(Auto)Ethnography and cycling

This article discusses the formation, salience and reformation of everyday bodily routines and resources in relation to cycling; it also examines how we can study them ethnographically in different places. I discuss forms of embodied, sensuous and mobile ethnography that can illuminate how routines, habits and affective capacities of cycling are cultivated and performed. The article argues that autoethnography is particularly apt at illuminating the embodied qualities of movement, and it sits within established ethnographies of ‘excising’ and ‘mobile bodies’. In the second part of the article, I draw upon ongoing autoethnographies of cycling in a familiar place (my hometown, Copenhagen) and by learning to cycle ‘out-of-place’ (in London) and ‘in-a-new–way’ (when commuting long distance on a racer bike). The study challenges static notions of the body by analysing how cyclists’ (and researchers’) affective capacities develop as they practice cycling.     

Motherhood,Myth and Gendered Agency in Political Violence

By building on theoretical insights from poststructuralist feminism and Roland Barthes' mythology framework, this article is offering a nuanced understanding of female agency in political violence by engaging with the visual and the cultural, by using a broader definition of agency in political violence and by analysing what gendered representations of war mean at the domestic level. In the first part of the article, the Myth of Motherhood is conceptualized as a meta-discourse disciplining representations of female agency in political violence. The article then focuses on two specific discourses within the meta-discourse, the Vacant Womb and the Deviant Womb, that inform understandings of gender, agency and political violence in one particular cultural artefact: the British television drama, Britz. The main argument is that motherhood is ‘everywhere’ in representations of female agency in political violence and that it is useful to think about motherhood as a myth. Only this way can we confront underlying norms, values and ideas believed to be common sense and think differently about gender, agency and political violence.     

Video diaries: audio-visual research methods and the elusive body

The contemporary rise of body studies has led sociologists to take embodiment seriously, however, the issue of methodology in relation to the body remains largely under-explored. This article addresses the concern to capture the elusive body from a methodological perspective and discusses the video diary as a novel device for attending to bodily experience. The article considers how observation is redesigned through the video camera and describes the different ways in which bodily experience can be represented on screen. Using examples from video diaries made by participants in a multi-method study of the body, health and illness in everyday life, it shows how video diaries can contribute to an embodied sociology by making the body visibly, audibly and viscerally present.     

Occupational Cultures and the Embodiment of Masculinity: Hairdressing,Estate Agency and Firefighting

Drawing on data from an Economic and Social Research Council‐funded project, this article explores the implications of different occupational cultures for men's masculine identity. With a focus on embodiment and individual agency, it explores the argument that it is within ‘scenes of constraint’ that gendered identities are both ‘done’ and ‘undone’. In this article we examine embodied experience in occupational cultures commonly stereotyped as ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’ (hairdressing, estate agency and firefighting), showing how men conform to, draw upon and resist the gendered stereotypes associated with these occupations. What we argue is that gendered conceptions of ‘the body’ need to be differentiated from individual men's embodiment. Instead, processes of identification can be shown to emerge via embodied experiences of particular kinds of gendered body, and in the ways in which men negotiate the perception of these bodies in different occupational contexts.     

INTIMACY,QUEERNESS, RACE

‘What do we see when we look at ourselves?’ asked South African visual activist/artist Zanele Muholi in her 2006 photographic collection Only Half the Picture. The question, a deeply challenging introspection, required black women in particular to reflect on the ways in which history has made us not look at ourselves, but be looked at. The images Muholi presented were viewed as both troubling and liberating. This article, using a queer framework, is concerned with recoding the ways in which black women's bodies and female sexuality have been represented in post-colonial contexts. Using Zanele Muholi's photography, the article opens possibilities for claiming an erotic position for the black female's ‘queer’ body. This is further complicated by racial dynamics. The article argues that such representations work against painful colonial histories of black female torture while also desexualizing the black female.     

