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Consumers play an integral role in societal divisions of labour. Rather than simply consume, they frequently perform labour. Incorporating consumers into the division of labour poses a challenge to this foundational and enduring concept, given its traditional focus on the technical division of tasks/skills within a labour process. Yet, insofar as completion of a circuit of production, distribution, exchange and consumption is predicated on consumers undertaking work in order to/after they consume, analysis of the division of labour would be incomplete without their inclusion. This paper uses the case of household recycling to demonstrate the importance of 'consumption work' for the organization of the waste management industry in England. By sorting their waste, consumers initiate a new economic process, providing feedstock (such as metals, plastics and paper) which in turn creates jobs/profits within the recycling, processing and manufacturing industries. Consumers also reconfigure public and private sector responsibilities when they sort their recyclable materials from general household waste, revealing the interdependency of consumption work with labour conducted under different socio-economic relations and across differing socio-economic domains. This paper makes the case for a renewed conception of division of labour to account for transformations and interconnections between work of different forms within contemporary society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Memory is an enormously important resource for the social sciences. This paper takes the subject of maternal memory to examine a corpus of work in the sociology of childbirth concerned with how women remember the experience of childbirth. It suggests that the sociology of memory has been more concerned with collective than individual experiences, and that women's memories of childbirth have generally been treated as a special case, rather than as a route to enhanced understandings of how memory works in relation to the all-important topics of time, identity and social change. Drawing on data from a 37-year follow-up to a study of childbirth conducted in the 1970s, it argues that maternal memory shares key characteristics with other kinds of memory, but can be significant in allowing women to reposition themselves as active social selves in a process that is remembered as not allowing much agency or autonomy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The night-time economy is often described as repelling consumers fearful of the 'undesirable Others' imagined dominant within such time-spaces. In this paper we explore this by describing attitudes towards, and reactions to, one particularly contentious site: the 'lap dance' club. Often targeted by campaigners in England and Wales as a source of criminality and anti-sociality, in this paperwe shift the focus from fear to disgust, and argue that Sexual Entertainment Venues (SEVs) are opposed on the basis of moral judgments that reflect distinctions of both class and gender. Drawing on documentary analysis, survey results and interview data collected during guided walks, we detail the concerns voiced by those anxious about the presence of lap dance or striptease clubs in their town or city, particularly the notion that they 'lower the tone' of particular streets or neighbourhoods. Our conclusion is that the opposition expressed to lap dance clubs is part of an attempt to police the boundaries of respectable masculinities and femininities, marginalizing the producers and consumers of sexual entertainment through 'speech acts' which identify such entertainment as unruly, vulgar and uncivilized. These findings are considered in the light of ongoing debates concerning the relations of morality, respectability and disgust. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Who gets to be 'sporty' and active in public is an enduring topic of socio-political debate. Disparities in participation continue from limited access, support and funding to ill-fitting equipment and clothing. This article focuses on the latter. Women have long been disproportionally restricted and harassed in public space not only in relation to how, where and when they move but also what they wear. I approach this issue via a unique data source – global clothing inventions for sport and athletic activities (1890–1940). Analysing convertible, multiple and hidden clothing patents, by and for women, reveals how inventors tackled ongoing socio-political restrictions to women's freedom of movement from the ground up and, often secretly, from the inside out. I suggest these data might be read as acts of resistance, enabling wearers to move and inhabit spaces in new ways, engage in a wider range of activities and make claims to equal public participation and mobility rights. These lesser-known clothing inventions invite us below the surface of conventional sporting histories, expand ideas around the creative possibilities of sport and activewear, and spark imaginaries of what other kinds of inclusive and inventive athletic identities might be possible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the tensions between civility and sectarianism in contemporary Belfast. Drawing on interviews with mothers engaged in raising young children in the largely working-class and divided inner city, the paper offers a situated account of the dynamics of social reproduction and change. This is pursued through an analysis of the interplay between expectations of civility and sectarianism in three situations: walking, shopping and playing. The tensions and dilemmas of maternal action as the divided inner city is navigated indicate the gendered character of civility, an important emerging norm facilitating social change in the post-conflict era. The situation of motherhood itself, both at the centre of ethno-national reproduction and at the interface of public and private life, is not insignificant in routinely drawing mothers into the everyday dynamics of post-conflict continuity and change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is concerned with the ways in which women are sold cosmetic surgery, and how they 'make sense of' their own participation in this market. It draws on ongoing ethnographic research to explore how a group of young women who have paid for breast augmentation surgery narrate their decision to undergo surgery, the choices they make as consumers of cosmetic surgery, and their experience of having surgery. These narratives are compared with the ways in which breast augmentation surgery is sold to them by the companies and medical professionals