Arlene Stein

Make Room for Daddy Anxious Masculinity and Emergent Homophobias in Neopatriarchal Politics

What are the sources of continuing antipathy toward homosexuality, and what might they tell us about changing forms of American masculinity? This article documents some emergent homophobias circulating among conservative activists in relation to campaigns against gay rights in the early 1990s and against gay marriage in 2004. As feminist critiques of traditional masculinity make their way into conservative rhetoric and as men struggle to define a role that maintains male authority without sounding overly authoritarian, new forms of homophobia have emerged that are compatible with conservatives’ quest to be seen as compassionate protectors of the family.

Sex, Truths, and Audiotape: Anonymity and the Ethics of Exposure in Public Ethnography

This article discusses ethical issues confronted in The Stranger Next Door, my ethnographic study of a small town divided by a local ballot initiative against gay/lesbian civil rights. Seeking to intervene in public debates about the issue, I wrote a book that was broadly accessible, painting vivid portraits of local activists engaged in this conflict. When the pseudonymous community was “outed” by a review in the statewide newspaper, rightwing activists became incensed, and charged me with compromising their anonymity, among other offenses. Years later, as I reflect upon these accusations, I recognize that some of them have some credence. While public sociological work cannot and should not seek to avoid controversy, I question whether the quest for anonymity in ethnographic research always serves the interests of researchers and their subjects of study.

Feminism's Sexual Problem Comment on Andersen

Reading Margaret Andersen’s description of the social and political context in which the sociology of gender emerged reminded me of the excitement I felt as an undergraduate in the late 1970s. To critically analyze women’s lives seemed so daring and new at the time. I was taken by Andersen’s description of the themes that rallied early feminist scholarship: understanding the social basis of gender roles, contesting the presumed inevitability of institutional forms, and, perhaps most poignantly, “taking women’s lives seriously.” While many of these concerns continue to inform our scholarship, the sociology of gender is vibrant but increasingly decentered—that is, less focused on a central set of animating questions—today. Much the same can be said of the interdisciplinary field of women’s studies. The critiques of queer and women of color scholars, along with poststructuralists and scholars of globalization, have made the “subject” of women’s studies less transparent. In some circles, the study of masculinities and transgenderism has become de rigueur, supplanting second-wave feminism’s exclusive focus on (woman-born) women. In this context, “Thinking about Women,” the title of Andersen’s essay, suggests a simpler time, when women were women, and gender studies were buttressed by a vibrant (though U.S.-centric) grassroots feminist movement. But to her credit, Andersen’s critique is not a simple narrative of decline. She recognizes many of accomplishments of the sociology of gender, a field she helped develop. At the same time, she is critical of a number of developments—in particular, a growing tendency to see gender as a practice rather than a structure. This theoretical trend, she says, has been fueled in large part by interactionist and poststructuralist analyses that emphasize the “doing” of gender. Missing, she argues, is an appreciation for the way that structures of power constrain the agency of social actors.

Whose Memories? Whose Victimhood? Contests for the Holocaust Frame in Recent Social Movement Discourse

Fifty years after the end of World War II, the Holocaust is being utilized as a symbolic resource by US social movements. This article investigates social movement “framing” processes, looking at the use of Holocaust rhetoric and imagery by social movement organizations and actors. I explore how competing movements, the lesbian/gay movement and the Christian right, battle over the same symbolic territory, and how the Holocaust frame is deployed by each. Two forms of symbolic appropriation in relation to the Holocaust are documented: metaphor creation and revisionism.

Feminism, Therapeutic Culture, and the Holocaust in the United States: The Second-Generation Phenomenon

In the late 1970s, children of Holocaust survivors utilized feminist and therapeutic ideas to develop a collective identity as the “second generation.” Emphasizing self-disclosure and storytelling designed to break the silence around the Holocaust, this cohort devised an identity linked to their parents but possessing separate needs and interests. The second-generation movement has been criticized for being overly introspective. This article, which draws on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews, takes a more sympathetic approach. By forming a collective identity and speaking openly about their experiences, children of survivors engaged in a therapeutic politics that contributed to the growing public consciousness of the Holocaust in the United States.

