THE HYBRID CRITICISM OF PATRIARCHY: Rereading Kate Millett's Sexual Politics

While much might be said about the exclusion of feminist texts from the canon of sociological classics, I instead want to offer a rereading of Kate Millett's Sexual Politics to show how the development of feminist theory has depended on rereading disciplinary canons, thereby re-opening the borders between the disciplines, especially the border between literary criticism and social science. At a time when sociologists are participating in or at least attending to the debates over the relationship of fantasy and reality, fiction and history, polemic and academic discourse, rereading Sexual Politics offers an understanding of how these debates have arisen in relationship to feminist theory's ongoing challenge to the canonical distinction of social science from literary criticism. Thus, rather than press for the canonization of Sexual Politics as a sociological classic, I want to suggest that feminist theorizing needs to sustain itself as a social criticism that includes a transdisciplinary criticism of canonicity.     

Accomplishing Profession through Self‐Mockery

One influential sociological approach to profession has it that a profession is something constructed by social actors themselves and that this work is performed through the swapping of atrocity stories. While atrocity stories are an important resource for constructing profession, they are not the only ones available to social actors. In this article, I draw on field work in an academic engineering research laboratory to document how social actors use self‐mockery to construct profession. They do this in five ways, including through the use of background knowledge to interpret self‐mockery, by reserving self‐mockery for specific conditions separate from conditions where engineering knowledge is put on display, by maintaining a preference for self‐presentations that exclude self‐mockery toward the speaker's self during presentations in lab meetings and lectures in courses, through the selection of locally insignificant selves for mockery, and by assembling their own accounts of self‐mockery.     

Between the Living and Undead: How Zombie Cinema Reflects the Social Construction of Risk,the Anxious Self,and Disease Pandemic

The zombie film has become an important component of contemporary popular culture. The sociological nature of the themes addressed by these films reflect prominent social concerns, and lend themselves to sociological analysis as texts themselves. This article examines the zombie film genre, its history, predominant themes, and its illustration of sociological dynamics related to identity, collective behavior, disease, contagion, and the privileges that come from social inequality. Particular attention is placed on what the zombie films, themselves, can tell us about society and how they illustrate sociological principles. First, we examine the origins and history of zombie cinema. Next, we move to a discussion of the central narrative devices around which zombie films are organized. In particular, we focus on two narratives in zombie films: those that emphasize zombie possession; and those that focus on the sociological risks of zombie pandemics. The discussion then moves to an analysis of zombies as selves, and how zombie films express cultural anxieties about selfhood, loss of autonomy, and threats of de‐individualization. We then explore the roles of power and privilege in the social epidemiology of zombification, paying particular attention to how those who succumb to zombiedom illustrate the sociological dynamics of health disparities in the real world. Finally, the sociology of infectious disease is used to address how zombiedom correlates with real disease outbreaks, what we know about the social aspects of infectious disease transmission, and the sociology of pandemics.     

More than just a product: Strengthening literature in sociological analysis

Contemporary sociology of literature is predominantly shaped by the research of literary production, which approaches literary works as black boxes and subordinates them to social interactions and institutions. Even sociologists who recognize usefulness of literature for its inner quality often look at literary texts as mere passive objects to be translated into sociological discourse. In proposing a new sociology of literature, I first briefly outline the history of sociological studies of literature; second, I introduce “the state of the art” in the sociology of literature; third, I explore the relationship between sociology and literature in more general terms; and lastly, I discuss approaches and ideas with the potential to become components of a new research program, which would be a powerful alternative to the mainstream paradigms in sociological studies of literature. Such a program would make it clear that sociology can greatly benefit from cooperation with literature when sociologists are sensitive to the subtleties and (especially aesthetic) specificities of literary works.     

Collective efficacy, family attachment, and urban adolescent suicide attempts

The suicide rate among American adolescents between the ages of 14-25 has dramatically increased during the last 50 years, and this fact has been the focus of extensive social-scientific investigation. To date, however, research focusing on the joint effects of mental health, family, and contextual-level predictors on adolescents' suicidal behaviors is scarce. Drawing on Durkheim's classic macro-level approach to suicide and collective efficacy theory, we use data from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods (PHDCN) to examine the effect of informal social controls on adolescents' suicide attempts. Analyzing reports from 990 youth, we examine the hypothesis that neighborhood-level collective efficacy and family-level integration and social control independently affect suicide attempts. We also examine the extent to which they interact in their effects on suicidal behavior. Overall, results from multilevel logit models support the Durkheimian expectation that family attachment reduces the probability that adolescents will attempt suicide. The effect of collective efficacy is interactive in nature. Specifically, we find that collective efficacy significantly enhances the protective effect of family attachment and support on adolescent suicidal behaviors. We discuss findings within the context of social control theory.     

