Embodied labour in music work

This paper frames the work of performance as embodied labour in order to understand the contingent production of particular music performances. It is an interdisciplinary account that sits at the intersection of the sociology of work, culture and the body. The concept of embodied labour is developed with reference to the complex account of materiality – of bodies and things – present in Tim Ingold's account of skill. This material account of skill is used to inform use to develop already of well established conceptualizations of body labour: craft, emotional and aesthetic labour through a reading of how these dimensions of embodied labour make possible the work of performance.     

SMOOTHING MACHINES AND THE CONSTITUTION OF SOCIETY

I ask the reader to imagine society as a production of‘smoothing machines’. Smoothing machines mark the surfaces of bodies, and in the social sense, they are markings of the body that indicate status, generally in terms of purity or perfection. The socius, Deleuze and Guattari write, is a coding machine, and codes smooth social relations of power. Elias Canetti, in his work on crowds, discovers an internal connection between smoothness, social power, and the body for him the first aspect of power is the smoothness of the teeth, and he traces modern forms of social control and violence to eating and incorporation. In his darkest vision, ‘everything is going smoothly’ comes to mean that everything is in our power, and power is equated with paranoia and the naked will to survive. Many contemporary disciplinary technologies take the form of smoothing the body, understood as‘fitting’ the body to a model of subjectivity and a functional regime. Not all smoothing machines facilitate social control, however. As Deleuze and Guattari suggest, many also generate lines of flight or escape. For every smoothing machine that forms a Subject and submits it to power, there are others that set it free.     

Intersexuality: On Secret Bodies and Secrecy

The article problematizes the treatment of intersex as a secret within the medical and family systems. Under the biosocial assumption that the “intersexual” body is pathological and requiring immediate surgical and hormonal regulation, intersex individuals are made to undergo a process of transforsexation, that is, the violent production of a normative masculinity or femininity by means of invasive clinical practices. In this process absolute secrecy serves as a central factor for the success of normalization. We argue that not only does “the secret” of intersex bodies become an active factor in the normalization of sex but also paradoxically it is counteracted by the body, which does not “speak” the language of “the secret” and continues to reproduce new forms of intersex combinations in response to ongoing medical intervention. Our analysis is based on case histories told by 6 mothers of intersex children and by 11 intersex adults, stories in which secrecy has been an essential theme in the process of transforsexation imposed by doctors and followed by the parents. Secrecy, even more than the surgery itself, was, in the experience of intersex adults, a great cause of confusion, anger, mistrust, and criticism. Because of secrecy, intersex children are thus deprived of a language to name their experience or interpret the sense of their body.     

Fertility treatment and organizational discourses of the non-reproductive female body

This paper contributes to debates on the intersections between organizations, the body, and reproduction by exploring how the non-reproductive female body is discursively (re)constructed by organizations which provide fertility treatment, such as private clinics and fertility magazines. Organization studies has neglected the non-reproductive body, despite a fair amount of research on its reproductive counterpart, especially pregnant and maternal bodies. Equally, these discussions privilege the employment relationship – for example, how women are enjoined to manage their bodies at work – whereas we concentrate on the marketplace, or the field of fertility treatment, and the organizations therein. These organizations, while focused on reproducing bodies, also influence, compound, and challenge notions of the bodies they are involved with. Through a Critical Discourse Analysis of texts produced by UK fertility organizations, we present three discourses of the non-reproductive female body that (re)generate subject positions where the absence of reproduction is a medical condition, an emotionally distressing experience, and something that needs to be cared for. Our argument suggests how the texts can operate as a form of Foucauldian governmental biopower, emphasizing how they hail the infertile female subject.     

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.     

Stories of Risk and Protection: A Turn to the Narrative in Social Policy Education

This paper discusses the role of ‘story’ in social policy teaching within social work education. In particular, it uses the explication of two students' stories of their own experience to consider approaches to the concepts of risk and protection. The paper sets a scene whereby the roles of narrative, practitioner-wisdom (Phronesis) and personal experience need to be addressed within social policy education. Then, using stories generated by an educational intervention building on memory work, it illustrates how the ‘pragmatic eclecticism’ of narrative analysis can illuminate some of the complexities of social policy constructs. A range of analytical tools have been brought to bear on the stories, including the distinct but related concepts of ‘role’ and ‘performance’ and literary devices such as genre and plot, as well as a consideration of intertextuality. This is done to support the notion that social policy needs to broaden its methodological range.     

