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.     

The Engaged Academic: Academic Intellectuals and the Psychiatric Survivor Movement

This paper considers some political and ethical issues associated with the ‘academic intellectual’ who researches social movements. It identifies some of the ‘lived contradictions’ such a role encounters and analyses some approaches to addressing these contradictions. In general, it concerns the ‘politico-ethical stance’ of the academic intellectual in relation to social movements and, as such, references the ‘theory of the intellectual’ associated with the work of Antonio Gramsci. More specifically, it considers that role in relation to one political ‘field’ and one type of movement: a field which we refer to, following the work of Peter Sedgwick, as ‘psychopolitics’, and a movement which, since the mid- to late-1980s, has been known as the ‘psychiatric survivor’ movement—psychiatric patients and their allies who campaign for the democratisation of the mental health system. In particular, through a comparison of two texts, Nick Crossley's Contesting Psychiatry and Kathryn Church's Forbidden Narratives, the paper contrasts different depths of engagement between academic intellectuals and the social movements which they research.     

Calling for accounts: numbers, monsters and membership1

This article questions how accounts are marked. In asking why some accounts ‘pass muster’ and others fail, the analysis brings into focus the extent to which membership work helps hold the social and the technical apart. The analysis contrasts a long insistence on narrative forms of interaction as defining conditions of co‐presence with numerical regimes in which there is an implicit deletion of social contact under fashionable slogans like ‘action at a distance’. Taking numbers to act as ‘bearers of culture’, the paper contests the idea that numerical forms of accountability delete the membership work traditionally associated with narrative forms of account. Attending closely to ‘occasions’ in which it is appropriate for members to deploy numerical accounts rather than verbal accounts, the argument challenges the idea that a face to face negotiation of social order has been superceded by a pervasive use of perfonnance targets. The article begins by exploring how ‘calls to account’ are created by a reporting of adverse budget variatices within organizations. Using an extended example to consider how such ‘gaps’ affect a manager's conduct towards a spouse who is sick, the analysis shows how the use of numbers becomes crucial to sustaining one's affiliation across a range of memberships. As illustrated, the rehabilitation of numerical artefacts into conceptions of the social greatly expands possibilities for interaction beyond that anticipated by the sociological ideal of ‘co‐presence’.     

Minute Particulars of the Counter- Culture: Time,Life, and the Photo-poetics of Allen Ginsberg

Abstract

Recent exhibitions of Allen Ginsberg’s photographs, which feature 1950s snapshots of his fellow-Beats Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs, have been dismissed by some as marketing exercises for the Beat myth that promote their biocentric image. Ginsberg himself invited comparisons between his work and Robert Frank’s The Americans. However, a detailed material analysis of his work as a poet-photographer, paying close attention to his handwritten captions, recognises it as a complex hybrid that extends his prophetic poetics. In particular, contextualising his work in relation to the 1950s photojournalism of Life and Time establishes the ways in which Ginsberg, and Burroughs, responded to the attacks made on the Beats in those magazines on behalf of Henry Luce’s ‘American Century’.     

Not without my sister(s)

Less than two months after 11 September 2001, and a few weeks after the beginning of the US bombing campaign in Afghanistan, President George W. Bush made an urgent plea to see Iranian filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf's Kandahar. Not only did the President want to see Kandahar; he encouraged US citizens to view it as well. This article offers two readings of Kandahar – the first suggestive of what its filmmaker Makhmalbaf saw in Afghanistan and the second suggestive of what Bush saw (or hoped to see) in Makhmalbaf's Afghanistan. In particular, this article focuses on how the Bush administration – against the intentions of Kandahar's director and star – propelled occidental subjects to ‘lift the veil’ on Afghanistan and on Afghan women by viewing Kandahar as if it positioned the feminine as a needy and willing object of US rescue. It was in part by laying this particular claim to the separated sisters of Kandahar that the Bush administration constructed a humanitarian US ‘we’ as among the foundations of its ‘moral grammar of war’ in the war on terror.     

