Chapter 1
ON BEING SOCIOLOGICAL
Everyday Life is Social Life
Sociology tries to answer the question ‘how is social life
possible?’ This means that it treats society and the way
we live our lives within it as a puzzle to be explained.
The technique of thinking first in terms of the group (ie of
the SOCIAL dimension) and only afterwards in terms of
the individual is the essence of what we mean when we
talk about thinking sociologically.
The structural, institutional, and behavioural dimensions
of society are social processes through which we make
and maintain our world.
Being Sociological
Sociologists use
• abstract ideas (theories)
• factual (empirical) evidence
Sociologists look for
• measurable regularities
• underlying and invisible rules
Pleasure and Play
Peter Berger in Invitation to Sociology
Sociology’s pleasure lies in seeing our familiar everyday
world ‘in a new light’
This can involve:
•
•
•
•
•
lateral thinking
a sense of play
recognition of ironies
new ways of framing our own experiences
understanding more clearly our own place in the
social scheme of things
The Sociological Imagination (1)
C. Wright Mill’s book of the same name.
With the sociological imagination we can
see that sociological understanding takes
place at the intersection of biography and
history.
Biography happens to individuals
History happens to societies
The Sociological Imagination (2)
Every individual lives out their own individual
biography (autobiography) within (in the context
of) the big picture of history. History is the story of
the aggregation of individual lives that we call
society.
An individual life begins at birth and ends at
death. We come, we are, we depart. The social
world was there before us and remains after we
die.
So we live our individual lives as best we can
within the social conditions around us.
The Sociological Imagination (3)
When we use the sociological imagination to look
at the intersection of history and biography we
will see both the large structural forces which
shape our lives and the small areas of self that
we live inside.
Our lives are lived in a complex loop between the
two.
The loop between inside and outside
Society is inside and outside of every individual
The Sociological Imagination (4)
It is outside us in all the formal institutions of
government, religion, education, and the economy. These
were made by humans but continue through time with a
life and force separate from any single individual or even,
today, any single ethnic group or nation.
And it is also inside us in the form of culture, of learned
knowledge, beliefs and values. People do things because
they find them personally meaningful.
But the thoughts that guide their actions are not isolated
and random. They are learned within social life.
Sociological Revelations
• illusions punctured
• connections and relationships revealed
• things do not have to be as they are – who
decides and who benefits?
• inequalities of power uncovered
Sociology as Critique
Mills ‘represented a social protest, a social anger’
in the mid twentieth century.
A hundred years earlier Karl Marx had done this
too. ‘I am speaking of a ruthless criticism of
everything existing.’
The sort of questions sociologists should ask:
• who controls whom? Economically?
Politically?
• what are the sources of social conflict?
• who are dependent, deprived, sacrificed?
Ghosts and Silences (1)
Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting
and the Sociological Imagination
The image of haunting signifies the many
ways in which good sociology looks
beneath the surface of past and present
arrangements to seek out what is missing,
silent.
Ghosts and Silences (2)
Their absences mark injustices and
injuries.
•
•
•
•
•
women
the poor
slaves
political prisoners
colonized indigenous peoples
Ghosts and Silences (3)
Where evidence is lacking, literature
may tell us more than orthodox
sociological methods of truth seeking.
The sociological imagination draws
on literary sources as sociological
evidence.
Consciousness and Connections
Both consciousness and connections continually
shift and change. There is always more going on
than meets the eye.
The story of the rock pool gives a graphic imagery
to demonstrate this point.
‘What on the surface appears simple is in
reality deeply complex.’
So does Sebald’s description of the post-war
German economic miracle.
Modernity
Sociology came into existence as an attempt to
understand and explain the ‘great transformation’ from
traditional to modern life.
Details of sociology’s origins are in Chapter 3
Modernizing.
Simmel’s essay on ‘Metropolis and Mental Life’ describes
how individuals experience and cope with the pace,
variety, and complexity of modern urban life.
Charles Chaplin’s Modern Times and Ron Fricke’s
documentary Baraka both illustrate what modernity
overload feels like.
Ethics and Social Theory
Sociology helps us to make sense of the world
 understanding how societies work is an ongoing process.
There are always new developments to be understood.
 generalizing about how things are – what we call
sociological theories – are not ends in themselves but
simply means to better understanding of society.
 theories can help us to distinguish good from bad social
arrangements – those that improve lives and those that
damage them.
 being sociological is ultimately an ethical practice. it means
searching out those made insignificant, even invisible –
women, racial and ethnic minorities, outsiders – by existing
power arrangements.
Films
• Water 2005 (Deepa Mehta)
• Baraka 1992 (Ron Fricke)
Chapter 2
DOING SOCIOLOGICAL
RESEARCH
Qualitative Research
Most closely associated with participant
observation and other less interactive
forms of fieldwork.
Similarly the collation of data within this
methodology are usually achieved by the
methods of interviews, logs and personal
journals. The varied foci and findings of
qualitative research are published in an
equally wide variety of forms and styles.
Quantitative Research
Dominated by a particular methodology and method;
the survey and questionnaire, respectively.
Thus survey data are typically collected through
questionnaires which are delivered to respondents
using face-to-face techniques, mail, telephone and
the internet. The survey involves the use of statistical
analysis and now almost inevitably uses dedicated
software packages. The findings of quantitative
research also tend to have a more standardised
format which focuses on issues of sampling, margins
of error and the reliability and validity of the
questionnaire.
Quantitative-Qualitative Binary (1)
The readily observed difference between
numbers and words is important to the
quantitative-qualitative binary. From this
commonsense perspective, quantitative
research generates data and analyses that
are numerical in form, including counts,
distributions, correlations, etc; whereas
qualitative research centres on words,
including stories, life histories, descriptions,
etc.
Quantitative-Qualitative Binary (2)
Numbers are most commonly associated with the
capacity to condense data, insofar as a number can
represent almost anything amenable to sociological
inquiry: an average, a rating, a correlation, etc.
Words or writing, on the other hand, are prized for an
opposite property, the capacity to detail and to extend.
It is important to mention that most subjects of
sociological inquiry can be explored through the use of
either numbers or words, albeit not with equal efficiency.
In this sense numbers and words represent opposite
ends of a representational and analytical continuum. In
practice the two mechanisms of communication are
interlinked.
