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Body and Gender
Even though we often think of bodies as natural and given, or else as freely plastic objects, bodies are both constructed and fundamental to our sense of self. This book investigates the body as an essential vector of inequality, shaped by institutions, interaction and culture, and how in turn it contributes to partly modify them. Sassatelli and Ghigi show how the process of embodiment is at the same time naturalized and contested, particularly evident in the case of gender. Drawing on classical sociological research about modernity and contemporary studies that emphasize intersectionality, the book looks at how the gendered body has been conceptualized with special attention to body politics, the power of appearance and the representation of embodied identity. It also considers the interplay between body, sex and sexuality and the way gendered bodies intersect with other dimensions of social inequality such as race, age, class and disability. This exploration of the rich field of sociological inquiry into the gendered body will be an invaluable read for all seeking to understand gender, sexuality and embodiment in contemporary society.
Encyclopedia of Consumer Culture
The Encyclopedia of Consumer Culture is the first reference work to outline the parameters of consumer culture and provide a critical, scholarly resource on consumption and consumerism.
Fathers, Childcare and Work
The work-life balance of fathers has increasingly come under scrutiny in political and academic debates and this collection brings together qualitative and quantitative analyses to explore their approaches to reconciling paid work and care responsibilities.
A Joyfully Serious Man
"Robert Bellah (1927-2013) was a hugely-influential twentieth-century American social scientist. During an intellectual career that spanned six decades, his work became central in many fields: the sociology of Japanese religion, the relationships between sociology and the humanities, the relationship between American religion and politics, the cultures of modern individualism, and evolution and society. His seminal 1967 essay "Civil Religion in America" created a huge debate across disciplines which continues to this day; his co-authored book Habits of the Heart (1985) was a bestseller (it sold close to 500,000 copies) and became the object of sustained public discussion about the temptation...
Anti-politics in Contemporary Italy
This book explores the discourses, attitudes and behaviours of professional politicians and ordinary citizens alike characterized by hostility towards the political sphere, political parties and, above all, professional politicians. It furnishes a clear, consistent depiction of the anti-politics phenomenon in general using Italy as a “laboratory” where anti-politics is widespread. After an original reconstruction of the concept of anti-politics, the author charts the rise of Silvio Berlusconi, the success of Umberto Bossi's Northern League, the resounding electoral victories of the Five Star Movement and the League (La Lega), all rooted in the anti-political rhetoric of Italy's leaders and the anti-political sentiment of its population. The author also traces the socio-political profile of the anti-political citizens of the main European democracies. This broad, consistent view of anti-politics will attract academics, journalists and policy makers interested in anti-politics in Italy and elsewhere. Students and scholars of party politics, party leaders, democracy and political participation will also find the volume of great interest.
Chinese Espresso
Why and how local coffee bars in Italy—those distinctively Italian social and cultural spaces—have been increasingly managed by Chinese baristas since the Great Recession of 2008 Italians regard espresso as a quintessentially Italian cultural product—so much so that Italy has applied to add Italian espresso to UNESCO’s official list of intangible heritages of humanity. The coffee bar is a cornerstone of Italian urban life, with city residents sipping espresso at more than 100,000 of these local businesses throughout the country. And yet, despite its nationalist bona fides, espresso in Italy is increasingly prepared by Chinese baristas in Chinese-managed coffee bars. In this book, Gra...
Beauty: Exploring Critical Perspectives
This volume was first published by Inter-Disciplinary Press in 2016. Rather than accept society’s ‘preferred metaphors’ about beauty at face value, the authors in this volume question the fact that beauty can also surprise us in the least foreseeable setting, at the most unexpected moment and in the most surprising or unsettling ways. Their work underscores beauty’s ephemeral, transitory, fleeting and at times confounding nature. The way beauty reveals itself to us, they point out, may challenge or even contradict established conventions, norms and values about aesthetics. The emergence of unconventional metaphors and analogies about beauty in these chapters calls on us to pay attent...
Migrant Farmworkers in 'Plastic Factories’
This book provides a fine-grained ethnographic examination of the everyday negotiations and conflicts taking place in greenhouses and packinghouses in an agricultural district in south-eastern Italy (Sicily). In a highly competitive global scenario, driven by multinational corporations and large retailers, small and medium-sized farms largely rely on migrant labour to fill their demand for casualized, flexible and low-paid jobs. By taking the reader into the ‘plastic factories’ where the author was hired as a farmworker, this book sheds light on the struggles – around the employment contract, the wage and the body – which take place every day between employers and employees. The book contributes to broadening the understanding of the dynamics innervating food production worldwide by recognizing the pivotal role of migrant labour not only as a factor in the restructuring of global supply chains, but also as an actor shaping these processes through its own unpredictable strategies.
Wounded Masculinities
This book contributes to the emerging field of men’s health studies, delving into how men incorporate, adapt, negotiate, or reject health care practices to perform masculinities in social interactions. By moving beyond the simplistic association between men, masculinity and the adoption of ‘risky’ or ‘unhealthy’ practices, this book draws from recent critical perspectives on the study of men’s health, seeking to challenge and problematize the relationship between masculinities and health. The text presents original empirical findings derived from qualitative and digital research examining the different ways in which men (re)negotiate their masculinities after the onset of a chron...
Global Denim
On any given day nearly half the world's population is wearing blue jeans. This is entirely extraordinary. Yet there has never been a serious attempt to understand the causes, nature and consequences of denim as 'the' global garment of our world. This book takes up that challenge with gusto. It gives clear, if surprising, explanations for why this is the case, challenging the accepted history of jeans and showing why the reasons cannot be commercial. While discussing the consequences of denim at the global level, the book consists of some exemplary studies by anthropologists of what blue jeans mean in a variety of local situations. These range from the discussion of hip-hop jeans in Germany, denim and sex in Milan through to the connection between denim and recycling in the US. But through all these intensively researched ethnographies of local denim we build our understanding of the most curious of all features of blue jeans - the rise of global denim.
