R. Tyson Smith

Passion Work: The Joint Production of Emotional Labor in Professional Wrestling

This paper presents a case of jointly produced passion work. Passion work is emotional labor designed to elicit a strong response from subjects through an impression of extreme states such as pain, agony, or suffering. Based on an ethnographic investigation of professional wrestling participants, this study analyzes the backstage emotion teamwork that takes place within the self and with other performers. The study traces how performers do this physical labor and the social consequences of such work. The findings demonstrate that a) social rewards are intrinsic to performances of passion work, b) jointly produced passion work allows for the sort of breadth that is difficult to achieve in solo emotional work, and c) emotional labor shapes identity in recreational performances of the body.

Warring Identities: Identity Conflict and the Mental Distress of American Veterans of the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan

Drawing from 26 life story interviews of recent American veterans, this paper analyzes the identity struggle faced by soldiers returning from Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom and reentering the civilian world. Instead of examining veterans’ problems as a consequence of post-combat mental illnesses such as PTSD and major depression, we analyze the contrast between the participants’ identities as soldiers and their identities as civilians. We find that the postwar transition causes adverse mental health effects that stem from contrasts between the military’s demands for deindividuation, obedience, chain-of-command, and dissociation and the civilian identity expectations of autonomy, self-advocacy, and being relational. Veterans’ reintegration to civilian society is further hindered by a culture that is perceived (by veterans) as having decreased understanding of the soldier/veteran experience itself. These identity conflicts—what we term warring identities—have an important yet understudied effect on veterans’ combat-related mental health problems.

The Hidden Discourse of Masculinity in Gender Discrimination Law

T he relationship among difference, sameness, and equality is one of the founding relationships of liberal democracies. It was an assumption made by John Locke that different talents, motivations, and abilities would lead to different outcomes, that is, to unequal economic and social consequences. Meritocracies presume different inputs and outputs: the harder you work, the more able you are, the higher you will rise. The inequalities at the end of the road are the natural outcomes of differences. By contrast, equality has often been confused with sameness. In the 1950s, for example, images of economic equality often caricatured Russian communists as all looking and acting (and thinking) exactly the same, while attacks on racial and gender equality played on fears of widespread miscegenation and androgyny. Difference, we are told, leads to inequality; equality means sameness. In the United States, the relationship among difference, sameness, and equality has also been the foundation of efforts to rectify discrimination based on race and sex. The Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution guarantees “equal protection under the law,” and on this clause an entire antidiscrimination edifice has been built. Equal protection is generally considered to have two meanings: one cannot treat “alikes” as if they were unalike, nor can one treat “unalikes” as if they were alike (see, e.g., MacKinnon 1987). Equality therefore has two meanings, and this duality has provided the foundation for a wide range of discrimination cases. Treating the same as if they were different is the basis for most sex and race discrimination cases. The landmark 1954 case, Brown v. Board of Ed-

Conversation about Cynthia Enloe’s ‘Nimo’s War, Emma’s War

Cynthia Enloe has demonstrated time and time again that looking at how gender operates in times of war and militarization is neither superfluous nor simply a luxury afforded to those in academia. Gender analysis is necessary to gain an understandingof themotivations, costs, and consequences ofmilitarized conflict. It is crucial for understandingwhat constitutes security,what andwhose concerns are important for post-conflict reconstruction, and what conditions are essential for peace. In Nimo’s War, Emma’s War: Making Feminist Sense of the Iraq War (Enloe 2010; hereafter NWEW), Enloe brings her ‘feminist curiosity’ and analytical framework tobearonanaspect of theUS-IraqWar that is toooftenoverlooked and undervalued by governmental officials, politicians, and military strategists: namely, the experiences and stories ofwomen. InNWEW, Enloe shows the impact of the War on four Iraqi women and four American women, not because they are directly connected to each other but because, she says, ‘we have something important to discover by thinking of Iraqi and American women together’ (Enloe 2010: 3). Enloe illuminates the myriad ways in which these women’s lives are joined through current and past military maneuverings. In early 2011, we [Brooks, Lundeen and Smith] met in an ‘Author Meets Critic’ session on NWEW with Enloe at the annual Eastern Sociological Society meeting. We have continued our conversation about Enloe’s book since this meeting. In what follows, we discuss two main themes of our correspondence: (1) the contributions of NWEW to feminist international relations, and (2) the impact of NWEW on our own feminist scholarship and teaching. NWEW overturns dominant views of women as passive subjects of war. In highlighting gender formations and the deep impact of war upon women on all sides of this conflict, Enloe destabilizes the US privilege that is often repro-