Heavenly Monsters: The Politics of the Male Body in the Naked Issue of Attitude Magazine

The male body in contemporary gay culture is subordinated to distinct aesthetic and ethical norms that reflect an all-male idolization of the young, muscular, smooth, and transcendent physique. The queer body is manipulated in different techniques including daily work at the gym, diet, hair supplement/removal, tanning, and dying. Liberating the body from heteronormative oppression does not necessarily guarantee the liberation of the (gay) body from other powerful systems that produce and commercialize body fascism. This article problematizes these body politics and economy of identity focusing on the naked issue of Attitude (October 1999), a six-year-old British life-style glossy magazine. This analysis mainly focuses on the illuminating interview with five gay men who express their intimate feelings and criticize the body worship in the gay media: an over-weight man, a skinny man, a psoriasis sufferer, an old and heavily tattooed and pierced man, and a bodybuilder who works as an escort.     

Linguists and other animals

Book reviewed in this article:
Joan Dunayer, Animal Equality: Language and Liberation     

Generations,Identities, and the Collective Memory of Che Guevara1

Has the image of Che Guevara lost its power to evoke radical politics in the face of pervasive commodification? The commercialization of this 1960s political icon has called into question the power of the market to shape collective memories. Meanwhile, antisystemic movements of the left continue to erect his image at protest events. In light of this contest over how Che Guevara is remembered, we investigate, using data from a survey of Spanish citizens, who is most likely to recall him. We find qualified support for the theory of generational imprinting—Che is more often recalled by those generations who saw him rise to prominence during their formative years, although prominent as a collective symbol rather than as a living person. Our results also corroborate the claim that historical figures or events are more salient for, and therefore more likely to be remembered by, some subgenerational units than others. Thus, although the younger generations are in general more likely than their elders to recall Che, he is most frequently remembered by the highly educated leftists who espouse postmaterialist and posttraditionalist values and identify more with their local regions than with the nation of Spain. These patterns suggest that, in contrast to the dire predictions of mass culture theorists, the memory of Che Guevara has become increasingly tied to markers of social, ethnic‐regional, and political identity.     

关于建立“成都学”的思考

通过一个城市的历史,去透视整个人类文明发展的进程、值得趋避的经验与教训,是城市学研究的根本目的.把具有两千多年历史的成都作为一个聚焦点,可以涉猎城市规模、城市生态系统、社会结构和社会文化,以及地理、历史、人才、经济、技术,城市管理机制、生态机制、监督机制和应变机制等诸多问题,这也都是当今世界性"城市化"浪潮中人们普遍关心的话题.     

葬礼:面对死亡的社会安排 ———城市环境下葬礼仪式浅析

通过实地观察和对殡仪馆工作人员的访谈，描绘了天津市城市内部现有的国家规范框架下葬礼仪式的具体过程以及附着在这个框架下的民间习俗的现状，试图通过对国家规范框架下的“正式”葬礼仪式及与其相对的“非正式”仪式——家庭告别仪式的程序形式的简略描述，展现在城市中普通个人的葬礼基于公共环境和家庭环境不同场景所采用的不同仪式过程。这是民间习俗对规范仪式的补充，同时也是“正式”规范对这种“非正式”实践的通融和消化。在描述现状之外，作者试图讨论蕴含在葬礼仪式中，不同死亡个体的葬礼仪式形式、规模及参与者等方面的区分所展现出的一种社会对死亡个体生前所处社会结构地位的认同，这种认同不仅反映了仪式所处社会背景的秩序和结构，也强化了这个社会的秩序和价值判断标准。     

论老建筑再生与城市空间品质的塑造

通过老建筑再生对于城市的价值意义的研究以及对城市与老建筑关系的分析，从多个角度阐述由老建筑再生所带来的城市意象、城市肌理、场所精神、城市色彩、城市风貌等要素的变化及其促进城市空间品质的提高，并结合国内外案例对这一观点行论证。     

The organizational shaping of collective identity: The case of lesbian and gay film festivals in New York

Using information gathered during fieldwork on New York lesbian and gay film festival organizations, this paper argues that scholarship on identity has not paid sufficient attention to the organizational mediation of collective identity. The shape of collective identity—how internal instabilities and diversities are accommodated, in this case—depends not only on the emergent characteristics of the “collective,” but also on the resolution of challenges particular to organizational fields. Two very differently conceived lesbian and gay festival organizations, sites at which decision making about collective identity is ongoing and self-conscious, are examined. The analysis traces how each responds to two related tasks: maintaining community legitimacy, which requires racial diversification, and surviving within an altered institutional environment. Rather than imposition from “above” or construction from “below,” the adaptive responses by organizations (to changes in both community expectations and the resource environment) transform the collective identity formulations reaching public visibility. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Colloquium Series of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies, City University of New York, 1995, and at the Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association, Washington, DC, 1995.     

Estimation of noncentrality parameters

We propose some estimators of noncentrality parameters which improve upon usual unbiased estimators under quadratic loss. The distributions we consider are the noncentral chi-square and the noncentral F. However, we give more general results for the family of elliptically contoured distributions and propose a robust dominating estimator.     

大中城市城郊失地农民的现状调查分析（I）

随着中国城市化进程的加快，在社会主体层面上直接表现为农民身份向市民身份的嬗变和转型。基于此背景，结合对某地区失地农民的120份调查问卷分析，从失地农民主体角度探讨他们对失地农民这一强制性身份的认同程度及其影响因素。研究发现，健全的社会保障体系、稳定工作和收入、城市生活方式及思想观念等3个因素最终影响着失地农民的身份认同。其中健全的社会保障体系、稳定工作和收入、城市生活方式及思想观念对失地农民身份认同起着不可替代的作用，且由大到小影响着失地农民的身份认同。     

South African Indian migration in the twenty-first century: towards a theory of ‘triple identity’

This paper is inspired by three issues, namely ongoing research on South Africans of Indian origin, the anecdotal evidence that accumulates through ongoing discussions on a casual level with such people and the increasing interest among researchers about how globalization and transnational movements are impacting upon identity formation among minorities who are seeking employment or a new life in the developed economies of the ‘big five’ English-speaking countries, i.e. the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the UK. It is in countries such as these that a third identity emerges and develops to instill a sense of triple identity. The information here suggests that, when people of Indian origin migrate to one of these countries, they continue to cling to South Africa because it is their country of birth, as well as to India, more for sentimental rather than practical reasons. The topic of this paper reflects a contemporary phenomenon not just among the Indians in South Africa, but also among other diasporas such as Chinese in Latin America, whose new and final emigration destination always seems to be the US. In addition, people of Chinese origin in the countries of Indochina, such as Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, experienced similar patterns of becoming diasporas in Europe, North America and Oceania in the 1970s. However, migration implores them to renegotiate their identities in order to adapt and settle in accordance with their newly adopted host territories. This gives rise to an identity that straddles three countries, which induces the need to examine new ways of identity building in a global transnational economy.