TRAUMA TRAINING AND THE REPARATIVE WORK OF JOURNALISM

This article examines discourses of trauma and affective labor in the emergence of trauma training in US journalism. In a body of training texts and films used in US journalism schools, crime and disaster journalism are being refigured as affective encounters between reporters and victims; in the process, training builds a language of trauma that describes and models the news making process as potentially reparative: as an epistemological meeting point between existing knowledge of social traumas and a training apparatus that enables constructs of trauma to do the cultural production of news differently. Rather than treat the emergence of trauma training initiatives as further evidence of the hegemony of therapeutic politics, I draw from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's calls for reparative critique, in which transformations in the process of news production may reveal the work of affective labor and its emotional intensities as key, but often unacknowledged, features of cultural production. Analysis of training films and manuals in these curricula, on the one hand, shows their attachments to a medical discourse of trauma that borrows language and constructs from the trauma science literature, replicating forms of referentiality between wounded bodies and traumatized psyches. However, their translation into representational practices and modes of conduct for reporters – as witnesses to others' testimonies – also pose ways of understanding the burdens and affective responsibilities professions like journalism increasingly bear for displaying and interpreting social change and political upheaval.     

The hostile environment,Brexit, and ‘reactive‐’ or ‘protective transnationalism’

The ‘reactive transnationalism hypothesis’ posits a relationship between discrimination and transnational practice. The concept has generally been studied using quantitative methods, but a qualitative approach augments our understanding of two context‐specific dimensions: the nature of the discrimination involved, and the types of transnational behaviour that might be affected. Drawing on in‐depth interviews with Bangladesh‐origin Muslims in London, Luton and Birmingham, in the UK, we demonstrate how anti‐Asian and anti‐Muslim racism have been conflated with intensified anti‐migrant racism in the context of ‘hostile environment’ immigration policies and the EU referendum (Brexit), producing an amplification of racist discourses associated with purging the body politic of its non‐white bodies. The insecurity generated is altering some people's relationships to Bangladesh, incentivizing investment in land and property ‘back home'. While this represents an example of ‘reactive transnationalism', we argue that ‘protective transnationalism’ might be a more appropriate way of describing the processes at work.     

Military Invasion and Women's Political Representation

The bodies produced by the violent practice of suicide bombing are a source of horror and disgust. They are, in feminist psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva's concept, abject: that which defies borders and is expelled to create the self. As ‘abject bodies’, suicide bombers' bodies frustrate attempts at calculation and rational control of security risks, and, in their mutilated flesh, expose as unstable the idea of the body as a whole with clearly defined boundaries between inside and outside. Female suicide bombers, whose bodies are already considered ‘abject’, produce a politics of the body that exceeds narratives of victimhood, and whose very monstrosity symbolically threatens the foundations of the nation-state. Attempts at constructing subjects out of the mutilated bodily remains of victims and perpetrators of suicide bombings are key practices in the production of the state and gendered subjects. The practice of suicide bombing and efforts to recover and resignify bodies reveals how power molds and constitutes the border of the body and state simultaneously. The explosive body of the suicide bomber thus has destabilizing effects beyond the motivations of its perpetrators and exposes the political work necessary to maintain the illusion of secure, bounded bodies and states.     