Cases and Variables (1)
Ragin (The Comparative Method: Moving Beyond
Qualitative and Quantitative Strategies, 1987; Constructing
Social Research: The Unity and Diversity of Method 1994)
has written on the linkage of qualitative - quantitative
research with the specific goals of sociological inquiry. He
recasts the numbers versus words debate in terms of the
elemental categories of research: cases and variables.
Indeed the start point for research is always either a case or
a variable (though knowing which may not be apparent at
the beginning). Regardless of the subject matter, the
experiences, attitudes, beliefs under scrutiny can be
categorised in generating a dataset as either a case
(example, instance, type, etc) or a variable (aspect,
dimension, feature, etc).
Cases and Variables (1)
Categories are the building blocks of sociological
inquiry.
Quantitative research tends to focus on large
numbers of cases and relatively few variables.
The capacity for numbers to condense data is
most useful in this context.
Qualitative research tends to focus on few or
singular cases and many variables. The capacity
for words to enhance data is most useful in this
context.
Framing Research
Framing represents an interaction on the
part of the researcher between the body of
sociological theory and the problem or
issue they are interested in. The result is
that research is always a process involving
the interaction of data and theory and vice
versa.
Framing Quantitative
Research (1)
Ragin describes quantitative framing in terms of
“fixed framing”.
As noted, quantitative research tends to focus on
large numbers of cases and relatively few
variables. In this respect the most important
categorisation is of the variables and their
measurement. Of central importance is the
capacity for the researcher to observe variation in
variables across the cases.
Framing Quantitative
Research (2)
For example, the explanatory power of a survey is not
much affected by the addition or removal of a few
cases. There is no difference in the statistical value of a
survey with 1000 cases and one with 1050. Even the
addition or removal of several hundred cases will have
only a minor effect on the “margin of error”. Thus, the
most important task for a researcher conducting a
quantitative investigation is to determine the variables
to describe the cases. It is variation in these variables
across cases that is crucial. Finding sufficient numbers
of cases to make the observation from is a secondary
problem.
Framing Quantitative
Research (3)
Quantitative research has a fixed framing insofar
as decisions made around the character of
variables determine its success or failure. While
the categorisation of variables can be fine-tuned or
even piloted prior to fieldwork, once these variables
are applied to cases there is no / only limited scope
to revise them. For example, if a questionnaire is
mailed-out to 1000 addresses (cases) and a typo is
discovered in one of the questions (variables) there
is very little that can be done to rectify the mistake.
Framing Qualitative
Research (1)
Qualitative research enjoys a “fluid
framing”. Qualitative research tends to
focus on few cases and many variables. Of
central importance is the capacity for the
researcher to develop a rich appreciation of
the case(s).
Interaction - Theory and Data
You develop and test your theory case by case. You formulate
an explanation for the first case as soon as you have gathered
data on it. You apply that theory to the second case when you
get data on it. If the theory explains that case adequately, thus
confirming the theory, no problem; you go to the third case.
When you hit a “negative case,” one your explanatory
hypothesis doesn’t explain, you change the explanation of
what you are trying to explain, by incorporating into it whatever
new elements the facts of this troublesome case suggest to
you, or you change the definition of what you’re going to
explain so as to exclude the recalcitrant case from the universe
of things to be explained
Becker, Tricks of the Trade: How to Think About Your
Research While You're Doing It , 1998, p.195
Quantitative
Research
Cases and
Variables
Many cases,
few variables
Variablecentric
Categorisation
Building
variables
Fluid
Framing
Variables
interrogated
Words or
Numbers, to
Numbers
condense
Qualitative
Research
Few cases,
many
variables
Case-centric
Building cases
Fixed
Variables
determined
Words, to
enhance
Scope of
Research
Startpoint of
Research
Goals of
Inquiry
Political
Stance
Quantitative
Research
Breadth,
shallow
Somewhat
deductive
Theory
Identifying
patterns
Making
predictions
Testing
theories
Tending
conservative
Qualitative
Research
Depth, narrow
Somewhat
inductive
Data
Interpreting
events
Giving voice
Advancing
theories
Tending
radical
Chapter 3
MODERNIZING
Sociology
• European invention (1830s)
• Early sociology was influenced by Enlightenment thinkers
• Aims to understand group life in modern society
• Modern society’s origins are to be found in the Dual
Revolutions: the Industrial Revolution and the French
Revolution
• Sociologists recognize positive aspects of modernity:
improvements in health & lifespan, broader access to
consumer good, & democratic freedoms
• Sociologists also recognize negative aspects: industrialized
death in total wars and extermination camps, environmental
degradation, & injuries wrought by colonization
The Enlightenment (1)
 C17th & C18th liberal intellectual movement
 Germany, France, Holland, Britain, the United
States
 Celebration of progress
 Celebration of culture’s domination of nature
 Commitment to science, critique & reason
against superstition, assertion & dogma
The Enlightenment (2)
Enlightenment as journey to individual and
human freedom
According to Jürgen Habermas (1987) The
Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, the
Enlightenment sets ‘the project of
modernity’ in motion.
The Enlightenment (3)
Peter Hamilton (1992) ‘The Enlightenment and the Birth of Social
Science’, in Stuart Hall & Bram Gieben (eds) Formations of
Modernity, Cambridge: Polity Press, p.57:
‘The Enlightenment … is one of the starting points for modern
sociology. Its central themes formed the threshold of modern
thinking about society and the realm of the social. Perhaps of
equal importance is that it signalled the appearance of the
secular intellectual within Western society, a figure whose role
is intimately bound up with the analysis and critique of society.
It is from this role that emerged, amongst other intellectual
positions the modern conception of the professional
sociologist, based in a specific institution. [It is] to the
Enlightenment that we should turn to see the emergence of the
profession of sociology.’
