Preservation of self in the nursing home: Contradictory practices within two models of care

Researchers have identified several aspects of nursing home care that interfere with residents' preservation of self. This paper examines how different models of care shape residents' opportunities for preserving a sense of self, adult identity, and agency. Using ethnographic data, I analyze staff practices in two facilities that reflect the contrast between the home and hospital models of long-term care. Previous research on long-term care suggests that an informal, “home-like” approach to care creates more opportunities for residents to preserve a sense of self-identity, whereas a formal, “institutional” approach fosters depersonalizing practices that interfere with residents' psychosocial well-being. My research suggests, however, that both approaches can have contradictory effects on residents' preservation of self. I analyzed patterns of objectification and infantilization that emerged in the social interactions between residents and staff members, as well as practices that mitigated these patterns. This study highlights how a larger culture of ageism and stigma surrounding dependency can become embedded in micro-level practices and underscores the challenges of defining and implementing “good” care.     

Olivia Records: The Production of a Movement

This article looks at the early years of Olivia Records, setting the context for the historic release of the album Where Would I Be Without You. From its origins as a Washington, D.C.-based activist collective in 1973, Olivia became a hugely successful recording company, marketing radical lesbian recordings and performances that soon defined the “women's music” movement. Both artistically and politically, Olivia's woman-identified albums became the soundtrack for a generation awakening to lesbian activism. Pat Parker and Judy Grahn's 1976 spoken-word recording is a unique demonstration of Olivia's radical production values and expanding catalog.     

INSTITUTIONALIZING SOCIAL MOVEMENTS: The Dual Strategy of the Korean Women's Movement

Since the 1990s, scholars have paid attention to the role of social movements traversing the official terrain of politics by blending a “contention” strategy with an “engagement” strategy. The literature often highlights the contribution of institutionalized social movements to policymaking and sociopolitical change, but rarely addresses why and how specific social movement organizations gain routine access to formal politics. Using the Korean women's movement as a case study, I analyze the conditions for movement institutionalization. As I perceive it as the consequence both of social movements' decision to participate in government and of the state's desire to integrate such movements into its decision‐making process, movement institutionalization appears when the three factors are combined: (1) pressure from international organizations, (2) democratizing political structures, and (3) cognitive shifts by movement activists toward the role of the state.     

“Anarchy all over Baščaršija”: Yugoslavia's new socialist culture and the New Primitives poetics of the local

The paper analyses Sarajevo's music movement of New Primitives and its “poetics of the local” as a struggle against the cultural hypocrisy of Yugoslavia's “new socialist culture” and its privileging of “external‐cosmopolitan” as apotheosis of cultured refinement and sophistication while denigrating “local‐parochial” as epitome of uncultured primitiveness. I argue that the movement's praxis is best understood as a call to reject externally‐imposed frames of reference as the basis for self‐understanding, and to embrace a socio‐cultural awareness that the only way to be in the world is to be authentically “primitive”– i.e. to exist as a distinct and autochthon socio‐cultural self.     

Farm Boys and Wild Men: Rurality,Masculinity, and Homosexuality*

Abstract In this paper I explore cultural constructions of “rural gay masculinity,” focusing first on the stereotype of the “rustic sodomite” seen in a number of Hollywood movies; second, on the construction of an idyllic Eden in the gay imaginary; and third, on gendered and sexualized performances among members of the men's movement and the “radical fairies.” In doing so, I suggest how the rural/urban divide is meshed, in complex and distinct ways, with homosexual/heterosexual and masculine/feminine dichotomies in cultural texts and practices. Set against these representations, of course, are the lives of homosexual men born and raised in the country: I discuss accounts of the lives of “farm boys” as a way of contextualizing and complexifying the dominant modes of representation outlined. In all of these portrayals, “rural gay masculinity” is figured in distinct ways, especially in relation to urban effeminacy. I end by calling for further exploration of these issues in an effort to more fully theorize the cultural meanings and experiences of “rural gay masculinity.”     

