Graffiti as a Form of Contentious Political Participation

Graffiti is a popular topic in the sociological, criminological, and linguistic literature with several book length treatments of various types of graffiti including tagging, gang graffiti, murals, and “bombings”. Yet, political sociologists have paid little attention to the role of graffiti as a form of contentious politics despite the often political nature of graffiti messages. As a result, most of the political research on graffiti is by non‐sociologists. We believe this is an oversight and that both political sociologists and social movement scholars need to seriously consider this form of micro‐level political participation. In this review we (1) demonstrate why some forms of graffiti should be considered a serious form of political participation; (2) compare and contrast graffiti to other forms of resistance including squatting and culture jamming; (3) review research findings on graffiti; and (4) discuss some of the conceptual and methodological challenges for doing graffiti research.     

The thematic content of graffiti as a nonreactive indicator of male and female attitudes

Graffiti written by men and by women were collected from the public restrooms of a large Eastern university. Based, in part, on the notion that graffiti are accurate indicators of group attitudes, frequencies of graffiti occurrence within 16 sexual and nonsexual content categories were analyzed to determine differences from results of previous research and between content currently expressed in male and female graffiti. Results indicated that women wrote more graffiti than did men, and that women's graffiti were more likely to express hostile, sexual, or issue‐related content. The inability of several psychosexual hypotheses to account for observed differences in graffiti content, and the difficulties inherent in the use of graffiti as nonreactive measures in social‐psychological research were discussed.     

Book reviews

Books reviewed: Alain Touraine, Can We Live Together? Equality and Difference James A. Vela‐McConnell, Who Is My Neighbor? Social Affinity in a Modern World Rita Arditti, Searching for Life: The Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo and the Disappeared Children of Argentina Clive Norris and Gary Armstrong, The Maximum Surveillance Society: The Rise of CCTV Ian Lennie, Beyond Management Richard Giulianotti, Football: A Sociology of the Global Game Andrew Sayer, Realism and Social Science     

Tagging the spectral mobility of the stateless body: Deleuze,stasis, and graffiti

Following recent work by Eleanor Kaufman, this essay reads Deleuze as a thinker of stasis and immobilization in order to think through the fantasy of the refugee as an exemplary figure of mobility. Working through Difference and Repetition, I argue that Deleuze’s understanding of space emerges from a concern with both immobility and the singular concept of temporality articulated in his concept of the “third synthesis of time.” The essay then turns to two contemporary instances of stateless people immobilized by very different forms of nation state sovereignty in Tunisia and the West Bank. I examine graffiti in both locations and develop a concept of tagging, which considers both the graffiti tag and the digital tag as intersecting technologies of distributed social networks that serve to freeze and make visible the stasis of the stateless person.     

Second generation Caribbean black male youths discuss obstacles to educational and employment opportunities: a critical race counter-narrative analysis

This study explores obstacles to navigating the high school-to-labor market transition experienced by Second Generation Caribbean Black Male Youth (CBMY) living in Canada's Greater Toronto Area (GTA). Drawing upon interviews with ten CBMY between the ages of 18–27, the article uses a qualitative phenomenological methodology to understand barriers to education and employment from their perspectives. Studies show that 45% of CBMY drop out of high school while 52% are precariously employed in the GTA [Allahar, A. L. 2010. “The Political Economy of ‘Race’ and Class in Canada’s Caribbean Diaspora.” American Review of Political Economy 8 (2): 54; James, C. E. 2012. Students “at Risk” Stereotypes and the Schooling of Black Boys. Urban Education 47 (2), 464–494.; Lewchuk, W., and M. Lafleche. 2014. Precarious Employment and Social Outcomes. Just Labour: A Canadian Journal of Work and Society, 22, 45–50.; Block and Galabuzi 2011. Canada’s Color Coded Labor market: The Gap for Racialized workers. Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives?=?Centre Canadien de Politiques alternatives]. The ten interview subjects provide retrospective and introspective counter-narratives that expose the race, class and gender-based barriers that frustrate their efforts to secure stable employment. The study utilizes Critical Race Theory (CRT) and the concept of White Supremacy to challenge the view that educational and employment success is based on color-blindness, merit and hard work. The CBMY counter-narratives examined in this study offer profound insight into dominant ideologies and practices that perpetuate racial biases, and present many valuable suggestions, explicit and implied, regarding how to improve the opportunities, inclusion and well-being of CBMY.     

