Epilogue of empire: East Timor and the Portuguese postcolonial catharsis

The demonstrations of solidarity with East Timor that occurred in Lisbon in September 1999 were the first major political demonstrations since the fall of the dictatorship in 1974. Solidarity with East Timor demonstrated the importance to the Portuguese of emotional and cultural ties to people whom they saw as sharing their language and Catholic religion. These commonalities have a clear colonial history and are now being reconstructed around the idea of Lusophony, which is taken to be the core of a Portuguese postcolonial identity. East Timor, a Portuguese colony that was occupied by Indonesia after the Portuguese revolution of 1974, used diacritical signs such as Portuguese and Catholicism in its nationalist struggle against Indonesia. These signs are the cultural patrimony of a local creole elite and are exaggerated in Portuguese perceptions of East Timor. The colonial and postcolonial ironies of this case of mutual constitution of identity are analyzed.     

Boundary Politics in the Public Sphere: Openness, Secrecy, and Leak

The issue of openness/secrecy has not received adequate attention in current discussion on the public sphere. Drawing on ideas in critical theory, political sociology, and cultural sociology, this article explores the cultural and political dynamics involved in the public sphere in modern society vis-à-vis the practice of open/secret politics by the state. It argues that the media, due to their publicist quality, are situated at the interface between publicity and secrecy, which thereby allows for struggles over the boundary of state openness/secrecy in the public sphere. A theory of boundary politics is introduced that is contextualized in the relationship among state forms, the means of making power visible/invisible (media strategies), and symbolic as well as discursive practices in the public sphere. In explaining the dynamics of boundary politics over openness/secrecy, three ideal-types of boundary creation are conceptualized: open politics, secrecy, and leak. The theory is illustrated with a case study of the Patten controversy in Hong Kong.     

The (mis)acquisition of gender identity among transsexuals

Transsexualism suggests questions for sociologists who study gender. Is gender identity always a precursor to role behavior or might it result from the social reactions to deviant behavior? This article considers several theoretical explanations for the (mis)acquisition of gender identity among transsexuals: biological hypotheses, psychoanalytic theories, social learning, and role theory. The author concludes that gender role and gender identity are confounded in past research and that the issue inflexibility of identities needs to be treated more systematically.     

Sexuality and gender identity: from a discursive to a relational analysis

This paper concentrates on the recent controversy over the division between sex and gender and the troubling of the binary distinctions between gender identities and sexualities, such as man and woman, heterosexual and homosexual. While supporting the troubling of such categories, I argue against the approach of Judith Butler which claims that these dualities are primarily discursive constructions that can be regarded as fictions. Instead, I trace the emergence of such categories to changing forms of power relations in a more sociological reading of Foucault's conceptualization of power, and argue that the social formation of identity has to be understood as emergent within socio-historical relations. I then consider what implications this has for a politics based in notions of identity centred on questions of sexuality and gender.     

Translating Spirituality: Universalism and Particularism in the Diffusion of Spiritual Care from the United States to Israel

Research on the transnational diffusion of ideas and practices shows how cultural objects go through translation, adaptation, and vernacularization when implemented in new localities. Less attention is given to the translators themselves and their heterogeneous and often conflicting visions. Drawing on the notion of transnational social fields (TSF s), this article investigates how cultural objects get vernacularized differently in different parts of the TSF , demonstrating how processes of translation reflect larger social and political struggles over questions of identity. As a case study, we focus on the attempt of actors from Israel and the United States to institutionalize spiritual care in Israeli health‐care organizations. The analysis reveals how spiritual care functioned as a porous cultural object, open to a wide range of interpretations and debates. While actors in New York saw in spiritual care the opportunity to bridge to Israeli Jews and create a global Jewish identity, Israeli actors split between using spiritual care as a vehicle for creating a local Israeli Jewish identity and seeing in spiritual care the opportunity to establish universal identities, broader than the Jewish one. The disagreement and conflicts between the groups influenced the translation process, turning it into a contentious struggle that involved different positions on the continuum between particularism and universalism.     