GENDER AND THE BODY OF MEDICINE OR AT LEAST SOME BODY PARTS:

Understanding the disproportionate location of women physicians in lower status medical specialties necessitates knowing how women and men view the prestige hierarchy of specialties. Previous research on status ranking has been largely quantitative and based upon male respondents. Using narratives from face-to-face interviews with male and female resident physicians, this study finds that, although residents are fairly consistent in their rankings, women were more likely to resist the concept of a prestige hierarchy. In addition to explicit dimensions conferring prestige are implicit justifications grounded in the physician's body. Specifically, high prestige is associated with active interventionist hands and "balls," body parts that I argue are not gender neutral. The findings shift the focus from individual-level gender differences toward a gendered examination of the medical specialty hierarchy. The physicians interviewed here give voice to the silent, symbolic, embodied work of gender that shapes the structure of medical specialties into a ladder with a masculine top and a feminine bottom, regardless of whether male or female bodies occupy the rungs.     

Reclaiming Self

In this article I use performance poetry pieces to reflect upon my experiences of living with a disability as a person of color, a woman, and an immigrant. It is my firm contention that, although listening to the stories of the clients we meet on our journeys is integral to creating individual and structural changes and raising awareness of mental health issues, as social workers it is just as important to share our own personal and collective stories of mental health, stigma, and recovery. As helpers and change makers, it is unlikely that we can influence mental health policy purely from behind the wall of positivism. Stories of clients as well as stories of our lived experiences are critical to challenging the strong divide that characterizes the social work academy: the us/them, service provider/service user, and the expert/client. Furthermore, my hope is that this article will add to the literature concerning the traumas experienced by immigrant women in their private domains.     

Oil,Polity, and Civil Society: The Construction of a Hegemonic System in Iraq (1945–1958)

Conventional theories of political economy assume that dependency on natural resources, such as oil, have a negative impact on the development of a democratic political system. While there is a developed body of work that explains the different mechanisms that shape this relationship, one mechanism, the role of the civil society, remains mostly ungrasped. As a result, the aim of this paper is to expand our understanding of the group formation effect, first discussed by Michael Ross (2001), and unpack the mechanisms that underline it, by looking at the relationship between rent from oil production, the civil society, and the rise of authoritarianism in Iraq during the period of 1945–1958. We argue that examining the relationship between these variables will help us understand the past and the current situation in Iraq, and it will improve our knowledge of the political formations and activism in oil‐producing countries in general.     

Towards a sociology of transgendered bodies

The articulation of a generic social process of 'body femaling' presented in Ekins (1993) and elaborated in Ekins (1997) is further developed in this article to provide a conceptual framework for a sociology of trans-gendered bodies. Transgendering refers both to the idea of moving across (transferring) from one pre-existing gender category to another (either temporarily or permanently), and to the idea of transcending or living 'beyond gender' altogether. Following Plummer's (1995) work on sexual stories, we distinguish a number of contemporary transgendering body stories which we consider in terms of four major modes or styles of body transgendering: those we identify as 'migrating', 'oscillating', 'erasing' and 'transcending'. We give illustrative examples of each mode with reference to the binary male/female divide, the interrelations between sex, sexuality and gender, and the interrelations between the four main sub-processes of transgendering, which we identify as 'substituting', 'concealing', 'implying' and 'redefining'.     

ON THE FAULT LINE: RACE,CLASS AND THE US PATRIOT MOVEMENT

This paper analyses the identity politics of the US Patriot Movement and how it addresses the anxieties its primary constituency–working-class whites–have with globalization. White workers find themselves straddling an identity fault under globalization. By virtue of their class, they suffer exploitation within a capitalist system. By virtue of their race, they find themselves the beneficiaries of racial privileges. To analyse how a patriot politic addresses this dual positionality, a poststructuralist identity theory is employed, focusing on a subset of this literature known as whiteness studies. It is argued that discourses of patriotism keep patriots from addressing the economic basis of many of their grievances while buttressing notions of cultural/racial superiority through ‘safe’ nationalistic coding. The Patriot Movement in Central Kentucky is examined as a case study–in particular, its deployment of a patriot politic around two issues: calls to legalize industrial hemp and efforts to stop the designation of a biosphere reserve in the state. This paper's conclusions are situated within a current debate in whiteness studies between those calling for the abolition of whiteness and those calling for its reconstruction. The paper contends that disidentification is not a viable option without alternative categories to replace it. The willingness of Kentucky patriots to galvanize around a patriot politics despite realizing goals through it indicates that working-class whites are anxious for political categories of action in the new global era. Given that working-class whites are mobilizing around categories that code their race-based anxieties, however, reconstruction paradigms must also consider the reconstruction of categories–such as ‘patriot’–that currently work to divide workers along racial lines.     