The Division of Labour in the
Social Sciences
Subject
History
Geography
Economics
Politics
Psychology
Anthropology
Sociology
Object
Time
Space
Resource allocation under
conditions of scarcity
Power
Individual mental processes
Group life in primitive
societies
Group life in modern
societies
The Industrial Revolution
 Invention of modern economic life
 Broke humanity’s dependence on organic resources
 Late C18th, early C19th – beginning in Britain
 Rise of the factory system
 Division of labour
 Massive increase in economic output
 Massive increase in wealth & living standards (though
unevenly distributed)
Krishnan Kumar (1988, p. 4): ‘To modernise is to industrialise’
The French Revolution
• 1789
• Invention of modern political life
• Active individual citizenship
• The democratic impulse
Classical sociologists’ variants on
the traditional/modern dichotomy
Traditional
Modern
Feudalism
Capitalism
[1864-1920]
Mechanical
solidarity
Traditional
domination
Organic
solidarity
Legal-rational
domination
Ferdinand
Tönnies
Natural will
Rational will
Karl Marx
[1818-1883]
Émile Durkheim
[1858-1917]
Max Weber
[1855-1936]
Terminology
• Modernism – a set of artistic practices
• Modernisation – the process of becoming
modern
• Modernity – the condition of being modern
Material Changes and Modernity
Marshall Berman (1982) All That is Solid Melts Into Air, p. 16
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
Scientific revolution
Industrialization of production (turns science into
technology)
Demographic upheavals
Rapid urban growth
Systems of mass communication
Increasingly powerful national states
Mass social movements of people
Ever-expanding, drastically fluctuating capitalist world
market
Modernization
Yuri Slezkine (2005, p. 1) The Jewish Century
‘…modernization is about everyone becoming urban,
mobile, literate, articulate, intellectually intricate,
physically fastidious, and occupationally flexible. It is
about learning how to cultivate people and symbols, not
fields or herds. It is about pursuing wealth for the sake of
learning, learning for the sake of wealth, and both wealth
and learning for their own sake. It is about transforming
peasants and princes into merchants and priests,
replacing inherited privilege with acquired prestige, and
dismantling social estates for the benefit of individuals,
nuclear families, and book-reading tribes (nations).’
Marx and Modernity
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the
Communist Party:
‘All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient
and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away,
all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can
ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is
profaned, and men at last are forced to face … the real
conditions of their lives and their relations with their fellow
men’.
Marshall Berman (1982) All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, Simon
and Schuster: New York:
p.21: ‘This is probably the definitive vision of the modern
environment’.
Modernity’s Debit Items
1.
Modernity’s underside: bureaucratisation &
disenchantment, industrialised war, & environmental
pollution
2.
Sustainability: extraction & depletion of scarce
resources
3.
Social considerations: Enlightenment intellectuals were
privileged European men – what of women and the
working class?
4.
Cultural considerations - expanded international
divisions of labour imposed ideas born in one place
and time on other places around the world
Chapter 4
WORKING
Profits, Classes and
Aspirations (1)
Work is the place where things
(commodities) are made and where profits
are generated. The fundamental driver of
capitalist society is the accumulation of
capital. The origin of all capital is profit.
One of the great contradictions of
capitalism is that while workers produce all
the value of society, they receive only a
portion of this value as wages from the sale
of commodities.
Profits, Classes and
Aspirations (2)
Work is the place where the two great classes
of capitalism are forged: the bourgeoisie and
the proletariat. Bourgeoisie describes the
class of modern capitalists who are owners of
the means of production and employers of
wage labour. Proletariat is the name given to
the class of modern wage labourers who,
having no means of production of their own,
are reduced to selling their labour power in
order to live.
Profits, Classes and
Aspirations (3)
Work is the place where aspirations are
generated. Work is where all the possible
things the people might find useful are given
physical form (as commodities). However, the
selection of commodities produced does not
float free from the broader struggle between
capitalists and workers. While the law of
demand and supply operates it always does
so in terms of class interest.
Work - a Source of Innovation
The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing
the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of
production, and with them the whole relations of society.
Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form,
was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier
industrial classes. Constant revolutionizing of production,
uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting
uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from
all earlier ones. All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of
ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away,
all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify.
All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man
is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real condition
of life and his relations with his kind
Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, 2004 [1848], p. 7
Control and Resistance
Management has a long history of trying to
secure control at work. Frederick Taylor
was a champion of what he called
“scientific management”.
The sociology of work has tended to focus
on efforts at managerial control over work
and workers’ resistance to these initiatives.
Control and Managerial Effort
1. Productivity. Efforts at maximising the output of
workers;
2. Efficiency, which has as its goal minimising
wastage by workers in the process of
production.
3. Compliance, or ensuring that workers comply
with the rules of management.
4. Subordination. The efforts by management to
ensure workers are passive in work and, in
particular, not resistant to change.
5. The goal of flexibility or ensuring that workers
are accommodating to change.
Deskilling
Harry Braverman identified the process of deskilling as
central to control.
•
Deskilling involves the separation of mental work and
manual work;
•
Deskilling is the objective of scientific management. It
is a means of securing managerial control over the
labour process;
•
Deskilling removes the skills, knowledge and science
of the labour process and transfers these to
management. At the same time deskilling pits manual
and mental workers against each other;
•
Deskilling facilitates the dispersal of the labour process
across sites and time;
•
Deskilling increases the capacity of capitalists to
exploit workers and simultaneously reduces the
capacity of workers to resist managerial control.
Fordism
Deskilling reaches its zenith in the design of work
called Fordism (named after Henry Ford, founder
of the Ford Motor Company).
The key to this re-design of work was the
introduction of the assembly-line into factories.
The assembly-line allowed Ford to determine the
pace and order of work, to drastically deskill the
work involved in making cars and to hire the
cheapest labour needed to complete the range of
tasks.
McDonaldization
George Ritzer suggests that the success of the fastfood company McDonalds is the result of the
dissemination of Fordist principles and deskilling. In
this sense, a McDonald outlet is one big assemblyline, used to deliver a range of pre-assembled food.
“McDonaldization”: ‘the process by which the
principle of the fast-food restaurant are coming to
dominate more and more sectors of American
society as well as of the rest of the world’
Ritzer, The McDonaldization of Society: An Investigation into the
Changing Character of Contemporary Social Life ,1996, p. 1
Panopticon
‘The Panopticon should facilitate the collection and storage
of (useful) information, provide the means of supervision
(through instructions or physical architecture) and monitor
behaviour and compliance with instructions. The Panopticon
does this by providing a physical superstructure of control
based on visibility. Meanwhile, compliance of the subject
population is achieved via economic, coercive or normative
sanctions. A well-developed system of surveillance at once
increases the capacity to identify any breach of rule
deserving sanction, and reduces the likelihood of the
necessity to invoke the sanction’
Sewell and Wilkinson, ‘‘Someone to watch over me’: Surveillance,
Discipline and the J-I-T labour process’,1992, p. 274
The Labour Process
as a Game (1)
Michael Burawoy’s main contribution to the
control and resistance debate was to reimagine the labour process as a game in
which the struggle for control takes
unexpected turns.