The Dual Strategy and Gender Policies of the Women's Movement in Korea: Family Headship System Repeal through Strategic Innovation

Abstract

Social movements sometimes successfully attain their goals by implementing policies and laws that represent their claims. Movement leaders raise issues susceptible to enactment as policies or laws, exploit legally and institutionally assured resources, and even participate at times in governmental policymaking and parliamentary lawmaking processes. This engagement strategy maximizes a movement's power to achieve its goals only when it is combined with the conventional activities of mobilizing collective action and forming dense networks across movement organizations to pressure the state. Based on the case study of Korean women's movements and their efforts to abrogate the patrilineal succession of family headship, I argue that movement activists' strategic innovation of blending “institutional politics” with conventional “movement politics”—that is, pursuing a dual strategy (Cohen and Arato 1992) and evolving into “movement institutionalization”—is critical to accomplishing gender policies and laws that, at least institutionally and legally, ensure gender equality.     

BECOMING HONG KONG,RAZING BAOAN,PRESERVING XIN'AN: AN ETHNOGRAPHIC ACCOUNT OF URBANIZATION IN THE SHENZHEN SPECIAL ECONOMIC ZONE

Located just north of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, the largest and oldest of China's Special Economic Zone (SEZ) has been both a project and symbol of post-Mao modernization. In this paper, I trace how the Shenzhen built environment mediates images and experiences of ‘Hong Kong’, arguing that transnationality in the SEZ is an everyday practice where tradition, colonialism, and the Cold War provide raw materials for the local reworking of the changing relationship between the Chinese state apparatus and finance capital. My story has a double focus: the ideology of urbanization as modernization and historic preservation. On the one hand, the ideology of urbanization-as-modernization legitimates a spatial order in which the rural is always posed to be superseded by the urban. Both the rural and the urban are empty signifiers that are created through comparison and deployed to guide action. In this important sense,‘Hong Kong’ has been urban with respect to rural ‘Shenzhen’ (formerly Baoan County), even as ‘Shenzhen’ has been urban with respect to the Chinese hinterland (neidi). On the other hand, historic preservation domesticates ‘Hong Kong’ as Shenzhen's past through the figure of Xin'an County, the geographic predecessor of both Shenzhen and Hong Kong. These complimentary displacements produce a nostalgia peculiar to the SEZ: a desire for a past that entitles contemporary Shenzhen residents to Hong Kong's prosperity. This nostalgia is structured with reference to a shared origin - Xin'an County - where Hong Kong's postwar history (1950–1979) becomes the past that Shenzhen (rural Baoan) would have had, if not for a cruel twist of socialist fate.     

Subculture wars: The struggle for the vape industry

Drawing on a 2-year study, I argue that the UK vape industry is engaged in a classificatory struggle between a subcultural industry and its “other”, the mainstream industry. I build on Thornton's analysis of club culture to characterize the subcultural vape industry as a community of taste built round a masculine aesthetic and a commitment to authenticity and DIY practice. Its attachment to complex systems and masculine spaces risked excluding customers without specialist knowledge or interest. The mainstream industry included tobacco companies which promoted vaping as a complementary category to smoking, linking their own vaping products to historic meanings of the cigarette as a lifestyle product. This task was hampered by the toxic legacy of combusted tobacco and its increasing reversion to a generic category rather than a branded product. Finally, the success of the price-focused vaping industry has been largely overlooked, but suggests that for most consumers, electronic cigarettes are still a contrasting category to combusted tobacco and are purchased largely on price. I conclude that the exclusion of a feminized, classed “other” is a defining element of subcultural formation, itself an overwhelmingly male mechanism of group identity construction.     

Gendering Resistance: Multiple Faces of the Kurdish Women's Struggle

The article explores the Kurdish women's movement in Turkey by bridging two forms of resistance: those of guerrilla women fighters and of activist women. Based on my extensive ethnographic and archival research, I ask how women under conditions of war engage in different modes of resistance. In what ways does the “heroic resistance” of guerrilla women resonate with and/or contradict the everyday, “ordinary” struggles of activist women? The potent image of the Kurdish guerrilla woman that emerged in the early 1990s is constitutive of many other modes of political subjectivities, even among women who do not or cannot become guerrillas. One of those subjectivities is that of the activist woman. My analysis suggests that women's activism opens up a middle ground of action between “heroic” and “ordinary” resistance by reconciling revolutionary politics with everyday activism around gender‐based violence, democracy, and human rights. Although both revolutionary movement participants and scholars of revolutionary resistance often contrast the “ordinary” with the realm of armed resistance, this article challenges this dichotomy. I take the two realms of resistance—the ordinary and the heroic—as the core constituents of revolutionary resistance, and I reconsider the gendered interplay between them.     

