Classification,Subjectivities, and Personal Visibility

This article proposes extending the empirical sociological debate regarding the complex ways social classifications construct scenarios of subjectivity. Based on the case study of the Boarding School for the Gifted Disadvantaged in Israel, the article describes how a new cultural order created a new scenario of subjectivity (“gifted disadvantaged”) that had not been known before. This scenario was shaped in relation both to the ethnic classification in Israel, as well as to two social categories that were well‐known in the educational field (“gifted” and “disadvantaged”). To understand the institutional dynamics involved in the construction of a new scenario of subjectivity, content analysis of the organizational documents that accompanied the founding of the school was carried out, and in‐depth interviews with graduates of the school were conducted in order to understand how those who populate the new scenario experience their subjectivity years after its construction. The findings indicate a specific connection between classifications, subjectivity, and personal visibility. Specifically, the study reveals a number of phenomenological aspects that enhance the experience of visibility: the cognitive identification of two types of self; the experience of cognitive liminality; and the consciousness of having a subjectivity deserving of special nurturance.     

Healing the Hidden Injuries of Class? Redemption Narratives,Aspirational Proxies,and Parents of Low‐Income,First‐Generation College Students

Existing scholarship has examined how low‐income individuals conceptualize their socioeconomically constrained positions in relation to the meritocratic ideologies and stratified mobility structures of the United States, but little is specifically known about how these individuals' ideas regarding their own status may be impacted by raising children who surpass their educational and occupational achievement levels. Drawing on interview data from both low‐income first‐generation (LIFG) college students and the parents of those students, this article examines how parents framed the achievements of their upwardly mobile, college‐going children in relation to their own experiences of socioeconomic, educational, and occupational constraint. Engaging qualitative understandings of the “hidden injuries of class,” the analysis demonstrates how parents of LIFG college students reconciled their own experiences of limited mobility despite hard work with their steadfast beliefs in meritocratic ideals by (1) invoking narratives of personal “redemption” from past “mistakes” or “failures” in relation to their children's educational accomplishments, and (2) conceptualizing their upwardly mobile children as “aspirational proxies” through whose accomplishments they measured their own success.     

自反性青年亚文化——青年文化的空间属性与情感转向

“青年文化”具有“亚文化”属性,不仅仅指“青春叛逆”这一特质,在新媒体时代更涉及到“网络媒介”对“青年文化”的形塑。通过当代大学生阅读调查、网络使用习惯调查以及实际社交状况的深描,探讨青年群体在虚拟空间与现实空间中不同的身份表达,可以发现当下“赛博空间”中的青年自我表征与现实身份认同的关系具有“自反性”,一方面“次元壁”的区隔显示出青年身份认同的焦虑,另一方面从“网络—现实”空间的二元对立中又生产出身份认同的路径,即通过“自我对抗”最终生产出青年的主体性。     

Whose Problem is This?

Abstract

This paper is concerned with how the needs of lesbian and gay youth are situated and defined in educational contexts and the intended and unintended consequences of framing their needs in particular ways. It is based on a case study of a senior college in New Zealand where a strategy for dealing with gay and lesbian youth was framed within a climate of market-driven educational reforms and where queer youth were viewed within the discourse of being “at risk.” This enabled the school to promote itself as providing a caring and nurturing environment without jeopardizing its position in the marketplace. However, this strategy had the unfortunate consequences of re-pathologizing lesbian and gay students and constructing their sexuality as a personal problem.     

Rehearsals in Citizenship: BBC Stop‐Motion Animation Programmes For Young Children

This paper examines new managerial discourses and practices in which the dialectic of labour is reconstructed as a series of acts of self‐understanding, self‐examination and “self‐work”, and through which the “self qua self” is constituted as the central object of management technologies. We interrogate concepts such as “excellence”, “total quality”, “performance”, “knowledge”, “play at work” and “wellness” in order to decipher the ways in which managerialism deploys what we term therapeutic habitus, and projects a new horizon of “human resourcefulness” as a store of unlimited potentialities. We invoke management’s wider historical–cultural context to situate managerialism within the framework of modernity as a cultural epoch whose main characteristic is what we term “derecognition of finitude”. It is the modern synthesis — with the “self” at the centre of its system of values — that provides the ground for current elaborations of subjectivity by managerialism. The paper examines how current vocabularies and practices in organizations use “work” to rearticulate discursively the human subject as an endless source of performativity by configuring work as the site of complex and continuous self‐expression. Management thus acquires a new discursive outline: instead of appearing as an authoritarian instance forcing upon workers a series of limitations, it now presents itself as a therapeutic formula mediating self‐expression by empowering individuals to work upon themselves to release their fully realized identity.     

