“I will not hate myself because you cannot accept me”: Problematizing empowerment and gender-diverse selfies

ABSTRACT

While selfies of beautiful cisgender women are declaimed by mainstream media as narcissistic and facile, some body-positive feminists and queer theorists argue that selfies can be empowering. They claim self-representation by traditionally stigmatized people can challenge normative presentations of beauty and gender. This article problematizes “empowerment” as a definitive and/or productive frame and argues instead for observation and analysis of “privilege” in situated practice. In this article I combine analysis of a collection of online cultural artifacts (including nonbinary selfies on Tumblr) and interviews with a small group of trans* social media storytellers to explore theoretical tensions between gender fluidity and identity fragmentation across multiple social media sites and practices. Gender-diverse digital self-representation encompasses both “consistent” androgyny, nonbinary, agender, and so on, and “emergent” presentations-in-flux. I assert that the ongoing iteration of self across social media—implied by self (re)presentation—can have simultaneous and contradictory political significance. I conclude that networked interpersonal complications frame understandings of empowerment, as perhaps they always have done.     

Problematizing the popular: the dynamics of Pinoy pop(ular) music and popular protest music

ABSTRACT

In 1973, the pop music industry in the Philippines, long dominated by the American Top 40, was jolted by the emergence of a new kind of sound that delivered soulful Filipino lyrics in the medium of Western rock. At about the same time the protest movement found, in the popular forms of Western rock and folk, powerful vehicles for cultural resistance. This experimentation within and outside the industry generated great interest across social classes and opened many possibilities for new kinds of popular music, later to be called Pinoy (slang for Filipino) rock or Pinoy pop music. This article looks into the dynamics of Pinoy pop/rock and protest music during the period of authoritarian rule and after, marking their points of intersection and divergence and analyzing the factors that account for the rich popular music production in the 1970s and the 1980s.     

A Critical Perspective on British Social Surveys and Community Studies and Their Accounts of Married Life c.1945–70

ABSTRACT

The family was a subject of prime importance to sociologists in the post-war period. Married life was one of the principal themes of British social surveys and community studies undertaken at this time. This article investigates the limitations associated with these contemporary analyses and how they can be explained. It will examine the relationship between the studies' findings and contemporary social developments, the variations in married life, and how the researchers' accounts related to their wider aims. It will conclude that such studies were more a product of the optimism of the post-war period than prompted by patriarchal beliefs.     

Contesting Popular Dancing and Dance Music in Britain During the 1920s

ABSTRACT

This article examines various reactions to new forms of dance music and dance in Britain during the 1920s. It shows how these new cultural forms were part of broader social and economic changes, and notes how they are seen to represent a considerable break with previous cultural forms. In particular, such changes have been seen as symbolic of the widespread ‘Americanization’ of British culture. This article questions the degree to which this was true. It thus examines attempts by ‘professionals' to fashion ‘British’ versions of both dance music and social dances. In addition, it examines how audiences resisted and exacerbated these developments.     

Facilitating or Impeding Acculturation: A Qualitative Study on Mobile Social Messaging in First-Generation Chinese Immigrants’ Everyday Lives

ABSTRACT

Previous research indicated that communication through media has been intertwined into immigrants’ everyday lives and become an essential part of their acculturating practices. However, no research has been conducted to examine how innovative, ethnic social media play a role in Chinese immigrants’ acculturation process in terms of social capital. In order to fill the research gap, a qualitative study was conducted to explore how Chinese immigrants use social messaging to accumulate social capitals to facilitate their acculturation process. Thirty face-to-face in-depth interviews were conducted among Chinese immigrants to collect data. Findings revealed that Chinese immigrants tend to consider acculturation as a complex and long process in which they navigate through and position themselves in the unfamiliar cultural system. The ethnic social medium – WeChat, and in particular, its social messaging plays an essential role in shaping Chinese immigrants’ acculturation experiences by assisting them in garnering both bonding and bridging social capitals.     

Life Narratives and Personal Identity: The End of Linear Social Mobility?

ABSTRACT

This paper uses visualisations of life trajectories drawn from the 1958 National Child Development Survey to show how this generation refused linear narratives of mobility in favour of jags and turning points. We argue that these visualisations demonstrate the limitations of conventional class-based interpretations of social mobility. . We show how these jags represent moments of switching between public and private lives, demonstrating the interruptions which this generation display. We argue that these visualisations are consistent with the distinctive historical conditions ofthis generation, especially its female members, We conclude that more studiesof popular identities of social mobility are needed.     