The Labour Process as a Game (2)
‘In identifying the separation of conception and execution,
the expropriation of skill, or narrowing of the scope of
discretion as the broad tendency in the development of the
capitalist labour process, Harry Braverman missed the
equally important parallel tendency toward the expansion of
choices within those ever narrower limits. It is the latter
tendency that constitutes a basis of consent and allows the
degradation of work to pursue its course without continuing
crisis. Thus, we have seen that more reliable machines,
easier rates, the possibility of chiseling, and so forth, all
increase the options open to the operator in making out’
Burawoy, Manufacturing Consent: Changes in the Labor Process
Under Monopoly Capitalism ,1979, p. 94
Michel de Certeau’s la perruque
(the wig)
‘La perruque is the worker's own work disguised as
work for his employer. It differs from pilfering in that
nothing of material value is stolen. It differs from
absenteeism in that the worker is officially on the
job. La perruque may be as simple a matter as a
secretary's writing a love letter on “company time”
or as complex as a cabinetmaker's “borrowing” a
lathe to make a piece of furniture for his living
room...’
Du Gay, Consumption and Identity at Work, 1996, p. 147
From Work Ethic to Aesthetic of
Consumption
Zygmunt Bauman argues that capitalist
societies are experiencing a shift from a
“work ethic” to an “aesthetic of consumption”.
This mirrors the rise of consumer society.
Development of a Consumer
Society (1)
Ideal Citizen in Producer Society
Ideal Citizen in Consumer Society
Endures monotony
Seeks pleasure
Is habituated to routine
Looks for difference
Defers gratification
Advances gratification
Is deliberate
Is compulsive
Respects tradition
Is eager for experience
Is loyal
Is fickle
Is readily satisfied
Is insatiable
Development of a Consumer
Society (2)
The development of a consumer society is
also associated with “disenchantment” of
both workers and consumers.
There are some possibilities for resistance
and re-enchantment in workers and
consumers becoming ironic and subversive
agents.
Chapter 5
CONSUMING
Consumption
Acts of consumption can be broken down into
two levels:
1. The material – the thing actually being
consumed
2. The symbolic – what it means to
consume it
The former may be individual and physical; the latter
is indisputably social (and frequently pertains to
status).
The Focus of Sociology (1)
Sociology tends to focus on the symbolic aspects of
consumption, but for most of human history (and today
for most of the planet) consumption has primarily been
about staying alive.
There are massive disparities:
1.
Vertically – between different social classes and
groups within countries (upper and lower classes)
2.
Horizontally – between different countries (Global
north and South)
Zygmunt Bauman (1993:214) Postmodern Ethics:
‘However far and wide it spreads, the emancipation
which modernity brought in its wake (liberation from
nature, friability of traditional constraints, infinity of
human potential, possibility of an order dictated
solely by reason), has been from the start and will
remain forever an ultimately local phenomenon, a
privilege achieved by some at somebody else’s
expense; it can only be sustained, for a time, on the
condition of unequal exchange with other sectors of
global society. What we came to call “economic
growth” is the process of expropriation of order, not
of its global increase’.
The Focus of Sociology (2)
West and Rest: the former are so rich because
the latter are so poor.
When considering the ability to consume we
should be mindful of:
•
•
•
•
•
class
age
gender
ethnicity
sexuality
The Focus of Sociology (3)
Because people in the same social strata
tend to share:
1. Lifestyles
2. Life chances
Multiple Meanings of
Consumption (1)
Anthony Giddens’ example of a cup of coffee
1. Fluid intake – source of refreshment
2. Ritual – act of meeting up with
significant others
3. Social distinction – you are what you
drink (identity)
4. Socially acceptable drug – culture,
power and the law
Multiple Meanings of
Consumption (2)
Coffee drinking as a series of relationships:
1. Physiological
Addiction – the need for a “fix”
2. Personal
Opportunity to catch up with others
3. Socio-economic
Necessity of global networks of production,
transportation and distribution to make this
possible (grounded in colonialism)
Consumption and Identity (1)
Fashion and modernity: shared etymology
Fashion as the stylistic expression of the
modern:
‘Fashion is the supreme expression of
that contemporary spirit’
Ulrich Lehmann (2000:xii) Tigersprung:
Fashion in Modernity, Cambridge, Mass.:
MIT Press.
Consumption and Identity (2)
Gilles Lipovestsky on Fashion:
‘In less than half a century, attractiveness and
evanescence have become the organizing principles of
modern collective life’ p. 6.
‘…modern fashion stands out as the earliest
manifestation of mass consumption: homogenous,
standardized, indifferent to frontiers’ p. 59.
‘A society that hinges on the expansion of needs is above
all a society that reorganizes mass production and
consumption according to the law of obsolescence,
seduction, and diversification; this is the law that titls the
economy into the orbit of the fashion form’ p. 134.
Consumption and Identity (3)
Fashion as a form of communication:
•
Who you are
•
Who you identify with
→ Social cohesion through consumption
Consumer Society (1)
John Benson, The Rise of Consumer Society in
Britain, p.6:
1)
Availability of choice and credit
2)
Social value defined by purchasing power
3)
Desire for the new
→ “I buy therefore I am”
Consumer Society (2)
‘In this country [America] there is no difference between a
person and that person’s economic fate. No one is
anything other than his wealth, his income, his job, his
prospects. In the consciousness of everyone, including its
wearer, the economic mask coincides exactly with what
lies beneath it, even in its smallest wrinkles. All are worth
as much as they earn, and earn as much as they are
worth. They find out what they are through the ups and
downs of their economic life’.
Max Horkhiemer & T.W. Adorno (2002) Dialectic of
Enlightenment, Stanford: Stanford University Press, p. 175.