Grappling with the Medicated Self: The Case of ADHD College Students

Drawing on interview data, this article is a case study of the “medicated self.” Specifically, we analyze how ADHD‐diagnosed college students construct how they are shaped by the behavioral effects of medicine. Students may perceive that pharmaceutical enhancement is necessary in the context of a competitive academic ethic. In this context something akin to Lareau's concept of concerted cultivation thrives as students practice what we call concerted medicalization in an attempt to literally embody the academic ideal. However, while medicine may enable students to manage academic performance and take control of “disordered bodies,” many remain uneasy about the extent to which they feel controlled by a drug. In the context of medical ambivalence, ADHD students engage in reflexive identity management and strategic pharmaceutical use to achieve some semblance of self‐control and self‐preservation during their college years. As their college education comes to a close, many prepare to return to what they construct as their “authentic,” nonmedicated selves as they enter the work world.     

Mother-Writing and the Narrative of Maternal Subjectivity

This essay discusses how writing from a maternal perspective can construct maternal subjectivity in a linguistic form. Maternal subjectivity is understood as the aggregate of subject positions, or “representations,” experienced by a woman who is a mother. Writing can form connections between subject positions, including those which have been split off or denied because of culturally induced ambivalence, to establish a subjectivity that is multiple rather than split. Through a reading of Mary Gordon's novel, Men and Angels, I show how the text's narrative structure, as it represents a mother's discourse with her own mother, her discourse with herself, and her discourse with her child, incarnates the plurality of self positions that mothers possess and constructs a relationship or “grammar” between them. By evoking this complex maternal subjectivity, mother-writing can be understood as a gesture toward recognition–both within the text, for its characters, and outside the text, for the mother/writer.     

Of Roots and Wings: Letting Go of the College‐Bound Child

This article examines how parents experience the process of “letting go” of their college‐bound children. The focus of our analysis is on how the parents evaluate the meanings of their children's leaving home and adopt strategies to facilitate the process for both themselves and the departing child. Our analysis is based on interviews with thirty sets of parents. The interview materials allowed us to recognize and then parse the paradoxical task faced by parents of fostering “attached individuation” for both themselves and their children. We address four broad and persistent themes that emerged from our conversations with parents. First, we consider how parents manage the range of sometimes‐conflicting emotions generated by the letting go process. Second, we analyze the content of parents' worries as a good unobtrusive measure of how they understand the transition to college as a ritual marker in their children's lives. Third, we show how negotiations about geography—about proper distance from home—in choosing a college reflect efforts to impose a measure of gradualism into the letting go process. Fourth, we report on how parents theorize the impact of a child's departure on family relationships in general.     

Working a Third Shift: Physical Activity and Embodied Motherhood

In their conception of the “third shift,” Dworkin and Wachs argue that working mothers engage in fitness and bodywork in addition to the first shift of professional work and the second shift of household labor and childcare. Within this third shift, the goal for women is to “erase physical evidence of motherhood” and return to the pre-pregnancy self. The cultivation of a body socially defined as “good” and “attractive” thus serves as a visible illustration of an embodied subjectivity anchored in morality and neoliberal personal responsibility, signifying a strong woman who has her body and her life under control. Utilizing thematic analysis to examine dominant constructions of embodied motherhood in popular texts and products, this article offers five conceptual categories to explore why and how women in engage in bodywork. Understanding how women operationalize the third shift of fitness and bodywork is important because it helps to unpack the struggles of contemporary motherhood and the competing realities of home, work, and self-care.     

