Breast Surgery as a Gender Technology: Analyzing Plastic Surgeons’ Discourses

This article explores the role of breast surgery as a gender technology by considering the discourse of plastic surgeons. We analyze the gender discourses that come into play when surgeons are asked to distinguish between 3 cases of breast surgery: breast implantation for transsexual women, postmastectomy breast intervention, and breast augmentation for aesthetic reasons. In the surgeons’ discourses, the 3 interventions are situated in the reconstruction/cosmetic divide. However, we can see that this boundary is profoundly influenced by cultural conceptions of gender. These gendered conceptions affect what is labeled normal/abnormal, what demands are considered legitimate, and which bodies are deemed able to possess certain attributes.     

Surviving on the inside: Reflections on being a woman and a feminist in a male academic institution

This article considers what it is like to be a woman on the inside: a white woman lecturer and tutor teaching social work students inside the white male bastion of the university. Universities are notoriously male-centred in their organisation, their teaching and their knowledge base; women working in universities have referred to themselves as ‘outsiders in the sacred grove’ (Aisenberg and Harrington, 1988). We might expect Departments of Social Work to be different to this, since social work has historically been a profession staffed by women, working with female clients (Brook and Davis, 1985). I will argue that patriarchal ideas and practices persist throughout higher educational institutions and that the impact of gender (as well as class, ethnicity and ‘race’, sexuality and disability) must be addressed at all levels within social work education.     

“人机交往”还是“人际交往”读屏时代青少年的同伴互动

“读屏”成为了越来越多青少年的“常规动作”和“生动表情”,青少年的同伴关系在种种屏幕面前也得以再造。电视屏幕为青少年展示了成人的后台景象,使青少年学习到许多人际交往模式以及相应的价值观念、行为方式。在网络虚拟世界中,青少年按照新的规则展开知识的传播、情感的交流、思想的撞击。学习如何同他人交往,并将这些交往技巧迁移到真实的社会情境中。手机作为“流动的现代性”的表征之一,重新结构着青少年的人际交往模式和社会关系网络。然而,青少年的社会需要不可能仅仅从抽象的“人机关系”中得到满足,“人机”关系自然不可能彻底取代“人际”关系。     

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.     

Performances of social class,race and gender through youth subculture: putting structure back in to youth subcultural studies

This paper aims to advance debates in youth studies about the contemporary relevance of social structures of class, race and gender to the formation of youth subcultures. I demonstrate how drawing on a cultural class analysis and education literature on learner identities and performativity can be productive in theorising the continued significance of class, and indeed also race and gender in young people's lives. In examining school-based friendships and (sub)cultural forms through empirical research in urban schools, I argue that not only are young people's subcultural groups structured by class, race and gender but also they are integral to the production of these identities. By examining the discursive productions of two school-based subcultures as examples: the ‘Smokers’ and the ‘Football’ crowd, I further argue that these identity positions embody resources or capitals which have differing value in the context of the urban school and thus demonstrate how race, class and gender privilege are maintained and reproduced through youth subculture.     

Race, Gender, and the Black Women's Standpoint

Hill Collins (1997, 1998, 2000) argues that because of their position within the intersecting hierarchies of race, gender, and class, black women as a group possess a “unique angle of vision” on the social world. Rooted in the everyday experiences of black women, the “black women’s standpoint” is marked by an intersectional understanding of oppression and a “legacy of struggle” against such oppression. In this article, I employ quantitative analyses of data from the National Survey of Black Americans (1992) and the National Black Feminist Study (2004–2005) to investigate the black women’s standpoint. I ask: “Do black women as a group tend toward the black women’s standpoint that Hill Collins describes?” and “Do black women embrace this perspective more than black men?” Results from numerous χ² and logistic regression analyses suggest that, within the black community, gender is not a significant predictor of the standpoint that Hill Collins describes, with black men and black women being equally likely to embrace many of the core ideas associated with the black women’s standpoint. I conclude by discussing the implications of this finding for gender and race‐based standpoint theory.     

Growing Down Like a Banana: Solomon Islands Village Women Changing Gender Norms

This article presents Solomon Islands village women’s opinions about gender norms. It explores their perceptions of their ability to be involved in leadership roles and decision-making, and their analysis of how they conceive of their abilities changing. It attempts to unravel the ‘push-pull’ experience for Solomon Islands rural women—a push towards modernity equated with gender equity and development, and the pull of traditional gender roles for women embedded in notions of what it means to be a good Solomon Islander woman. It concludes that women’s empowerment must be viewed as a journey that encompasses women’s strategic and practical interests relating to agency in a variety of locations. This article contributes to understanding some aspects to women’s empowerment and how international NGOs and other development entities may have a role in creating space for women’s self-reflection, public commentary and visibility in secular social space.     