Symbolic Interaction with Consumer Products: An Affect Control Theory Approach

Symbolic interactionism is one of the few social psychology perspectives that recognizes the important role of physical artifacts, including consumer products, in social life. Consumer products are artifacts people can use to maintain the expressive order within social life – the order that is embedded within the shared meanings of a culture. As a formal theory of symbolic interactionism, affect control theory emphasizes culturally shared affective meaning, the impressions produced within social events, and identity processes that rely on those cultural meanings and social events. We contend that affect control theory provides a framework for understanding and researching how consumer products influence people's social experience and interaction. First, we specifically explore how affect control theory's concepts of affective meaning, identity modification, and impression management can be applied to understanding consumer products. Building on this foundation, we then consider how affect control theory might also contribute to three new research directions: social interaction with consumer products, affective design of consumer products, and the prosumer identity created from consumer products. Our conclusion is that affect control theory provides sociologists with a means of exploring the important and fascinating questions that emerge when we consider people's symbolic interaction with consumer products.     

A Sociological Account of the Persistence of Invalidated Anorexic Identities

Most versions of identity theory have had difficulty explaining the persistence of invalidated identities. Drawing from data on anorexic identity transactions, we identify three dimensions that contribute to understanding this persistence. Two dimensions, size and control, are shown to be the locus of identity invalidation; the third, desirability, is shown to be the locus of validation. Confirmation of one's sense of being desirable, we propose, contributes to anorexics continuing to appropriate identities invalidated by others. We argue that the concepts “master identity,” “fictionalized identity,” and what we term “discordant awareness context” are more useful for theorizing the persistence of invalidated identities, such as anorexia, than those focusing on the degree of consensus over the person as a social object found in conventional identity theory.     

Gender,the Body and Organization Studies: Que(e)rying Empirical Research

Even in organization studies scholarship that treats gender as performative and fluid, a certain ‘crystallization’ of gender identities as somehow unproblematic and stable may occur because of our methodological decision‐making, and especially our categorization of participants. Mobilizing queer theory — and Judith Butler's work on the heterosexual matrix and performativity in particular — as a conceptual lens, we examine this crystallization, suggesting it is based on two implicit assumptions: that gender is a cultural mark over a passive biological body, or is a base identity ‘layered over’ by other identities (class, race, age etc.). Following Butler, we argue that in order to foreground the fluidity and uncertainty of gender categories in our scholarship, it is necessary to understand gender identity as a process of doing and undoing gender that is located very precisely in time and space. Given this perspective on gender identities as complex processes of identification, non‐identification and performativity, we offer some pointers on how the methodological decision‐making underpinning empirical research on gender, work and organization could and should begin from this premise.     

Invisible no more: White racialization and the localness of racial identity

What does it mean to be white? How do whites see themselves and other white people, racially? These are empirical questions, questions that sociologists have spent decades trying to answer. Among numerous findings, none have been as pronounced as white racelessness; the theory that whites possess invisible, or raceless, identities. Despite its influence on our understanding of race, the construction of whiteness as an invisible identity has been called into question, as a number of scholars, past and present, focus more on the local dynamics of white racialization. For a growing cross-section of whites, modern cultural and demographic change has shattered the illusion of white normality, causing them to confront their own racial identities in intimate and explicit ways. How do these and other whites respond to being seen as white? Though adept at detailing the way whites conceptualize white racial identity, generally, sociologists have been far less successful in examining how whites conceptualize white racial identity, locally. In this article, after reviewing both general and local constructions of white racial identity, I argue that going forward, researchers need to dispense with contextual overgeneralizations and focus more the localness of white identity formation.     

Beyond social networking: Performing global Englishes in Facebook by college youth in Nepal1

Until recently, scholarship on online social networking has mostly focused on issues of social relationship, privacy, identity and literacy. Research on the interface between multilingualism, multimodality and online social networking from a discursive perspective is relatively limited. This ethno‐graphic study draws data from Facebook pages composed and hosted over two years by three economically and educationally privileged undergraduate students in Nepal and uses conceptual constructs of mediascape, convergence culture and global Englishes. The study investigates how the advent of social networking online in Facebook by college youth has influenced their use of the English language and other semiotic resources to index both their local and cosmopolitan identities. Findings suggest that these youth are using social networking to redefine the role of English in relation to their existing social relationships, innovatively mixing English and Nepali in order to construct their bilingual identities, and embedding English with other texts to recontextualize both local and global media content. The paper concludes with a summary of major findings which suggest that online social networking practices have significantly helped to bring about a cultural change among this particular social group in Nepal.      