The Social Imaginaries of Women's Peace Activism in Northern Uganda

The metanarrative of global feminism is often constructed as a progressive and emancipatory movement emanating from the West and fostering radical politics elsewhere in the world. Such a view is not only ethnocentric but, critically, it fails to engage with the complex ways in which feminist politics travel and are evinced in specific localities. In this article, I seek to understand how marginalized women in the “Global South” – particularly in Africa – interpret, experience and negotiate feminist ideas to wield political power within the context of their social and moral worlds. I focus on women's organized resistance to violence and armed conflict, known as “women's peace activism.” Using a case study of a women's peace movement in Uganda mediated by an international feminist organization called Isis Women's International Cross-Cultural Exchange, I conducted in-depth qualitative interviews with a wide range of activists in the organization and in its network in postconflict areas in Northern Uganda. I argue that the feminist peace discourse is most meaningful when its universal values of equity and securing the dignity of women are appropriated and re-signified through the cultural institutions and the collective memory of activists in their local settings.     

The impossibility of loving: blanchot,community, sexual difference

This paper aims to clarify Blanchot's notion of community and his practice of communism through, first, an account of his involvement in the Events of May 1968 and, second, an exploration of The Unavowable Community, in which Blanchot reads a short novel by Marguerite Duras, which recounts the tropisms of a brief relationship between a young woman and a homosexual man. As I show, Blanchot's affirmation of what he calls “the impossibility of loving”, which emerges from his reading of Duras, is linked to what he calls “worklessness [désoeuvrement]”; that is, the active process of loosening or undoing that contests any attempt to establish a community around a shared essence. I will claim that it is by attending to the relationship to worklessness that one might attend to what Blanchot calls the “spaces of freedom” that open around us: to those happenings which are not enclosed by prevailing determinations of the social space. A further aim of this paper is to address the concerns of Jacques Derrida, for whom Blanchot's writings on community betray what he calls in Politics of Friendship a “schematic of filiation”, in which the relation to the brother is the privileged model for the relation to the Other. I also provide an account of Blanchot's negotiation of Levinas's account of the relationship between ethics and eros as it is presented in Totality and Infinity.     

Sarah Bernhardt,Live: A Reply to Allen Ellenzweig

This article seeks to retrieve something of the effect of Sarah Bernhardt live. It begins with a brief discussion of Sarah Bernhardt's reputation for breeches roles. From there, and in dialogue with Allen Ellenzweig's conception of Bernhardt's “persistent dualities,” the article moves on to analyze an additional duality: Bernhardt's movement between life and death. Here, I ask what the “Divine Sarah's” willingness to die nightly may tell us about anti-Semitism, social death, and the paradoxical resilience of the live.     

From the Nativist's Point of View

Based on my participant observation of the border militia group known as the Minutemen, this article examines what motivates people to participate in social movements. Building on social movements' scholarship, I argue that participation cannot be reduced to the expression of the beliefs which group members hold. However, while previous scholarship has turned toward organizational dynamics and networks to move beyond the ideological foundations of political behavior, I turn to everyday practices. By focusing on practices, ethnography allows us to expand our understanding of movement participation by showing not just the “before” of a movement (understood as a set of ideas or interests people hold) or the “outcomes” of a movement (understood as securing of material interests) but the “during” of a movement. And, as I show through the Minutemen, the “during” of the movement can sometimes be what inspires and sustains participation, and indeed, be the very crux of what the movement is about.     

Insider-allies: The precarious politics of men in identity-fluid feminism

Academic and activist conversations about the position of men in feminism often operate under the assumption that women are the movement's key beneficiaries and men are privileged outsiders lending their support. I use 59 interviews from a broader project on feminist and LGBTQ+ activism in the United States to illustrate how men's orientation to feminism is shaped by whether social movement organizations adopt what I call woman-centered or identity-fluid politics. While woman-centered politics treat men as allies whose intentions must be vetted by women, identity-fluid feminism imagines men as insiders with their own independent investment in the movement. I argue that the tension between these two models of identity politics gives men a liminal “insider-ally” position within feminism. Although feminist men are given a tentative authority to speak for the movement, the persistence of woman-centered understandings of feminism means men's insider status is contested, especially when they dominate feminist spaces, compromise women's sense of safety, and seek leadership.     