'Estrogen-filled worlds': fathers as primary caregivers and embodiment

Within the wide body of scholarship on gender work and caring, sub‐strands of research have grown tremendously in the past decade, including largely separate studies on fatherhood and embodiment. Drawing on a qualitative research project with Canadian fathers who self‐identify as primary caregivers of their children, this article focuses on recovering largely invisible links between theoretical and empirical understandings of fatherhood, caring and embodiment. The article builds on the work of key sociologists of the body as well as the work of Goffman and Merleau‐Ponty. Specifically, Merleau‐Ponty's concept of ‘body subjects’ and Goffman's work on the ‘moral’ quality of bodily movements through public spaces are utilized as lenses for understanding fathers' narratives of caring, particularly how men speak about their movements with children through what several fathers refer to as “estrogen‐filled” worlds. As caring for others involves forming social networks and relations, embodiment can matter in the spaces between men, between male and female caregivers, and between men and the children of others. This article argues that through the changing stages of caring for children, male embodiment constantly shifts in the weight of its salience in the identities and practices of fathers and caregiving.     

Differentiating among penal states

This review article assesses Loïc Wacquant's contribution to debates on penality, focusing on his most recent book, Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity ( Wacquant 2009 ), while setting its argument in the context of his earlier Prisons of Poverty (1999). In particular, it draws on both historical and comparative methods to question whether Wacquant's conception of ‘the penal state’ is adequately differentiated for the purposes of building the explanatory account he proposes; about whether ‘neo‐liberalism’ has, materially, the global influence which he ascribes to it; and about whether, therefore, the process of penal Americanization which he asserts in his recent writings is credible.     

Women's Work,Dirty Work: The Gynaecology Nurse as ‘Other’

This article seeks to explore the world of the gynaecology nurse. This world defines the gendered experience of nursing; that is, women in a women's job carrying out ‘women's work’. It is also a world that receives scant public recognition due to its association with the private domain of women's reproductive health. Many issues dealt with on a daily basis by gynaecology nurses are socially ‘difficult’: cancer, infertility, miscarriage and foetal abnormalities; or socially ‘distasteful’: termination of pregnancy, urinary incontinence, menstruation and sexually transmitted disease. The ‘tainted’ nature of gynaecology nursing gives it the social distinction of ‘dirty work’ but does not deter the gynaecology nurse from declaring her work as ‘special’, requiring distinctive knowledge and skills. Qualitative data collected from a group of gynaecology nurses in a North West National Health Service hospital displays how they actively celebrate their status as women carrying out ‘dirty work’. Through the use of ceremonial work that continually re‐affirms their ‘womanly’ qualities the gynaecology nurses establish themselves as ‘different’, as ‘special’, as the ‘other’.     

‘The Right to Choose or Choosing What's Right? Women's Conceptualizations of Work and Life Choices in Contemporary Russia’

The resulting social and economic transformations of marketization and democratization have had a significant impact on the employment terrain of post‐socialist Russia. This has had particular effects on the forms and structures of work available for women. Our article argues that as a result of these social and economic transformations, the metaphor of ‘choice’ inherent in current theoretical approaches to the study of women at work in western contexts can also be adapted to the post‐socialist context. Building on existing research on women and work in the UK and in Russia, we seek to provide new insights into Russian women's own understandings of work and non‐work choices grounded in an analysis of women's use of rights discourses. Drawing on in‐depth interview data with 49 women living in the provincial Russian city of Ul'ianovsk, we explore constructions of work in relation to narratives of discrimination; as a means of ‘samorealizatsiia’, and as ‘choice’ reflecting the continuing inseparability of public and private roles for women. Situating our work in wider global debates affecting the gendered nature of employment, the examination of the use of rights discourses not only highlights the multiple ways in which women perceive their choices about work but also offers an alternative conceptual framework.     