Cultural studies as praxis: (making) an autobiographical case

This autobiographical essay ‘takes cultural studies personally’, drawing on experience, identity and the personal to indicate how and why the author is proponent of and is working on developing a model of cultural studies as social justice praxis despite the constraints academia in general and of the university as an institution in particular. The paper travels roughly from the author’s student and teacher days in Sierra Leone through his graduate student days in Canada to his current role as university teacher in the USA. He selectively concentrates on his experience as a teacher of literature (and African multi-role utilitarianism), education and cultural studies (using one of his cultural studies courses and students’ questions about the utility of cultural studies as example), his shifting and overlapping racial/ethnic identities (African/black) and the politics of identity, and his thoughts on the place of theory in cultural studies and a black approach to theory (black ambivalent elaboration) as contributory factors. While this account acts in its own way as an argument for conceptualizing cultural studies as praxis, the primary focus is more modestly on my own autobiographical account as a specific case. In fact, an autobiographical approach is employed precisely to be specific and in the attempt to avoid the pitfalls of over­generalization and the authority of authenticity.     

Social Movements Through the Gender Lens

Although it is widely acknowledged that many aspects of social life are gendered, only relatively recently have feminist researchers begun to address the ‘gender blindness’ of the social movement theory. Integrating findings from multiple studies, the article considers how gender affects social movement dynamics. It is argued that gender exerts pervasive influence on every aspect of social movement activities. The patterns of mobilisation, political and cultural opportunities, framing process and intra-movement dynamics are all gendered. It is argued that although ample evidence demonstrates that protest is gendered, we do not yet know whether there is any general pattern of influence of gender on social movements, a pattern that enables a systematic explanation of the effects of gender on social movement dynamics. In conclusion, I will examine the reasons for this and suggest avenues for research.     

Changes in the gender structure: Inequality at the individual,interactional, and macro dimensions

As a society, we've made tremendous progress toward gender equality over the past several decades. Yet there remains significant inequality between women and men. Furthermore, when we look closely at some of the progress made toward gender equality, we find it considerably less impressive than surface appearances. In this article, we review the updated framework of Risman's (2017) gender structure theory and argue that it can help us make sense of the progress we've made as well as analyzing inequality as it persists between women and men. Using gender structure theory, we then show how gender is simultaneously reproduced and contested across the individual, interactional, and macro levels of society within 3 major social domains: work, family, and gender identity.     

Explaining Attitudes toward Immigrants and Immigration Policy: A Review of the Theoretical Literature

In the research literature on immigration attitudes, there are a number of theories that explain why individuals hold positive or negative opinions of certain immigrant groups and immigration policies. In this review of the literature, the theories are summarized into five categories: personal and social identity, self and group interest, cultural values and beliefs, social interaction, and multilevel theories. The majority of the theories offer explanations that favor one causal direction, focus on social psychology or the social structural environment, and assume that effects are additive rather than interactive. It is argued in this review that scholars would benefit by using multilevel theories, such as group position theory and intersectionality, in order to extend their explanatory reach past the theoretical standards and, in doing so, be able to better examine some understudied but important questions, such as why individuals often hold pro‐ and anti‐immigrant opinions simultaneously. Multilevel theories have the potential to offer a nuanced understanding of immigration attitudes.     

Gender, home and family in cultural capital theory

The paper argues that Bourdieu's stress on early familiarization for the highest value of cultural capital is closely linked to his idea, strongly emphasized in Distinction, about the role of family and domestic life for individual development and social positions. The role of women, as mothers and homemakers, is crucial in this process. Yet, Bourdieu defines social origin as deriving from the father. The centrality to Bourdieu's thinking of a resilient traditional pattern of masculine domination and feminine submission constitutive of the Western gender habitus explains both his stress on ‘normalcy’ for the production of legitimate dispositions, and his resistance to incorporating into his thinking the implications of recent transformations in home family living, which have destabilized the gender order. It is thus important to consider contemporary feminist analyses of the family and home life and their significance for a renewed theory of cultural capital. The paper considers two sets of literature. Firstly, it addresses the manners in which home and family are conceptualized in Bourdieu's key texts where these issues were prominent in the development of his thinking on cultural capital. The second set of literature includes texts by feminist academics in the fields of family, gender and the body, which analyse the destabilizing of the gender order and everyday family living in contemporary society. Two questions are addressed on the basis of these reflections: (1) Is cultural capital an individual or a household resource? (2) How does cultural capital relate to personal interdependencies at the level of family and households?     