Refiguring the Family

In November 2003, the Massachusetts Supreme Court ruled that samesex couples are entitled to equal marriage rights. Later the following year, voter initiatives designed to ban same-sex marriage were passed in 11 state ballots throughout the United States, and pundits declared that a sizeable proportion of George W. Bush’s support for the presidency came from ‘values voters’ who saw gay marriage as a threat. Bush and Republican members of Congress proposed a federal Constitutional Amendment that would ban same-sex marriage. The Massachusetts decision has deeply divided the United States.

Manufacturing Islamophobia: Rightwing Pseudo-Documentaries and the Paranoid Style

Rightwing organizations in the United States have produced and circulated a number of videos which exaggerate the threat Islamic militants pose to ordinary citizens in the West. These videos owe a great deal to the frames established two decades earlier in religious right campaigns against homosexuality. This article provides a textual analysis of these videos and their production, showing how they manifest “heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy,” which Richard Hofstadter characterized as the “paranoid style.” We term these films “pseudo-documentaries” because while they utilize some of the conventions of the documentary genre—claims to “fairness and accuracy,” the use of “experts,” and the incorporation of news footage, testimonies, and “facts”—they are produced by political interest groups and are expressly made to persuade and mobilize through distortion. A comparison of homophobic and Islamophobic videos reveals continuities in rightwing rhetoric, as well as strategic shifts, and indicates the emergence of an increasingly fragmented, pluralized, and privatized political sphere.

Professionalization and Subversion

ed empiricism, grand theory, history of sexuality, same-sex intimacy, sexual

Rage against the StateStrangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, by HochschildArlie Russell. New York: The New Press, 2016. 351 pp.

Losers. That’s what a reporter named Rick Santelli called homeowners who had obtained high-risk mortgages, who were facing foreclosure in the midst of the economic crash. By helping to bail them out, in 2009 Santelli charged that the federal government had rewarded those who deserved to be punished. It mattered little to him that banks had deceived those borrowers. His rant was the opening salvo of a movement, bankrolled by billionaires, that tapped into white, middle-class Americans’ rage against the state and its beneficiaries. The Tea Party then proceeded to divide Washington against itself, and the rest is, as they say, history. Arlie Hochschild’s decision to leave her comfortable Berkeley home to talk with white Tea Party supporters in Louisiana to try to understand their seemingly paradoxical view of the world was prescient. Louisiana, deeply conservative, is a poor state. It is also a place where the ‘‘great paradox’’ is clearly evident—where many who clearly benefit from government protections and social programs nonetheless oppose them with a vengeance. Since November 2016, many people, including myself, have read Strangers in Their Own Land looking for clues to Trump’s electoral college victory. How could things have gone so horribly wrong for the Democrats? And now that we’re in this mess, what should we do? Are white working-class voters a lost cause? Though Hochschild focuses on one of the reddest states in the nation, she offers us some useful ways of thinking about these questions and a few partial answers, deepening the national conversation at this highly fractured time. Focusing on the ‘‘keyhole issue’’ of the environment, Hochschild takes us through a dystopian landscape where toxic waste ruins once pristine lakes, causing massive fish kills and heightened rates of cancer, and where there is both ‘‘great pollution and great resistance to regulating polluters.’’ Many of Hochschild’s respondents suffer the consequences of environmental contamination, yet they calculate that government is the greater evil. ‘‘Sure I want clean air and water,’’ Madonna Massey, a resident of Lake Charles, tells her, but capitalism and free enterprise are even more important. Madonna, says Hochschild, trusts God to ‘‘take care of the rest.’’ Hochschild’s white middleand workingclass subjects share what she calls a ‘‘deep story’’ about what’s wrong with the country that fuses bootstrap individualism, Christian morality, and a politics of resentment. As they see it, upstanding, productive citizens like themselves could once work hard, make a better life, and imagine a future of progress. But that’s no longer true. Today, they confront wage stagnation, and even those who have pretty good jobs tend to feel insecure. Meanwhile, others are rapidly moving ahead of them and their families— the ‘‘line-cutters,’’ who bought high-risk mortgages and were bailed out by the federal government, or who receive government ‘‘handouts.’’ Hochschild’s interviewees see themselves as the true victims. It’s a familiar right-wing lament: the ‘‘productive’’ members of society versus the ‘‘parasites.’’ In the mid-1990s, I interviewed small-town conservatives who were Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, by Arlie Russell Hochschild. New York: The New Press, 2016. 351 pp.

17.94 cloth. ISBN: 9781620972250.

17.94 cloth. ISBN: 9781620972250.