On the political economy of youth: a comment

This article is written as a brief comment on a recent discussion that has taken place in the pages of the Journal of Youth Studies on the question of youth, youth studies and political economy, in a series of articles by Côté [2014. “Towards a New Political Economy of Youth.” Journal of Youth Studies 17 (4): 527–543; Côté, J. 2016. “A New Political Economy of Youth Reprised: Rejoinder to France and Threadgold.” Journal of Youth Studies. doi:10.1080/13676261.2015.1136058] and France and Threadgold [2015. “Youth and Political Economy: Towards a Bourdieusian Approach.” Journal of Youth Studies. doi:10.1080/13676261.2015.1098779]. It argues for the value of embracing a broad understanding of the term political economy, and for the importance of increasing the attention paid to political economy in the field of youth studies. The comment draws on a simple review of articles published in the Journal of Youth Studies over a five-year period between 2011 and 2015 in order to clarify the different approaches that can be taken by youth studies researchers with respect to the question of political economy.     

Darren: Erotic Interludes in Political Transference

The dilemmas and opportunities of interpellation and intelligibility play out also in the sexual domain. In “Darren: Erotic Interludes in Political Transference,” Stephen Hartman shows how interpellation makes both him and Darren intelligible and therefore anxious: The power of discourse to legitimate desire means that you can lose your legitimacy and fall into abjection if you ever refuse your interpellation. Here Hartman, interpellated by The New York Times announcement of his marriage to another man, desexualizes and abjects his patient by interpellating his desire as a desire to be a married gay guy, a “good gay” too.     

Public Accounts: Defending Contested Practices

Little attention has been paid to how actors account for controversial institutional conduct or contested practices. Relying on a content analysis of letters to the editor, I explore how actors operating in the Habermasian “public sphere” justify the contested practice of linking Native American symbols with sports teams, and suggest that in their rejection of challengers to their definitions of the situation, authors create public accounts. Consisting primarily of justifications rather than excuses, these accounts are of four types: “denial of injury,” “assertion of benefit,” “claim of authority,” and “rejection of challenge.” For those who wish to conduct comparative analyses of contested practices, these concepts may prove useful.     

“No Tyson in Tongie!”: The Battle to Protect a Rural Way of Life in Kansas*

Political mobilizations in small towns have come to play a disproportionate role in today’s national politics. This article examines the conditions giving rise to small‐town mobilizations through an in‐depth case study of Tonganoxie, Kansas. Residents of this town mounted a massive campaign to block the opening of a Tyson chicken processing plant in 2017. The article draws on interviews, observations, a newspaper claims database, and extractions from the “No Tyson in Tongie” Facebook group page. The article maintains that a racialized cultural framework (“rural idyll”) among White middle‐class residents helped them perceive the plant as an existential threat. Social networks, sustained through social media, enabled the same residents to mobilize in a fast and forceful manner. We suggest that in “hybrid” towns (partially rural and suburban), the “rural idyll” is politically decisive. It unites recently settled and established residents in battles to defend a particularly racialized and classed way of life.     

Social stratification,voting behaviour,and the images of Canadian federal political parties*