involved in the rapidly expanding market for breast augmentation surgery. The paper shows how this particular group of young white working-class women shift between imagining the breast augmentation operation as a simple beauty treatment and recognizing it as medical surgery, and explores how this shapes their perceptions of the risks and benefits of buying new breasts. It also shows how those who market such procedures manage and manipulate perceptions of the process of breast augmentation surgery and the risks that attend on it in an effort to encourage this form of consumption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that the French Revolution constituted the basic metaphor through which Pierre Bourdieu perceived and analyzed gender hierarchies; that the class structure of the ancien régime and the mechanisms of its legitimation were the major metaphors he used through his scathing critiques on the order of the sexes; and that the ideals of liberté, égalité and fraternité were always his reformatory aims for a just, gender-neutral society. The paper shows how this preoccupation with the Revolution of 1789 structured Bourdieu's analysis of gender relations and sexual identities in contemporary society. It exposes the ways in which he identified men with the nobility and women with the third estate; it presents his analyses of the role that traditional ideologies and state bureaucracies play in legitimating this arbitrary order of masculine domination; and it analyzes his proposals for a sexual revolution while exposing the counter-revolutionary forces that persistently negate attempts to reform gender hierarchies. Fundamentally, this new reading of Bourdieu's exegeses on gender suggests that he was working with a ready-made interpretive scheme, a model of society that he was inclined to see as always reproducing itself: the ancien régime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Emerging studies on private security work in Britain's night-time economy explore important sociological themes such as masculinities and violence. Contributing rich ethnography to this literature, and in furthering an embodied sociology, this paper describes the gendered construction of competency among 'bouncers' or door supervisors within the context of their potentially violent work. Centrally, it explores the door supervisors' variable bodily capital (comprising body build and acquired techniques of the body) alongside normative limits to their violence. Here physicality is central to the practicalities of doorwork, risk management and the embodiment of dominant and subordinate masculinities. Within doorwork culture, embodied typifications such as 'hard men', 'shop boys' and others (eg, 'bullies' and 'nutters') are related to assessments of possible violence against doorstaff, the delineation of (flexible) boundaries for their own (in)appropriate violence against 'problematic' customers and the construction of competent identity. Besides contributing empirical data to the literature this paper underscores the integrative potential of embodiment for social scientists and urges policy makers to appreciate the degree to which (potential) violence is embodied in the night-time economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While many accounts of gendered embodiment focus on transformation, this article examines how normative gendered identifications are reinforced among middle-class young people playing classical music. Drawing on an ethnographic study of young people in youth orchestras and a youth choir in the south of England, it examines how the authority of the male conductor is constructed and experienced. It explores the construction of the charisma on which this gendered authority is based, through embodied craft, sexualization and humour, showing how conductors cultivated this mode of authority, which relied on the embodied intimacy of classical musical practice. As a consequence of these gendered power dynamics, young women talked about their conductors differently from the young men. Despite the discomfort or resistance that some of the young women voiced in private, they approached rehearsals with a willing trust which gave the public appearance of their consent to his authority. Against the ways in which participants emphasized agency and choice in interviews, observations of rehearsals revealed young people's conformity to this gendered authority. This paper therefore contributes to theorizing gender among the middle classes by demonstrating how the affective power of the conductor in youth classical music ensembles produces conformity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sociological and criminological views of domestic and gender-based violence generally either dismiss it as not worthy of consideration, or focus on specific groups of offenders and victims (male youth gangs, partner violence victims). In this paper, we take a holistic approach to violence, extending the definition from that commonly in use to encompass domestic violence and sexual violence. We operationalize that definition by using data from the latest sweep of the Crime Survey for England and Wales. By so doing, we identify that violence is currently under-measured and ubiquitous; that it is gendered, and that other forms of violence (family violence, acquaintance violence against women) are equally of concern. We argue that violence studies are an important form of activity for sociologists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In debates on social change and personal life, modernity has generally been conceptualized in opposition to tradition, though some have pointed to the persistence of traditional values and practices within modern family relations. In this paper we seek to extend these debates beyond their largely Eurocentric context. Drawing on a comparative qualitative study of women and social change in Britain and Hong Kong, we argue for an understanding of the traditional and the modern that takes account of the ways in which tradition is reshaped in the context of modernity. The accounts of young adult women and their mothers in Hong Kong and Britain reveal varied interpretations of family obligations and practices in relation to normative ideals of family life in each context. We consider how configurations of family life deemed 'modern' are inflected by the differing traditions and histories of Hong Kong and British society and argue that these differences are not only cultural, but also attributable to the material conditions under which family relationships are forged and negotiated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper focuses on the potential of