Partial publicity and gendered remembering: figuring women in culture and performance

This essay brings representational issues of female publicity into recent discussions about space, community and memory. Cultural analysts in a variety of fields have used these concepts to foreground the radically contextual and socially embedded nature of artistic production as well as to incorporate psychic and material notions of representation into the analysis of the political. I argue that such conceptual work is implicitly gendered, something made clearer by asking feminist questions about the function of memorial space in imagining publicity. To focus an interrogation, I investigate one disciplinary strain within cultural studies: theatre and performance studies. Throughout, I position performance – both theatrical and social – as an exemplary site with which to investigate the linguistic, spatial, and embodied practices of culture. Such forms expose the gendered operations of language, space and gesture as well. Furthermore, the field of performance studies has produced theoretical paradigms that derive from larger theories of memory and space. By thus positioning it as both a site of culture and a site of cultural theory, I argue that performance can illuminate the tacit gendering of culture more generally. My investigation of publicity and civic memorial will build upon three relatively recent examples of civic performance in Chicago: the performance of First Lady at the 1996 Democratic convention, the 1996 inauguration of the Jane Addams Memorial Park in Chicago, and the premiere of Chicago-born playwright David Mamet’s The Old Neighborhood in 1997. I frame both Chicago theatre and other kinds of Chicago performances as different types of civic memorial in order to speculate on relationships amongst different types of genres. More importantly, I illustrate the different ways that women function allegorically and indirectly as vehicles for imagining publicity and for lamenting its failures. My examples suggest how women – living and/or memorialized, ethnically marked and unmarked – can figure paradoxically as the object blamed for the loss of extended affiliation even as (conversely) they are also blamed for its ‘unnatural’ public promotion.     

“If I Can Offer You Some Advice”: Rapport and Data Collection in Interviews Between Adults of Different Ages

Reflexively analyzing interactions between myself (young adult woman) and 150 adult research participants, I explore how interviewees responded to the interviewer's perceived age in combination with other social identity categories. Addressing a gap in scholarship on adult‐adult interview interactions, this article examines how age gradations, in combination with other axes of similarity or difference, affect researcher‐interviewee rapport and data acquisition. Racial similarity, regardless of age, unlocked access to the topic of race/ethnicity. Age intersected with gender such that women within a decade of the woman interviewer's age assumed similarity and were communicative. In interviews with similarly‐aged heterosexual men, awareness of sexuality inhibited answers around intimacy. With older interviewees, gender similarity bridged the age chasm with women. In contrast, age and gender difference inspired older men to act paternalistically and give unsolicited advice. Even among adults, interviewees' classification of the interviewer's age contours the interactional dynamic, impacts data acquisition, and reproduces social distinctions.     

Transforming habit: revolution,routine and social change

Compelling recent scholarly work has explored the crucial role affect, emotion and feeling might play in activating radical social and political change. I argue, however, that some narratives of ‘affective revolution’ may actually do more to obscure than to enrich our understanding of the material relations and routines though which ‘progressive’ change might occur and endure in a given context – while side-stepping the challenge of how to evaluate progress itself in the current socio-political and economic landscape. Drawing on the work of Eve Sedgwick, John Dewey, Felix Ravaisson and others, this article asks whether critical work on habit can provide different, and potentially generative, analytical tools for understanding the contemporary ethical and material complexities of social transformation. I suggest that it habit’s double nature – its enabling of both compulsive repetition and creative becoming – that makes it a rich concept for addressing the propensity of harmful socio-political patterns to persist in the face of efforts to generate greater awareness of their damaging effects, as well as the material forms of automation and coordination on which meaningful societal transformation may depend. I also explore how bringing affect and habit together might productively refigure our understandings of ‘the present’ and ‘social progress’, as well as the available modes of sensing, instigating and responding to change. In turning to habit, then, the primary aim of this article is to examine how social and cultural theory might critically re-approach social change and progressive politics today.     