Troubles With Textual Authority In Sociology

This text raises questions about the dilemma of the authorial voice in sociology texts that presume to present factual, data-based narratives about other people and their lives. The discussion bears particularly on so-called qualitative and historical forms of sociological writing although the issues are equally alive for other sociological genres. The dilemma of the authorial voice has beer given rather wide attention of late in literary studies and in anthropology. Relatively little attention thus far has been given to the topic in professional sociology. By drawing on variant reflexive forms, the text seeks to bring its own production and grounds under examination in such a way to suggest how the dilemma is present for those writing substantive narrative texts.     

Cutting through the Silence: A Sociological Construction of Self-Injury

This project provides a sociological perspective on self-injury by assessing whether cutting is a learned behavior and whether practitioners use stigma management techniques. In-depth interviews via e-mail with self-reported self-injurers indicate cutting is learned from the self or from outside sources. Interviewees also discussed the stigma management techniques they use and whether they choose to disclose their behavior. The findings point to a potential increase in learned cutting from outside sources, and the potential for outside sources to help cutters maintain their behavior by providing each other with support.     

Systematic Generation of Theory in Family Sociology*

This paper describes a procedure for facilitating the generation of theory useful to family sociologists. This procedure is based upon a linguistic model, and it utilizes the metaphor of literary genre as a guide. A distinction is made between the construction and the generation of sociological theory. The suggestion is made that the generation perspective may enhance the ability of theorists to find subtle interconnections among phenomena and thereby to extend fields of sociological knowledge along novel paths. The procedure itself depends first upon the construction of a binary lexicon. One such lexicon consists of one matrix of concepts describing social structure from the perspective of stabilization of social relations and a complementary matrix describing structure from the perspective of destabilization. From these matrices, one concept is chosen as a metonym or as a metaphor to act as a basis for deriving connections among the other concepts in the matrices. The manipulation of concepts from both matrices permits the development of propositions suggesting ironies and contradictions in social relations. Examples of the use of this procedure are presented, and some unresolved problems are described.     

Knowing the social world through literature: Sociological reflections on Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities

The general thesis of this contribution is that 'literature' - which I very loosely define as any kind of imaginative and stylistically expressive presentation of experience through written language, typically with a narrative structure - offers a way of knowing the social world equal in cognitive value to the more scientific discourse of sociology. Just as scientific accounts of social life are not a priori superior to laypeople's accounts in terms of the claim to knowledge of phenomena - even though they may improve on laypeople's accounts by way of techniques of observation and methods of data analysis - so literary and scientific-sociological accounts of social reality differ only in the mode of linguistically communicating knowledge, not in the claim to knowledge itself. Literature may refer to fictional entities that do not exist, but it is no less capable of imparting knowledge and less no capable of being true. I defend this thesis first by way of some general remarks on the idea of literature as a medium of sociological knowledge and then turn to what I see as an exemplary instance of sociological insight to be gained through literary writing in Robert Musil's monumental novel of 1930-1942, The Man Without Qualities . I conclude with some further comments on the methodological issues raised by invoking literature as a vehicle of sociological communication, as well as on the context of Musil's writing in Austrian culture of the early twentieth century and his relationship to other sociologically significant writers of the modernist period.     

"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.     

Cosmopolitanism and the relevance of ‘zombie concepts’: the case of anomic suicide amongst Alevi Kurd youth

Against Beck's claims that conventional sociological concepts and categories are zombie categories, this paper argues that Durkheim's theoretical framework in which suicide is a symptom of an anomic state of society can help us understand the diversity of trajectories that transnational migrants follow and that shape their suicide rates within a cosmopolitan society. Drawing on ethnographic data collected on eight suicides and three attempted suicide cases of second‐generation male Alevi Kurdish migrants living in London, this article explains the impact of segmented assimilation/adaptation trajectories on the incidence of suicide and how their membership of a ‘new rainbow underclass’, as a manifestation of cosmopolitan society, is itself an anomic social position with a lack of integration and regulation.     

Emotions and the Self: Depression and Identity Change

Emotions hold a central place in sociological understandings of the self, both as a facet of identity management and as an outcome of self‐processes. We extend identity theory and research on emotions by suggesting that emotion may be another source of identity change and examine this using a longitudinal sample of newly married couples, focusing on person identities and depression. We find that individuals' identities change to become consistent with others' views. We also find that the more depressive symptoms that individuals experience, the more negative their identities. The identity meanings that change, however, are different for men and women.     

Social science and the poetics of public truth

I argue that sociological theory can be understood as a kind of poetic discourse and that sociological truth is itself a rhetorical construction. Once we see social scientific objectivity and innovation as linguistically constructed, we can reframe our criteria for judging the adequacy of sociological theories. We then notice that the meanings of such criteria as logical rigor, or correspondence to a factual or hermeneutic foundation, are themselves relative to different paradigms or genres, which in turn are shaped and assessed through prudent poetic judgment. Awareness of the literary, discursive character of social science knowledge should encourage a greater critical appreciation of truth generated through our own and other poetic forms.     