quantitative research methods for sociologists who research the gender division of unpaid domestic work. To begin, it reflects on the emergence of the sociological interest in unpaid domestic work and identifies an early core concern with making invisible work visible. It is argued that quantitative research methods provide us with the most valuable opportunities for 'recognising' unpaid domestic work since they facilitate larger scale representative projects. However the data in most of the large scale surveys are scant, and fail to reflect developments in the conceptualisation of unpaid domestic work. Four areas of concern to contemporary sociology are identified: domestic work practices, relationships, negotiations and meanings. Given the complex questions that these four sub-topics raise, the paper proposes a range of sub-areas as a focus for ongoing sociological research into unpaid domestic work. It is concluded that, despite the methodological challenges presented, detailed indicators of the multiple dimensions of unpaid domestic work need to be agreed so that valid information can be collected in large scale surveys as routinely as it is on paid work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

My paper is an analysis of contemporary Czech expert discourses on love and coupledom, framed within ongoing feminist discussions of sociological theory's emphasis on the individualization, reflexivity and detraditionalization of gender. Using Bourdieu's notion of symbolic violence, I argue for understanding therapeutic discourses as perlocutionary speech acts that authoritatively enact gendered norms and heteronormative assumptions. This performative approach both challenges heightened reflexivity theory by pointing to its flawed voluntarism, and also allows for grasping transformation through fissures between a perlocutionary act and its reception. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on informants' accounts of gifts displayed on their living room mantelpieces drawn from a recent study exploring domestic display in Cardiff. The mantelpiece is an ideal space for looking at a particular category of salient objects: gifts on show in the home. An interpretation of narrative accounts is located within existing theoretical and empirical studies of gift exchange to reconsider the complex enmeshment of this traditional relation in everyday practices. An equivalence between the mantelpiece and the ‘gifts’ it presents in the home as taken-for-granted, inherited practices and materials leads to a final discussion focusing on the apparently democratised yet still gendered character of everyday gift practices. In conclusion, a consideration of the gendering of the gift questions whether this traditional, problematic method of accounting for and maintaining relations is desirable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Little research has examined constructions of gender among young British-Chinese. This paper seeks to further understanding in this area, particularly in relation to notions of ‘laddism’ currently deployed in educational policy discourse around gender and achievement. As a group British-Chinese boys tend to very high achievement in the British Education system. The notion of ‘laddish behaviour’ as an explanation for boys’ apparent underachievement in comparison to girls at GCSE level was discussed with British-Chinese pupils. An overwhelming majority of British-Chinese pupils supported this explanation, and a majority of these pupils applied notions of ‘laddish behaviour’ to British-Chinese boys, to some extent contesting stereotypes of the Chinese as uniformly ‘good pupils’. However, the discourses of ‘the good Chinese pupil’ and ‘Chinese value of education’ were frequently drawn on by pupil respondents, with the result that the pupils often presented British-Chinese manifestations of ‘laddism’ as mild versions in comparison with pernicious ‘others’. The paper discusses different presentations of laddism among some of the male respondents. It concludes by analysing the impact of ‘raced’ and gendered discourses on British-Chinese constructions of masculinity. British-Chinese boys may be able to adopt versions of masculinity which do not impede their learning, but this tended to result in their masculinity being problematised in teacher discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is concerned with the identities of disabled South Asian women within Britain. It presents empirical evidence concerning how disability, gender and ethnicity are negotiated simultaneously for young disabled Muslim and Sikh women. How these identities are negotiated is analysed in the realms of family, religion and marriage drawing on qualitative interviews with the young women, their parents and siblings. The paper argues against ideas of singular identity or the hierarchisation of identities or oppressions. The paper contributes to contemporary debates about how young South Asian women are constructing new forms of identity in Britain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current interest in difference has arisen in part because of its importance in recent recognition claims, and in part because of a belief that as a concept it can illuminate social diversity. Debates here have stressed the importance of the symbolic in the construction of social relations and social diversity, and have highlighted the relational underpinnings of diversity. In this paper we seek to take forward aspects of such an analysis by examining some issues in the shaping of difference and inequalities in the domains of gender, class and ‘race’. It is our argument that we can gain insights in these domains by better describing and theorising the mutuality of value and material social relations. The paper argues that issues of identity and difference need to be more firmly located within relational accounts of social practice, and in the nature of claims (to recognition and resources) which emerge out of different social locations. By exploring issues of difference in debates on class, gender and ‘race’, we argue that relational accounts must be placed within a perspective that also emphasises the content and patterned nature of (highly differentiated) social relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract This paper argues for the need to revisit classical sociological texts with a view to excavating the masculinity that inheres in these texts and saturates the concept of the social. Primarily through an examination of Durkheim and Simmel, it explores the strategies whereby masculine individuals could be released from corporeality and granted the sort of embodiment that allowed them to transcend their particularity and become social agents. It is argued that male embodiment is deeply sedimented in the sociological imaginary as the very condition of social action and the constituent of social agency. Thinking through the conceptual lenses of corporeality, embodiment and agency exposes some of the ways in which the analytical scaffolding of ‘the social’ rests on a deeply gendered ontological foundation. While the sociological tradition may indeed have continued salience for contemporary sociologies of the body, a relatively unreflexive recuperation of these texts is problematic. This paper challenges those who seek to rehabilitate the classics in the service of an embodied sociology to produce a much fuller accounting of the truncated corporeal terrain upon which classical sociology developed, and one which explicitly recognizes its gender. