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Mothers and unions are rarely associated, but Cynthia J. Cranford (Qualitative Sociology, December 2007) found that women leaders successfully constructed a “union motherhood” in the Janitors for Justice movement.

By drafting children and partners into protests, women leaders made the union a “family affair.” Both men and women actively engaged in caring for the many children who attended demonstrations and activities, which blurred gender roles. Coordinated childcare enabled more women to participate and promoted class solidarity, and allowed leaders to frame motherhood and unionism as mutually beneficial.

Motherhood gave women a unique vantage point from which to make claims of union goals, such as health insurance for children. Similarly, union politics added both practical value (wage earning) and symbolic value (empowerment through activism). R.A.

unmasking racism

Halloween festivities may have a more sinister side than smashing pumpkins or your neighbor’s Harry Potter costume.

Historically the holiday has been used as a “ritual of rebellion” where dominated groups temporarily assumed the role of the powerful. But Jennifer C. Mueller, Danielle Dirks, and Leslie Houts Picca (Qualitative Sociology, September 2007) argue some white students now use the holiday to re-affirm their dominance through existing racial stereotypes.

According to data collected from 663 personal journals of U.S. college undergraduates, some viewed Halloween and costuming as a “safe” and culturally tolerated opportunity to “take a break from” or “defy” social norms, especially those of race. Students even felt okay about dressing up as the racial “other” in derogatory ways, wearing costumes like “Vato Loco,” “Kung Fool,” “Ghetto Thug,” and “Project Chick.” These caricatures are then written off as harmless jokes, justified by the holiday.

The authors conclude that the racism permitted during Halloween is the same that supports the material and ideological benefits and disadvantages of different racial groups in our nation. If they’re right, October 31st is scarier than we thought. R.A.

rock ’til you drop

Bob Geldoff said “most people get into bands for three very simple rock and roll reasons: to get laid, to get fame, and to get rich.” Unfortunately, they might also “get” an increased risk of mortality.

Mark A. Bellis and colleagues (Journal of Epidemiology and Com­mu­nity Health, October 2007) studied 1,064 famous musicians who performed on the All-Time Top 1000 Albums list. They measured survival rates from the time the musicians became famous and compared them to expected survival rates for the general population. Rock stars in the United States, Canada, and Europe, they found, die far younger than those in the general population.

Their untimely demise is due in large part to their environments. According to the authors, high levels of stress, depression, and substance abuse lead to more deaths.

But when rockers get old, there’s an interesting divergence between Europeans and North Americans: European stars live longer the farther they get from their initial point of fame, whereas North American stars aren’t so fortunate. The latter are more likely to die from chronic conditions like cardiovascular disease because they’re living without the universal health insurance that treats these chronic conditions in their European counterparts. K.C.

Before our first print issue had even gone to press, our talented, savvy, and tireless web editor, Jon Smajda, built contexts.org. There you’ll find extended content on each of the articles featured in our pages. For Andrew Lindner’s article on embedded media in Iraq, for example, we link to a contract specifying the “ground rules” governing the relationship between embedded reporters and the military. Other features include links to materials for further study, audio and video clips, supplemental materials provided by authors, and even some of the “hate mail” inspired by sociological research. (Suffice it to say, Rob Sampson’s work on immigration and crime, featured in our last issue, has been a real, um, hit.)

As we develop this site, our plan is to maintain an easy electronic access point for the print version of Contexts while taking full advantage of the flexibility, responsiveness, and accessibility of the internet. At contexts.org we can offer timely analysis and commentary on current events and a responsive forum for community-building with scholars, journalists, policy makers, and the general public.

To these ends, we’ve recently launched two blogs we’d love you to check out. The Discoveries blog (contexts.org/discoveries) has grown out of the popular Discoveries feature in the magazine. Here we’ll point you to the latest sociological research that’s lighting a fire under our Graduate Student Editorial Board and editorial team. A second blog, Contexts Crawler (contexts.org/crawler), scans the internet for media reports and other insights offered by sociologists, and brings them together in one space nearly everyday. Both blogs present ample evidence that the sociological imagination is alive and well—and that we’re really just getting started.