Keeping up appearances: aesthetic labour in the fashion modelling industries of London and New York

This paper addresses itself to literature on ‘aesthetic labour’ in order to extend understanding of embodied labour practices. Through a case study of fashion modelling in New York and London we argue for an extension of the concept to address what we see as problematic absences and limitations. Thus, we seek to extend its range, both in terms of occupations it can be applied to, not just interactive service work and organizational workers, and its conceptual scope, beyond the current concern with superficial appearances at work and within organizations. First, we attend to the ways in which these freelancers have to adapt to fluctuating aesthetic trends and different clients and commodify themselves in the absence of a corporate aesthetic. The successful models are usually the ones who take on the responsibility of managing their bodies, becoming ‘enterprising’ with respect to all aspects of their embodied self. Secondly, unlike Dean (2005 ) who similarly extends aesthetic labour to female actors, we see conceptual problems with the term that need addressing. We argue that the main proponents of aesthetic labour have a poorly conceived notion of embodiment and that current conceptualizations produce a reductive account of the aesthetic labourer as a ‘cardboard cut‐out’, and aesthetic labour as superficial work on the body's surface. In contrast, drawing on phenomenology, we examine how aesthetic labour involves the entire embodied self, or ‘body/self’, and analyse how the effort to keep up appearances, while physical, has an emotional content to it. Besides the physical and emotional effort of body maintenance, the imperative to project ‘personality’ requires many of the skills in emotional labour described by Hochschild (1983 ). Thirdly, aesthetic labour entails on‐going production of the body/self, not merely a superficial performance at work. The enduring nature of this labour is evidenced by the degree of body maintenance required to conform to the fashion model aesthetic (dieting, for example) and is heightened by the emphasis placed on social networking in freelancing labour, which demands workers who are ‘always on’. In this way, unlike corporate workers, we suggest that the freelance aesthetic labourer cannot walk away from their product, which is their entire embodied self. Thus, in these ways we see aesthetic labour adding to, or extending, rather than supplanting emotional labour, as Witz et al. (2003 ) would have it.     

Child Sexual Abuse in Madurai,India: A Literary Review and Empirical Study

This article attempts to explore the cultural and patriarchal relevance of child sexual abuse in a conservative town in India, with a special interest in understanding the current problems experienced by teenage girls in India. A questionnaire was distributed to 100 respondents who belonged to Thiagarajar College of Engineering, Thiruparangundram, Madurai. The questionnaire was developed with special reference to the female protagonist, Lily in Jaishree Misra’s Secrets and Lies. The resulting article also includes an e-interview with Jaishree Misra. The researchers hypothesize that change can be envisioned when the social conscience is awakened to cruel events that happen in the Indian population. Change regarding social events must go even further to allow children to blossom and experience the joys of childhood.     

Clothing and dementia: A neglected dimension?

The article explores the neglected subject of clothing and dementia. Addressing questions of the body, identity and selfhood, it argues – against the dominant understanding – that clothes continue to be significant in the lives and wellbeing of people with dementia. Drawing on new theorising that emphasises the embodied nature of selfhood, the article explores the role of clothing in the maintenance of identity; its nature as the ‘environment closest in’; its significance in social interaction; and its potential character as an agent of control and normativity. The article concludes that clothing and dress offer a potentially interesting field in which we can explore the nature of personhood in dementia, and in ways that offer insights into forms of response through which individuality and selfhood can be recognised, maintained and enhanced.     

Sexual Relationships,Behaviors, and Experiences Among Bisexual Men in Mumbai,India

ABSTRACT

Objectives: This exploratory study attempted to assess a range of sexual behaviors, relationships, and related factors among a sample of bisexual men in Mumbai, India. Methods: Data collection occurred in two separate phases. First, focus group discussions were facilitated with local community members in order to finalize an interviewer-administered questionnaire. Afterward, structured interviews were conducted with a sample of 50 bisexual men using this questionnaire. Results: Participants reported a wide range of sexual behaviors and relationships with male and female partners. Conclusions: Findings have implications for future research and practice focusing on bisexual men in India,as well as their partners of all genders.     

Just one of the guys until shower time: How symbolic embodiment threatens women's inclusion in the US military

The military constitutes a complex occupational field for women — one in which embodied masculinity is legitimized and rewarded, and women's bodies are often perceived as problems to the extent that they deviate from this masculine standard. Drawing from 33 in‐depth interviews with men and women who served on active duty in the US military between 2005 and 2015, we ask: How does female embodiment raise barriers to the full incorporation of women as equal workers in a total institution? Our analysis focuses on three primary aspects of what we call symbolic embodiment (female bodies as physically weak, as leaky/unclean and as sexually distracting), as they are rooted in the cultural imagination more than in any biological or experiential reality. We show how the symbolic embodiment of female workers effectively undermines individual claims of honorary masculinity by reasserting the pre‐eminence of naturalized capacities over individual performance and experience, and constructs women as second‐class workers within the masculine culture of the military. Our results extend the literature on the embodied self at work and reveal potential limits to Bourdieu's theory of the gendered habitus.     