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract This paper adopts a feminist poststructuralist approach to demonstrate the ambiguities and complexities which exist in the relationship between work and subject. Recent studies in organizational sociology have argued that the discourses of work, and changing working cultures, have had a powerful effect on the production of subjectivities. New forms of working behaviour have been constructed as desirable, which often draw on personal qualities such as gender. This paper draws on research conducted with doctors and nurses in the British National Health Service to reveal the ambiguities which exist in the ways in which individuals position themselves in relation to these discourses. The discourses of work and organization are constantly mediated through, and destabilised by, the intertextuality that exists with competing discourses such as those of professionalism, gender, home and performance. Although organizational discourses are clearly powerful in the construction and performance of subjectivities, the interplay between discourses means that these are constantly destabilised and undermined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper asks whether place is significant in understanding the gendering of senior management and how it might be integrated into existing theories. Drawing on interviews and focus group discussions with women and men in senior management in Wales, it compares the gendering of senior management in Wales with other regions of the UK. The situation in Wales is explained by the historical legacy of a peripheral economy dependent on male-dominated heavy industries and the gender relations and stereotypes associated with this. There is a relative lack of senior managerial positions, for both women and men, and women are under-represented in middle management compared with women elsewhere. There is evidence that paternalistic masculinites are widespread in managerial cultures and that although women may find this form of masculinity easier to deal with than a more aggressively 'macho' masculinity, it casts them in a subordinate role at work. Cultural stereotypes such as the 'Welsh mam' operate in contradictory ways, in some instances holding women back and in others furthering their careers, and there is evidence that women are challenging existing gender stereotypes. A lack of geographical mobility and associated attachment to place affects progress into senior management and creates stability at middle-management level. Place needs to be taken into account in explaining the gendering of senior management because of the spatial distribution of production and the cultural patterns and stereotypes associated with different economic structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I examine the assumptions underlying the idea of women as vulnerable and at risk, and how this understanding contributes to shaping practices of climate change adaptation. The article is based on ethnographic fieldwork in the expert community in Dhaka and in a climate change adaptation field site in coastal Bangladesh. Following Ananya Roy's work, I understand coastal Bangladesh to be a riskscape, a geographical space suffused with imaginations of anticipated risks that must be managed through disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation. Roy further argues that riskscapes create new subjects of risk, and that such subjects are highly gendered because development has tended to focus on poor women 'in very specific ways'. In this article, I build on Roy's insights to explore how women are constructed as 'subjects of risk' in climate change adaptation. I also show how climate change adaptation, in becoming the new buzzword for development, continues to focus on poor women in very specific ways, which are applied to fit with the climate change 'metacode'. While well-intended, the understanding of women as subjects of risk is imbued with ambivalence, because it may contribute to supporting structures that make women vulnerable by normalizing relations of risk. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I contend that gender is of crucial importance, not only in assigning people to 'places' in the division of labour, but also in the very definition of occupations, and thereby in shaping the division of labour as a whole. The social relations of gender[2] are central to the labour process. As such, gender must be included as a central feature of any analysis of social stratification, whether it is concerned with the social characteristics of people in particular occupations or whether it seeks to analyse the social relations in which they engage. The present discussion will be confined to the realm of paid work, although (as I have argued elsewhere) the scope of stratification studies must eventually be broadened to include unpaid work also, before the sexual division of labour and the social relations of gender can be given due importance.[3]. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is concerned with how the process of sex-rle socialisation operates in pre-schools (kindergartens) and primary schools with respect to the teachers' perceptions of the creativity of their pupils. Creativity may be seen here as the child's ability to provide new or original products of ideas which are valued by the teacher as imaginative and worthwhile in the particular context. The material is taken from a wider study by the author into the 'Sociology of Creativity', based upon empirical data gathered in classes of children aged four (pre-schools) or seven to eleven (primary schools). Previous studies have shown that sex rle identification and creative performance may be linked to the extent that there is some alteration, reversal or rejection of traditional sex-rle norms by creative persons.