Kirsten Dellinger

MAKEUP AT WORK Negotiating Appearance Rules in the Workplace

This study seeks to understand womens use of makeup in the workplace. The authors analyze 20 in-depth interviews with a diverse group of women who work in a variety of settings to examine the appearance rules that women confront at work and how these rules reproduce assumptions about sexuality and gender. The authors found that appropriate makeup use is strongly associated with assumptions about health, heterosexuality, and credibility in the workplace. They describe how these norms shape womens personal choices to wear makeup. Next, they examine how some women transform the meanings of wearing makeup and, in rare instances, attempt to subvert the institutionalized norms. Although many women find pleasure in wearing makeup, the authors conclude that the institutional constraints imposed by the workplace effectively limit the possibilities for resistance.

Masculinities in “Safe” and “Embattled” Organizations Accounting for Pornographic and Feminist Magazines

While research shows that there are familiar forms of doing masculinity involving distancing from femininity/women or from subordinated/marginalized masculinities/men, there is less emphasis on the fact that the content of these masculine performances varies depending on the specific cultural norms and ideologies present in an organization. The author relies on a comparative case study using in-depth interviews and participant observation in the accounting departments at a heterosexual men’s pornographic magazine and at a feminist magazine to examine how organizational culture shapes the ways that men (and women)do masculinity at work. Both accounting departments support a general pattern of doing masculinity referred to as the business professional attitude, but men also utilize unique strategies of doing masculinity depending on the degree to which masculinity is “safe” or “embattled” at their workplace. The author concludes by discussing the consequences of these strategies for men’s and women’s work relationships.

The symbolic lynching of James Meredith: a visual analysis and collective counter narrative to racial domination

The hanging of a noose on the University of Mississippi’s statue of civil rights pioneer James Meredith in February 2014 was framed by university administrators as the act of a few deviant white students, but our analysis suggests otherwise. A historical review shows the university’s long-standing resistance to meaningful change and a continuing lack of transparency following racist incidents. Visual analysis shows that the university remains saturated with monuments, place names, and other symbols of racial dominance. Narratives of marginalized people on campus, including some of the authors, reveal the corrosive effects of normalized white supremacy. The authors’ analysis suggests that, instead of an aberration, the noosing aligned the statue with the prevailing symbolic environment. This study builds bridges between sociological analysis and critical race theory and demonstrates the importance of group processes in understanding and responding to racist incidents on campuses.

The Catfish Industry and Spatial Justice in the Mississippi Delta: Steve Yarbrough's The Oxygen Man

This essay traces Edward Sojas “geography of labor” in the Mississippi catfish industry. Our interdisciplinary analysis integrates the socioeconomic realities of the Mississippi delta with Steve Yarbroughs literary rendering of that place in his 1999 novel The Oxygen Man . We argue that Yarbroughs novel closely maps changes in Mississippi delta agribusiness and urges readers to reimagine spatial justice in a landscape infamous for racism and poverty.

Displaced: Life in the Katrina Diaspora:

ined as a collection of neighborhoods or villages best governed by local residents and elders—ignores the whole of the city in favor of plans that seek to recoup small-scale living under the guise that such projects will have a spillover effect within the larger metropolitan region. This spillover effect, Valverde argues, is emblematic of the possibilities and problems of current urban (re)development agendas that have been heavily influenced by Jacobs’ perspective. This dialogic relationship between Everyday Law On The Street and Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities is perhaps best distilled in Chapter Five, where we learn that the village-model Jacobs advocated has helped produce what Valverde calls ‘‘ghost jurisdictions’’—’’entities that have been politically abolished but some of whose legal rules continue to be in force’’ (p. 111). Such jurisdictions often encompass residential properties, such as rooming houses, that have fallen out of fashion in the contemporary cosmopolitan city but still retain legal resonance in municipal codes throughout urban America. As cities and the residential patterns of urbanites have changed, such laws play an invisible hand in the sociolegal infrastructure and settling/emergence of civic disputes in cities like Toronto. Often frustrating new development, residential maintenance and construction, Valverde demonstrates that, despite the virtual extinction of urban establishments such as rooming houses, new municipal codes and legislation are predicated (knowingly and unknowingly) on a sociolegal framework born of an earlier period and different sociolegal contexts. Taken together, this book is perhaps best understood as the foundation for a new path at the intersection of urban and political sociology. As Valverde successfully demonstrates, ‘‘our urban spaces contain many injustices’’ and to analyze and understand such we must begin to look at cities as comprised of a layered sociolegal apparatus (p. 140). Such insights conjure the image of cities as matryoshka dolls (wooden Russian nesting dolls), a composition of antiquated and dysfunctional sociolegal frameworks layered upon another often under the noses of urbanites and civic authorities. As with most works that open new pathways for sociological inquiry, there will be those who read this work and crave for elaboration or perhaps a longer tome. This possible contention is well anticipated by the author and seems to be the sentiment that Valverde means to leave with her readers, seeking to inspire and empower follow-up and further attention (much like what Valverde does with Jacobs’ research). Scholars and students alike will find much to learn in this book, as it is the first (and hopefully not the last) to shine a light on the layered sociolegal infrastructure of urban America—which plays a significant and too often invisible role in frustrating and facilitating urban living and change. Indeed, as intended from the outset, Valverde successfully provides a lens to view the city differently from its ‘‘big brother,’’ the state. While ‘‘seeing like a state’’ has proven a useful window into the entanglement of citizenship, power, and space, Mariana Valverde develops and provides a provocative and innovative sociological and legal framework to view this nexus by ‘‘seeing like a city.’’