Gendered and classed activist identity in the Russian oppositional youth movement

This article examines how activist identity is constructed in the Russian opposition youth movement Oborona. The research is based on fieldwork among youth activists in Moscow and St Petersburg. The author analyses how activist identity is classed and gendered, as well as its relations to the Russian civic field. The article suggests, first, that the activist identity is marked by an affiliation with the intelligentsia: activists have grown up in intelligentsia families and articulate their activities through the intelligentsia's ‘markers’, such as intelligence, discussion skills and education. Secondly, activists follow a dissidents' cultural model, by emphasizing the importance of non‐conformism and traditional dissident values, and draw parallels between the contemporary government and the totalitarian Soviet state. Thirdly, this traditional intellectual dissident identity is associated with cosmopolitanism through the movement's international connections and appropriation of the forms of action of global social movements. Sometimes the activist practices and aspirations conflict with the group's ideals. Furthermore, the activist identity is gendered and embodied in the right activist ‘look’, which is defined by masculinity. Regardless of the movement's liberal ideals in regards to democracy, questions of gender and sexuality are not discussed, and activists do not question traditional understandings of gendered divisions of labour.     

POLARIZATION,SECULARIZATION, OR DIFFERENCES AS USUAL? The Denominational Cleavage in U.S. Social Attitudes Since the 1970s

Scholarly debates over modernization and social change in the late twentieth century have raised far-reaching questions about the possible consequences for religious group conflict and differences in behavior, identity, and opinion. Three general theoretical interpretations—polarization, secularization, and stable influence—have been asserted in the relevant literatures, yet which interpretation might best capture the effects of religious group memberships during the past three decades remains unresolved. We seek to advance research and debate on the changing influence of religion by investigating questions about the magnitude of, and trends in, religious groups differences in attitudes toward issues relating to gender, abortion, and sexuality during the past three decades. Building from past research, our analyses make use of three innovations: we apply a new typology of religious group memberships; we evaluate main versus interaction effect models to gauge evidence of change in the magnitude of religious influence; and we use indices that enable comparisons of the magnitude of group-based differences in attitudes across distinct issues and over time. Of the seven different issues we analyze, two reveal evidence of growing group-based differences, while the remaining five are characterized by a pattern of stability. We discuss the significance of these results for understanding limits of secularization theory, considering in conclusion how our results contribute to ongoing debate over the effects of religious group memberships.     

Lesbian Health

ABSTRACT

Health care research suggests that lesbians may face unique physical and mental health risks, yet few studies make use of gender and sexuality theories to explain lesbian health. In this study, a social constructionist view of sexuality is used to examine the impact of lesbian identity on well-being. Drawing from nineteen intensive interviews with women who self-identify as lesbians, the results show that individuals' sexual identities change over time and are affected by their social environments. The data also demonstrate that sexual identity and social context have implications for well-being. Specifically, hostile environments, which are characterized by animosity toward gay men, lesbians, and others who do not conform to heteronormative gender expectations, are associated with distress over lesbian identity and with physical and mental health problems. By contrast, supportive environments, which many women report finding through feminism, facilitate the construction of a positive lesbian identity and enhance well-being.     

‘I myself had a sweetie …’: re‐thinking female same‐sex intimacy beyond the institution of marriage and identity politics

This article is understood as an intervention into current debates around the question of rights in relation to sexuality and in particular to issues of same‐sex marriages and alternative family structures. As the interpretation of rights in relation to sexuality generally focuses on gay identities, this article reflects on the effects of these discourses on non‐normative modes of sexuality and intimacy. More specifically the article focuses on interviews conducted in Johannesburg on ‘mummy–baby’ relationships. By contextualising these relationships in the historical and cultural framework of sexual cultures and cultures of intimacy, this article argues that the South African history and cultures provided and provide a space which accommodates forms of female same‐sex intimacy that are not necessarily linked to metropolitan sexual cultures. The article discusses the tensions between non‐lesbian same‐sex intimacy and metropolitan lesbianism by focusing on homosociality as a gender theory. The article questions the regulatory functions of identity and problematises the practice of ‘coming out’ as always being a liberating moment.