[1] Berlotti has also drawn attention to the effect of early sex-rle socialisation on females and has stated that:. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the relationship between gender, sexuality and citizenship embedded in models of citizenship in the Global South, specifically in South Asia, and the meanings associated with having - or not having - citizenship. It does this through an examination of women's access to citizenship in Nepal in the context of the construction of the emergent nation state in the 'new' Nepal 'post-conflict'. Our analysis explores gendered and sexualized constructions of citizenship in this context through a specific focus on women who have experienced trafficking, and are beginning to organize around rights to sustainable livelihoods and actively lobby for changes in citizenship rules which discriminate against women. Building from this, in the final section we consider important implications of this analysis of post-trafficking experiences for debates about gender, sexuality and citizenship more broadly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Australia's Intergenerational Reports (2010, 2015) make a case for restraining public expenditure on an ageing population given the sizeable post-WWII baby boom cohort, increasing longevity, and uncertain economic prospects for younger generations. There also is concern for major disparities within older and younger generations resulting from cumulative advantages or disadvantages over the life course. Drawing on national survey data from the Attitudes to Ageing in Australia study, this article investigates perceptions of inequity between age cohorts at two time points (2009–10, 2015–17) focusing on variations by age and gender around lifelong opportunities for baby boomers compared to other groups, share of government benefits, and support for increasing pension age eligibility. The findings indicate a shift in attitudes between 2009–10 and 2015–17 with more in the younger cohorts in 2015–17 reporting better lifelong opportunities for baby boomers; and baby boomers receiving a fair share/more than a fair share of government benefits. With pension age eligibility, there is a small but significant shift in attitudes supporting the increase and a corresponding drop in those opposing it, however opposition is highly gendered with more women in each of the age cohorts opposing it at both time points. While there is a perceptible shift in younger cohorts' attitudes towards baby boomers' perceived advantages, overall attitudes are not totally supportive of government arguments for expenditure restraint; although a more overt public discourse on intergenerational inequity is emerging as the declining life prospects of younger cohorts are juxtaposed with tax-advantaged housing and retirement wealth of many older age Australians. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent debates about flows of help within the family have indicated considerable diversity according to the type of help (money, services), and ages and gender of those involved, and have shown that values are only a partial guide to the scale of such flows. This paper focuses on a particular occasion for help, young people's housing, and a particular region, South-East England, where one would expect family financial help to be high given the capacity to help of older generations (due to higher average incomes and wealth) and the affordability problems faced by young people. It is shown that contrary to hypothesis only 12% of a sample of young people had received financial help for housing purposes since they had left home, less than found in previous studies with different samples. The amounts involved were less than young people believed their parents could afford. The role of inheritance was also found to be minor. The results from the different studies are explained as due to changes in the housing market, changing values regarding financial help and differences among the samples. Intensive re-interviews with three households from very different back- grounds are used to show the different ways in which family help operates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a variety of discourses and empirical studies it has been argued that compared with women, men show more reluctance to express intimate emotion in heterosexual couple relationships. Our paper attempts to theorise this gender asymmetry in intimate emotional behaviour as a sort of `emotional power', within the wider context of continuing gender inequalities of resources and power in society. To the extent that men's role as breadwinner becomes their central life interest (they become `workaholics'), women are left with emotional responsibility for the private sphere, including the performance of the `emotion work' necessary to maintain the couple relationship itself. Increasingly women's dissatisfaction in relationships (which men dismiss as unjustified `whingeing') stems mainly from this unequal division. Yet many women still collude with male power by living the family `myth' and `playing the couple game': they perform emotion work on themselves to convince themselves that they are `ever so happy really', thereby helping to reproduce their own false consciousness. This suggests that gender asymmetry in relation to intimacy and emotion work may be the last and most obstinate manifestation and frontier of gender inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contrasts patterns of female labor market participation in Britain, Germany and France and develops a theoretical approach which can encompass both universal features of gender divisions in the labor market and nationally specific ones. This paper has two objectives: to contrast patterns of female labor market participation in three West European societies and to develop a theoretical approach which can encompass both universal features of gender divisions in the labor market and nationally specific ones. Empirically, the focus is on the different levels and forms of labor force participation over the female life cycle, particularly on any resultant employment casualization. Consideration is also given to patterns of horizontal and vertical segregation and to pay. The differences between the three countries are explained by positing the existence of nationally specific gender profiles with a differential impact on labor market patterning along gender lines. These profiles are constructed by gender regimes at the level of the state which, in turn, are the result of political struggles and compromises of a variety of political actors. The article utilizes European statistical data and secondary sources.

