‘Can I borrow your glasses?’: a prescription for learning to see the cultural roots of identity terms and implicit categories through others’ lenses

Why is there so much confusion and conflict around common identity labels, a problem that extends well beyond any stereotypes that they may evoke? How do we escape the seeming paradox that we reject racism but still speak frequently of black and white? Who claims the power to determine or name others’ identities? The confusion and conflict about identity that play out on a surface level are often caused by starkly different but implicit understandings that operate beneath the surface. For example, terms like black, Jewish and Muslim may invoke several of our deeper conceptions or categories like race, culture, religion and ethnicity, and to varying degrees in different places. Critically, these categories themselves are culturally rooted. This article shows how our implicit categories can lead to both cross-cultural confusion and problematic misunderstandings in course content. Helping students to recognise and to understand the cultural roots of our implicit categories should be a deliberate learning outcome. This type of cultural understanding can be advanced significantly through guided reflection on experience and explicit instruction; in addition, some subjects and approaches – intercultural education, study abroad and Holocaust education among them – show particular promise for achieving this aim.     

Personality profiles of factitious disorder imposed by mothers: A comparative analysis

Factitious Disorder Imposed by Another (FDIA) can be difficult to expeditiously identify. Understanding personality characteristics of FDIA perpetrators via psychological assessment may decrease the time between initial abuse and identification of FDIA. Personality characteristics of FDIA mother-perpetrators were examined through a comparative analysis of MMPI-2 profiles. It was predicted that mother-perpetrators would have significantly higher overall profile elevations on the MMPI-2 and elevations on specific clinical scales than a comparative control group. Results indicated that mother-perpetrators displayed significantly higher, elevations on the Psychasthenia (Pt) and Schizophrenia (Sc) scales and a trend toward significantly higher elevation on the Psychopathic Deviate (Pd) scale than the control group. These findings, along with the demographic information obtained, establish a preliminary foundation for understanding an overall profile of mother-perpetrators.     

Identity Work,Techniques of Neutralization,and Deviance: Exploring the Relationship Among Older Adult Gamblers

This study investigates the value of techniques of neutralization in understanding how people involved in marginal to widely deviant behaviors perform identity work. Based on 33 in‐depth interviews with older adult gamblers, we show how techniques of neutralization are used to align personal and social identities. We describe the techniques of neutralizations our participants use along a continuum of gambling involvement, showing how techniques differ in variety and content and are contingent on larger narratives about appropriate behaviors, identities, and selves operating in contemporary society. Our research helps to refine sociologists' understandings of relationships between levels of involvement in deviant behaviors and identity work.     

The Importance of “Empty Gestures” in Recovery: Being Human Together

What do clients/patients want or value from their encounters with healthcare providers? Based on ethnographic research conducted with individuals suffering from drug addiction and mental health issues, this article argues that clients/patients treasure “everyday” or “human” interaction with medical staff. Everydayness is accomplished through three generic social processes: **co‐silence, inclusion in back‐stage activity, and physical dramatizations of authenticity. These processes and other ordinary interactional strategies for “being human together” should be seen as vital tools for recovery.     

LGBTQ Women,Appearance Negotiations,and Workplace Dress Codes

The purpose of this study was to explore LGBTQ women’s experiences with unwritten or formal dress codes at work. I asked: What are LGBTQ women’s experiences in the workplace with appearance management, and what are LGBTQ women’s experiences navigating the written and unwritten dress codes in the workplace? To answer the research question, interviews were conducted with 24 self-identifying LGBTQ women. Six key themes emerged from the data. Themes included (1) expressed sexual identity in appearance, (2) unwritten dress codes in work environments did not always allow for expression of sexual identity in appearance, (3) motivations for pressure or desire to conceal expression of sexual identity in appearance at work, (4) negotiations of revealing or concealing sexual identity in appearance in the workplace impacted levels of comfort and confidence, (5) verbal and nonverbal negative experiences related to appearance at work, and (6) received compliments about appearance at work.     

