Urban Nightlife,Social Capital,and the Public Life of Cities1

Sociologists and urban scholars emphasize how nightlife establishments contribute to the social capital and public life of cities. In the interests of tempering this line of argument, I suggest three generalizable empirical findings that provide grounds for skepticism on this score: (1) the racial and class barriers to participation imposed by urban nightlife enterprises; (2) the normalization of gender differences and the routine harassment of women within such scenes; and (3) the lack of inclusiveness surrounding local nightlife in urban neighborhood communities. These findings suggest that nightlife scenes may function more efficiently as generators of bonding rather than bridging social capital.     

Urban Ethnography of the 1920s Working Girl

The 1920s was the era of the city. The urban population of the USA for the first time exceeded the population of rural areas and the nascent institutions of city life were flourishing. This article discusses the urban ethnography of the era with a focus on the way women and work was conceptualized, especially how ‘the city’ figured in explanation. Three ethnographies are examined — Frances Donovan's The Woman Who Waits (1920) and The Saleslady (1929) and Paul Cressey's The Taxi‐Dance Hall (1932). Donovan and Cressey presented their empirical material to show that the so‐called working girl faced a multifaceted world of opportunity in employment, not of disadvantage, as commonly emphasized in today's ethnographic studies of women and work. The conclusion reflects on the past, present and future in terms of the city's explanatory prominence in various eras.     

Masculinity and Meat Consumption: An Analysis Through the Theoretical Lens of Hegemonic Masculinity and Alternative Masculinity Theories

Research has found that men are more likely to choose to eat meat, particularly red meat, when compared to fruits and vegetables. This study examines the theory of hegemonic masculinity and discusses how the consumption of meat assists in the production of a masculine identity. Specifically, eating meat allows one to be seen as masculine, and the avoidance of meat permits one to be viewed as feminine. This narrow depiction of gender pushes alternative masculinities and unique eating habits to the sideline, ignoring the agency individuals possess when deciding the fate of their perceived gender. This paper seeks to discover if men, who participate in alternative eating practices, have the ability to define a new variation of masculinity. Four alternative theories will challenge hegemonic masculinity: multiple masculinities, natural masculinity, protest masculinity, and hybrid masculinities. Three examples will display the way marginalized men consume meat: historical upper‐class male fasting, meat consumption within men's ministries, and the vegetarian practices among men. Overall, this paper analyzes the basic concepts of hegemonic masculinity, the gendered consumption of meat, and questions if marginalized men are redefining the way others perceive their masculinity or if they are, in fact, striving to become exemplars of hegemonic masculinity.     

From Collective Memory to Collective Imagination: Time,Place, and Urban Redevelopment

This article is about a place that does not exist, yet. It is about residents' perceptions of redevelopment plans involving the reconstruction of a defunct neighborhood firehouse. Interviews revealed the residents' “collective imagination” as they actively envisioned potential future outcomes for a firehouse‐turned–community center. When asked about the needs of the community, interviewees discussed the current conditions of their neighborhood (the present), its history (the past), and how they would like to see it change (the future). This corresponds well with George Herbert Mead's ideas about temporality. I argue that connecting the identity of a place to a sociological understanding of time (especially Mead's) is a necessary step for gaining a better understanding of the subjective side of urbanization and ultimately creating a better vernacular knowledge base for urban redevelopment plans.     

Adventure as Character Work: The Collective Taming of Fear

It is ultimately through experience that character is formulated and made evident. From an ethnographic examination of an adventure program (Ropes Adventure, Inc.) that attempts to mold the identity of adolescents who have been detained for minor felonies and misdemeanors, we examine how personal challenge can be channeled into moral messages. By evoking and then taming fear (adventure), organizations demonstrate the power of personal accomplishment, trust, and cooperation—each socially legitimated moral virtues. We argue that character building efforts may be hampered when organizational aims and actual implementation of structured adventure collide.     