In this article I argue that critical phenomenology, informed by critical race and intersectional scholarship, offers a useful lens through which to consider suicide and self-harm among men. To illustrate this, I draw on a narrative informed analysis of the accounts of 10 men who had experienced self-harm, read through Sara Ahmed's queer phenomenology. Two themes are emphasised: gendered, raced, classed bodies that are (unexpectedly) stopped; and bodies that, despite being stopped, still 'do' – enacting violence and control against self and other. Critical phenomenology can support much needed examination of the complex ways in which socioeconomic class, race, gender and age structure experiences of distress among different social groups. This approach enables a simultaneous examination of the way that privilege and oppression may shape both the experience of distress, and the way it is responded to – including through violence against the self, and against others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The trend towards desegregated women's and men's toilets, including installing Gender Neutral Toilets (GNTs), and the implications of revisions to the Gender Recognition Act for women-only spaces, have brought into focus the pre-existing lack of female toilet provision in the UK. Looking at the problem from a town planning perspective, I argue that austerity-driven cuts are coming together with GNT provision to reshape the public toilet landscape in ways that continue to be detrimental to women. Typically women are only provided with half as many facilities as men, resulting in queues for the Ladies, and GNT provision based on relabelling rather than redesigned or additional provision can, in fact, increase competition for the cubicles in the Ladies. The historical, legislative and cultural reasons for this inequality are explored, along with the different types of public toilet and the different requirements of male and female users. The article draws on previous research project findings, many of which foreshadow the problems currently coming to the fore as a result of toilet desegregation. In conclusion, recommendations are made as to how to deal with the conundrum of providing adequate facilities for all women and men, whilst providing all sorts of individuals with choice and privacy to create inclusive, accessible cities for all. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the double burden of 'menstrual etiquette' and the implications for women's inclusion in public spaces in Scotland today. Beginning from Laws' work on 'menstrual etiquette', we explore how menstrual etiquette is characterised primarily by the burden of rendering menstruation invisible, both discursively and practically. However, women not only work to ensure that others remain unaware that they are menstruating; they depend on technologies, such as menstrual product dispensers and bins, to facilitate this process of rendering menstruation invisible. When these technologies are absent or poorly maintained, women experience a double burden: not only must they maintain the social invisibility of menstruation but do so without social or infrastructural support or drawing attention to this absence (for fear of breaching the discursive silence demanded of menstrual etiquette). We locate poor maintenance of facilities within the very same 'civilising process' that has pushed women's bodily management to the furthest reaches of the private sphere. Socially invisible, these infrastructural supports are granted low status and poorly maintained. The pressure to maintain conceptual silence around menstruation limits women's capacity to contest this neglect and, in turn, perpetuates their exclusion from public space. This article, then, exposes the nature and the compounding temporal and affective burden of menstrual etiquette and advocates for breaking discursive silences to facilitate much needed social change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Norbert Elias and John Scotson's analysis of the interconnection between positive and negative community identities in The Established and the Outsiders is well-known. Elias's subsequent writing about community offers a more rounded analysis, going beyond established/outsider configurations by exploring community's gendered character and the forces involved in the 'we–I balance' that counteract the pervasive process of individualization. Elias's use of personal pronouns to reveal how community identity ('we') relates not only to outsiders ('they') but also to an individual member ('I') of communities is central to his extended theory of community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines a group of intellectual workers who occupy a peripheral but not powerless position in the global economy of knowledge. How do they handle relations with the global metropole, especially in new fields of research where established hierarchies are in question? Three new domains of knowledge - climate change, HIV/AIDS and gender studies - are studied through interviews with 70 active researchers in Southern-tier countries Brazil, South Africa and Australia. A pattern of extraversion, involving active adoption of paradigms from the metropole, is widespread and institutionally supported. Major alternative knowledge formations have not emerged in these domains. However contestations of more specific kinds are frequent. Paradigms are adapted, criticism is offered, activism is engaged, capacities are developed and allegiances sometimes changed. The valorization of local knowledge, which goes beyond the abstractions of universalized paradigms, is particularly significant. Not stark subordination, but a complex collective negotiation characterizes the response of intellectual workers in the Southern tier. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Observable anxieties have been developing about the position of boys and young men in contemporary society in recent years. This is expressed as a crisis of masculinity, in which place is often implicitly implicated, but is rarely considered for its role in the shaping of young men's practices, trajectories and aspirations. Drawing on research conducted with young people who accessed a range of social care support services, this article argues that transition means different things for young men in different locales and that local definitions of masculinity are required to better understand young men's lives and the opportunities available to them. The authors argue that home life, street life, individual neighbourhoods, regions and nations all shaped the young men's identities and the practices they (and the staff working with them) drew on in order to create successful futures and 'safe' forms of masculinity. It is suggested that this place-based approach has the potential to re-shape the 'crisis' discourse surrounding masculinity and the anxieties associated with young men. