where they encounter many forms of discrimination. Their families may be better off economically, but not emotionally. I examine the role of the state, pointing out that many governments face a double bind—needing women to migrate for economic reasons but not wanting citizens abused abroad or the accompanying adverse publicity. I critique several government responses to this dilemma and conclude by assessing recent international initiatives to address migration problems, suggesting they lack perspective on how globalization influences women's migration.     

“经验研究”与“理论研究”——古典社会学、心理学的诠释学意涵

当前中国社会学中的一个突出问题是,"经验研究"与"理论研究"两个阵营之间相互质疑。然而,从当代诠释学的角度则有"经验"与"理论"一致性的命题:经验是文本的类似物。这一命题原创性地蕴含在社会学和心理学的奠基者詹姆斯、涂尔干、弗洛伊德和韦伯的思想之中,而本文的主体部分即发掘这些古典思想的诠释学意涵。文章指出,基于这一诠释学命题的理论建构,在解决中国社会学中两个阵营对峙问题的同时,将文化自觉置于学科建设的基础位置。     

Negotiating Personal Experience over the Lifetime: Narrative Elasticity as an Analytic Tool

Sociology and neighboring disciplines have produced different analytic tools to examine the dialogical relationship between individuals and society (“narrative work,” “identity work,” “moral career,” “moral breakdown”). However, the question of how individuals negotiate the interpretation of personal experience over their lifetimes in a changing cultural context remains unexplored. This article introduces narrative elasticity as a feature of narrative work and as a time‐sensitive analytic tool for conducting inquiries into processes of temporal retraction and expansion of what storytellers conceive as the normal order of significance. The application of this tool to the analysis of mature and elderly Chileans' life stories shows how cultural change occurs at the individual level, considers factors that motivate and inhibit processes of reinterpretation of personal experience, and identifies different levels at which it operates.     

Tattoos and Teddy Bears: Fetishism on Exhibit in Paris

I add a developmental perspective to the picture Roth and Freedgood have elaborated regarding the significance of surfaces. With Roth's attent ion to the analytic couple and adult intersubjective interaction, I include the mother–infant dyad—what I have written about, following Winnicott, as the “nursing couple.” I now employ Meltzer's evocative concept regarding the aesthetic impact of the mother. From this perspective regarding the early maternal relation, I then address the anxieties that Freedgood, especially, highlights in relation to culture and gender. I emphasize that we communicate to and with a maternal object that is herself a complex object both in her surface and in her interior. I contend that jewelry is a concrete representation of the mother's most interesting bodily surface.     

Adornment as a Method of Interior Design

In this essay, predominant psychoanalytic perspectives on the meanings and functions of bodily adornment are interrogated from a feminist perspective. An argument for theorizing the prolonged, if not perpetual, utility of surface-sensory experience to ongoing personal development, continuing into adulthood, is posited. Through a discussion of the properties of the skin, a claim for understanding experience that takes place at the skin surface in adult intersubjective engagement is developed. A case vignette is presented that chronicles the operationalization of these hypotheses.     

The Living Gesture and the Signifying Moment

Drawing from Peircean semiotics, from the Greek conception of phronesis, and from considerations of bodily awareness as a basis of reasonableness, I attempt to show how the living gesture touches our deepest signifying nature, the self, and public life. Gestural bodily awareness, more than knowledge, connects us with the very conditions out of which the human body evolved into its present condition and remains a vital resource in the face of a devitalizing, rationalistic consumption culture. It may be precisely these deep‐rooted abilities for what I term “self‐originated experience” that can ultimately offset automatism.     

Letters to Louis: Marital Dissolution Through the Social Construction of Lived Experience

This article examines the author's narrative within letters written to her husband over a span of several years. I examine how a marriage dissolves from the inside out, from the perspective of the lived experience of one member of the marriage. The primary research focus is how individuals living within troubled marriages construct their own marriage. Although we know much about what predicts divorce, little research considers the social construction of marriage from the perspective of the person living within that marriage. Drawing on symbolic interactionism, this autoethnographic analysis of my letters to Louis reveals an insider's view of how a marriage dissolves. Gottman's Oral History Interview coding is used as a tool of analysis throughout.     

