Part of the Harry Potter series’ sociological and lay appeal is that it is set in the familiar backdrop of life course development. The books bring to life the agents of socialization and social pathways familiar to anyone experiencing, or having already experienced, the transition from adolescence into adulthood.
about the authors
Kathleen Thiede Call is a muggle professor in the health and policy management division of the public health school at the University of Minnesota. She studies access to health insurance and health care among vulnerable populations.
Donna McAlpine is a muggle professor in the health and policy management division of the public health school at the University of Minnesota. She studies alcohol, drug, and mental health care.
Book Review
Harry Potter and the Wise and Powerful Life Course Theorist
about the authors
Sharon Hays is in the sociology departent at the University of Southern California. She studies gender, culture, and social inequality.
Book Review
Low-Calorie Feminism
In Full Frontal Feminism, author Jessica Valenti presents an updated, white- middle-class-hetero-friendly, do-it-yourself version of feminism for young women. Hays and Butler argue that this version of feminism is ultimately vacuous and reproduces the very problems Valenti is trying to confront.
about the authors
Robert C. Bulman is in the sociology department at Saint Mary's College of California. He is the author of Hollywood Goes to High School: Cinema, Schools, and American Culture.
Nicole S. McCants is a sociology major at Saint Mary's College of California.
Culture Review
Enlightened Teenage Masculinity
While Superbad continues the crude and sophomoric story of nerdy, horny, and virginal teenage boys desperately eager to have sex with girls, it also presents a novel, enlightened version of teenage masculinity, one that presents vulnerability and tenderness. While fraught with misogynistic and crass dialog, Superbad tells the story of two male best friends who are afraid to part from each other after high school. It challenges us to ask how adolescent boys can learn to be men without ridiculing and dominating women, and without fearing that close friendships with other men undermine their masculinity or heterosexuality.
about the authors
Ross Macmillan is in the sociology department at the University of Minnesota. His interests include sociology of the life course and social demography.
E.C. Hedberg is a sociology Ph.D. student at the University of Chicago and a staff research analyst at the National Opinion Research Center. He studies intergenerational family exchanges and research methodology.
Culture Review
Heat Wave
ross macmillan: Tales of the Heat
At least three sociological accounts attempt to explain why such massive heat-related death took place in Chicago during the second week of July, 1995. An epidemiological investigation, Eric Klinenberg’s book Heat Wave, and now the narrative play Heat Wave staged in Chicago this past spring. All three are sociological, two are interesting and entertaining, and one is accurate.
E.C. Hedberg: dramatic calamitas
As a sociologist and former theater and film student, I was curious to see the relationship between sociology and drama reversed, and I wondered if it was even possible to adapt a piece of research into a dramatic framework set for the stage.
about the author
Lynn Comella is in the women's studies department at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. She is completing a book on the history and retail culture of women-owned and -operated sex toy stores in the United States.
Culture Review
It's Sexy. It's Big Business. And It's Not Just For Men.
Every January the AVN Adult Entertainment Expo transforms the Sands Convention Center in Las Vegas into what is arguably the world’s largest adult playground. The AVN Expo-one of many such trade shows that take place each year-is a microcosm of the sex industry and thus offers a revealing sociological window into the marketing, mainstreaming, and gender dynamics of sex in American society.
about the author
James Farrer is in the graduate school of global studies at Sophia University in Tokyo. He is the author of Opening Up: Yout Sex Culture and Market Reform in Shanghai.
Culture Review
A Chinese-Led Global Sexual Revolution
Experts at the inaugural meting of the World Association of Chinese Sexologists envision China leading the next wave of a global sexual revolution. A description of that meeting trains a lens on the peculiar power of nationalism in contemporary China.
about the author
Doug Guthrie is in both the management and sociology departments at New York University. He studies leadership, corporate governance, and the economics reforms in China.