The sociology of subjectivity, and the subjectivity of sociologists: a critique of the sociology of gender in the Australian family

In this era of reflexive sociology it is commonplace that subjectivity is of great sociological concern, and that the comprehension by social researchers of their own subject position is essential. Still, old habits die hard. Focusing on selected texts in the sociology of the Australian family, this paper traces the effects of failing to focus the sociological gaze on subjectivity and its variation across society. Highlighted are some patterns of analytic misconstruction of subjectivity, especially the substitution of measurement for a theory of practice, and the projection by sociologists of their own class-specific subjectivity onto society at large. Ultimately, this misconstruction turns works like those discussed in this paper into a powerful denial of alternative subjectivities, and a reinforcement of the socially dominant perspective.     

A Postmodern Perspective on Black Suicides in the United States

Abstract

This paper offers an alternative explanation to the rationalist perspective of black suicides in the United States. It assumes a deconstructionist approach, offering the proposition that the social construction of reality in the black community is such that suicide among blacks occurs at a far greater number than their quantitative measures reveal.

The postmodern turn is far more interpretive in placing the reality of black suicide in context than the modernist language of Durkheim and others. The postmodern turn suggests that there is more to black suicides in the United States than meets the eye-more, in that the word, suicide, carries “traces” of other words and texts. Social workers, as enablers and facilitators, must grasp the significance of this social reconstruction if they are to have an impact upon the intertextual nature of black suicides.     

Revisiting the sociology of identities and selves with discursive resources

In recent years, a growing body of multidisciplinary research has used the concept of the discursive resource. Discursive psychologists, communications scholars, and sociologists have all used this concept. Discursive resources are clusters of categories supplied by culture that present explanations for past and future activities, provide individual and collective identities for self‐construction, and enable and constrain texts. In this essay, I describe how this research contributes to sociological theorizing of identity, and make some recommendations for researchers who wish to use these concepts or improve these concepts. Studies using the concept of the discursive resource contribute to sociological theorizing of identity by showing how discursive resources are related to important features of social life such as future talk; collective identities; space and time; and complex and political divisions of labor, culture, and postmodernity. I then conclude by suggesting that future research analyze the social distribution of discursive resources across different kinds of social environments.     

"Ordinary people" and "death work": Palestinian suicide bombers as victimizers and victims

Applying criminological/victimological concepts and theories, the study addresses the social processes involved in Palestinians' suicide terrorism and describes Palestinians' pathways to suicide bombing. The data are derived from in-depth interviews of 7 male and female Palestinians serving prison sentences in Israel for attempted suicide bombing. The social background, context, and experiences of the interviewees, including their recruitment, interactions with the organizations that produce suicide bombing, the tangible and intangible incentives and rewards that motivated them to become suicide bombers, their preparation for the mission, and the strategies employed by the organizations to sustain recruits' resolve to conform to the plan are described and analyzed. The implications of the findings for theory and public policy are drawn and discussed.     

Toward a Buddhist Sociology: Theories,Methods, and Possibilities

This article explores potential links between Buddhism and sociology, highlighting the many commonalities between sociology and Buddhism, with an emphasis on ways that Buddhist thought and practice may contribute to the field of sociology. What could Buddhism offer to our understanding of social institutions, social problems, and to the dynamics and possibilities for social change? The Four Noble Truths, central to Buddhist teachings, are explored in reference to their sociological theory applications. Finally, mindfulness practices that are endemic to Buddhism are explored as tools for sociologists to consider as they work reflexively, develop sociological insights, and pursue social justice.     

EXPANDING THE LITERARY HORIZON:

Although literary devices help postmodern sociologists distinguish their own perspectives from those of their subjects, literary borrowing also threatens to reduce the sociologist's perspective to one among many equivalent fictions. I argue that we can diminish this threat by expanding our notion of what literature can do. Current literary borrowings follow the institutionalized practice of separating literary from explanatory discourse, but pre-institutionalized precedents show that literature can serve to conceptualize situated behavior. I analyze one such precedent in the work of the poet John Keats (1795–1821), who formulated an almost Meadian interaction theory. Keat's use of unrealistic elements and an identifiable point of view to deploy them in his texts suggests ways in which sociologists might adapt literary conceptualization to foreground their understanding of the behavior they study.     

WHY BLACK PEOPLE TEND TO SHOUT! AN EARNEST ATTEMPT TO EXPLAIN THE SOCIOLOGICAL NEGATION OF THE ATLANTA SOCIOLOGICAL LABORATORY DESPITE ITS POSSIBLE UNPLEASANTNESS

The Atlanta Sociological Laboratory, 1895-1924, comprised the first American school of sociology (Wright 2002). Despite this fact, the sociological accomplishments of this group of scholars are relatively absent from the existing sociological literature. Data collected for this investigation indicate that the Atlanta Sociological Laboratory has been rendered sociologically invisible because of race prejudice, the perception that the school's findings were ungeneralizable, that their methods of research unsophisticated and of low quality, and that they omitted theory from their analyses. The findings of this investigation indicate that the Atlanta Sociological Laboratory utilized a sophisticated methodology to produce generalizable findings that included theory despite the race prejudice that existed during that period in American history.