Consumer Society (3)
The role of advertising:
To get us to buy things
Two strategies:
1. Creation of desire (sex appeal – you can be this
attractive)
2. Creation of anxiety (personal inadequacy – you are
this unattractive)
Underlying message: you are how you look (identity =
image)
Other Points to Note
1.) The Continuing Spread of the Consumer Ethic
•
Privatization of public life
•
Shoppers rather than citizens
•
The sacralization of consumption
•
“Affluenza”
2.) Relationship to Production
•
Things are the products of human labour
•
Our consumption is someone else’s production
•
Production presumes consumption & vice versa
•
Some consume more than others (disposable
income)/some work more than others (division of
labour)
Films
• Black Gold 2006 (Marc & Nick Francis)
• Maxed Out 2006 (James D. Scurlock)
• They Live 1988 (John Carpenter)
Chapter 6
TRADING
Trading
• Has existed for most of human history
• Rudimentary division of labour based on
gender
• Little exchange of surplus – mostly
subsistence
Adam Smith (1776)
• Civilisation comes through “truck, barter &
exchange”
• Expansion of the division of labour
• Specialisation of tasks
Invention of Money
•
•
•
•
•
Storage without waste (John Locke 1690)
Measure of value
Expands division of labour
From local to global currencies
Increases interdependency
Impersonal Markets
•
•
•
•
Now the primary mechanisms of exchange
Require Commodification
Allocate resources
Do not satisfy the conditions of modern
price theory
Problems With the Market (1)
• Buyers and sellers have imperfect knowledge
(transaction costs)
• There can be qualitative differences in the
“same” product
• Markets do not clear, they find equilibrium
• It is not free: it requires contracts, standards &
conditions
• Giant corporations dominate production & sales
• Consumption is manipulated by producers
• Demand for many commodities is inelastic
Problems With the Market (2)
• Non-price competition often dominates
• Path dependence
• Private markets cannot satisfy public goods (free
rider problem & merit goods)
• Production can be efficient & destructive, e.g. it
destroys the environment (externalities)
• The isolation paradox: self-interest may
motivate action but the actions of others
complicate outcomes
Labour Markets (1)
• Distinctive feature of capitalism (Karl Marx, Max
Weber)
• Increase in human toil
• Creation of “free” labour markets began in
Europe
• End of worker land rights
• Outside Europe this process often involved
colonial projects
• Workers are compelled to sell their labour power
• Wages: difficult assessing individual worker’s
skills & contributions
Labour Markets (2)
Talk of markets collapses a very
complicated struggle by a host of parties –
capitalists, workers, households, states
and organizations – into a misleading
abstraction.
Granovetter and Tilly, 1988
Capitalists Seek to Lower
Wage Costs
• Labour-saving technologies (“downsized”
workers)
• Move capital from country to country
→
• Globalised labour market
• South’s increased involvement in labourintensive production
• North’s increasing quest for niches of hi-tech
production
• Dependent & uneven development: massive
disparities between CEOs & workers, division
between Global North & Global South
Current Trends
• Downsizing
• Subcontracting
• Increase in part-time, benefit-less work
Globalisation (1)
Refers to flows of people, finance,
commodities, images and ideas beyond the
borders of nation states. These flows are
by no means recent. Processes of
globalization are uneven and they do not
form a coherent whole.
Globalisation (2)
→ Annihilation of space through time
David Harvey
→ The “global village”
Marshall McLuhan
Globalisation (3)
“After three thousand years of explosion, by
means of fragmentary and mechanical
technologies, the Western World is imploding.
During the mechanical ages we had extended
our bodies in space. Today, after more than a
century of electronic technology, we have
extended our central nervous system itself in
a global embrace, abolishing both space and
time as far as our planet is concerned”.
Quoted in Harvey, 1989, p. 293
Globalisation
Thomas Friedman
• ‘globalization involves the inexorable
integration of markets, nation-states and
technologies to a degree never witnessed
before’(1999, p. 7).
• “the earth is flat” (2005)
Globalisation and
Americanisation
Americanisation is an important feature of
globalisation because:
• The US is the world’s dominant military
power
• US corporations are major players in the
global economy
• US cultural features are global (film,
television, popular music etc)
The Future of Capitalism
Newton Gingrich
‘More and more people are going to operate
outside corporate structures and hierarchies in
the nooks and crannies that the Information
Revolution creates. While the Industrial
Revolution herded people into gigantic social
institutions-big corporations, big unions, big
government – the Information Revolution is
breaking up these giants and leading us back to
something that is – strangely enough-much like
Tocqueville's 1830s America’
Quoted in Dawson and Foster, 1996, p. 40
Digitisation of Trade
• The internet & virtual capitalism
• Electronically mediated home work
• Direct marketing, data gathering &
decision-making done online
Digitisation of Trade, but…
• Information superhighway planted on top
of existing structure of highly corporatised
global capitalism
• Material production functions will stay
place-based
• Retail stores fight back against online
competitors, e.g. Niketown, super malls
The Future
Capitalism will not become friction free
A system subject to recurring booms &
busts
But here, as always, the future will be the
product of decisions made by all of us. It is
an important goal of this book to give
citizens some of the tools needed to be
thinking participants in this yet-to-be future.
Chapter 7
STRATIFYING:
CONTESTING CLASS
Marx’s Classes as Production
Relations
Karl Marx defined capitalist society as a relationship between two
social classes – wage-labour and capital.
Wage workers and capitalist employers are involved in constant
struggle over the rate of exploitation.
Class struggle was the ‘motor of history’ (Marx, Capital Vol 1
1976, pp.781-94).
The separation of workers from the ownership of the means of
production hid from view the actual process of exploitation. Marx
called this “commodity fetishism” and ‘false consciousness’ in
which workers saw themselves as being potentially equal with the
capitalists (Marx, 1976, Capital Vol 1 pp.163-77).
Class consciousness would arise only as a result of the
intervention of revolutionaries.
Weber’s Classes as Market
Relations (1)
Max Weber’s concept of capitalism was of that of
market society in which individual actors exchanged
commodities. He viewed economic classes in terms
of individuals owning more or less economic
‘assets’ than others.
Individuals also differed according to their access to
political power (party) and according to their ability
to consume (status).
Weber did not think that individuals were assigned
to classes as production relations since they could
change their class, status and party positions.
Weber’s Classes as Market
Relations (2)
Weber saw individuals as having social mobility,
acting to change their position in society.
What motivated individuals to try to increase their
market share was their rationality; their ability to act
as rational actors in the market.
The capitalist market represented a progressive
shift from non-rational society to a rational society
where progress was measured by an increasingly
efficient division of labour.
Weber regarded socialism as a return to the nonmarket irrationality of serfdom.
Neo-Marxism
Marx’s prediction of socialist revolution was falsified by
events. Many Marxists drew the conclusion that economic
interests alone were not sufficient to make the working class
revolutionary. Some theorists concluded that the proletariat
was no longer the ‘historic agent’ of socialism. The working
class appeared to be in decline relative to the middle class.