Parenting,Uncertainty, and Expert Advice: How Privileged American Families Work with Private Counselors in Their Children's College Race

This article uses privileged families who hire Independent Educational Consultants (IECs) as an instance to examine how privileged parents collaborate with individuals whom they consider educational experts to support their children in the college race. We argue that advantaged parents' anxieties about their children have created a market for IECs who provide expert advice in order to mitigate the uncertainties that these parents experience and to manage various goals that they want to achieve at an important turning point in their children's lives. Drawing primarily on interviews with parents who work with IECs, we introduce the concept of “collaborative cultivation” to analyze the processes whereby advantaged parents rely on the expertise and expert status of private counselors to cope with their and their children's vulnerability in the college race while at the same time preparing their children for the unknown future. The parental method of “concerted cultivation” reveals how elite parents rely on individuals they perceive as experts to establish “bridges” between their own social worlds and the academic worlds that appear to beyond their control. This bridging labor points to the myriad cultural beliefs enacted to justify the child‐rearing goals that privileged parents wish to accomplish by working with IECs.     

Pragmatics for the Production of Subjectivity: Time for Probe‐Heads

This article attends to the collaborative project of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, and specifically to their concept of “probe‐head” as mapped out in A Thousand Plateaus. Probe‐head names the rupturing of, and production of alternative modes of organisation to, the mixed semiotic of faciality that determines much of our lived life, in fact that constitutes us as “human”. In exploring this alternative “production of subjectivity” the essay attends also to Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of “several regimes of signs”, and to the idea of an experimental “pragmatics” of living. The essay goes on to map out what might be called two operating terrains of probe‐heads, in fact two different “times” of the contemporary – the past and the future – and looks at how these might be deployed against the impasses of the present. As far as the latter goes the essay looks at case studies of myth/modern paganism and contemporary art production.     

Testo Junkie Notes for a Psychoanalytic Forum

Starting with an autobiographical account of my own involvement within psychoanalytic practices, this paper opposes psychoanalysis to a new set of “somatopolitical” techniques of intervention. The paper studies psychoanalysis as a technology of the body, a verification apparatus, and a technology of government and asks how psychoanalysis can (or can’t) work as a critical technique of production of subjectivity within the neoliberal pharmacopornographic regime.     

“碎片化”时代高校青年文化建设的转型与重构

当前“碎片化”时代下的社会结构性特征包括知识爆炸式增长、社会思潮多元化、快餐文化风行、传播手段多样性等,其发展态势影响了青年主体与文化的群像特征,包括加剧了青年的圈层主体性、导致了青年文化碎片化、一定程度上颠覆了组织及活动载体。研究提出了高校青年文化建设在“碎片化”时代下转型与重构的五条路径:围绕“立德树人”,发挥共青团在青年文化建设中的价值导向作用;加强“文化自信”,整合碎片化的信息与资源;深入基层,针对性渗透到青年文化的每个角落;创新整合及碎片重构,搭建大数据下的“智慧团建”;发扬先锋模范作用,培育示范性青年文化。     

The Meaning of Queer Home

Abstract

This article positions two proto-queer texts together in order to demonstrate how the development of American “queer subjectivity” arose as a discernible discursive and embodied notion related to “home.” Written before the arrival of the queer category, Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (The Crossing Press, Freedom, CA, 1982) and Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues (Alyson Press, Los Angeles, CA, 2003, original work published 1993) concentrate upon the home as a site conditioned by twin concerns that would become central to queer politics: “the home” as narrative metaphor and homes as real-world shelters. Queering the home stretches and scrambles the home category (“dyke bar as home,” “Black lesbian sisterhood as home,” “body as home”) while insisting upon self-defined, material structures of protection and comfort for queers. The article performs a “reading through skin” of queer scholarship and of sociological data. It argues that these queer-emergent texts helped establish notions of “queer home” via exploring metaphoric and empirical axes related to domestic space.     

Students Who Strip: The Benefits of Alternate Identities for Managing Stigma

We apply interactionist theories that highlight the contextual nature of stigma and the relational quality of stigmatization to the case of college students who work as topless dancers. We explore how the “toll of stripping” might be mediated by having an alternate, positive identity like “student.” Our analysis demonstrates that students who strip are distinctive from other strippers in important ways that stem from their salient, positive identity as students. Although they often feel as if they live a “double life” because they hide their occupation from family and friends, they benefit from sharing their student goals and ambitions with club customers. “Student” is a socially acceptable identity to share in routine social interactions and helps student strippers frame dancing as a transient occupation, offering them an opportunity to maintain a positive sense of self while buffering them from some of the negative effects of stripping.     