While we hope contexts.org will open a few new vistas for sociological influence and community building, we see such efforts as wholly in keeping with the fundamental goals, principles, and insights of this publication and our discipline. After all, the tag line of this magazine is Understanding People in their Social Worlds. The combined strengths of contexts.org and our print publication offer an even better forum to understand the social worlds around us—and to better connect with the social worlds of our readers.

Erving Goffman once wrote, “When they issue uniforms, they issue skins.” And, we can add, two inches of flesh. When we enact a new role, we show ourselves to others in a different way. That’s what Goffman meant by “skin.” But we also engage our deep feelings in new ways—that’s the “two inches of flesh.”

Feeling is elicited by interactions we experience, remember, or imagine having with people in our lives. Feelings are social in that sense.

Moreover, each culture provides prototypes of feeling, which, like differently toned keys on a piano, attune us to different inner “notes.” For example, the Tahitians have one word—sick—for what in other cultures might correspond to ennui, depression, grief, or sadness. According to the Czech novelist Milan Kundera, the Czech word “litost,” refers to an indefinable longing, mixed with remorse and grief, which has no equivalent in any other language.

Cultures lay out the possibilities for subjectivity and in that way guide the act of recognizing a feeling. Apart from what we think a feeling is, we also have ideas about what it should be. We say, “you should be thrilled at winning the prize” or “you should be furious at what he did.” We evaluate the fit between a particular feeling and context in light of what I call “feeling rules,” which are themselves rooted in culture.

Given such feeling rules, we may then try to manage our feelings. We try to be happy at a party or grief-stricken at a funeral. In short, it is through our apprehension of an interaction, our definition of feeling, our appraisal of feeling, and our management of feeling that feeling is social. If, as C. Wright Mills said, the job of sociology is to trace the links between private troubles and public issues, the sociology of emotion is—or should be—at the very heart of sociology.

This approach to feeling offers us a way of looking at work. When paid to do certain jobs, we do what I call “emotional labor”—the effort to seem to feel and to try to really feel the “right” feeling for the job, and to try to induce the “right” feeling in certain others. For example, the flight attendant is trained to manage fear at turbulence and anger at cranky or abusive passengers. A bill collector is trained to manage compassion or liking for debtors. Wedding planners (one of the para-familial service workers I’m interviewing these days) often try to help clients symbolize the special moment of falling in love, as well as deal with jealous mothers, quarreling parents, or what one planner called “grooms’ jitters.”

Over the last 40 years, the number of service sector jobs has grown. By my estimate, some six out of 10 of those service jobs call for substantial amounts of emotional labor. This work doesn’t fall equally upon the two genders; roughly a quarter of men but half of women work in jobs heavy in emotional labor. Emotional labor has hidden costs, and these fall more heavily on women.

Increasingly, emotional labor is going global. In my latest work, I have written about a south-to-north “heart transplant.” Here, a growing number of care workers leave the young and elderly of their families and communities in the poor southern countries to take up paid jobs caring for the young and elderly in families and communities in the affluent northern ones. Such jobs often call on workers to manage grief, depression, and anguish vis-a-vis their own children, spouses, and parents, even as they genuinely feel—and try to feel—joyful attachment to the children and elders they daily care for in the north.

Emotional labor crosses borders in other ways as well. Through telephone and email, service providers in Bangalore, India, for example, tutor American children with math homework, make long—distance purchases of personal gifts, and even scan romantic dating service Internet sites for busy professionals. What we see here are the paradoxes—and sometimes estrangements—involved in commodifying even the smallest, most personal acts.

The idea of emotional labor—and of a sociology of emotions in general—helps illuminate the “hidden injuries,” to quote Richard Sennett, of all the systems we study, including the latest versions of sexism, racism, and capitalism.