Masculinity and Child Care: The Reconstruction of Fathering

In this article we focus on a group of fathers who use parental leave and how they include care-giving in their construction of masculinity. The fathers shape their own masculine form of care-work differently from the mothers' interaction with the child. Both mothers and fathers, however, take part in the process of reproducing masculinity as the norm by giving masculine care higher status. Care-giving activities are adopted by the hegemonic form of masculinity with its strong connection to paid work.     

The Man of Hobbes: Masculinity and Wartime Necessity

Abstract The primary focus of this article is on the wartime (1939–1945) necessity of the British Army intervening into the personal lives of soldiers in order to maximise military effectiveness. Analysis of administrative discourse on masculinity suggests that the Army was only too well aware of the fact that men approximated the exemplary masculinity of the combat soldier to greatly varying degrees and that, in practice the Army worked not only to achieve a division of labour among servicemen which reflected a range of military masculinities, but also to find a means of dealing with the fears and anxieties of all men which often centred on death or marital infidelity. It suggests that the necessity of such state intervention into the private lives of soldiers was contingent on men's emotional investment in the both the gender order and the particular relations of trust which bound them to it.     

Masculinity as a Gendered Form of Desire: Laplanche and Enigmatic Seduction

Laplanche’s formulation of primal seduction and afterwardsness is employed to theorize masculinity as a gendered form of desire. This formulation is grounded in the notion that gender, sexed difference, and Freudian sexuality are complexly interrelated and mutually determined, forming gendered desire and desirous gender. With Laplanche, identification with a gendered other is understood to be preceded by identification by the other. Masculinity is in this instance constituted by how one translates and retranslates the enigmatic signifiers inscribed by the address of adult caregivers, and by how the untranslated remains of that address inspire and animate the performance of gender. Primal seduction is here further employed, in extended form, to explore and augment understandings of the intergenerational transmission of masculinities through paternal seduction. Masculinities are in this articulation considered to emerge in relation to the vulnerabilities associated with the experience of the enigmatic within relations of power, in the tensions between subjectivity and subjectification. The article privileges the enigmatic, unrepresented experiences of being, and the otherness of self, and while I attempt to apprehend these understandings through the presentation of case material, I do so to demonstrate that the enigmatic is, by definition, elusive and indeterminate, and I invite the perspective that this problematic not be resolved.     

Collective and Elective Ethnicity: Caste Among Urban Muslims in India

This article explores how the significance of ethnic identity can vary within a stable population, using caste among Muslims in Hyderabad, India as a case study. While some Hyderabadi Muslims are still embedded in ethnic networks, most now experience ethnicity as elective and do not rely on a corporate caste group for their social connections. This reflects a decline in the value of caste identities, which no longer provide economic or political resources. Increasingly, Muslims seek status through education, profession, or income. Thus, most Muslims in Hyderabad experience caste membership, identity, and networks in a weakened or attenuated way.     

The Social Organization of Conversational Remembering: Experience as Individual and Collective Concerns

This article examines the social organization of remembering in conversation. Examples of conversational remembering are used to discuss the way the sequential organization of talk co-opts others into the project of remembering; how we interactively commit others to the individual and collective relevance of our experience claims; and, finally, how conversational remembering is rhetorically organized in terms of the interdependencies of our own and others' experience as individually and collectively relevant.     

The Organizational Construction of Hegemonic Masculinity: The Case of the US Navy

This article examines the construction of hegemonic masculinity within the US Navy. Based on life history interviews with 27 male officers, this study explores alternative discourses and identities of officers from three different communities in the Navy: aviation, surface warfare, and the supply corps. Definitions of masculinity are relationally constructed through associations of difference: aviators tend to draw upon themes of autonomy and risk taking; surface warfare officers draw upon themes of perseverance and endurance; and supply officers draw upon themes of technical rationality. Further, these masculinities depend upon various contrasting definitions of femininity. Finally, this article explores a series of contradictions that threaten the secure construction of masculinity within this military culture.     

