Sarah E. H. Moore

Is the Healthy Body Gendered? Toward a Feminist Critique of the New Paradigm of Health

A number of sociologists have identified the emergence of a ‘new paradigm’ of health, based on the principle that the National Health Service should seek to prevent ill-health rather than simply treat the sick. The sociology of health promotion that has emerged over the past 15 years has contributed to debates about risk, lifestyle and consumerism, but the gendered nature of what some refer to as the ‘new morality of health’, and in particular its urging of feminine attributes, has largely been neglected. This article provides a critical examination of the ‘new paradigm’ of health and its relationship to femininity. I suggest that femininity involves a certain attitude to the body that we also find in current health policy, and cultural representations of health more generally: that the body is essentially uncontrollable (yet something we should seek to control, as a matter of virtue), that it is a good in and of itself, and that it is synonymous with the self.

Cautionary tales: Drug-facilitated sexual assault in the British media

This article explores the cultural construction of drug-facilitated sexual assault (DFSA) in the British media. We consider the relationship between media reporting and belief in routine DFSA, and look at the ways in which DFSA is presented and received as a legitimate, plausible, and credible threat. As a media story, DFSA shares certain characteristics of the ‘crime legend’ and the ‘moral panic’, although it is, this article suggests, more appropriately conceived of as a ‘cautionary tale’. The final part of the article outlines the ‘cautionary tale’ as a paradigm for understanding media coverage. It is the victim and potential victim’s behaviour (as opposed to that of a folk devil) that is marginalised in the ‘cautionary tale’, and the threat is frequently represented as both external and internal to the individual, as resulting from an opportunistic attacker and/or one’s own negligent behaviour.

Controlling Passions: A Review of Recent Developments in British Sex Education

This article traces the shifts in the conception and delivery of sex education in British schools during the 1990s, drawing upon policy documents, teaching handbooks and teachers’ schemes of work. Two distinctive forms of sex education emerged during this period: a mandatory sex education focussed on the risks of HIV/AIDS and, later, teenage pregnancy; and a non-curricular sex education based on a discourse of emotional wellbeing and personal development. Far from being mutually exclusive, these two forms of education have, in recent years, started to overlap. Mastering a certain style of emotional expression is regularly framed as a means of avoiding ‘high risk’ sexual encounters and teenage sex is often described as damaging ones emotional wellbeing. The article offers a critique of these developments, arguing that current Sex and Relationship Education prescribes a certain emotional disposition, mystifies sex for young people, and transforms teenage pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections into problems of emotional maturity.

Tracing the Life of a Crime Category: The shifting meaning of “date rape”

This article traces the shifting meaning of “date rape” in US newspapers across a fourteen-year period. A crime category created by a niche feminist press, “date rape” originally referred to a form of intimate-partner violence, and has, more latterly, come to refer predominantly to an assault that occurs after a victim has had a drug, such as Rohypnol, surreptitiously slipped into her drink. Employing quantitative content analysis to explicate this shift, the article considers possible explanations for the changing meaning of “date rape,” including the applicability of the risk thesis and criminological theory on the de-politicisation of crime. Finally, I suggest that a feminist perspective allows us to recognise that “date rape” has been transformed from an issue of female disempowerment into a nebulous threat of limited ideological significance.

Towards a Sociology of Institutional Transparency: Openness, Deception and the Problem of Public Trust:

Transparency has become the watchword of 21st-century liberal democracies. It refers to a project of opening up the state by providing online access to public sector data. This article puts forward a sociological critique of the transparency agenda and the purported relationship between institutional openness and public trust. Drawing upon Simmel’s work, the article argues that open government initiatives routinely prize visibility over intelligibility and ignore the communicative basis of trust. The result is a non-reciprocal form of openness that obscures more than it reveals. In making this point the article suggests that transparency embodies the ethos of a now-discredited mode of what Ezrahi calls ‘instrumental politics’, reliant on the idea that the state constitutes a ‘domain of plain public facts’. The article examines how alternative mechanisms for achieving government openness might better respond to the distinctive needs of citizens living in late modern societies.

Prestige, Performance, and Social Pressure in Viral Challenge Memes: Neknomination, the Ice Bucket Challenge and SmearForSmear as Imitative Encounters

This article examines social media challenges that emerged in 2013, focusing on Neknomination, the Ice-Bucket Challenge and SmearForSmear. We understand them as ‘viral challenge memes’ that manifest a set of consistent features, making them a distinctive phenomenon within digital culture. Drawing upon Tarde’s concept of the imitative-encounter, we highlight three central features: their basis in social belonging and participation; the role of prestigious people and groups in determining the spread of challenges; and the distinctive techniques of self-presentation undertaken by participants. Based upon focus group interviews, surveys and visual analysis we suggest that viral challenge memes are social practices that diffuse in a wave-like fashion. Negotiating tensions between the social and individual, imitation and innovation, continuity and change, viral challenge memes are best thought of as creative practices, rather than sheep-like acts of conformity, and affirm the usefulness of analytical principles drawn from Tarde.