Power and Pantaloons: The Case of Lee Boo and the Normalizing of the Student in Micronesia

Standing at the entrance to Palau Community College is a statue of Lee Boo, the son of the chief of Koror who was sent to England in 1783 as part of an exchange between Palauans and English sailors who had shipwrecked earlier on a nearby island. Dressed as the ideal Enlightenment scholar, Lee Boo serves as both a figuration of the normalization of Western schooling in Palau and other parts of Micronesia, as well as a productive simulacrum. A “reading” of Lee Boo employing visual and discursive analytics allows us to consider more fundamental issues of how a Foucaultian power/knowledge circuit operates through technologies of school and, in this case, the construction of the subjectivity of the student in Micronesia, as well as the ways in which processes of colonization and contemporary “development” circulate through formal schooling in the region.     

Leaving Home for College: Expectations for Selective Reconstruction of Self

This paper describes how 23 primarily upper-middle-class high school seniors anticipated identity changes as they prepared to leave home for college. The transition from high school to college is a period of “liminality” during which students are structurally in between old and new statuses. We discuss how students anticipated change, planned to affirm certain of their identities, imagined creating new identities, and contemplated discovering unanticipated identities. Such interpretive effort must be understood in the context of the ambivalence they felt about leaving home and achieving independence. The data also provoke discussion of how social class membership might be implicated in people's ability to control identity change as they move through the life course.     

Performance measurement: Some conceptual issues

Measures of how well a system is operating are clearly of interest to a wide range of users, from organizational researchers to system managers. The current literatures in such areas as “performance measurement, ” “organizational effectiveness, ” and the like show little consistency in their definitions of terms or in their methods for generating measures. The present paper attempts a clarification of these issues in the form of a conceptual minimalist position which requires only three basic definitions, and leaves, as far as possible, all remaining issues open to empirical investigation.We first review the literature on “organizational effectiveness” contrasting the organizational goals and systems paradigms, and note the lack of either theoretical or empirical convergence between the two. An examination of the nature of effectiveness statements suggests that this failure of convergence flows mainly from the different criterion sets generated by the two paradigms — and, importantly, that one should not expect convergence on a single measure or set of measures which uniquely define how well a system is performing. One's view of how well a given system is performing is a function of where one stands (either theoretically or in relationship to the system), and pursuit of the one true set of performance measures is a futile exercise. Instead, we propose to redirect attention to the identification of the various individuals and groups (“constituencies”) with an interest in system performance, and to the investigation of those items of system relevant information (their “performance measure sets”) which do, in fact, change their evaluations of how well the system is performing. This perspective will, we hope, redirect effort from futile theoretical debate to empirical investigations of what measures are used, by whom, and to what effect, in specific settings.     

Art dealers as competitors and community builders: Understanding the overlapping social logics of the contemporary art world

Art dealers are often described as gatekeepers who are focused on their own position as well as the status of their artists and collectors. We argue that this is an incomplete account of art dealing. The goal of this article is to explain how art dealing is a “toolkit” that does not exclusively focus on status building and social capital, but also includes behavior associated with accessing the visual arts field and community development. First, art dealers often have a background that has strong social ties to art, which provides them with intimate knowledge of the art world and social connections with artists, collectors, and other art world actors. For that reason, entry into art dealing reflects intimate knowledge of art practices, what we call “proximate connoisseurship.” Second, art dealerships reflect both competitive and communal factors. Art dealers may choose to work with artists based on their ability to generate income, social capital, and prestige (“competitive logic”), but art dealers may also employ a “communal logic” focused on friendships and creating community. This theory of art dealers is illustrated with excerpts from interviews with 34 dealers randomly selected from the rosters of international art fairs such as Art Basel Miami, EXPO Chicago, Aqua, and the New Art Dealers Alliance show.     

Troubling Whiteness: Commentary on Harris's “The House of Difference”

This article focuses on Harris's (this issue) understanding of racialized subjectivity as a socially constructed phenomenon where fantasies about race are transmitted intergenerationally. I was raised as a “white” South African and I had two vivid associations to Harris's proposal that a “psychose blanche,” an invisible repository of unsignified, racially inflected thoughts, feelings, and selves exists at the heart of “whiteness.” In both cases I recalled a scene from my youth where I was taught that whites in apartheid South Africa deserved punishment and would receive this “come the revolution.” These lessons were crucial building blocks in the formation of my racialized subjectivity, and I describe and interrogate them in an attempt to add further variety and color to the landscape that Harris so deftly draws as she resignifies her “whiteness.”