Social justice,care and developmental welfare in South Africa: a capabilities perspective

One of the paradoxes of the democratic project in South Africa is that the combination of political empowerment, organised constituencies of poor people and increasing social sector spending has made minimal impact on increasing equality. Despite an overall macroeconomic framework that emphasises fiscal restraint, social welfare spending has increased in the past 14 years, and dramatically so since 2003. Almost one in four South Africans receives some or other form of grant, and the majority of recipients are women. Indeed, South Africa is regularly described as the developing world’s largest and most generous welfare state. I address the extent to which gender inequalities are reduced through public sector spending, asking the question: what is the optimal relationship between social policy and the intrinsic democratic goals of equality, social justice and citizenship? Drawing on Amartya Sen’s capabilities approach, the article argues that a focus on social sector spending alone is inadequate to address questions of social justice. Instead, I draw attention to the normative assumptions, discursive environment and institutional context in which social policy is elaborated and implemented. I argue that, in a context in which there is relatively poor infrastructural capacity in the state to ensure that service delivery takes place in fair, consistent and egalitarian ways, households and communities act as shock absorbers of state failures and women’s gendered burdens increase, despite formal commitments to gender equality. While women appear to have gained from political empowerment, women politicians did not effectively leverage their position in the state to promote pro‐poor policies or to build coalitions to challenge the watering down of early commitments to reducing gender inequalities.     

Melancholia,Ambivalent Presence and the Cost of Gender Commentary on Paper by Meg Jay

I would like to engage three aspects of Jay's argument: first, I want to suggest that there is an important distinction to be made between melancholia and depression, and that Butler's melancholy gender depends on this distinction, which emphasizes the social and political dimensions of melancholia. Second, Jay diagnoses the theory of melancholy gender with a troubling ambivalence; I contend that this ambivalence is central to the logic of Butler's argument, and to the processes of melancholia and gendered identification, and that this ambivalence is also purposefully manifest in Freud's text. Third, Jay's piece makes a call for conceptual disarticulation in the register of foreclosure as it relates to prohibited homosexual object choice. This desire for disarticulation and anxiety about homosexual undecidability leads to the collapse of gender, sex and sexual orientation, and the result of this collapse is an ambiguous subject who emerges as reheterosexualized and normatively gendered.     

The ‘Feminization’ of Management? Issues of ‘Sameness’ and ‘Difference’ in the Roles and Experiences of Female and Male Retail Managers

Explanations of women’s poor representation in senior management usually emphasize differences between women and men managers’ experiences, circumstances and aspirations, and the gendered character of organizational structures and processes. Whilst these may all disadvantage women, some writers have suggested recently that women managers may differ in style and orientation in ways particularly appropriate for today’s developing organizations. This paper explores issues of ‘sameness’ and ‘difference’ between women and men managers in retailing. Whilst both male and female store managers wanted to downplay gender differences and adopt a ‘gender neutral’ approach, they also associated a number of advantages and disadvantages with being a woman manager in certain contexts. Rapid sectoral change had caused companies to reassess the desired attributes and competences of managers; associated both with an enhanced valuing of ‘feminine’ qualities and with a more ‘objective’ and ‘clinical’ approach to assessment. Despite their equal numbers at entry points women remained poorly represented at senior levels, suggesting that subjective and informal processes were important determinants of women and men’s progress. Given management is inherently a process enacted by individual managers within a social context the extent to which it can be conceived in gender neutral terms is questioned since individuals are inevitably discussed and identified in terms of their gender.     

The theoretical costs of ignoring childhood: rethinking independence, insecurity, and inequality

Childhood scholars have found that age inequality can be as profound an axis of meaningful difference as race, gender, or class, and yet the impact of this understanding has not permeated the discipline of sociology as a whole. This is one particularly stark example of the central argument of this article: despite decades of empirical and theoretical work by scholars in “the social studies of childhood,” sociologists in general have not incorporated the central contributions of this subfield: that children are active social agents (not passive), knowing actors strategizing within their constraints (not innocent), with their capacities and challenges shaped by their contexts (not universally the same). I contend that mainstream sociology’s relative imperviousness has led to theoretical costs for both childhood scholars—who must re-assert and re-prove the core insights of the field—and sociologists in general. Using three core theoretical debates in the larger discipline—about independence, insecurity, and inequality—I argue that children’s perspectives can help scholars ask new questions, render the invisible visible, and break through theoretical logjams. Thus would further research utilizing children’s perspectives and the dynamics of age extend the explanatory power of social theory.     