When the Lord builds the house: An autoethnographic account of working in an evangelical for-profit organizational culture

Religion is often perceived as a private topic, thus belonging outside the traditional conceptualization of a work environment. However, religion is a pervasive organizing framework and an understanding of its role in the workplace is needed from a communicative perspective. In the following autoethnography, I describe my experience working for a Christian for-profit homebuilder – starting with new employee orientation and moving through my final day at Local Homes. I focus on instances where tension emerges between expectations and reality as I learn about and interact within the overtly evangelical Christian organizational culture. The tension is illustrated through four vignettes that correspond to the traditional phases of socialization. Through writing this autoethnographic account, I attempt to move beyond my personal experience and situate my story within larger disciplinary and societal conversations about the socialization process in a religious organization. With this goal in mind, I conclude with methodological and theoretical implications.     

What makes you stronger: age and cohort differences in personal growth after cancer

Using two waves of the National Survey of Midlife Development in the United States, I compare changes in personal growth over a 10 year period among cancer survivors and individuals without cancer. Moreover, I examine joint effects of age and cohort on personal growth after a cancer diagnosis. The theoretical framework of this study integrates impairment, resilience, and thriving perspectives. Findings reveal that, although personal growth declines with age for all individuals regardless of cohort and cancer status, cancer slows the decline in personal growth with age in 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s birth cohorts, yet accelerates the age-related decline in the 1920s cohort. I argue that a sociological perspective can enhance our understanding of the interplay of developmental and sociocultural influences on psychological adjustment to cancer. Seemingly idiosyncratic psychological reactions to cancer partly reflect macrolevel processes represented by cohort differences.     

Teaching Sociology in Community College: Balancing Ideals with Institutional Constraints

Many professionals experience conflict between personal ideals about the meaning and importance of their work, and the structural limitations of the workplace. This conflict presents professionals with the challenge of how to hold true to their ideals within a non-supportive or even hostile environment. In this paper, I describe my experiences balancing my ideals about teaching, learning, and the purpose of a college education with the institutional constraints of a community college. There are three main sections in this paper. First is a discussion of the reasons I chose a career in community college teaching. The second section focuses on the institutional constraints I have encountered over the first 5 years of my career. In the third section, I explain how I have attempted to balance my ideals with the structural limitations of the college where I teach. Throughout the paper, I blend personal narrative with the relevant literature. In doing so, I intend to use my personal experience as a lens for discussing the challenges and possibilities that characterize community college teaching in general.     

TEACHING IN LITHUANIA—THE PERSONAL AND THE PROFESSIONAL

The aim of this paper is to demonstrate the central role of the countertransference as a catalyst for understanding for both teacher and student. During a week of teaching basic psychoanalytic concepts to Lithuanian university students in central Lithuania, I discovered that there was an absence or lack of understanding between the group I was teaching and myself. Our expectations were very different. On a political, cultural level, I was faced with a Lithuanian understanding of the world that is quite different from a Western European perspective. This personal narrative explores how I used my countertransference to the group, and their countertransference to their clinical work, as a tool to begin to explore the professional issues we have in common and to struggle to understand the differences. It was impressive to observe, through the lived experience of this work, the development of a well‐functioning group that had overcome not only the difficulties that accompany large groups but that had taken on board a new way of thinking and working. I returned in October 2004 for a further week's teaching and a continuation of a joint teaching–learning enterprise.     