Nous servant des sondages faits sur les élections nationales canadiennes de 1965 et 1968, nous développons l'analyse d'ogmundson sur l'esprit de vote des différentes classes sociales, dans l'enquête de 1965. Dans son étude, il comparait les résultats obtenus quand les orientations de classes des partis politiques étaient formulées de trois façons possibles: d'après les jugements des experts, d'après la moyenne des évaluations données par les répondants du sondage de 1965, et d'après les estimations idiosyncratiques de chaque répondant. Les deux derniers critères étaient pris des évaluations de chaque parti, selon une échelle sémantique à sept points, qui avait, comme points axiaux: “pour la classe moyenne” opposéà“pour la classe ouvrière.” Notre analyse répond à trois questions: premièrement, si les découvertes de base d'Ogmundson pour 1965 tiennent pour 1968; deuxièmernent, si les évaluations sur les partis par les répondants, d'aprés une deuxième échelle établie parles points “de gauche” opposées à“de droite,” donnent des résultats comparables, aussi bien sur les échelles que dans les sondages. Finalement, en utilisant une analyse de facteur, s'il y a, sur l'ensemble de treize échelles employées dans chaque enquête, quelque évidence d'un facteur de classe dans les évaluations données aux partis. La réponse est affirmative pour la première question et négative pour la seconde. Dans le cas de la troisième, un seul facteur fixe apparaît pour chaque parti, comme décrit par ses électeurs. La structure de ce facteur est commune à tous les partis dans les deux élections, et cela n'a pas grand chose à faire avec les orientations de classe perçues par les répondants. On explore toujours les implications théoriques de ces données. Using the 1965 and 1968 Canadian national election surveys, we extend Ogmundson's analysis of the “class” vote in the 1965 survey. He compared the results obtained when the class orientations of political parties were defined in three alternative ways: according to the judgments of experts: according to the mean ratings given by respondents in the 1965 survey; and according to each respondent's idiosyncratic ratings. The latter two criteria were taken from ratings of each party along a 7–point semantic differential-type scale which had as its end points “for the middle class” v. “for the working class.” Our analysis answers three questions: first, whether Ogrnundson's basic findings for 1965 hold also for 1968: second, whether respondents' ratings of the parties along a second scale anchored by “left-wing” v. “right-wing” yield comparable results across scales and Surveys; third, using factor analysis, whether there is any evidence for a class-based theme in the ratings given parties on the set of thirteen scales employed in each survey. The answer is affirmative to the first question and negative to the second question. In the case of the third question, a single unrotated factor emerged for each party as described by its voters. The structure of this factor was common to all parties in both elections, and it appeared to have very little to do with their perceived class orientations. Theoretical implications of these findings are explored.     

“Sassy Queens”: Stylistic orthographic variation in Twitter and the enregisterment of AAVE

Recent computational sociolinguistic analyses of social media have emphasized the potential of using orthographic variation as a proxy for speech, thereby permitting macro‐level quantitative studies of regional and social variation (e.g. Eisenstein, 2015). However, the extent to which stylistic variation may affect these analyses remains largely unexplored. In this paper, I explore how authors use variant spellings stylistically to deploy personae and characterological figures (Agha, 2003), by examining the presence of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) features in a corpus of 15,804 tweets extracted from the timelines of 10 gay British men. I argue that the stylization of AAVE signals the development of a very specific persona—the “Sassy Queen”—which relies on an essentialized imagining of Black women as “fierce” and “sassy.” Concluding, I emphasize the value of micro‐level analyses in complementing quantitative analyses of linguistic variation in social media.     

Excitable Speech: Judith Butler, Mae West, and Sexual Innuendo

Working with Judith Butler's Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative, this essay pursues a series of questions on the performativity of speech acts, using sexual innuendo as an example. As performed by the provocative American playwright and classic Hollywood film star, Mae West, sexual innuendo provides an instance of “excitable speech” that allows for the exploration of speech as a site of political resistance. The questions that frame this discussion are as follows: How are vulnerability and agency produced in speech? What are the foreclosures or censors at work in producing speech and the speaking subject? What constitutes the “force” of the performative speech act? How is the speech act repeatable? And do these conditions leave room for Butler's notion of linguistic agency, where the speech act works to undermine linguistic conventions through resignification? Finally, the essay offers queer readings of Mae West in order to demonstrate the concept of “discursive performativity,” which underpins Butler's argument.     

Assimilation,Ethnic Competition,and Ethnic Identities of U.S.‐Born Persons of Mexican Origin

Processes governing the ethnic identification of second and later generations of Mexican immigrant descendants are explored empirically using the Latino National Political Survey, 1989–1990. With multinomial logit regressions, I test hypotheses based on three contrasting perspectives, namely, that ethnic identification, or identification other than “American,” arises directly from: a) cultural continuity and a lower level of assimilation; b) an experience of ethnic competition; and c) both processes. The results from the LNPS support the view that both processes are at work. For example, consistent with the presence of an assimilation process, the chance of “Mexican” identification (as opposed to “American” identification) declines to half in the third generation and to one tenth in the fourth and later generations, relative to the chance in the second generation. Consistent with the presence of an ethnic competition process, (perceived) experience of discrimination doubles the respondent's chance of “Mexican” identification. Also, a level rise in the darkness of skin color is associated with a 60 percent increase in the chance of Mexican identification.     