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Critiques of cosmopolitanism theory argue that the concept is premised on implicit assumptions of a masculine global citizen, replete with privileged access to various mobile and symbolic forms of social advantage. In response, empirical accounts of cosmopolitanism have explored the impact of class, education, and ethnicity on cosmopolitan practices. Yet, little direct empirical attention is given to whether and how men and women might differently understand and frame cultural diversity. We argue that to the extent that cosmopolitanism is constituted by social practices, scripts and repertoires of discursive narrativization, it is likely to be navigated and applied through gender-ideologies. Applying the methodological concept of cognitive schema to a set of qualitative data, and focusing on expressions of hospitality towards others within local communities, we inductively assemble evidence to show that men and women have differently articulated cosmopolitan imaginations. In conclusion, we consider what our empirical attention to gender might mean for how we advance critical theories of cosmopolitanism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article critically explores sociological arguments for greater biosocial synthesis, centring contemporary developments in public policy to demonstrate how such a reframing of humanity tends to reinforce existing political orders and socially patterned normativities. The case for further amalgamation of the social and life sciences is examined to suggest that production of somatic markers of truth from relational encounters largely relies upon an anaemic and politically contained version of the social as acquired in early childhood. More specifically, the gendered, classed and culturally specific practice of parenting children has come to occupy a new significance in accounts of social brains and environmentally reactive genomes. This is highlighted through a discussion of 'early intervention' as a heavily biologized policy rationale framing opportunities for biosocial collaboration. It is argued that late capitalist objectives of personal investment and optimization are driving this assimilation of the social and life sciences, pursuing an agenda that traces and re-scores long-standing social divisions in the name of progress. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses how the gender-based violence of homelessness contributes to young women engaging in bodily alliances with men as a strategy for physical protection. The embedding of individualized and postfeminist discourses through the conditions of neoliberalism and the structural disadvantage of homelessness have meant that young women are required to adopt self-regulatory practices and take personal responsibility for their physical safety. Drawing on Bourdieu's social capital theory and its development by Skeggs and Shilling, and based on qualitative research undertaken with fifteen young women who had experienced homelessness in Australia, I suggest that feminine capital is mobilized through necessity by young homeless women through the formation and maintenance of intimate relationships with men to access a sense of safety in an environment that is hostile to the female body. However, as the narratives presented here demonstrate, the value and privilege ascribed to (certain) male bodies is only accessible vicariously to young women, it is inherently precarious, it can undermine access to other types of capital and these intimate relationships can also be a source of gender-based violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses the question of how gender inequalities are produced in the film industry. In the absence of industry or organizational interventions, these inequalities seem unmanageable. We present an exploration of the gendered working lives of below-the-line film workers in New Zealand, in the context of the western film industry. Repeatedly, women activists have pointed out that a perception of gender equity contradicts the statistics, which demonstrate traditional as well as 'new' forms of sexism. In this post-feminist context inequality is typically invisible and unspoken, and there is a thriving narrative of meritocracy based on talent and determination, where 'you're only as good as your last job'. Below-the-line 'crew' are distinguished from creatives in a hierarchy of creativity. In the New Zealand film industry, they are not unionized, and there are no policies addressing gender. From their perspective, their powerlessness in terms of employment rights is taken as a given, a price they pay for doing their dream job. In spite of beliefs about merit, talent and the 'good idea', women's 'good ideas' and their work capabilities across a range of roles are less likely to be recognized and rewarded than those of men. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using data from the British Household Panel Study ( BHPS) from 1995 to 2005 we examine the nature of the allocation of savings, investments and debts between heterosexual couple members, how these vary by individual and household characteristics, and how these patterns vary over a ten-year time horizon. We find savings are more commonly held in joint names than investments or debts and there is evidence of an increasing independence in financial arrangements between couple members throughout the period 1995 to 2005. Controlling for age and other factors, cohabitation reduces the likelihood of shared financial arrangements. Both partners' labour market income affects the likelihood of having any savings or investments for both men and women but as men's labour income increases, the likelihood of men having jointly held savings and investments with their female partner reduces. Psychological well-being is improved where individuals have any savings or investments either solely or jointly held with their partner. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An intriguing shift in the public interest of Roma, Gypsy and Traveller minorities has been the rise of the ' Gypsy' reality TV star in shows across Europe (' Gypsy' is the word most often used in popular media culture). The latest phenomenon to hit the UK has been the Channel 4 series Big Fat Gypsy Weddings (Firecracker Films, Channel 4, 2010-2013), a flamboyant production that has garnered both huge audience shares and fierce criticism, with commentators berating its narrow, sensationalist focus. Drawing on both specialized literature on Roma minorities and current sociological debates on reality TV formats, this article raises questions about how the politics of the 'demotic turn' of such formats (as noted by Turner in 2004) can lean towards the demonic through emphasizing such groups as spectacular, extraordinary and above all, negatively different. Furthermore, this article shows how the series not only reproduces old stereotypes of Gypsies and Travellers as different, ethnicized others but is also heavily embroiled in UK gender and class discourses. Whilst the series claims to be a unique insight into a marginalized community, this close analysis discusses the wider politics within which it is embedded and how such representations can both popularize and undermine marginalized or minority groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how activist identity is constructed in the Russian opposition youth movement Oborona. The research is based on fieldwork among youth activists in Moscow and St Petersburg. The author analyses how activist identity is classed and gendered, as well as its relations to the Russian civic field. The article suggests, first, that the activist identity is marked by an affiliation with the intelligentsia: activists have grown up in intelligentsia families and articulate their activities through the intelligentsia's 'markers', such as intelligence, discussion skills and education. Secondly, activists follow a dissidents' cultural model, by emphasizing the importance of non-conformism and traditional dissident values, and draw parallels between the contemporary government and the totalitarian Soviet state. Thirdly, this traditional intellectual dissident identity is associated with cosmopolitanism through the movement's international connections and appropriation of the forms of action of global social movements. Sometimes the activist practices and aspirations conflict with the group's ideals. Furthermore, the activist identity is gendered and embodied in