The Infringement of the Right to Establish a Family for Jewish Spouses Who Are Mutually Proscribed from Marrying Each Other

Abstract

The article focuses on one of the most painful experiences in intimate relationships and unveils a hitherto unexplored type of human right infringement, namely the right to establish a family in Israel, purported to be a democratic state. Thousands of couples are proscribed from marrying each other every year in Israel. This paper focuses on Jewish couples consisting of male Cohanim (descendants of Jewish priests) and female divorcées, as one among other types of forbidden marriages. Four themes emerged from data analysis of narratives of 26 interviewees, which converged to a common motif of liminality of Cohen-divorcée couples. Based on empirical data, I describe the predicament attendant to this human rights violation which is transmitted to offspring of these couples. The article argues that this liminality undermines the basic rationale of the prevailing millet (personal law) system and discusses the implications of this liminality for human rights and religion-state relations.     

Relighting the Fire: Visualizing the Lesbian in Contemporary India

This article revisits the controversy surrounding Deepa Mehta's Fire (1996), India's first publicly released film depicting female same-sex desire. The film has become a touchstone for discussions of the representation of queer and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) lives in India. While the majority of critical accounts of the film have rejected the use of “lesbian” on the basis of its Anglo-American specificity, this article seeks to recast lesbians at the heart of Fire by filtering them through the lens of transnational protest, and by offering a close reading of the film's own play on religious and cultural symbolism. Viewed almost two decades after its release, in the light of the Delhi rape case of December 2012 and subsequent events, including the upholding of a law criminalizing gay sex in November 2013, the film now more than ever seems to offer a fantasy of the future, rather than a viable reality in the present day. Within Fire, the circumnavigation of heteronormative power and desire is certainly queer, but the film's labeling as “lesbian” subsequent to its release in India opened up an important public forum for a debate about female desire and independence that continues to resonate today. This article does not attempt to offer a conclusive argument about the use of the term “lesbian” to label the relationship between women that is depicted within the film, but it does examine the way in which the film itself visualizes desire between women, and in particular the use of Hindu narratives, imagery and motifs. The film's interpellation into lesbian politics is facilitated by the strong emphasis on a female-centered desire that is not defined by motherhood, that cannot be contained, and that demands to be seen.     

Information Technology Clusters in India

The Indian information technology (IT) industry is deeply entrenched in the key metros of India, giving rise to seven large IT clusters. The country's tier I cities Bangalore, Delhi, Chennai, Hyderabad, Pune, Mumbai, and Kolkata have all emerged as significant IT hubs. The seven IT clusters are different in their history, economic weight, activity base, anchor companies, business models, government role, and other driving forces. However, even as these cities are attracting IT investments and creating employment for thousands of citizens, the drawbacks of overstressed infrastructure, escalating real estate costs, and shortage of skilled IT professionals represent challenges for IT organizations. The paper substantiates the inevitability of the hardware and software sectors linked development at this stage. It is the first attempt to study the IT industry in India through the prism of the countrywise cluster development and combination of IT sectors – hardware design and manufacturing, IT services, software and research and development, and IT-enabled services for business process offshoring.      

The Journey Around My PhD: Pitfalls,Insights and Diamonds

Embarking on postgraduate research involves making a transition from practitioner to researcher. While there is a well established body of knowledge to address research methodology, it is presented in a fashion that suggests the research process is straightforward and linear and fails to offer insights into the ways postgraduate students construct their researcher identities. This paper will draw on the authors' experiences as PhD students and highlight what was learned about the research process from involvement in a research project. The paper will highlight some of the challenges of undertaking postgraduate research as well as some of the insights gained.     

