Gender and Embodiment as Negotiated Relations

Author(s):  
S. L. Crawley ◽  
Ashley Green

Gender pervades every part of life, from identity and embodied practices to institutional and transnational social order. An interactionist approach recognizes that gender is constituted by pervasive, thoroughgoing, situational organizing practices of meaning-making pervading our worlds, which are always relational and emergent among people in institutional contexts at historical moments. Gender identities are not a feature of “types” of individuals but, rather, comprise negotiated relations between and among us—which can be normalizing or resistant. This chapter examines the development of sociological theory on gender and embodiment. It begins by looking at a brief timeline of the last 150 years of the everyday (US) “queer” lexicon to demonstrate how academic concepts seem to intertwine with the proliferation of everyday identities in the mundane world. The chapter then outlines its beginnings in microsociology, the connections between micro and macro theorizations, and emergent masculinities, femininities, transgender, and non-binary identity practices, pointing to various paradigm shifts along the way including feminisms, intersectionality, and queer theory. Constantly in production for everyone, gender proliferates as negotiated relations, made especially visible by resistance identities. We conclude briefly with future directions.

Author(s):  
David Skarbek

The Puzzle of Prison Order presents a theory of why prisons and prison life vary so much. While many people think prisons are all the same—rows of cells filled with violent men who officials rule with an iron fist, life behind bars varies in incredible ways. In some facilities, prison officials govern with care and attention to prisoners’ needs. In others, officials have remarkably little influence on the everyday life of prisoners, sometimes not even providing necessities like food and clean water. Why does prison social order around the world look so remarkably different? This book shows that how prisons are governed—sometimes by the state and sometimes by the prisoners—is tremendously important. It investigates life in a wide array of facilities—prisons in Brazil, Bolivia, Norway, England and Wales, a prisoner of war camp, women’s prisons in California, and a gay and transgender housing unit in the Los Angeles County Jail—to understand the hierarchy of life on the inside. Drawing on theories from political economy and a vast empirical literature on prison systems, the book offers a framework for understanding how social order evolves and takes root behind bars.


Author(s):  
Philipp Zehmisch

Chapter 2 contextualizes the Andaman Islands as a fieldwork location. It has two major objectives: First, it serves to introduce the reader to the Andamans as a geographical, ecological, and political space and as a site of imagination. This representation of the islands concentrates on the interplay of discourses and policies which have shaped their global, national, and local perception as well as the everyday life of the Andaman population. Second, the chapter underlines the conflation of anthropological theory, fieldwork, and biographical transformations. It demonstrates how recent theoretical trends and paradigm shifts in global and academic discourse have become enmeshed with the author’s experiences in and perceptions of the field. Elaborating on these intricate personal and professional ‘spectacles’ of the fieldworker, the author thus contextualizes the subjective conditions inherent in the production of ethnography as a type of literature.


2004 ◽  
Vol 40 (3) ◽  
pp. 205-211
Author(s):  
John Germov

This article provides a brief overview of Stephen Crook’s scholarly and professional work as a prelude to the articles by Malcolm Waters and Jan Pakulski and Bruce Tranter. His scholarly work particularly focused on the theorization of social differentiation and social order in studies of everyday life. Through the critical appraisal of postmodernist approaches, he developed his own post-foundational radicalist approach that transcended the determinism of unitary meta-narratives, but also avoided relativistic and atheoretical descriptions of the plurality of ‘the everyday’. Yet the everyday relevance of sociological practice was a defining feature of Steve’sweltanschauung, epitomized in his professional service and role as a public intellectual.


2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 62-92
Author(s):  
Lisa Asedillo

This article explores writing and scholarship on the theology of struggle developed by Protestants and Catholics in the Philippines during the 1970s-90s. Its focus is on popular writing—including pamphlets, liturgical resources, newsletters, magazines, newspaper articles, conference briefings, songs, popular education and workshop modules, and recorded talks—as well as scholarly arguments that articulate the biblical, theological, and ethical components of the theology of struggle as understood by Christians who were immersed in Philippine people’s movements for sovereignty and democracy. These materials were produced by Christians who were directly involved in the everyday struggles of the poor. At the same time, the theology of struggle also projects a “sacramental” vision and collective commitment towards a new social order where the suffering of the masses is met with eschatological, proleptic justice—the new heaven and the new earth, where old things have passed away and the new creation has come. It is within the struggle against those who deal unjustly that spirituality becomes a “sacrament”—a point and a place in time where God is encountered and where God’s redeeming love and grace for the world is experienced.