On ethnomethodology, feminism, and the analysis of categorial reference to gender in talk-in-interaction

This paper sets out an ethnomethodological approach to the study of gender and interaction, and demonstrates how the topic of ‘gender’ can be studied empirically via its categorial reference in talk‐in‐interaction. I begin by charting the history of ethnomethodological accounts and studies of gender, starting with Garfinkel's groundbreaking work and the subsequent ‘doing gender’ project, alongside a more general discussion of feminism's relationship to ethnomethodology. I then consider two related trajectories of research, one in conversation analysis and the other in membership categorization analysis, both of which deal with the explication of gender's relevance to interaction, but in somewhat different ways that raise different problems. Finally, drawing on data from different institutional settings, I show how ‘categorial’ phenomena such as ‘gender’ can be studied as phenomena of sequential organization using the machinery of membership categorization alongside conversation analysis. I suggest that the analysis of members' categories in their sequential environment allows language and gender researchers to see how everyday notions of gender are taken up, reformulated, or resisted, in turns of talk that accomplish conversational action; that is, how categories ‘might be relevant for the doing of some activity’ ( Sacks, 1992 vol. 1: 597).     

Social relationships and shifting languages in Northern Thailand1

This paper explores how speakers’ understandings of the conduct of social relationships mediate changing and socially distinctive syncretic language practices in a Northern Thai community. Although a shift away from vernacular (Kam Muang) speech styles to Standard Thai was emblematically tied to young and urban speakers in nostalgic discourses, syncretic speech styles and metalinguistic discourses also reflected local and socially positioned understandings of institutional roles and social relationships. I argue that scholars of language change and shift should foreground the mediating role of social relationships in speakers’ uses and understandings of their communicative repertoires across multiple timescales.     

Marx,labour and emancipation in South African sociology: a preliminary rethinking

In a university and disciplinary environment where knowledge is increasingly commodified, this paper sketches a reconstruction of the mature Marx’s analysis of capitalism. I argue that his understanding remains methodologically powerful and helps to ground sociological analyses of the present. While accepting that there are good grounds for questioning the relevance of Marx in the wake of the South African political transition and the Post‐Fordist transformation of labour, this interpretation departs significantly from how Marx has generally been interpreted by sociologists and other social scientists in the country by foregrounding the commodity as the starting point of his social critique. Indeed, I argue that ‘class’ and ‘workplaces’, long a focus of radical sociologists, are on their own inadequate to grasp Marx’s concept of capitalism. Finally, drawing on the Frankfurt School, I suggest the importance of a critique of labour and the recognition of contradiction as the starting point of an emancipatory project.     

Epistemic authority and the gender lens

Researching ‘hidden’ forms of social inequality such as gender often poses particular challenges. Not least of these is how to uncover such dimensions of social life whilst preserving the perspectives of research participants, who may not consider such matters relevant to their lives, particularly if other forms of identity or oppression are more prominent for them. Here, I reflect on these issues in the context of researching user involvement in mental health services from a feminist perspective. I show how ‘uncovering’ gender and other forms of social inequality in the field was aided through adopting a wide analytical lens focusing on power, along with reflexivity and openness in discussing my own political analysis and commitments in relation to the study area with the researched. I also describe how I attempted to resolve the epistemological‐ethical issues involved through conceptualising these in terms of ‘situatedness’ and gender salience and adopting a feminist standpoint which emphasised what researchers can, and indeed should, bring to the research enterprise. Related issues of power and empowerment in the research process are discussed.     

Real Gender: Identity,Loss, and the Capacity to Feel Real

This article concerns gender and feeling real. Beginning with Judith Butler’s deconstruction of gender as an ontological category, it argues that the subjective experience of gender as real has been underaccounted for. By reviewing Butler’s work on gender melancholy and then elaborating psychoanalytic theories of identification and reality, this article links feeling real to the dual capacities to both separate from and connect with the object. To illustrate the implications for thinking gender identity and transformation, it concludes with a reading of Miles Walser’s poem about the name discarded in a gender transition.     

Gender,visuality and violence: visual securitization and the 2001 war in Afghanistan

Visual securitization (the discursive processes by which images are assigned security implications) is integral to understanding how war and political violence is made possible. However, its insights have yet to be coupled with feminist international relations (IR) scholarship, which is alert to the connections between gender and (in)security. This article synthesizes these two research areas through Lene Hansen’s (2011) framework of visual securitization to investigate the gendered logics that underpinned the 2001 war in Afghanistan. By analyzing 123 photojournalistic images alongside American media texts and foreign policy discourse, I argue western images of Afghan women enacted a specific visuality through which they became constructed as a legitimate matter of security. The article makes two important contributions through this analysis. Firstly, it extends feminist understanding of the war in Afghanistan by demonstrating how the interplay between the visual and textual, and the gendered and racial logics operating within such interplay, visually produced Afghan women as a referent object of security. Secondly, this argument illustrates how gender can be critical in enabling the acceptance of visual securitizations, and how such securitizations can be enacted through gendered representations of insecurity and threat.