Networked Collective Symbolic Capital Revisited

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-33
Author(s):  
Hong-Chi Shiau

This study attempts to illustrate identity performance via the display of symbolic capital by Taiwanese gay men through photo-sharing experiences on Instagram. For Taiwanese gay men, photo-sharing experiences on Instagram have become a significant venue where they can interact with selected publics through performing various personae. This study has classified roles with various forms of cultural capital as well as clarifying how distinction is meticulously maneuvered among collapsed contexts. Through ethnographic interviews with 17 gay male college students from Taiwan and textual analysis of their correspondence though texting on Instagram, this study first contextualizes how the interactional processes engaged in on Instagram help constitute a collective identity pertaining to Taiwanese gay men on Instagram. The photo-sharing experiences are examined as an identity-making process involving the display of various symbolic capital, illuminating the calculated performance of taste and the collective past oppressed by the heteronormative society. The conclusion offers an alternative sociological intervention that goes beyond the notion of digital narcissism to help understand how the cultural capital on the presumption of photo-sharing experiences is invested.

2022 ◽  
pp. 426-440
Author(s):  
Hong-Chi Shiau

This study attempts to illustrate identity performance via the display of symbolic capital by Taiwanese gay men through photo-sharing experiences on Instagram. For Taiwanese gay men, photo-sharing experiences on Instagram have become a significant venue where they can interact with selected publics through performing various personae. This study has classified roles with various forms of cultural capital as well as clarifying how distinction is meticulously maneuvered among collapsed contexts. Through ethnographic interviews with 17 gay male college students from Taiwan and textual analysis of their correspondence though texting on Instagram, this study first contextualizes how the interactional processes engaged in on Instagram help constitute a collective identity pertaining to Taiwanese gay men on Instagram. The photo-sharing experiences are examined as an identity-making process involving the display of various symbolic capital, illuminating the calculated performance of taste and the collective past oppressed by the heteronormative society. The conclusion offers an alternative sociological intervention that goes beyond the notion of digital narcissism to help understand how the cultural capital on the presumption of photo-sharing experiences is invested.


Languages ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 57
Author(s):  
Saskia Huc-Hepher

In this article, an interdisciplinary lens is applied to French migrants’ reflections on their everyday language practices, investigating how embodied and embedded language, such as accent and London-French translanguaging, serve as both in-group and out-group symbolic markers in different transnational spaces. Key sociological concepts developed by Pierre Bourdieu are deployed, including field, habitus, hysteresis and symbolic capital, to assess the varying symbolic conversion rates of the migrants’ languaging practices across transnational spaces. A mixed-methodological and analytical approach is taken, combining narratives from ethnographic interviews and autobiography. Based on the data gathered, the article posits that the French accent is an embodied symbolic marker, experienced as an internalised dialectic: a barrier to inclusion/belonging in London and an escape from the symbolic weight of the originary accent in France. Subsequently, it argues that the migrants’ translanguaging functions as a spontaneous insider vernacular conducive to community identity construction in the postmigration space, but (mis)interpreted as an exclusionary articulation of symbolic distinction in the premigration context. Finally, the article asks whether participants’ linguistic repertoires, self-identifications and spatialities go beyond the notion of the ‘cleft habitus’, or even hybridity, to a post-structural, translanguaging third space that transcends borders.


2012 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 187-211 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erez Levon

AbstractThis article presents an analysis of a slang variety, called oxtšit, as it is described and used by a cohort of gay men in Israel. Unlike many previous analyses of gay slang, I argue that the men described do not use the variety to help construct and affirm an alternative gay identity, but rather that they use it as a form of in-group mockery through which normative and nonnormative articulations of Israeli gay male sexuality are delineated. It is suggested that this discussion has implications for sociolinguistic understandings of “groupness” more broadly, and particularly the relationship between macro-level social categories (like “gay”) and individual lived experience. (Gay slang, Israel, vari-directional voicing, identity/alterity)*


Author(s):  
Anna de Fina

AbstractThis article focuses on the inter-relations between storytelling and micro and macro contexts. It explores how narrative activity is shaped by and shapes in unique ways the local context of interaction in a community of practice, an Italian American card-playing club, but also illustrates how the storytelling events that take place within this local community relate to wider social processes. The analysis centers on a number of topically linked narratives to argue that these texts have a variety of functions linked to the roles and relationships negotiated by individuals within the club and to the construction of a collective identity for the community. However, the narrative activities that occur within the club also articulate aspects of the wider social context. It is argued that, in the case analyzed here, local meaning-making activities connect with macro social processes through the negotiation, within the constraints of local practices, of the position and roles of the ethnic group in the wider social space. In this sense, narrative activity can be seen as one of the many symbolic practices (Bourdieu 2002 [1977]) in which social groups engage to carry out struggles for legitimation and recognition in order to accumulate symbolic capital and greater social power.