Author(s):  
Katherine S. Corker ◽  
M. Brent Donnellan

Research on situations has been reinvigorated within social and personality psychology. This chapter argues that a developmental perspective on situations can further enrich understanding of person-situation transactions and generate interesting predictions for future empirical tests. The approach is grounded in life course theory (Elder & Shanahan, 2006), an interactionist approach that considers person-situation dynamics as critical to understanding individual lives. The chapter describes an overarching perspective and reviews principles of personality development before turning to an explicit consideration of how situational characteristics (the Situational Eight DIAMONDS; Rauthmann et al., 2014) may change with age. It then outlines how a developmental tasks perspective and socioemotional selectivity theory can be integrated with the DIAMONDS characteristics. It concludes by describing different kinds of person-situation transactions that promote consistency and change in psychological characteristics across the lifespan and suggests a few future directions for research.


Author(s):  
Jens Ambrasat ◽  
Christian von Scheve

Ever since Georg Simmel’s seminal works, social relations have been a central building block of sociological theory. In relational sociology, social identities are an essential concept and supposed to emerge in close interaction with other identities, discourses and objects. To assess this kind of relationality, existing research capitalises on patterns of meaning making that are constitutive for identities. These patterns are often understood as forms of declarative knowledge and are reconstructed, using qualitative methods, from denotative meanings as they surface: for example, in stories and narratives. We argue that this approach to some extent privileges explicit and conceptual knowledge over tacit and non-conceptual forms of knowledge. We suggest that affect is a concept that can adequately account for such implicit and bodily meanings, even when measured on the level of linguistic concepts. We draw on affect control theory (ACT) and related methods to investigate the affective meanings of concepts (lexemes) denoting identities in a large survey. We demonstrate that even though these meanings are widely shared across respondents, they nevertheless show systematic variation reflecting respondents’ positions within the social space and the typical interaction experiences associated with their identities. In line with ACT, we show, first, that the affective relations between exemplary identities mirror their prototypical, culturally circumscribed and institutionalised relations (for example, between role identities). Second, we show that there are systematic differences in these affective relations across gender, occupational status and regional culture, which we interpret as reflecting respondents’ subjective positioning and experience vis-à-vis a shared cultural reality.


Author(s):  
Hailey N. Otis ◽  
Thomas R. Dunn

The theory and practice of queer worldmaking is a vital part of the study of queer communication. Rooted in the acts, activism, artistry, and the everyday lives of LGBT+, queer, and proto-queer people across the world, the theorization of queer worldmaking emerged alongside the founding of queer theory itself in the late 1990s. Surfacing in both José Esteban Muñoz’s writing on minoritarian performance and disidentification as well as Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner’s essay, “Sex in Public,” the term “queer worldmaking” was quickly taken up in communication scholarship, driving Gust Yep’s foundational work on “The Violence of Heteronormativity in Communication Studies.” Evolving according to various disciplinary demands and cultural influences, contemporary endeavors in queer worldmaking in communication studies largely follow three general paths: (a) drawing upon quare/queer of color theories to theorize worldmaking through/as enactments of disidentification(s), queer futurity, queer utopias, hope, and queer relationality; (b) conceptualizing academia, scholarship, and academic pursuits as productive sites for envisioning and creating queer worlds; and (c) tending to the worldmaking potentialities of queer memories, monuments, and archives. These intellectual pathways overlap, interweave, and split off into unpredictable rhizomatic directions, paving the way for scholarship that converses with, diverges from, and pushes forward queer worldmaking in communication studies in curiously queer directions.


Author(s):  
Ryan M. Milner

This chapter focuses on the everyday antagonisms that are perpetuated through memetic participation, specifically regarding race and gender identities. However, it also argues that memetic participation can be employed for the counterpublic contestation of those same antagonisms. The memetic logics, grammar, and vernacular introduced in the first half of the book are tools employed for both silencing marginalization and vocal pushback of that marginalization. The nature of this counterpublic engagement is ambivalent though, given that memetic media are often fraught with ambiguous irony and ambivalent humor. Genuine antagonisms and marginalizations can thrive under the “just joking” frame. But—even in the midst of this ambivalent system—there is value to the agonistic counterpublic engagement occurring through memetic media. Voice exists, even in the midst of the tensions evident throughout this discussion.


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