Growth Mixture Modeling of Adolescent Body Mass Index Development: Longitudinal Patterns of Internalizing Symptoms and Physical Activity

Growth mixture modeling was used to identify different trajectories of body mass index (BMI) among adolescents ages 10–15 from a national sample. Three distinct classes were found for both boys and girls: “normative” (90.9% and 89.7%), “high increasing” (6.3% and 7.4%), and “decreasing” (2.8% and 2.9%). Multinomial logistic regression identified family income as predictive of class membership for boys and pubertal status and being rural as predictive for girls. Parent‐reported health was a common predictor across gender. Growth curves of internalizing symptoms and physical activity were modeled to explore trends across classes. Findings highlight complexities in the relations between BMI, internalizing symptoms, and physical activity in this developmental period.     

Factores organizacionales y acoso psicológico en el trabajo: el papel moderador del liderazgo “laissez-faire”

Resumen

Tradicionalmente se ha conceptualizado el sexismo como una hostilidad genérica hacia las mujeres. Sin embargo, éste puede manifestarse conjuntamente con actitudes benevolentes y con el reconocimiento de características “positivas” del estereotipo femenino. La respuesta a esta contradicción está en la naturaleza de estas características: no se puede infrahumanizar a las mujeres negándoles la capacidad de experimentar sentimientos, pero sí se las puede infravalorar atribuyéndoles sentimientos o características “devaluadas”. El sexismo se caracteriza también por la falta de homogeneidad en la percepción del grupo “mujeres”. Podemos hablar de subtipos específicos: tradicional (ama de casa), independiente (profesional) y sexy. Con el fin de analizar las diferencias existentes en la atribución de características a estos tres modelos de mujer, así como las diferencias en la valoración de las mismas, se elaboró un cuestionario con tres versiones. Los participantes (hombres y mujeres) debían calificar el tipo de mujer correspondiente en un listado de 24 rasgos asociados a tres dimensiones: competencia-sociabilidad, sentimiento-emoción, natural-cultural. Los resultados indican que el tipo de rasgos asignados, así como la valoración de los mismos, varía en función del tipo de mujer y del sexo del participante.     

The Importance of Sex in the Lives of Women Living with HIV: A Critical Quantitative Analysis

The authors explored the importance of sex for 1,289 women living with HIV in Canada. Approximately half of women viewed sex as “very” (19.6%) or “somewhat” important (32.3%) and the remaining reported “neither important or unimportant” (22.0%), “somewhat unimportant” (5.4%), or “not at all important” (20.1%). Women who had a regular sex partner, identified as African, Caribbean, or Black, were more educated, believed HIV treatment prevents transmission, or had better physical health-related quality-of-life reported greater importance of sex, whereas those who were older, used illicit drugs, or experienced violence in adulthood reported lesser importance. Findings underscore the diversity of women's perspectives within the context of their lives.     

A Tale of Two “Unorganizables”

How should we define “organizability?” I identify here four factors that contribute to a group’s organizability: organizers’ expectations, labor market structures, employers’ actions, and workers’ union sentiments. I briefly discuss how the first three factors correspond with workers’ union sentiments in comparing two divergent occupations: teaching assistants (TAs) and web designers. Workers must choose between conflicting identities in constructing themselves as “organizable” workers. While TAs ultimately framed their identities primarily as employees, web designers still consider themselves unorganizable. I explore similarities and differences between these cases and propose some steps union organizers and web designers could take in unionizing.     

A new political economy of youth reprised: rejoinder to France and Threadgold

In a previous issue of this journal, France and Threadgold [2015. “Youth and Political Economy: Towards a Bourdieusian Approach.” Journal of Youth Studies doi:10.1080/13676261.2015.1098779] claim that they ‘strongly believe that a political economy perspective remains vital for understanding macro-structural power’ (8), yet they reject key aspects of the version I recommended in an earlier issue of this journal [Côté. J. E. 2014a.“Towards a New Political Economy of Youth.” Journal of Youth Studies 17 (4): 527–543]. They also present a Bourdieusian framework, asserting that it provides a better understanding of the effects of political and the economic forces on the lives of young people. In this article, I show how their rejection of the political-economy-of-youth perspective is based on their misunderstandings of some of the fundamental concepts of that perspective, as well as their misrepresentations of what I recommend to the youth studies community concerning that perspective. Consequently, although their Bourdieusian framework may be useful in illuminating certain aspects of the problem, their attempt to promote their framework as a better approach to the political economy of youth is based on unfounded claims. I use their errors to illustrate several metatheoretical principles that can help researchers to be less imperialistic in their claims, and I offer an analysis of how this dispute reflects the current fragmented nature of the field of youth studies.