• Antonio Gramsci and the German Frankfurt School
highlighted the dominance of capitalist ideology in
neutralising class consciousness.
• Eric Olin Wright and Pierre Bourdieu, are prominent
Neo-Marxist who attempted to combine Marx with
Weber.
Neo-Weberians
Weber’s theory explained not only the existence of economic
classes, and the relative autonomy of economics and
politics, but also allowed for individuals to escape particular
classes and exercise choice without the inconvenience of
overthrowing capitalist society
Neo-Weberians like Frank Parkin or Anthony Giddens claim
that capitalism has outgrown the nineteenth and early
twentieth century economic scarcity that required classes to
compete for zero-sum shares in the national wealth.
The persistence of social, national and cultural barriers to
equality is reflected in both the upward movement of
individuals into skilled occupations and a downward mobility
of individuals into a casualised workforce and a residual
marginalised underclass.
A Marxist Response to MarxWeber hybrid classes
There are at least two important objections to MarxWeber hybrid theories of class formation.
• Classes are defined by their relation to the
means of production and not by market share of
revenue.
• Fetishism of the Intellectuals: the role of
bourgeois intellectuals who reproduce the
sanitised, inverted ideology of capitalism as a
matter of fair shares’.
Social Movements (1)
Social movements are the product hybrid theories of
class formation that substitute actual groups of
individuals in the marketplace (revenue classes) for
social relations of production (Crompton, Class and
Stratification: An Introduction to Current Debates 1998,
pp.18-19).
Disadvantaged groups are mobilised ideologically and
politically to challenge the cultural alibis for inequality.
Their rationale is: If the problem of inequality is caused
by unequal distribution, or exchange, then the solution
must involve a political strategy to equalise distribution
or exchange.
Social Movements (2)
However, the women’s movement, and movements
around gay and lesbian, black, immigrant, indigenous
rights have been remarkably unsuccessful in securing
the recognition of rights and in equalising revenue
shares (i.e., upward mobility).
A recent attempt to rescue social movements as agents
of global change is that of Hardt and Negri (Empire
2000; Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of
Empire 2004). They define the Multitude as the
“common” element of all the singular social movements
capable of challenging the Empire of capitalism.
USA, Australia and New Zealand:
Lands of White Settlement
European settler states test the explanatory power of
race and gender independently of class relations. The
claim is that the United States, Australia and New
Zealand are relatively open, fluid societies
comparatively free of class barriers.
However systemic gender and racial oppression
originated with the impact of the capitalist mode of
production on pre-existing lineage, slave and domestic
modes of production so that they became “surrogates”
of class relations (Miles, Capitalism and Unfree Labour
1987, p.44).
Argentina: The “Multitude”
Versus the Proletariat
In the case of Argentina, Hardt and Negri suggest that
the working class disappears when factory jobs
disappear, leaving the unemployed and self-employed
as the “vanguard” of the Multitude.
However arising out of these surrogate working class
movements, it is not the Multitude that poses the real
threat to global capitalism. Rather it is the potential
power of the organised proletarian and peasant masses
that capital fears. This is why in an attempt to avoid
popular insurrections the dominant capitalist powers are
prepared to allow despotic regimes to be replaced by
popular regimes that allow the masses a voice.
Iraq: Nation and Religion
against Class
Iraq is the obvious test case where a progressive, secular
nationalism combines with a fundamentalist Islamic
nationalism to over-ride the class interests of peasants and
workers. It is a country in which class seems the most
unlikely source of social solidarity and change.
Yet if we look at the modern history of Iraq we find a history
of class struggle. We find that the capitalist classes in the
West have conspired with the local ruling class to maintain
regimes hostile to the mobilisation and political power of the
working class. We find that same class re-emerging and
reforming itself out of sheer economic necessity: unions
have been revived; strikes for basic rights and conditions.
Chapter 8
GOVERNING: POWER
Defining Power
•
•
•
•
the ability to do or act
political or social ascendancy or control
personal ascendancy
authorization, delegated authority
Characteristics of Sociological
Theories
• Theory is the name we give to the abstract ideas that
structure the way we understand and think about the
practical things we study.
• Sociological theories attempt to organize the apparently
random nature of social life into coherent social
knowledge.
• Sociologists use theories as their ‘sociological maps’ to
help them explain what societies are and how they work
and change.
Quantifiable Power
Max Weber’s definition of power:
‘the chance of a man or a number of men to realise
their own will even against the resistance of others’
• Quantity concepts of power see it as capacity:
• Some people, or categories of people have more of it
than others.
• How much you have greatly depends on your place in
society –gender, race/ethnicity, class, age, wealth or
poverty etc.
Legitimate Power - Leadership
Max Weber defines domination (a specific
form of power) as
“the probability that a command with a
given specific content will be obeyed by a
given group of persons.”
Economy and Society p.53
Max Weber
Three sources of legitimate power which rulers exercise
over those they rule:
Type of Domination
Traditional
Charismatic
Legal-rational
Grounds for claiming obedience
Obey me because this is what
our people have always done
Obey me because I can
transform your life
Obey me because I am your
lawfully appointed superior
Frank Parkin, Max Weber, 1982, p.77
Legitimate Power - Leadership
Two competing accounts of political power in the
United States in the 1950s
Robert Dahl Who Governs
• Pluralist power
• Groups (business, workers, taxpayers,
consumer groups etc) compete for power
on equal terms and all get to exercise
some
• No single interest dominates
Pluralist or Elite Power?
In direct contradiction
C Wright Mills The Power Elite
• One power elite dominates – a
combination of political, military, and
business people
• Many of these had not been
democratically elected
• The citizen consent necessary for
legitimate rule in a legal rational
democracy was under threat
Legitimacy and Globalized
Power
Present day globalization processes are undermining the
sovereign power of the nation state.
Manuel Castells: network society and the network state
globally linked organized crime
Carolyn Nordstrom: international shadow powers –
networks of goods and services
operating outside formal state and legal channels
trading in legal and illegal commodities
Capillary Power –
Michel Foucault
Power as action.
Not exercised over people but generated in
interactions between them.
EXAMPLE OF POWER EXERCISED OVER
PEOPLE
The Sentence against Damiens 1757
The Parlement declares “the said Robert-François Damiens has been
convicted of having committed a very mean, very terrible, and very dreadful
parricidal crime against the King. The said Damiens is sentenced to pay for
his crime in front of the main gate of the Church of Paris. He will be taken
there in a tipcart naked and will hold a burning wax torch weighing two
pounds. There, on his knees, he will say and declare that he had committed
a very mean, very terrible and very dreadful parricide, and that he had hurt
the King.... He will repent and ask God, the King and Justice to forgive him.