Reclaiming America: the quest for home in Shawn Wong’s Homebase

ABSTRACT

With its dynamic narrative, Shawn Wong's Homebase recounts the story of four generations of a Chinese family searching for a homebase on the land of the United States. Personal experiences, family chronicles, and Chinese American history are portrayed through various forms, including short stories, correspondences, student essays, memories, and dreams. A major theme of the novel is geographically and spiritually “reclaiming America,” or attempts by Chinese Americans to make the United States their “real” home. The protagonist's way to reclaim America involves revisiting landmarks and other places in the United States where his father and grandfather had traveled, through which he tries to discover the meaning of his own life in the United States and thereby to find his personal identity and home in this country. In drawing the topography of Chinese American history, Shawn Wong not only inscribed Chinese American presence on those places where the protagonist's forefathers had lived and worked, but also used legends to implant their heritage into those soils. Shawn Wong hopes that through his writing he can build for Chinese Americans a history, a cultural foundation with myths and legends of their own. Only when a people's myths spread over the land they inhabit can the land truly be considered theirs. The Chinese American identity shaped in Homebase is heroism, rooted in the ethnic identity of the male Chinese American in the American West, and this is the “home” that the protagonist as well as many other Chinese Americans ever quest for.     

What the ‘Third World’ means to me

Abstract

This essay offers an experience of how the author comes to understand the terms ‘Third World’ in a specific social, historical, and political context in Taiwan. For the author, his deepest understandings of the ‘Third World’ did not come from theoretical readings, but from several concrete personal experiences.     

Great Expectations? Childhood,Family, and Middle-Class Social Mobility in Nineteenth-Century England

ABSTRACT

Existing histories of social mobility have focused on adults and on measuring the achievement of individual upward mobility. However, children and families were central to mobility strategies. Using the papers of the Heywoods of Bolton, this article examines how the families of the industrial middle class endowed their offspring with the goods and character needed to secure their social standing, highlighting the emotional intricacy of these processes. It demonstrates that such families conceived of social mobility as a familial project and that rather than pursuing upward mobility, their chief objective was to guard against social decline.     

Dancing from Past to Present: Nation,Culture, Identities. Edited by Theresa Jill Buckland

ABSTRACT

The rise of smuggling in eastern Ghana is directly related to the establishment of the colonial state. Elderly Ghanaians discuss gin smuggling in the context of a colonial state which tried to curb it, but also emphasize the authority of chiefs and elders who encouraged it. Based on a combination of interviews and archival research, this article first examines the uses of imported gin and suggests why it became one of the most important smuggled goods. There follows an in-depth look at the organization of the smuggling enterprises, and an exploration of how smugglers managed their dealings with the colonial state as well as local society. The complex and changing relations between African smugglers, traditional chiefs, local communities and the colonial state illustrate the irrelevance of the colonial state in the moral picture, and also how the gin smugglers' engagement with the wider world was shaped by an utterly local perspective.     

Play in the house of order: The Necessary Stage's BrainStorm

Abstract

This article opens up the question of modernity in relation to Yan’an woodcuts by recounting the Matisse debate among artists in Yan’an circa 1942, during the War of Resistance against Japanese occupation. Yan’an woodcuts did not move in a direction akin to the stylistic reform engaged by Western modernism; instead they pushed modern Chinese woodcuts to develop according to the requirements of ‘national form.’ Yan’an woodcut artists’ exploration of ‘national form’ involved a synthesis of folk aesthetics and woodcut techniques with the creation of modern‐style woodcuts, and a synthesis of revolutionary content with the artistic expression of national form. In this way a new kind of artistic ideal was realized. Compared with contemporary artistic questions in the West, the formal questions of Chinese revolutionary art surpassed the artistic as such to support rich social content and revolutionary discourse. The establishment of national language in art accords with the desire and imagination to construct of a new kind of modern nation‐state.     