Organization ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 365-382 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nick Rumens ◽  
John Broomfield

Building on emerging research on ‘gay-friendly’ organizations, this article examines if and how work contexts understood and experienced as ‘gay-friendly’ can be characterized as exhibiting a serious breakdown in heteronormativity. Taking the performing arts as a research setting, one that is often stereotyped as ‘gay-friendly’, and drawing on in-depth interview data with 20 gay male performers in the UK, this article examines how everyday activities and encounters involving drama school educators, casters and peers are shaped by heteronormative standards of gay male sexuality. Adopting a queer theory perspective and connecting with an emergent queer theory literature in organization studies, one concern articulated in this article is that heteronormative constructions of gay male sexualities constrain participants’ access to work; suggesting limits to the abilities and roles gay men possess and are able to play. Another concern is that when gay male sexualities become normalized in performing work contexts, they reinforce organizational heteronormativity and the heterosexual/homosexual binary upon which it relies. This study contributes towards theorizing the heteronormative dynamics of ‘gay-friendly’ places of work, arguing that gay male sexualities are performatively instituted according to localized heteronormativities which reinforce contextually contingent, restrictive heteronormative standards of gay male sexuality which performers are encouraged to embody and perform both professionally and personally.


2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 136-144
Author(s):  
Ida Bagus Suatama ◽  
Anak Agung Ngurah Anom Kumbara ◽  
A. A. Sagung Kartika Dewi

The purpose of this research is to understand and explain the discourse and practice of commodifying the usada Bali and negotiating the balian atmosphere in relation to economic interests. The method used is critical ethnography with qualitative analysis. This study found that the practice of commodifying usada Bali by balian was done by manipulating cultural capital, symbolic capital, and economic capital in the domains and dynamics of the habitus of usada Bali treatment to achieve economic goals. In medical practice, the balian people conduct negotiations in the gymnasium as a professional code of ethics in the midst of increasingly tighter competition in medical services. The findings of this study reflect the occurrence of mutual transformation in the practice of Balinese usada medicine due to the hegemony of modernity.


Author(s):  
Anne Harris

Drawing on the narrative frames of the "road trip" and "lesbian drama," genres which, it could be argued, normatively construct Otherness with all that is Queer, in respect to not fitting in or belonging, this article attempts to draw on queer theory to out gay male and lesbian relationships. Relationships between gay men and lesbians, constructed in and around identity practices, have been troubled by the emergence of queer folk, productively focusing attention on the differences between and within gay male and lesbian identities and communities. Using the metaphor of "road trip" to Queer gay male and lesbian relationships, I reconsider the question of lesbian presences in queer theory and in doing so seek to productively trouble the normalising practices of identity with gay male and lesbian relationships.


Author(s):  
Chris Perriam ◽  
Darren Waldron

The chapter probes responses to representations relating to lesbian, gay, bisexual and queer identities and desires. Three dominant themes emerge: (1) ageing among lesbians, gay men and bisexuals; (2) gay male, and, to a lesser extent, lesbian and bisexual desires and identities; and (3) a sense of shared experience, as a stake in community history or as a personalised mark of identity. The chapter reveals that investment, care, surprise, empathy, (self-) recognition and identification are recurring modes of engagement, and shows how viewers claim varying degrees of closeness to the subjects, characters and people on screen.


Author(s):  
Daniel Rivers

This essay looks at the worldview of gay male communalists across the United States in the mid-1970s as seen in the rural gay magazine Rural Free Delivery (RFD) in the critical years from 1973 to 1976 as well as in other extant archival sources related to gay communalism. As a clearinghouse for gay men involved in radical, back-to-the-land ventures, RFD provides a complex view of the creation of a largely white, gay male counterculture spirituality that fused the sexual politics of early gay liberationists with ecofeminist, animist, New Age understandings of sexuality, the natural world, and spirit. Gay men who were or who wanted to live in communal spaces nationwide sent letters and stories into RFD, which was published in a variety of gay male communal spaces during these years.


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