When this will be done, he will be taken in the same tipcart to the Place de
Grève and will be put on a scaffold. Then his breasts, arms, thighs, and legs
will be tortured. While holding the knife with which he committed the said
Parricide, his right hand will be burnt. On his tortured body parts, melted
lead, boiling oil, burning pitch, and melted wax and sulfur will be thrown.
Then four horses will pull him apart until he is dismembered. His limbs will
be thrown on the stake, and his ashes will be spread. All his belongings,
furniture, housings, where ever they are, will be confiscated and given to
the King. Before the execution, the said Damiens will be asked to tell the
names of his accomplices. His house will not be demolished, but nothing
will be allowed to be built on this same house.”
Source: Anonymous, Pièces originales et procédures du procès, fait à
Robert-François Damiens (Paris: Pierre Guillaume Simon, 1757)
Techniques and Tacitcs of Power
Foucault wanted to upset the way of understanding power
that sees it as
a) residing principally in the state, and
b) being the equivalent of repression.
He argues that:
•
•
•
•
Power doesn’t start from one central point.
It is experienced in a multiplicity of relations.
Power relations are specific, reversible.
Power is always and everywhere present in human
interactions.
Discipline
• The idea of discipline indicates the existence of
a whole complex of techniques of power that do
not rely on force and coercion.
• From the 19th century onwards, discipline
becomes the distinctive form of modern power.
New ways of controlling and training people –
‘technologies of the body’.
• The disciplines operate through the institutions
of incarceration, prisons, asylums, factories and
schools.
General Characteristics of
Disciplinary Power
1. Hierarchical observation
2. Normalising judgements
3. Micro-penalties and rewards
Self-discipline Practices –
Examples in Everyday Life (1)
Weitz, Rose, 2001. Women and Their Hair: Seeking
Power through Resistance and Accommodation.
Gender and Society, 15, 5, 667-686.
Cecelia
Some days I have good hair days, and some days I
have bad hair days. On good days I feel like, you
know, my hair does make me powerful. If my hair
looks good, I feel beautiful. And if I look beautiful,
and another man is attracted to me, then, (laughs) I
have got power over him.
Self-discipline Practices –
Examples in Everyday Life (2)
Johns, David and Jennifer, 2000. Surveillance, Subjectivism
and Technologies of Power: An Analysis of the Discursive
Practice of High Performance Sport, International Review for
the Sociology of Sport, 32, 2, 219-234.
Athletes learn to be intensely aware of the importance of the
body and adopt technologies that permit themselves to effect
‘operations’ on their own bodies and souls, thoughts,
conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in
order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom,
perfection, or immortality.’ Foucault (Technologies of the
Self).
Films
• Richard III 1995 (Richard Loncraine)
• The Road to Guantάnamo 2006 (Michael
Winterbottom)
Chapter 9
RACIALIZING
Introduction (1)
• Because there is no scientific foundation for using the
term ‘race’ as a biological description of human
populations, when sociologists need to use the term they
often put it in quotation marks.
• The nineteenth and early twentieth century was the
period of imperialist expansion which laid the foundation
for the development of many of today’s racial issues.
• But the early sociologists were not aware of this and did
not explicitly address the significance of ideas about race
in their work.
Introduction (2)
• Today the ‘problem of race’ and issues of
racialization are quite central to sociology.
• In a globalizing world, conflicts and patterns of
violence and disorder are increasingly defined in
racial terms.
• The vocabulary of race is an element of everyday
language, part of the stock of cultural capital we
draw on to organise our world, ascribe or claim
identity, and guide our interaction with others.
Globalization Processes (1)
The dimensions of the globalisation process
relevant to contemporary forms of racism lie in:
•
the disjunctions between the working of the
global economic system (which creates
economic interdependence through multiple
systems of exchange in production, trade
and finance) and
•
the political autonomy of the nation states
that make up the system.
Globalization Processes (2)
In the processes of globalization
•
•
Increased mobility brings previously
separate populations into close
contact in their everyday life and work
and increases competition for
resources.
Power and resources are not
distributed equally among core and
peripheral states. (Wallerstein)
Globalization Processes (3)
This results in
•
•
•
growth of distinct ethnic minorities
within modern democracies
re-emergence of claims for local
identity in both core and peripheral
states
new forms of racism which may be
masked as ‘cultural incompatibility’
Globalization Processes (4)
The United Nations defines an international system of
universal standards which contributes to the process of
political integration.
•
•
•
•
1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights
International and regional organizations e.g.
UNESCO, ILO, the Council of Europe, NAFTA, the
International Court of Justice
1965 Covenant on the Elimination of all Forms of
Racial Discrimination
European Union 1999 Amsterdam Treaty –
members required to take appropriate action to
counter discrimination based on sex, racial or
ethnic origin.
Race, Ethnicity and Nationalism
• These are interconnected terms
• Each of these ideas can be the basis for
social action
• Processes of racialisation – discrimination
on the basis of supposed biological
distinctiveness and the institutionalisation
of economic, legal and political
arrangements based on these
assumptions draw on and employ all three
concepts.
Nationalism and Nationality
• Nationalism and nationality are today associated with the
‘nation state’.
• All nation states have ‘ethnic minorities’.
• Nationality is always socially constructed.
• Not all ‘nationalities’ have achieved a nation state.
• Nationalism is an inclusive concept (cf ‘race’ which is an
excluding concept).
• Nation states control political power and the legitimate means
of force within a defined territory.
• National movements generally aim for some form of political
independence.
• National identity is the identity acquired by membership of the
political community.
• National identity is the basis for the acquisition of citizenship
that allows full participation in society.
‘Race’ and ‘Ethnicity’
• The definitions and everyday use of the terms ‘race’ and
‘ethnicity’ are complex and varied.
• The term ‘race’ has an ascriptive quality and is mostly used to
describe a population rather than a social group.
• The term ethnic emerged in the 1960s (Glazer and Moynihan)
and was used to distinguish between white populations within
a multi ethnic state, in terms of their countries of origin.
• In contemporary multi-ethnic states, a sense of common
origin can provide a basis for identification and mobilisation
for social, communal or political action.