城市白领集体相亲现象研究

当前．城市白领青年越来越多加入了集体相亲的行列，在全国上下掀起了一股相亲热潮．引发了人们的思考。本文从多方面分析了城市白领青年集体相亲的原因。并对集体相亲现象的评论进行了探讨。     

Buildings as History: The Place of Collective Memory in the Study of Historic Preservation

Using data from ethnographic fieldwork in New Orleans, Louisiana, I examine the “buildings as history” ideology of the contemporary historic preservation movement to contribute to the sociological understanding of the logics of the movement, the relation of collective memory to historic preservation, and, more broadly, the processes of meaning construction in relation to the built environment. I conclude that the preservationist emphasis on the inherent value of the historic built environment irrespective of that environment's association with historically significant events and figures provides a means both to defuse critiques over preserving buildings with “difficult histories” and to justify preserving as much of the historic built environment as possible, which then allows for the continued expansion of the movement's purview and ensures its ongoing existence.     

Frontier Masculinity in the Oil Industry: The Experience of Women Engineers

This study contributes to the empirical evidence in the area of gendered organizations ( Martin and Collinson, 2002 ) and their effects on the women who work in them through an interpretive, ethnographic analysis of the oil industry in Canada, specifically Alberta. The study combines data from interviews with women professionals who have extensive employment experience in the industry, a historical analysis of the industry's development in the area and the personal contextual experience of the author. It is suggested that there are three primary processes which structure the masculinity of the industry: everyday interactions which exclude women; values and beliefs specific to the dominant occupation of engineering which reinforce gender divisions; and a consciousness derived from the powerful symbols of the frontier myth and the romanticized cowboy hero. In this dense cultural web of masculinities, the strategies that the women developed to survive, and, up to a point, to thrive, are double‐edged in that they also reinforced the masculine system, resulting in short‐term individual gains and an apparently long‐term failure to change the masculine values of the industry.     

Predatory Care: The Imperial Hunt in Mughal and British India

Taking the hunt as both metaphor of rule and political practice, this paper compares the predatory exercises of two imperial formations in India: the late British Raj and the sixteenth-century Mughal empire. The British pursuit of man-eaters confronted feline terror with sovereign might, securing the bodies and hearts of resistant subjects through spectacles of responsible force. The Mughal hunt, on the other hand, took unruly nobles and chieftains as the objects of its fearful care, winning their obedient submission through the exercise of a predatory sovereignty. Both instances of 'predatory care' shed light on the troubling intimacy of biopolitical cultivation and sovereign violence.     

Masculinity and Sexual Violence: Assessing the State of the Field

Despite strong evidence that men perpetrate most acts of sexual violence, little is known about the factors that lead some men to commit such harmful acts. A growing body of feminist scholarship has begun to explore this question, although the disciplinary and geographic breadth of these studies has prevented the development of a cohesive research agenda. This literature review contributes to this task by reviewing the major theoretical contributions to the study of masculinity and sexual violence, detailing some of the ways in which sexual violence aids in the production of masculine individuals, groups, and states. Taken as a whole, we argue that this body of scholarship views sexual violence as a mechanism through which social constructions of masculinity are produced and reproduced, although the forms that this violence takes vary by context. We conclude with a discussion of some of the theoretical and empirical limitations of this research and consider the implications of these findings for public policy.     

Getting Angry to Get Ahead: Black College Men,Emotional Performance,and Encouraging Respectable Masculinity

This article draws on two years of ethnographic fieldwork to explore how a group of black men on a college campus displayed anger in order to encourage other black men to adopt a respectable form of masculinity. Although prior research suggests that black men may work to avoid public displays of anger to evade negative stereotypes of black men, we uncover the contexts in which black men were comfortable expressing feelings of anger, frustration, annoyance, and irritation. Specifically, group leaders displayed these emotions when they observed recruits to their group engaging in actions or behaviors that threatened to reinforce certain stereotypes about black men.