"THE STORY" OF A DEATH: THERAPEUTIC CONSIDERATIONS WITH BEREAVED FAMILIES

Facilitating and listening to bereaved families tell "The Story" of their loss is an important component of therapeutic work with bereaved families. Following a discussion of the general functions of stories, the authors use a variety of case examples to illustrate how "The Story" can be used as an assessment device, as an initial intervention, and as a gauge of the progress of treatment. Family stories of loss are conceptualized as constructions, and the emphasis is on how individual and family context affect and are affected by these stories. Throughout the paper, particular attention is paid to ways stories canbe useful for children in families.     

Youth transitions and migration: negotiated and constrained interdependencies within and across generations

This paper, based on a longitudinal and multi-sited ethnographic study, explores the intersection between youth transitions, migration and relationships. It considers the complex ways in which rural Bolivian young people move back and forth between work and education, between home and migrant destinations as they strive to form their own household and develop new relationships, whilst continuing to maintain interdependent relations with their parents and siblings. It presents three life stories which outline the key role of relationships in shaping youth transitions and migrant trajectories. Whilst the three pathways are different, they also encompass some similar features: the complexity of deciding between school or work, the key role of migration, the importance of social networks and old/new relationships, and the impact of birth-ordered and gendered household relations. In particular the paper argues that the concept of negotiated and constrained interdependencies is a useful way of understanding the flexible and opportunistic yet limited nature of youth transitions in a context of migration. The paper is based on fieldwork which involved tracking down 14 of the 18 households who had been involved in my doctoral research over 10 years ago, and of these 14 households one or both parents and two or three of the siblings were interviewed.     

Training Bodies,Building Status: Negotiating Gender and Age Differences in the U.S. Fitness Industry

What role does the body play in facilitating interaction across status differences? Whereas previous scholarly work has focused on “roles” and “specialized knowledge,” I investigate how bodies, appearances, and physical abilities are also consequential in these exchanges through the concept of “bodily capital.” Coined by Bourdieu, bodily capital provides a way to understand why individuals invest time, energy, and resources into their bodies, and what they expect to receive in return. As a concept, bodily capital is necessarily broad as it encompasses a variety of forms, including athletic prowess, attractiveness, physique, muscle tone/strength, agility, and other modes of embodiment. Because the body is integral to a variety of status distinction-making processes, individuals invest in and exchange bodily capital to increase their relative status in specific fields. Drawing on interviews with 26 personal trainers and 25 clients, as well as more than one year of participant observation, I find that trainers and clients use bodily capital to negotiate gender and age differences, either by re-arranging interactional power dynamics or resisting stereotypes. The type of bodily capital that allows for such negotiations to take place, however, is the hegemonic thin-toned ideal—a classed and largely raced form of bodily capital that has purchase in the U.S. fitness industry. Although individuals in the study were able to use this form of capital to enable successful cross-status interactions, doing so reified the dominance of middle-class, white bodily aesthetics. Thus, while bodily capital may challenge some status hierarchies, it reinforces others.     

THE EMBRACE:

This article develops the notion that non-distance is a constitutive element in human relations. The essential difference between body-engagement as a relation of non-distance and face-engagement (comprising eye-contact and talk) as a relation of distance is demonstrated. Body-engagement reduces distance and the separate self/body dissolves through touch. The full significance of touch as an encounter and a merging together of bodies is found in the embrace. In it bodies clasp together and draw and press closer to the point where separate and disengaged personal spaces open up and collapse into one common closure. Exploring a broad range of "embrace' phenomena, beginning with the ordinary ritual of shaking hands, and continuing through whole body embraces, erotic love, and finally communitas and mystical union with the divine, this study questions the possibility of unity between self and other. It suggests that the seed of distance always remains within the moment of non-distance, yet the growth of the self (the separate, the different) requires the element of non-distance attained in the unity of the embrace.