Sarah Sobieraj

Narrative and Legitimacy: U.S. Congressional Debates about the Nonprofit Sector*

This article develops a theory about the narrative foundations of public policy. Politicians draw on specific types of narratives in order to connect the policies they are proposing, the needs of the public, and their own needs for legitimacy. In particular, politicians are drawn to policy narratives in which they themselves occupy the central and heroic character position, and where they are able to protect the scope of their jurisdictional authority. We demonstrate how this works through a historical analysis of congressional debate about the nonprofit sector in the United States. Two competing narratives framed these debates: (1) a selfless charity narrative, in which politicians try to empower heroic charity workers and philanthropists, and then stay out of the way; and (2) a masquerade narrative, in which fake charities are taking advantage of the nonprofit tax exemption, in order to pursue a variety of noncivic and dangerous activities. Members of Congress quickly adopted the masquerade narrative as the dominant framework for discussing the nonprofit sector because it provided a more powerful and flexible rhetoric for reproducing their political legitimacy. By developing innovative elaborations of the masquerade narrative (i.e., identifying new categories of “false heroes”), while remaining faithful to its underlying narrative format, politicians were able to increase the persuasive impact of their legislative agendas. We argue that the narrative aspects of political debate are a central component of the policy-making process because they link cultural and political interests in a way that involves the mastery of cultural structure as well as the creativity of cultural performance.

Understanding the Rise of Talk Radio

The number of radio stations airing political talk shows—predominantly conservative talk radio—has surged in the past few years. This massive change in the radio industry says something about the demand for such shows, but attributing the rise of talk radio to a corresponding rise in conservative popular opinion is misleading. We argue that this remarkable growth is better explained by the collision of two changes that have transformed the radio business: deregulation and the mainstreaming of digital music technologies. Regulatory changes have shifted much of radio production and control from local to mass production (managed by industry giants such as Clear Channel Communications) and created a context ripe for nationally syndicated hosts such as Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and Mark Levin. Meanwhile, rapid technological changes have given consumers more control over the way they listen to music. Technologies such as MP3 players, Internet radio, smart phones, and Pandora Radio have made it more difficult for stations with a music format to be profitable. As music programming has become more problematic, many stations have developed a highly successful business model by converting to talk formats airing nationally syndicated shows.

Bitch, slut, skank, cunt: patterned resistance to women’s visibility in digital publics

ABSTRACT Resistance to women’s public voice and visibility via street harassment and workplace sexual harassment have long constrained women’s use of and comfort in physical public spaces; this gender-based resistance now extends into digital arenas. Women face extreme hostility in the form of digital sexism in discussion rooms, comment sections, gaming communities, and on social media platforms. Reflecting on two years of in-depth interviews with women who have been on the receiving end of gender-based digital abuse (n = 38), conversations with industry professionals working in content moderation and digital safety, the extant literature, and news stories about digital attacks against women, I offer a lens to think through the prominent patterns in digital sexism, showing (1) that aggressors draw upon three overlapping strategies – intimidating, shaming, and discrediting – to limit women’s impact in digital publics, (2) the way femininity and femaleness are used to undermine women’s contributions, and (3) men call attention to women’s physicality as a way to pull gender – and the male advantage that comes with it – to the fore in digital exchanges. Finally, I argue that when digital sexism succeeds in pressing women out of digital spaces, constrains the topics they address publicly, or limits the ways they address them, we must consider the democratic costs of gender-based harassment, in addition to the personal ones.

Book Review: Angry White Men: American Masculinity at the End of an Era:

whether this verbal intimacy is accompanied by physical expressions of intimacy is beyond the purview of Deep Secrets and could profitably be studied by someone as attuned as Way to evidence of cultural resistance. It is not only physical expressions of affection that are absent in this book; also missing, as objects of separate study, are the guys for whom physical involvement with other males eventually becomes a marker of sexual identity. Deep Secrets is a gender book, about being a boy and becoming a man; sexual orientation enters the picture mostly as an eventual object of fear, a sensation from which gay men, of course, are not themselves immune. While the realities of actually being gay are not explicitly part of her book’s focus, Way does, however, record vast differences, linked to race and class as well as age, in what behaviors get coded, and hence often avoided, as gay. The resourceful, heartening resistance that Way uncovers among boys does not, she openly laments, last even through a young man’s teens. Late in adolescence, the defensive ‘‘no homo’’ mantra that boys learn early in their lives begins to be taken much more seriously, Way found, making the late-teen years for many ‘‘a time of disconnection and loneliness’’ (p. 184). When boys reach their late teens, she maintains, the notions of ‘‘progress’’ and ‘‘development’’ that are her own profession’s stock in trade are inappropriate for describing what happens to many young men. Healthy emotional development, she believes, is inextricably bound to feelings of connection with others; that becoming a man so often means learning to disconnect from other males, to sever the ties that had so recently meant so much, commonly makes the late teens ‘‘a period of profound loss,’’ a time when a male’s development actually ceases (p. 184). Despite that somber declaration, there is something profoundly hopeful about Deep Secrets, something that indeed sets Way’s work apart from the other examinations of the contemporary American boy. Deep Secrets introduces some boys whose large numbers, indeed whose very existence, have gone largely unnoticed. Way’s abundant evidence of young men’s verbal tenderness with and about each other strips the notion of male emotional constriction of its aura of inevitability. This is a book about eventual loss, but also about the possibility of rediscovery.