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by monte bute

Sociology has long been notorious for its use of jargon and impenetrable prose. Sociologists writing badly inspired the editor of Fowler’s Modern English Usage to coin a new word-sociologese. These bad habits have rendered scholarly articles and books mostly unreadable. In short, the monograph has become a charnel house for academic prose. Good writing, particularly in non- scholarly venues, is essential for a truly public sociology.

(Full text of George Orwell’s Why I Write and Politics and the English Language are available online.)

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edible sociology

by jennifer a. jordan

Thomas McNamee’s Alice Waters and Chez Panisse and Peter Kaminsky’s Pig Perfect haven’t received quite as much coverage as other recent food books. But both definitely deserve to be read by anyone interested not only in pigs and vegetables but also in bigger, more sociological questions about systems of food production and distribution, and the kinds of landscapes and lifestyles produced by particular sets of tastes and regulations.

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by harvey molotch

The inequities of class, gender, and physical capacity gain their expression in moments of anxiety over how to eliminate one’s waste. This is one truth made evident in Q2P (an abbreviation for “Queue to Pee”), a movie by the award-winning, India-based filmmaker Paromita Vohra.

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good sociology makes lousy tv

by michael kimmel

There are very few films and virtually no television or literary characters that speak to sociology. And what is out there depicts sociologists as idealistic yet clueless liberals, perverse voyeurs, pseudo-scientific poseurs, or hopeless apologists for the status quo. And those are the complimentary images.

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the big business of haut chocolat

by priscilla parkhurst ferguson

Chocolate, in case you haven’t noticed, is big business. Visits to the 13th annual Salon du Chocolat in Paris and the 10th annual Chocolate Show in New York afforded a splendid opportunity for comparative chocolateering.

Official website for Salon Du Chocolat, and New York Chocolate Show.

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trespassing in someone else’s utopia

by jonathan r. wynn

Fan Fair-the Country Music Association (CMA) Music Festival-is an annual migration for tens of thousands of fans. Nashville’s storied Lower Broad district is glutted with people hoping to spy a star, get a signature, and catch as many performances as possible.

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Purchase this article from UC Press

Purchase this article from UC Press

online resources

media coverage

• The Rise (and Rise) of Viagra: Mother Jones interviews Meika Loe.
• Viagra: the hard sell: Coverage of Loe’s work by the BBC.
• Ritalian abuse: statistics, at pbs.org: Meika Loe highly recommendeds this as a teaching resource.
• NY Times: Brain Enhancement Is Wrong, Right?: An article in The New York Times about academics using Adderall and Provigil to improve their academic performance.

further research

• Adele E. Clarke, Janet K. Shim, Laura Mamo, Jennifer Ruth Fosket, and Jennifer R. Fishman studies contemporary context and working definitions for biomedicalization. Key Work: “Biomedicalization: Technoscientific Transformations of Health, Illness, and U.S. Biomedicine,” American Sociological Review 68 (2003): 161–194.
• Peter Conrad and Deborah Potter introduce and explore medical diagnostic expansion in the case of ADHD. Key Work: “From Hyperactive Children to ADHD Adults: Observations on the Expansion of Medical Categories,” Social Problems 47 (2000): 559–582.
• Richard DeGrandpre provides an early socio-cultural analysis of Ritalin use, and an argument about over-diagnosis. Key Work: Ritalin Nation: Rapid-Fire Culture and the Transformation of Human Consciousness, W.W. Norton & Company, 1999.
• David E. Karp provides a qualitative analysis exploring the relationship between medicine and identity. Key Work: Is it Me or My Meds? Living with Anti-Depressants, Harvard University Press, 2006.
• Adam Rafalovich examines physicians’ relationships to medical ambivalence and uncertainty in treating ADHD. Key Work: “Exploring Clinician Uncertainty in the Diagnosis and Treatment of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder,” Sociology of Health and Illness 27 (2005): 305–323.
• Sean Esteban McCabe: Study: 7 percent of college students used prescription drugs as stimulants for non-medical purposes, January 6, 2005.