the right activist 'look', which is defined by masculinity. Regardless of the movement's liberal ideals in regards to democracy, questions of gender and sexuality are not discussed, and activists do not question traditional understandings of gendered divisions of labour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on the vast literature concerned with the cultural aspects of gender, this article explores the ways in which individuals living in different national contexts value the ideal of a dual earner/dual carer couple at the expense of the male breadwinner model. Via a comparison of fifteen European countries included in the Family and Gender Roles module of the 2002 International Social Survey Programme (ISSP), three attitudinal patterns were identified: the unequal sharing that portrays a male breadwinner norm, the familistic unequal that also endorses a gender-segregated arrangement though with a greater wish for men's involvement in housework and childcare, and the dual earner/dual carer model, which, despite covering nearly 40 per cent of respondents, is very unequally distributed across countries. It is proposed that societal gender cultures are of major importance to an understanding of cross-national variations in attitudes and their relationship with the real forms of gender division of labour. The connection between couples' attitudes and practices is thus examined in order to assess the extent to which support for the dual earner/dual carer model encourages couples to engage in more equal sharing of paid and unpaid work. Findings reveal the importance of the normative dimension insofar as the impact of attitudes on practices seems to depend on the historical pathways of gender cultures and the ways in which they underpin welfare policies and female employment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reports on a study of mediatised public discourses on nationhood, citizenship, and gender in Britain, and analyses the ways in which these accounts may be utilised in the cultivation of particular kinds of social identities. We distinguish our approach at the outset from other lines of inquiry to report on a macro level exploration of an event in which these value discourses were operative, namely the national the press reaction to the former Home Secretary and Foreign Secretary Jack Straw's 2006 comments on the Muslim face-veil or niqab. The article traces and analyses the interactions and intersections of completing but overlapping accounts of nationhood, citizenship, and characterisations of the role of Muslim women. It identifies interdependent clusters of responses that illustrate the ways in which the niqab is a ‘contested signifier’ in contemporary social and political life, and the ways in which nationhood, citizenship, and gender feature prominently in its signification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a masculinist space, ‘the streets’ present a variety of dangers to homeless women, a fact that has received too little attention within the social science literature. This study utilizes data drawn from interviews with homeless women and service providers in Edinburgh, San Francisco, Vancouver, Montreal and Ottawa, to explore the complex survival strategies that homeless women develop to prevent criminal victimization. Through women's words, we see that gender is understood strategically as performance. Four gender performances are identified and discussed: the ‘femininity simulacrum’, the ‘masculinity simulacrum’, ‘genderlessness’ and ‘passing’. We discussed how each of these performances is employed in the pursuit of safety and security in frequently violent and chaotic social spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research suggests that women have more limited career opportunities than men. Using Swedish longitudinal data, covering the period between 1979 and 2000, more light is shed on the association between hierarchical levels and differences between men's and women's career opportunities in terms of occupational transitions. The analyses indicate that women face the greatest hindrance to advancement at lower hierarchical levels and that these disadvantages attenuate with higher hierarchical levels. These results contradict the common idea of a glass ceiling, ie that problems for women accrue with increasing hierarchical levels. The findings point to the need for focusing more on gender inequalities at low hierarchical positions although the glass ceiling hypothesis cannot be dismissed altogether. Moreover, the results do not support the view that the gender penalty in careers is larger in the private sector as compared to the public sector. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the concept of emotions through sociologist Pierre Bourdieu's notion of capitals, the most well-known of which is cultural capital. More specifically, the author presents a case study of maternal emotional engagement in children's education as a means to investigate the gendered nature of emotional capital and its relationship to social class.

The article discusses the need for understanding gender as a type of lived social relation in order to bridge the divide that exists between material feminists and cultural feminists. The ways in which the concept of agency can be used in order to connect the notion of identity to the more abstract concept of social structure are outlined. This is done through an examination of sociologists Judith Butler's and Pierre Bourdieu's theories on performative agency and Bourdieu's phenomenological notion of social space.

The article discusses the relationship between class analysis and feminist theory, with the author focused both on the ways in which class analysis informs feminist theory and how it has been used to critique feminist theory. The criticism of feminist theory based on the perceived centrality of family/household systems to class and gender constructs is first examined. The author then goes on to question the validity of social constructionists' sharp separation between the biological idea of "sex" and the sociocultural notion of "gender" when speaking categorically of women in order to question whether or not women represent their own type of social class. Particular focus is given to the aforementioned concepts' place in the social field theory of French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu.

The article examines the embodiment of class and gender in a subject through the conferring of social identity on it. The author utilizes French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu's understanding of the cultural and symbolic aspects of class divisions in order to investigate this idea of the imposition of social norms. More specifically, the connection between class distinction and gender are analyzed through the lens of Bourdieu's concept of the habitus, with particular focus given to the construction of feminine identity. The ways in which class and gender identity can inform political struggles are then discussed, with focus given to mothers' protests against housing for child sex abusers in the early 21st century and their depictions in the press.

The article discusses the social theory of French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, with particular focus given to his understanding of class, gender, and sexuality, as well as the implications of his thought for feminist theory. Bourdieu's definition of gender as sexual difference is explained, and the connection he draws between social identity and sexual identity is outlined. The author explains how Bourdieu's social theory of habitus has been utilized by feminists in order to incorporate class analysis into feminist theory.