What Is ‘Body Work’? A Review of the Literature

Lyon and Barbalet (1994) , Kang (2003 ), Wolkowitz (2002 , 2006 ), and others have proposed the concept of 'body work' as a means for further developing the sociology of the body. This article gives an overview of the different (although frequently overlapping) forms of body work that have been identified in the sociological literature. These include a notion of body work as (i) the work performed on one's own body, (ii) paid labor carried out on the bodies of others, (iii) the management of embodied emotional experience and display, and (iv) the production or modification of bodies through work. The article concludes with suggestions for the future of research on body work and the sociology of the body.     

Hard men, shop boys and others: embodying competence in a masculinist occupation

Emerging studies on private security work in Britain's night‐time economy explore important sociological themes such as masculinities and violence. Contributing rich ethnography to this literature, and in furthering an embodied sociology, this paper describes the gendered construction of competency among ‘bouncers’ or door supervisors within the context of their potentially violent work. Centrally, it explores the door supervisors’ variable bodily capital (comprising body build and acquired techniques of the body) alongside normative limits to their violence. Here physicality is central to the practicalities of doorwork, risk management and the embodiment of dominant and subordinate masculinities. Within doorwork culture, embodied typifications such as ‘hard men’, ‘shop boys’ and others (eg,‘bullies’ and ‘nutters’) are related to assessments of possible violence against doorstaff, the delineation of (flexible) boundaries for their own (in)appropriate violence against ‘problematic’ customers and the construction of competent identity. Besides contributing empirical data to the literature this paper underscores the integrative potential of embodiment for social scientists and urges policy makers to appreciate the degree to which (potential) violence is embodied in the night‐time economy.     

The body as experienced: an embodied approach to the packaging of the Dai river bathing custom in Xishuang Banna,China

This article looks at the filming of the Dai river bathing custom by the media professionals for tourism promotion in Xishuang Banna, China. It speaks to the previous scholarships that have studied the Otherness of ethnic minorities in China's mainstream and popular representations. Yet this case contextualizes this issue in the era of China's domestic tourism, when ethnic cultures and bodies are increasingly put on display, experienced, and (re-)produced through individualized, immediate, embodied encounters in tourist zones. By taking embodied experiences to the center, this article studies the touristic representation of ethnic minorities as China's national Others from an angle of embodiment. It inquires how the embodied experiences of both media professionals and Dai bathers at the filming constitute the very process during which Otherness, difference, and selfness are perceived, actualized, and (re-)produced in localized reality and at the grassroots level.     

Faith,work, and women in a changing world: the influence of religion in the lives of beedi rollers in West Bengal

In India, religious norms and values play a significant role in regulating the lives of women and girls in many communities. This article looks at how the lives of women and girl beedi (hand rolled cigarette) rollers in a Muslim community in West Bengal are influenced by their religious background, highlighting the complex relationship between gender, faith, and work. Secondly, the article discusses how secular NGOs – which in India are often seen to be hesitant in addressing questions of religious faith and practice – can engage in development work with women and girls in faith-based communities. The article focuses on the experiences of two secular NGOs working with women beedi workers in villages in Murshidabad, as they come to understand that to bring about significant changes in women's lives they must open up discussions around sensitive religious belief, within the community and their own organisations.     

The embodied becoming of autism and childhood: a storytelling methodology

In this article I explore a methodology of storytelling as a means of bringing together research around autism and childhood in a new way, as a site of the embodied becoming of autism and childhood. Through reflection on an ethnographic story of embodiment, the body is explored as a site of knowledge production that contests its dominantly storied subjectivation as a ‘disordered’ child. Storytelling is used to experiment with a line of flight from the autistic-child-research assemblage into new spaces of potential and possibility where the becomings of bodies within the collision of autism and childhood can be celebrated.     

Generalized Linear Models in Family Studies

Generalized linear models (GLMs), as defined by J. A. Nelder and R. W. M. Wedderburn (1972) , unify a class of regression models for categorical, discrete, and continuous response variables. As an extension of classical linear models, GLMs provide a common body of theory and methodology for some seemingly unrelated models and procedures, such as the logistic, Poisson, and probit models, that are increasingly used in family studies. This article provides an overview of the principle and the key components of GLMs, such as the exponential family of distributions, the linear predictor, and the link function. To illustrate the application of GLMs, this article uses Canadian national survey data to build an example focusing on the number of close friends among older adults. The article concludes with a discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of GLMs.