Culture Review
The Great Helmsman's Cultural Death
Outside of Mao Zedong’s mausoleum in Tiananmen Square, Chinese entrepreneurs sell cigarette lighters, watches, and other trinkets that bear the former leader’s image. Mao’s transformation from cultural revolutionary to kitschy cultural icon is one reflection of a long line of changes in China’s culture and political economy.
about the author
Deborah Carr is Contexts' Trends editor. She teachers sociology at Rutgers University. Her research focuses on the sociology of the life course, aging, social psychology, and gender.
Trends
middle (aged) kingdom
China’s “one-child policy” is hailed as the world’s most effective overpopulation control policy. It has been so effective, in fact, Chinese population officials now fear their country will lack sufficient numbers of adult children to care for aging parents, the nation may lack the resources to provide other services for its burgeoning elderly population, and a skewed sex ratio&where men increasingly outnumber women&will lead to anti-social behavior among unmarried and socially unconnected men.
about the authors
Doug Hartmann is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Minnesota. His research interests focus on race and ethnicity, multiculturalism, popular culture (including sports and religion), and contemporary American society.
Chris Uggen is Distinguished McKnight Professor and chair of the sociology department at the University of Minnesota. He studies crime, law, and deviance, especially how former prisoners manage to put their lives back together.
Good Writing and Good Thinking
Recently we heard a story from an eminent sociologist about a paper she submitted to a leading journal that got us thinking about good writing.
The story wasn’t all that complicated or, for that matter, unfamiliar. Its basic punch-line was that one of the reviewers recommended rejecting the paper on the grounds that it was very well written and thus more suited for a publication like the New York Times Magazine than a mainstream sociology journal.
To their credit, the editors didn’t take this advice. However, the anecdote is both telling and disconcerting. Too often in our field the appellation “well written” functions as pejorative rather than as praise. This is particularly troubling to us because the overarching mission of this publication—to bring sociological insight to larger public audiences—requires writing that is engaging and accessible. Contexts is nothing if it is not about the quest for good writing.
We’re not convinced reviewers like the one above really understand what good writing is and why it’s so valuable. Good writing can’t be reduced to proper punctuation or grammar. It isn’t just stringing together words that convey other people’s ideas in a more accessible, poetic, or clever way. Good writing is the actual accomplishment and physical embodiment of clear thinking and strong analysis. Good writing is good thinking. And quality written thought comes in many different forms and serves many purposes. In this issue, for example, we have Sharon Hays and Jess Butler’s rip-roaring and devastating critique of Full Frontal Feminism and a clear-eyed, empirical account of declining social ties in America today by Miller McPherson, Lynn Smith-Lovin, and Matthew Brashears. Very different writing styles. Very different purposes. And both, in our judgment, wonderful pieces of writing.
Writing well, like doing good sociology, is also not easy. Our authors spend a great deal of time honing their insights and findings, and we work with them closely to ensure their prose is as clear and compelling as possible. (If you’re interested, we’ve recently updated and revised the innovative two-stage submission and review process developed by Contexts founding editor Claude Fischer to help achieve these outcomes; see contexts.org/submissions).
What’s at stake in defending and cultivating good writing is much larger than Contexts; it involves the future of sociology itself. The written word, after all, is the primary means by which we confirm core knowledge, generate new ideas, and clarify and debate unresolved questions. Good writing may be, as Monte Bute suggested in commenting on George Orwell in our last issue, the most basic and fundamental method of the sociological enterprise, and the key to realizing the promise of our big, broad, synthetic vision of the world. In an increasingly interdisciplinary and yet specialized academic environment, no discipline is better positioned to play a leading intellectual role than sociology itself—if we can formulate and disseminate our ideas properly.
None of this is to suggest the writing that appears in our leading journals is bankrupt or misguided, or even that it is not often very good. Quite the contrary, we believe journal articles (even very technical or dense, theoretical ones) have an indispensable place and purpose, and we both take pride in the work we publish in these venues. The point, rather, is to insist that good writing—clear, purposeful thinking put into words on a page—is crucial to sociology and the task of rendering social life meaningful and intelligible.
about the author
Todd Gitlin is in the sociology and journalism departments at Columbia University. He is the author of The Bulldozer and the Big Tent: Blind Republicans, Lame Democrats, and the Recovery of American Ideals.