What we talk about when we talk about ‘walking in the city’1

Originally published. in France in 1980 (and translated. into English in 1984), Michel de Certeau's The Practice of Everyday Life has assumed. the status of an ur-text for many cultural studies academics and students. In particular, his chapter on ‘Walking in the City’ is often cited. as a blueprint for understanding key terms in the cultural studies repertoire such as ‘power’ and ‘resistance’. This article revisits ‘Walking in the City’ in order to supplement some of the established. understandings of his work circulating in the field of cultural studies, as well as the intersecting fields of cultural geography and urban studies. The paper begins by suggesting ways in which established. understandings of Certeau's work might be usefully rethought and extended. through a consideration of differentiated. instances of walking. Critiquing the account of body-subject relations posited. by Certeau through reference to the writings of Marcel Mauss on techniques of the body and self, the author calls, in particular, for a greater consideration of the role of assemblages and affect in understanding everyday urban practices. By the conclusion of the article, the author arrives at a more nuanced. understanding of the feedback loop between the body-subject and the city, and suggests ways in which Certeau's writing on walking remains productive for those strains of cultural studies interested. in the practices of an increasingly virtualized. urban space.     

Craft as work–life unity: The careers of skilled working‐class men and their sons and grandsons after deindustrialization

This article focuses on the enduring significance of craft in the careers of Kent Royal Dockyard craftworkers and their sons and grandsons after deindustrialization. The closure of this naval shipbuilding and repair yard together with the subsequent move to post‐industrial employment did not end men's engagement with their craft practices. Instead, this developed into a ‘craft outlook’ defined by a motivation for performing actualizing labour that interwove paid and non‐paid work. Men's careers did not become individualized projects of self as collaborative intergenerational practices gave a long‐term narrative to their careers and lives. Therefore, three contributions are proposed to the literature on working‐class male careers and craft. First, an analytical framework is advanced that empirically distinguishes a ‘craft outlook’ from traditional manual trade employment. Second, a craft outlook reflected ‘whole life careers’ that were constructed from both paid and non‐paid work. Third, the concept of ‘human imprint’ is developed to recognize the generational affirmation produced by the transmission of craft practices.     

Corporate Strategy and Gendered Professional Identities: Reorganization and the Struggle for Recognition and Positions

Will decentralization of responsibilities in services give women service workers at the lower levels of the organization better and more ‘professional’ jobs and a recognition of their importance in the organization? This article looks at the valuation of so‐called women's skills in services in reorganization processes involving dehierarchization and decentralization of responsibilities. Through four cases of reorganized private and public services in Norway it is shown that more focus on customers and decentralization of responsibilities for the services may lead to recognition of gendered skills and an improved position for women service workers at the lowest levels of the organization. When the tasks of the workers are closely linked to the core function of the organization and not dominated by the organization's ‘dirty work’, the women at the lowest levels may obtain a more ‘professional’ work role and their work be recognized as important for the organization.     

Facebook Bras and #digitalharems: Fantasies of Mimesis and the Transgressions of Aliaa Elmahdy and Amina Sboui

Abstract

This article presents a horizontal reading of Aliaa Elmahdy's and Amina Sboui's corporeal interventions alongside the efficacy of digital platforms in order to consider how algorithmic and normative protocols related to content filtering on social media amplify certain forms of political communication while prohibiting others. I argue that readings of Elmahdy's and Sboui's bodily politics through the lens of liberal feminism rely on what I call discourses of mimetic networking, where particular mediated events become reterritorialized as part of an archival knowledge of ‘Arabness’. This is done through the organization of data via hashtagging and content moderation, and through rhetorics of techno-optimism that mirror ‘first contact’ narratives which gender, racialize, and flatten complex and fluid engagements with new media in non-US/European contexts. The article concludes with a consideration of how the persistence of their corporeality relays with both normative and programmatic parameters online to make alternative visions of communication possible.     

Ultimate concerns in late modernity: Archer,Bourdieu and reflexivity

Through a critique of Margaret Archer's theory of reflexivity, this paper explores the theoretical contribution of a Bourdieusian sociology of the subject for understanding social change. Archer's theory of reflexivity holds that conscious ‘internal conversations’ are the motor of society, central both to human subjectivity and to the ‘reflexive imperative’ of late modernity. This is established through critiques of Bourdieu, who is held to erase creativity and meaningful personal investments from subjectivity, and late modernity is depicted as a time when a ‘situational logic of opportunity’ renders embodied dispositions and the reproduction of symbolic advantages obsolete. Maintaining Archer's focus on ‘ultimate concerns’ in a context of social change, this paper argues that her theory of reflexivity is established through a narrow misreading and rejection of Bourdieu's work, which ultimately creates problems for her own approach. Archer's rejection of any pre‐reflexive dimensions to subjectivity and social action leaves her unable to sociologically explain the genesis of ‘ultimate concerns’, and creates an empirically dubious narrative of the consequences of social change. Through a focus on Archer's concept of ‘fractured reflexivity’, the paper explores the theoretical necessity of habitus and illusio for understanding the social changes that Archer is grappling with. In late modernity, reflexivity is valorized just as the conditions for its successful operation are increasingly foreclosed, creating ‘fractured reflexivity’ emblematic of the complex contemporary interaction between habitus, illusio, and accelerating social change.     