Storytelling and Justice in The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest; Or, In Defence of Inquisitorial Criminal Justice

The courtroom proceedings at the end of the novel The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest give us a rare insight into the inquisitorial system of criminal justice favoured by much of continental Europe. The trial offers justice and vindication to Lisbeth Salander: those entrusted by the state with her care and protection — namely Dr Teleborian and Advocat Bjurman — are revealed to be corrupt, sadistic characters; the official version of her life and character is rescinded; and her own version of events is finally heard and found credible. This chapter argues that the distinctive features of the inquisitorial system of criminal justice help make possible these revelations and revisions. I also want to suggest that the novel helps extend criminological understanding of the courtroom experience as well as the benefits of the inquisitorial system. In this respect the essay contributes to criminological debates about the comparative benefits of the inquisitorial and adversarial systems of criminal justice and the process of ‘status degradation’ in the courtroom.1 To be clear, I do not wish to suggest that the novel is a rhetorical argument in favour of a particular model of criminal justice; I simply wish to note and then account for the relationship between the distinctive courtroom victory and judicial proceedings in the novel.

Sex and risk: An editorial

Four articles in this issue focus on sex and risk. The articles in question cover a range of national contexts and topics – sex workers in New Zealand, sex education in Britain, groping on Japanese commuter trains and the Human Papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine in Canada – and give us the chance to look at how sex-related risks are managed and represented in different ‘risk environments’ (as Abel and Fitzgerald 2012, have it). Just as striking, though, are the similarities between the articles here. All are concerned, to varying degrees, with the social forces at work in the designation of risk – in the role played by commercial interests, the economic context, political rhetoric, and cultural norms in urging us to accept that particular behaviours are dangerous or certain groups ‘at risk’. In this sense, they illustrate that the designation of certain behaviours as ‘risky’ is not a consequence of the application of objective scientific knowledge but a social process. To put it differently, and as Douglas and Wildavsky (1983, p. 29) famously argued, risks are selected. For them, moral judgements about blame and responsibility play a key role in delineating which dangers come to be seen as the most threatening in a society. Their concern, of course, was with how modern risks reflected culturally-embedded ideas about pollution, purity and defilement. This is particularly true, they argued, of sex-related risks. It is therefore interesting that some of the contributions to this issue draw attention to the framing of inappropriate groups or sexual conduct as dirty and polluting. Take, for example, Horii and Burgess (2012) analysis of recent concerns about ‘chikan’ (groping) on Japanese commuter trains and the subsequent creation of sex-segregated trains. They explain how middle-aged men have been widely, and unjustly, seen as the key perpetrators: their vilification, they suggest, has centrally involved allusions to them being smelly. The labelling of a group as dangerous and unsanitary coalesce here – and, as with ‘pollution beliefs’ more generally, ‘function[s] to keep some categories of people apart so that others can be together’ (Douglas and Wildavsky 1983, p. 36). Other articles demonstrate Douglas and Wildavsky’s argument that the language of risk fulfils similar functions to a much older language of morality. Moore (2012), for example, asks whether teaching young British pupils to identify and take the ‘right choices’ to guard against the risks of early sexual relations really represents a move away from the more traditional and explicit moral sanctions of earlier sex education. For Moore, what’s just as worrying about the current prescription of ‘healthy’ sexual relations is that it is decidedly narrow and, more than this, reifies sexual intimacy into a ‘set of distinct, discrete acts, categorised as either risky or preventative’. Other articles show how a language of risk – like moral opprobrium – can operate as a means of justifying the removal or marginalisation of certain groups and behaviours. This is evident not just in Horrii and Burgess’s article, but also in the Health, Risk & Society Vol. 14, No. 1, February 2012, 1–5

‘Showing Awareness’ and the 1960s Counter-culture: Breaking Rules and Finding the Self

‘Showing awareness’ constitutes a deeply personal statement of recognition that a particular illness exists and causes suffering. It is also a practice that reflects a faintly oppositional stance towards mainstream society, often involving a condemnation of the treatment of certain minority groups (AIDS patients or female breast cancer sufferers, for example), or a rather solipsistic ethic of awareness and compassion. This chapter suggests that we see ‘showing awareness’ in the context of a wider cultural-historical shift in which a heightened interest in personal authenticity has developed alongside a distrust of social institutions. I suggest that the countercultural period of the 1960s and 1970s was particularly important in the development of this cultural milieu in the USA and the UK, and laid the basis for the contemporary interest in ‘showing awareness’.1 It is not my purpose, however, to transport the reader back to the 1960s, to place a flag in this period’s cultural soil, and claim it as the precise point at which ‘showing awareness’ emerged. It is clear that the contemporary drive to ‘show awareness’ does not straightforwardly reproduce the ideals of the 1960s, but rather extends and develops the original countercultural ethos. Nor is it my purpose to deny the existence of a certain anti-authority cultural current prior to the 1960s.

Flags and Poppies: Charity Tokens of the Early Twentieth Century

The next two chapters explore the historical background to the awareness ribbon campaigns of the 1990s. Before we look at the specific origins of the yellow, red, and pink ribbons, we must consider possible historical precedents to these charity symbols. To this end, this chapter examines flag days and the Armistice Day poppy.