One Thing I Know
The Movement and the Party
One thing I know is that political bents consist of two distinct elements—the movement and the party—and the relation between them.
The movement consists of amateurs acting on principle by way of passionate action, while the party is made up of professionals making deals and acting by calculation. The movement represents outsiders who aim to change values or policies, or to move the political system in a certain direction; the party represents insiders, aiming to leverage their power into successful careers.
These ideal types are structurally different. A benign interpretation is that there is a division of labor, a difference of type: In this sense, the movement is fuel while the party is a vehicle. But often the difference isn’t static and the two elements doubt their compatibility. The frictions flare into conflict. The movement and the party express divergent human faculties, and tend to engage different character types. Each needs the other but also suspects the other and fears betrayal. The movement tends to think the party is on the verge of selling out, and the party that the movement is reckless, or irrelevant, or counterproductive.
In her remarks earlier this year about the relations between Martin Luther King (the movement inspiration) and Lyndon Johnson (the policy consolidator), Hillary Clinton tried to express the interdependency of the two. The attacks to which she was subjected illustrate the difficulty of sustaining the right balance.
Over the last several decades, the dominant force in American politics has been the combination of the movement conservatives and the Republican Party. Beginning in the late 1950s, accelerating with the Goldwater campaign of 1964 and its sequel, the Reagan ascendancy in California, eventually culminating in Reagan’s presidential victories and the rule of George W. Bush, the conservative movement dynamically combined social conservatives with pro-business, anti-government, anti-tax conservatives. Beginning in the late 1970s, fueled by a wave of evangelical Christianity, these movements succeeded in taking over the party, coalescing under the leadership of men of Western demeanor consolidating Southern strategy aims.
While this movement-party synthesis was developing, the left was decisively weakened by a movement-party antagonism. When, at Johnson’s behest, the Democratic Party committed itself to the Vietnam War, the tenuous and complex relationship between movement and party that had developed with civil rights ruptured. In 1968 the party rejected the movement, and as a result fell out of power. The movement fragmented into movements, and the party withered.
Fast-forwarding toward the present, we can see how teeth-grittingly left-liberal movements have strived to accommodate themselves to the party and vice versa. Eventually, MoveOn.org amalgamated more than 3 million members who could raise money outside the party and enter into elections. In 2004, the campaign of Howard Dean infused movement energies into the Democratic Party. The “netroots” demonstrated that they could raise money and energize the party from its periphery. Though Dean failed in his quest for the presidency, he succeeded in catapulting himself into the leadership of the Democratic National Committee, aiming to rebuild the party’s base. In the congressional elections of 2006, the so-called netroots mobilized with significant effect. They had become, in a sense, the movement on behalf of the party.
Meanwhile, the radical international, economic, and administrative policies of George W. Bush pushed the right’s movement-party synthesis into a corner. Their movement is fatigued, their party embattled. The evangelical glue has weakened. No single individual emerges as self-evident heir in the line of Goldwater-Reagan-Bush. It remains to be seen how convincingly Republican candidate John McCain can position himself as a living synthesis without painting himself into Bush’s electoral corner. Only if persona can make the difference does he stand a chance.
The question for the left side of American politics now is whether it can enfold the disparate energies of movements within the imperfect vehicle of a party.
Democrats battered each other this year because their energies split between two of the 1960s’ successor movements. For Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton represent offshoots of two different movements, though only Obama has the persona and style of the outsider.
Harkening to his experience as a community organizer, invoking “hope” and “change” incessantly, combining “cool” manners and “hot” rhetoric, Obama offers himself as a living translation of movement into party, intimating that he could be a transformational president (though tinctured, he hopes, by a non-partisan tinge). The next test of his transformational powers will be whether he merges the civil rights and feminist streams into a single movement that counts for more than a one-shot campaign.
About Contexts
Contexts is a quarterly magazine that makes sociology interesting and relevant to anyone interested in how society operates.
It is a publication of the American Sociological Association, edited by Jodi O’Brien (Seattle University) and Arlene Stein (Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey).
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