The systems' approach and social work methods

Many social work courses are now using ‘system theory’, or as I prefer to call it, ‘a systems' approach’, in teaching social work method on a unitary basis. Most social work techers recognise that the systems' approach is not enough on its own and that traditional methods have a place in practice. What is not clear is how these methods relate to the systems' approach.

In this article the relationship between the systems' approach and various methods and theories of intervention is explored in a number of different ways. Firstly, there is an examination of the relationship of various client, target and action systems. Secondly. Lippitt's analysis of the ‘diagnostic orientations’ of change agents is discussed and related to strategies aimed at changing the goals and the power structures of target systems. Then certain counselling and casework methods are considered in relation to Lippitt's analysis, leading on to a brief comment on methods of intervention based on systems' theory. Finally, an educational strategy for presenting this approach is discussed.     

Is computer gaming a craft? Prehension,* practice,and puzzle-solving in gaming labour

ABSTRACT

This article applies sociological theories of ‘craft’ to computer gaming practices to conceptualise the relationship between play, games, and labour. Using the example of the game Dota 2, as both a competitive esport title and a complex game based around a shared practice, this article examines the conditions under which the play of a computer game can be considered a ‘craft’. In particular, through the concept of ‘prehension’, we dissect the gameplay activity of Dota 2, identifying similarities with how the hand practices craft labour. We identify these practices as ‘contact’, ‘apprehension’, ‘language acquisition’ and ‘reflection’. We argue that players develop these practices of the hand to make sense of the game’s rules and controls. From this perspective, it is the hand that initiates experiences of craft within computer gameplay, and we offer examples of player creativity and experimentation to evidence its labour. The article concludes with a discussion on the need for future research to examine the quality of gaming labour in the context of esports.     

ON 'MAELSTROMS LARGE AND SMALL,METAPHORICAL AND ACTUAL': 'GRAY ZONES' IN THE WRITINGS OF PRIMO LEVI

This article examines the work of Primo Levi, with a focus on the tensions between ‘witness’ and ‘public intellectual’ in Levi's work. It analyses the notion of ‘gray zones’ in Levi's writings, where it functions as a way of indicating transformations in political action and public discourse in the wake of Auschwitz: most importantly, the Nazi genocide undermined the position of ‘spectator’ crucial to liberal discourse by implicating the spectator as a ‘bystander’. The study goes on to discuss the concepts of ‘work’, ‘science’ and ‘intellect’ in Levi's writing, showing how these categories reflect Levi's ultimately unsuccessful struggle to uncover a mode of political thought and public intervention adequate to the changes in political space of which the ‘gray zone’ is symptomatic, i.e. a condition of universal complicity and powerlessness. It concludes that implicit (and undeveloped) in Levi's thought is a set of ‘aesthetico-political’ presuppositions concerned with the articulation of founding, legitimacy and judgement. These presuppositions challenge the reliance of emancipatory discourses upon subjectivity and the logic of self-determination, indicating the need for a politics based on ‘pedagogical accountability’. Resisting the postmodern logic of ‘testimony’, which emerges in the gap between universal claims and their performance and hence dismantles the ‘outside’ as a space of judgement, i.e. the determination of the legitimacy of actions, the politics of pedagogical accountability grounds such an outside in the conjoining of power, responsibility for the world and boundary thinking. This space ‘outside’ ideology and the circulation of subjectivities emerges via resistance to the specifically ‘anti-political’ violence pervasive in late capitalism, and through the clarification of the distinction between this mode of violence and that (‘pre-political’) violence aimed at ‘subjects’.