SIGN,SYMBOL, AND METALANGUAGE: AGAINST THE INTEGRATION OF SEMIOTICS AND SYMBOLIC INTERACTIONISM

Dean MacCannell's proposal for a “rapprochement” between symbolic interaction-ism and semiotics, in which the “generality” of symbolic interactionism's conception the sign is “raised” to that of semiotics, is examined. By turning exclusively to Saussurian semiotics, MacCannell does not adequately reflect the distinction between “natural” and “arbitrary” representation in Peirce's semiosis that is the most fruitful link with Mead's symbolic interactionism. Consequently, MacCannell's argument at the level of terminology is flawed. Rather than merging, the perspectives might benefit from a radical rethinking of representation. This would involve preserving the distinction between the “natural” and “arbitrary,” while at the same time recognizing that in mass society “arbitrary” representation has become a kind of “second-order” (Barthes) indexical metalanguage of membership within which symbolic interaction may occur. As Baudrillard claims, “commutation of signs” has replaced “interaction of symbols,” yet strains against an unfulfilled symbolic demand. Efforts should be directed at generating a theory of representation capable of addressing the tension that produces this symbolic demand.     

Toward a Sociology of Nature

Although we often believe that nature stands apart from social life, our experience of nature is profoundly social. This paper unpacks this paradox in order to (1) explain sociology's neglect of the environment and (2) introduce the articles in this special issue on “the sociology of nature.” I argue that sociology's disinterest in the biophysical world is a legacy of its classical concern with tracing society's “Great Transformation” from gemeinschaft to gesellschaft: while early anthropologists studied “primitive” societies that allegedly had not yet completed “the passage from nature to culture” (Lévi‐Strauss 1963 : 99), pioneering sociologists presumed that industrialization and urbanization liberated “modern” society from nature and therefore focused their attention on “urbanism as a way of life” (Wirth 1938 ). As exemplified by the articles in this symposium, environmental sociology critiques the nature‐culture and town‐country dualisms. One of environmental sociology's core contributions has been demonstrating that nature is just as much a social construction as race or gender; however, its more profound challenge to the discipline lies in its refutation of the sociological axiom that social facts can be explained purely through reference to other social facts. “Environmental facts” are a constitutive feature of social life, not merely an effect of it.     

Tattoos and Teddy Bears: Fetishism on Exhibit in Paris

I add a developmental perspective to the picture Roth and Freedgood have elaborated regarding the significance of surfaces. With Roth's attent ion to the analytic couple and adult intersubjective interaction, I include the mother–infant dyad—what I have written about, following Winnicott, as the “nursing couple.” I now employ Meltzer's evocative concept regarding the aesthetic impact of the mother. From this perspective regarding the early maternal relation, I then address the anxieties that Freedgood, especially, highlights in relation to culture and gender. I emphasize that we communicate to and with a maternal object that is herself a complex object both in her surface and in her interior. I contend that jewelry is a concrete representation of the mother's most interesting bodily surface.     

The Interaction Order and Musical Sound: Shopping with Erving Goffman

Drawing on qualitative interviews and extending insights provided by Erving Goffman (1983, 1971), this article argues that music plays a crucial role in the interaction order of retail environments. I suggest music permeates these locations of consumption; shoppers are presented as perceiving musical sounds as both “territorial offenses” and sounds that can also represent an “intimate ally.” Crucial here is the nature of territoriality that manages an individual's exposure through the symbolic and literal placement of boundaries around the self, covering and protecting the self while navigating public space, tacitly securing rights in relation to others, and minimizing encroachments upon the “territories of the self.” I contend that when shopping, participants can feel “at home” in these locations thanks in part to the role of music but also in other cases actively avoid these situations, using privatizing music as a means of regaining auditory discretion. The contribution of this article extends Goffman's formulation of the interaction order, accounting for the dual role that music represents, as both a territorial offense and an intimate ally for shoppers.     

The Discreet Charm of Lenin

This article takes two postcards of Lenin as their point of departure to ask about articulations of Soviet history as image and kitsch. I am especially interested in the ways in which the dead body or mummy of Lenin comes to symbolize an imagined social coherence that accrues specific political significance after the demise of the Soviet Union. In looking at Lenin's mummy as a site of memory and key to understanding contemporary Russian political desires, the article offers one analytical interpretation of the continuing preservation of Russia's revolutionary and also Stalinist past. By arguing that the Lenin mummy simultaneously functions as camp and kitsch, and as an embodied time of eternity, I also seek to understand how “grandiose” understandings of Soviet history work in this present.