The Global Sociology Blog

I have blogged about this yesterday. After the visible deviance, the strong social reaction (death threats via Facebook… that’s gonna make Todd Krohn warm up to Facebook!) and stigma (the woman was outed within hours of her deed), now comes the more or less obligatory shaming ritual, or, as Harold Garfinkel would call it, degradation [...]

I have blogged before about the fact that patriarchy is both structural and normative. It exists through institutions that reproduce patriarchal privilege and inequalities. But it is also a cultural system entirely contributing to the normative acceptance of patriarchal symbols, discourse and values. And as with any normative system, there is a price to pay [...]

There is nothing I can add to this great post by Jeremy Levine on two movies I decided not to go see precisely because what he writes was entirely predictable from the trailers:
Precious:

Social Science Lite: Dangerous Implications via kwout

And The Blind Side:

Social Science Lite: Dangerous Implications via kwout

Because, you see, there was never any real [...]

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal via kwout

Medicalization removes part of the stigma and mitigates the potential social sanctions.

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For those of you who remember my review of – and multiple posts on – Loïc Wacquant’s Punishing The Poor, this will seem a perfect illustration. As you remember, Wacquant’s thesis is that the neoliberal state, as it loses power on the economic and social fronts as a result of neoliberal policies it embraced, reasserts [...]

This

Why, Tiger? Why, bankers? Why? Because they can | Zoe Williams | Comment is free | The Guardian via kwout

reminded me of this, that is, a blog post where I used Denis Colombi’s starting point on traders as exempt from social norms that the rest of us are expected to follow. In other words, up [...]

Any fan of football (soccer for Americans) has heard of it – the infamy:

The hand that gave France its qualification for the 2010 World Cup in South Africa. For non-soccer fan, especially on this side of the Atlantic, that move is not allowed. It’s cheating. And this started a storm. Remember Howard Becker, deviance only [...]

If a white person commits an atrocity, it’s because that person has mental health problems
If a non-white person commits an atrocity, it is because non-white people all have self-control problems of some kind (translation: they’re not as civilized as “we” are)
If a person with an Arab name (Note to the media: there is no such [...]

Denis Colombi notes this wonderful gem from former Judo superstar turned right-wing politician (you see where this is going, don’t you?):

Une heure de peine…: David Douillet est-il Français ? via kwout

Let me offer a rough translation of this steaming pile:

“To me, a woman doing judo or in another sport, that’s neither natural not rewarding. For [...]

No one writes about the American culture like Barbara Ehrenreich. At the same time, Ehrenreich never lets anyone forgets that there is a socially stratified reality out there and that cultural trends are often ideological scaffolding supporting unequal and precarious systemic conditions for most of us. Her latest book, Bright-Sided: How The Relentless Promotion of [...]

I cannot emphasize enough what an important book Loïc Wacquant’s Punishing The Poor – The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity is. Except, I have already done that by posting various quotes that I thought were important and made essential points as I was reading the book.
The main argument made by Wacquant is that the social [...]

Video here.

BBC NEWS | South Asia | Village ‘witches’ beaten in India via kwout

Now might be a good time to revisit Kai Erikson’s Wayward Puritans for an interesting study of how accusations of possession and witchcraft are almost always directed at women and involve both symbolic and materials issues:

BBC NEWS | South Asia | Village [...]

“Making the inmate or his kin pay, reducing services within custodial establishments to a bare minimum, generalized unskilled work inside penitentiaries: for now, these measures are pursued less for their financial fallout, which is negligible compared to the pharaonic expenditures demanded by the policy of penalization of poverty, than for the message they send to [...]

“Probing the gestation, operant philosophy, and early results of the welfare ‘reform’ of 1996 highlights developments fostering the penalization of public aid and thence the emergent coupling with the penal wing of the state. (…) In both the political debate leading to the passage of the law and the body of the legislative text itself, [...]

“Comparative analysis of the evolution of penality in the advanced countries over the past decade reveals a close link between the ascendancy of neoliberalism, as ideological project and governmental practice mandating submission to the ‘free market’ and the celebration of ‘individual responsibility’ in all realms, on the one hand, and the deployment of punitive and [...]