BDSM Role Fluidity: A Mixed-Methods Approach to Investigating Switches Within Dominant/Submissive Binaries

This mixed-methods study of BDSM investigates the nuances of BDSM participants’ role identities, role frequencies, and role fluidities—shifts in identities and play across time, location, scene, and play partner. Data were gathered from 202 online surveys and 25 semistructured interviews about participants’ roles given their gender and sexual identities. These data reveal that men tend to self-identify as Dominant, Master, Top, or Sadist (DMTS) and always perform dominant roles, while women tend to self-identify as Submissive, Slave, Bottom, or Masochist (SSBM) and always perform submissive roles. Although this would seem to support the theory that BDSM reinforces gendered dominant/submissive binaries, further analyses indicate that women and queer/pansexual individuals disrupt this binary through their Switch identities and roles. Switching and queer identities, thus, offer the possibility for transforming dominant/submissive and other binaries.     

共名状态下“母亲”的伦理困境——社会学视角

《母亲》是赛珍珠荣获诺贝尔文学奖的七部作品之一,也是赛珍珠作品中最为独特的一部.“母亲”的共名身份,是在特定生存环境所编织而就的伦理关系网中确立的;其身份危机与角色冲突导致了一系列伦理困境:“母亲”的生命冲动与生活其间的社会空间、物质空间、精神空间冲突产生的伦理困境,诚实与谎言、忠诚与背叛、珍视生命与对生命扼杀两难导致的罪与罚的伦理困境,女性身份认同与性别歧视观念的矛盾导致的伦理困境等.赛珍珠用“共名”身份塑造的母亲形象,使“母亲”成为中国劳动母亲们的典型形象,因而超越了个体意义而具有了普适性特征.     

Assessing the Tongzhi Label: Self-Identification and Public Opinion

Tongzhi is one of several Chinese terms that refer to individuals who are attracted to the same sex. Using data from two different surveys in Hong Kong, this research note examines how the term tongzhi coexists with other terms. We investigate the prevalence of self-identification as tongzhi, and we explore the extent to which using the term tongzhi influences public attitudes toward gay people and gay rights. Activists began popularizing the term tongzhi in the late 1980s, but less than one third of the participants in our 2008 survey of sexual orientation minorities (n = 728) described themselves as tongzhi. Using a split-ballot experiment in a 2013 public opinion poll (n = 831), we found that attitudes toward gay people and gay rights were not significantly impacted by whether questions were phrased in terms of tongzhi or the main alternative term tongxinglianzhe. We discuss how our findings can enrich understandings of earlier research and illuminate avenues for future study.     

Assessing Politicized Sexual Orientation Identity: Validating the Queer Consciousness Scale

Building on psychological theories of motivation for collective action, we introduce a new individual difference measure of queer consciousness, defined as a politicized collective identity around sexual orientation. The Queer Consciousness Scale (QCS) consists of 12 items measuring five aspects of a politicized queer identity: sense of common fate, power discontent, system blame, collective orientation, and cognitive centrality. In four samples of adult women and men of varied sexual orientations, the QCS showed good test-retest and Cronbach’s reliability and excellent known-groups and predictive validity. Specifically, the QCS was positively correlated with identification as a member of the LGBTQ community, political liberalism, personal political salience, and LGBTQ activism and negatively correlated with right-wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation. QCS mediated relationships between several individual difference variables and gay rights activism and can be used with both LGBTQ people and allies.     

Body image,aging, and identity in women over 50: The Gender and Body Image (GABI) study

We conducted a qualitative study of 1,849 women over age 50 to capture the thoughts, feelings, and attitudes that women at middle age have about their bodies and the experience of aging. Via an open-ended question online survey, four primary themes emerged: (a) the physical and psychological experience of aging; (b) the injustices, inequities, and challenges of aging; (c) the importance of self-care; and (d) a plea for recognition of the need to maintain a contributory role in society. Results highlight the complexities of women’s psychological and physical aspects of aging and point toward important topics worthy of further study in this growing population.