• Ethnic minorities may embrace their ethnic identity and group
membership.
• The term racism now describes unacceptable behaviour
toward ‘ethnic’ groups as well as racially identified
populations.
• Discrimination on the basis of cultural (ethnic) difference has
been described as ‘new racism’. (Miles)
Sociological Analysis of Race
• Race, ethnicity and nationality make up a set of contested
concepts.
• A variety of theoretical approaches can be identified.
• Concern with race developed in Britain in the 1960s in response
to the increasing presence of migrant ethnic groups from the
colonies and recognition of changes taking place within the
society.
• American sociologists initially examined issues of segregation,
immigration and perceptions and awareness. In the 1960s they
began to focus on the dynamics of ethnic groups.
• Marxist tradition. ‘Race’ as ideology and seen in historical and
economic context (see the work of Robert Miles).
• Miles – focus on racialisation – the social construction of race as
a process located within the capitalist mode of production.
• Weber on status groups (see John Rex and Michael Banton).
• Gramsci, theory of hegemony. Stuart Hall and the Birmingham
Centre. Cultural studies approach. Racism as ideology.
Racialisation and Identity
• Contemporary identity is de-centred and fragmented.
• Race and ethnicity provide the starting point for the
narrative construction of identity through negotiation with
others.
• In a mass society where ‘strangers’ are brought into close
proximity, presumed common origins become a source of
instant recognition and identification.
• Local ethnicities can threaten national identity.
• Identities are never completed; they are always in the
process of becoming through negotiation and interaction
with the other.
• There is a contemporary explosion of forms of cultural
expression from migrant cultures in art, literature, film,
mass media and theatre which explore the lived experience
of migrants in interaction with the culture of the others.
Conclusion
Race, ethnicity and nationality are social
(and cultural) constructs which provide the
basis for the systems of symbolic
representations we draw on in constructing
the social groups we inhabit and in
ordering relationships with other groups.
Chapter 10
GENDERING
Gender
The concept of gender is complex and
contested.
Gender, like sexuality, must be seen as
something that is produced socially, in
complex ways and in struggles between
those who have power to define and
regulate, and those who resist.
Why Study Gender?
• Because it’s inevitably and unavoidably always with us.
• Because commonsense taken for granted notions like
→ ‘men’and women are different’
→ ‘everybody knows what ‘a man’ is
and what ‘a woman’ is
→ ‘gender differences are natural’
are all too simple to be sociologically accurate or
true.
• Because it is complex and therefore interesting.
Gender in Sociology –
Individual Level
Individuals act toward reality on the basis
of the meanings they give to it and these
meanings are constantly modified in social
interaction.
The meanings of terms like 'male' and
‘female’ must be found in the meanings
persons bring to this category of
experience.
Gender in Sociology –
Social Level
Gender is a significant element in the way social arrangements
and the social order work.
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
government and laws
family structures and arrangements
paid and unpaid work
education
medicine
religion
literature
media and popular culture
In each of these areas there are gendered activities and
expectations in the way we live.
Gender as a Difference (1)
When people say that men and women are ‘different’ they
usually mean an innate, inherent, biological difference.
→ The biological is also social.
Most cultures allow for only two socially sanctioned sexes.
But the physiology of sexing works along a continuum.
→ The social may also have biological aspects.
Gender roles and identities are seen as being produced
through culture.
Gender as a Difference (2)
Gender socialization teaches us the behaviours
considered in our time and culture to be appropriate
for whether we are male or female.
But there is neurophysiology evidence of
physiological differences in men’s and women’s
brains.
Making a Distinction –
“Sex” and “Gender”
Feminist theorizing made a strong distinction between
• sex – biological
and
• gender – social.
It was a politically useful distinction to make their point
about inequality but doesn’t really cope with the way
biological and social aspects are interwoven in gender
identity.
Gender as ‘doing’
Can also be described as ‘performing’ gender.
Erving Goffman suggests that particular ways of being
‘feminine’ or ‘masculine’ are made available to us by our
cultures. We adopt, modify, or resist these as we ‘do’ our
gender.
Harold Garfinkel says there are codes appropriate to
masculine and feminine. Appearance, activities (including
jobs), talk, dress, attitudes, emotions.
Don West and Candace Zimmerman say that gender can be
seen as a routine, methodical and recurring accomplishment,
guided by social expectations and notions that particular
ways of doing gender are the most natural.
Doing Masculinity
R.W. Connell, Masculinities (1995).
• There are prevailing forms of masculinity in each
society.
• Some men are better positioned than others to
practice the dominant form of masculinity in that
society.
• This most powerful masculinity is described as
‘hegemonic masculinity’.
• It has been challenged by feminism and by other
less valued forms of masculinity.
Defending Hegemonic Masculinity
‘The Gun Lobby’
• Asserts a man’s right to defend himself and his
family and other possessions.
• Strategy is based in a belief and assumption that
dominant masculinity is a universal and natural
norm.
• Sees challenges to dominant masculinity as
evidence of feminism, communist plots, an
invisible enemy.
• Defence may be phrased as a moral obligation
and supported by fundamentalist Christian
beliefs.
Group
Radical
Environmental
Movement
Men in Gay and
Bisexual Networks
Unemployed Young
Working Class Men
Hegemonic
Masculinity
Strategy
Reject
Frame new ways of working together.
Anti-sexist politics. Reverse of
masculinity therapy. Hard to sustain
without ‘gender vertigo’.
Reject
Homosexual masculinity. Gay
organizations as pressure groups for
policy and law changes. Service
providers of care, research, education.
Accept
Construct a parallel set of goals that are
attainable. Being a hard drinker, knowing
drug user. Keeping women under control
by violence if necessary. Raising
children with their own competencies.
Doing Femininity
Mansfield, Louise and Joseph Maguire 1999 “Active Women,
Power Relations and Gendered Identities: Embodied
Experiences of Aerobics” in Practising Identities: Power and
Resistance ed. Sasha Roseneil and Julie Seymour,
Macmillan, London.
Elaine (explaining how she feels about exercise and her body):
I became so obsessed with the fact that I wanted to be thin
and so I didn’t hardly eat anything … and I exercised a lot
and I just thought that if I became thin everything would be a
lot better…. [I wanted to] show that I could model clothes
just like people thought was ideal.
Films
• Water 2005 (Deepa Mehta)
• Offside 2006 (Jafar Panahi)