“Above the below”: body trauma as spectacle in social/media space

The exposure and, more particularly, self‐exposure of psychological and bodily trauma has become the central feature of our “postdocumentary” culture. TV talk shows, observational documentary, life‐style programming and reality television all facilitate the exhibition and consumption of personal pain and suffering (as well as joy and individual success). Generally speaking, this showcasing of personal trauma is a gendered one; with many of the established and newer formats dismissed as feminised media culture; with few, if any, intellectual pretensions. This is partly the case because the domain of emotional suffering, at least, has been conventionally designated a “feminine” one, with women especially, licensed to speak about bodily or psychological insecurity, vulnerability or damage. When “masculine” damage or trauma is at stake, its presentation and articulation in media culture takes on quite different forms and meanings. Bearing in mind this context, this essay examines an example of the new hybrid of reality TV and performance piece: the David Blaine event entitled “Above the Below”. It does so in order to explore the meanings, symbolics and ethics of the current specularisation of bodily trauma in social and media space; revealing the multiple ways in which an ethics of the self and of becoming is articulated in a popular form. Ultimately, the aim is to make more complex our understanding of “the apparently oxymoronic ‘popularity’ of trauma” as cultural text (Radstone , p. 189).

This dissolution of the boundary between inside and outside gives rise to a fourth aspect of the felt experience of physical pain, an almost obscene conflation of private and public. It brings with it all the solitude of absolute privacy with none of its safety, all the self‐exposure of the utterly public with none of its possibility for camaraderie or shared experience. Artistic objectifications of pain often concentrate on this combination of isolation and exposure. (Scarry , p. 53)     

Managing Identity in a Dirty Occupation: Male Strippers Experiences with Social Stigmas

In this research, I explore the social stigmas male strippers experience for engaging in a deviant occupation and the identity work they perform to maintain a positive sense of self. Specifically, I draw from 22 in-depth interviews with male exotic dancers and 18 months of fieldwork at a strip club. Overall, participants experienced three social stigmas as a result of stripping. These were reactions of shock and disgust, being targets of the “fag discourse,” and being falsely accused of being gay. Dancers used different techniques to manage these stigmas, such as passing, relying on narratives of professionalism, resisting feminine characterizations of themselves, and avoiding male patrons. Overall, these strategies proved to be effective in protecting their self-views.     

Feminism and Military Gender Practices: Israeli Women Soldiers in "Masculine" Roles

Women's military service is the focus of an ongoing controversy because of its implications for the gendered nature of citizenship. While liberal feminists endorse equal service as a venue for equal citizenship, radical feminists see women's service as a rei•cation of martial citizenship and cooperation with a hierarchical and sexist institution. These debates, however, tend to ignore the perspective of the women soldiers themselves.
This paper seeks to add to the contemporary debate on women's military service the subjective dimension of gender and national identities of women soldiers serving in "masculine" roles. I use a theory of identity practices in order to analyze the interaction between state institutions and identity construction. Based on in-depth interviews, I argue that Israeli women soldiers in "masculine" roles shape their gender identities according to the hegemonic masculinity of the combat soldier through three interrelated practices: (1) mimicry of combat soldiers' bodily and discursive practices; (2) distancing from "traditional femininity"; and (3) trivialization of sexual harassment.
These practices signify both resistance and compliance with the military dichotomized gender order. While these transgender performances subvert the hegemonic norms of masculinity and femininity, they also collaborate with the military androcentric norms. Thus, although these women soldiers individually transgress gender boundaries, they internalize the military's masculine ideology and values and learn to identify with the patriarchal order of the army and the state. This accounts for a pattern of "limited inclusion" that reaf•rms their marginalization, thus prohibiting them from developing a collective consciousness that would challenge the gendered structure of citizenship.     

Zen and the art of aut-ethnography: a tribute to Robert M. Pirsig

With the passing of Robert M. Pirsig, I felt that it was an appropriate time to write a tribute to his work and the influence it has had on my own theorising in regard to autistic ways of being. This reflection utilises the concept of an ‘aut-ethnography’ to examine passages that I had highlighted word by word when I first read Pirsig’s book: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. These fragments contain links to a number of theoretical ‘lines of flight’ within my own work and that of others, from his concepts of dynamic ‘quality’ to his discussion on the tension between scientific method and lived experience.