Vicarious Vagrants: Incognito Social Explorers and the Homeless in England, 1860–1910. Edited by Mark Freeman and Gillian Nelson

ABSTRACT

This article seeks to place the debate about affluent working-class people in the inter-war and post-war periods within the broader context of long-term economic and social change. It explores why important structural changes were ignored for a long time, and how they came into view as the focus of professional social inquiry shifted following the Second World War, only to be reconceptualized as a new ‘social problem’ in the politically driven controversy about ‘affluence’ in the late 1950s. The article argues that we need to pay more attention to the gulf between official and vernacular understandings of social class in twentiethcentury Britain, drawing a distinction between everyday usage and professional languages of class.     

Keep Fit and Play the Game

ABSTRACT

This article provides new insight into the modernization of the monarchy after the First World War by exploring how George VI promoted fitness and outdoor recreation during the interwar years. Sport functioned as a site of cross-class male bonding which formed part of a wider strategy by the monarchy to strengthen social cohesion. The new royal charities raised substantial funds, and they established a national fitness movement during the 1930s which was supported by the National Government, Labour leaders and the Trades Union Congress, but eschewed extremes on both left and right.     

Mediating a compromised solidarity

ABSTRACT

This article explores popular media as resources for judgment in how settled migrants in Europe imagine solidarities toward newer arrivals seeking entry into the region. It discusses the news and entertainment consumption of Filipino nurses in London and how this figures in their imaginary of social and political bonds with refugees. Drawing on ethnographic interviews, I argue that these Filipino migrants can only articulate a compromised solidarity: one fractured between empathy with refugees and concern about what these newer arrivals might mean for settled migrants in the city. I then explain how the media contribute to this fracturing. One way is that the xenophobia in popular media content on social media leads the Filipinos to assert their difference with other migrants, including refugees. A second is that the Filipinos deploy popular media content, especially on British television, to assert that they belong to UK society more than other migrants, again including refugees.     

Traversing the Local and Universal in the Catholic Renewal

ABSTRACT

Increasing numbers of educated Catholic travellers visited holy sites in Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Though we are beginning to uncover more about these holy sites in the context of ‘local’ religion, we know very little about how educated travellers encountered them. These sacred places were also places of mobility and exchange. This article explores the responses of an educated traveller from Bohemia on a pilgrimage to Loreto and his encounters with holy sites and religious materials along the way and what this reveals about Catholicism in between the local and universal.     

Non-national museum attendances in the UK. Part 2: counting them in

ABSTRACT

This is the second of two papers that together present an interim report on a study of visit numbers to UK regional and local museums. It identifies trends in museum visiting between 1891 and 2015 within the context of socio-economic change, and discusses the principle causes of annual variances (sometimes of substantial magnitude) at a local level. It suggests that changes in visit levels are generally within the control of a museum rather than the consequence of external influences, and questions how far the experience of the period since 2001 is comparable with what has gone before.     

Baby-Boomers to ‘Beanstalkers’

ABSTRACT

In the 1950s and early 1960s, the British teenager was presented as a symbol of generational rebellion in the popular press, social investigations, and much political debate. We draw on oral histories, newspapers and the archives of prominent social surveys to question this presentation. By examining how working-class teenagers and their parents experienced and remembered the post-war years, we identify a disjuncture between the literature on moral panic and the widespread evidence of intergenerational cooperation between parents and children. Many working-class parents, enjoying newfound economic security, felt able to encourage their children to enjoy more adventurous lives.     

Heirs and Spares: Elite Fathers and Their Sons in the Literary Sources of Umayyad Iberia

ABSTRACT

In the medieval Islamic world, elite men were the benchmark of hegemonic masculinity and social power. A presumption of masculine authority within the household shaped the way early medieval rulers were described by chroniclers, and how medieval fathers related to their sons. The formal and informal ways in which they interacted with lower status men – whether their clients, their courtiers, or their sons – were hedged about with the symbolic language of gender. The article focuses on the ways in which certain Andalusī literary sources talk about relations of fathers and their sons with the ruling Umayyad family, to offer an additional dimension to our picture of how the dynasty conceptualised and legitimised its power.     

Olive Schreiner,Epistolary Practices and Microhistories

ABSTRACT

Focusing on the letters of the South African feminist writer and social theorist Olive Schreiner (1855–1920), this article explores Schreiner's strategic uses of letter-writing as a key tool in her work as a cultural entrepreneur in a number of different social and political contexts. In advocating a microhistory approach which recognizes that macro and micro are interconnected and should be seen as lenses of perspective rather than as separate spheres, we examine various strands of Schreiner's ‘cultural project’ and consider how her epistolary activities articulated and furthered this.