In recent years, the concept of boundaries has been at the center of influential research agendas in anthropology, history, political science, social psychology, and sociology. This article surveys some of these developments while describing the value added provided by the concept, particularly concerning the study of relational processes. It discusses literatures on (a) social and collective identity; (b) class, ethnic/racial, and gender/sex inequality; (c) professions, knowledge, and science; and (d) communities, national identities, and spatial boundaries. It points to similar processes at work across a range of institutions and social locations. It also suggests paths for further developments, focusing on the relationship between social and symbolic boundaries, cultural mechanisms for the production of boundaries, difference and hybridity, and cultural membership and group classifications.

The Study of Boundaries in the Social Sciences

▪ Abstract In recent years, the concept of boundaries has been at the center of influential research agendas in anthropology, history, political science, social psychology, and sociology. This article surveys some of these developments while describing the value added provided by the concept, particularly concerning the study of relational processes. It discusses literatures on (a) social and collective identity; (b) class, ethnic/racial, and gender/sex inequality; (c) professions, knowledge, and science; and (d) communities, national identities, and spatial boundaries. It points to similar processes at work across a range of institutions and social locations. It also suggests paths for further developments, focusing on the relationship between social and symbolic boundaries, cultural mechanisms for the production of boundaries, difference and hybridity, and cultural membership and group classifications.

In this article we ask what it means for sociologists to practice intersectionality as a theoretical and methodological approach to inequality. What are the implications for choices of subject matter and style of work? We distinguish three styles of understanding intersectionality in practice: group-centered, process-centered, and system-centered. The first, emphasizes placing multiply-marginalized groups and their perspectives at the center of the research. The second, intersectionality as a process, highlights power as relational, seeing the interactions among variables as multiplying oppressions at various points of intersection, and drawing attention to unmarked groups. Finally, seeing intersectionality as shaping the entire social system pushes analysis away from associating specific inequalities with unique institutions, instead looking for processes that are fully interactive, historically co-determining, and complex. Using several examples of recent, highly regarded qualitative studies, we draw attention to the comparative, contextual, and complex dimensions of sociological analysis that can be missing even when race, class, and gender are explicitly brought together.

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Practicing Intersectionality in Sociological Research: A Critical Analysis of Inclusions, Interactions, and Institutions in the Study of Inequalities*

Preface (1999) Preface (1990) 1. Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire I. 'Women' as the Subject of Feminism II. The Compulsory Order of Sex/Gender/Desire III. Gender: The Circular Ruins of Contemporary Debate IV. Theorizing the Binary, the Unitary and Beyond V. Identity, Sex and the Metaphysics of Substance VI. Language, Power and the Strategies of Displacement 2. Prohibition, Psychoanalysis, and the Production of the Heterosexual Matrix I. Structuralism's Critical Exchange II. Lacan, Riviere, and the Strategies of Masquerade III. Freud and the Melancholia of Gender IV. Gender Complexity and the Limits of Identification V. Reformulating Prohibition as Power 3. Subversive Bodily Acts I. The Body Politics of Julia Kristeva II. Foucault, Herculine, and the Politics of Sexual Discontinuity III. Monique Wittig - Bodily Disintegration and Fictive Sex IV. Bodily Inscriptions, Performative Subversions Conclusion - From Parody to Politics

Postmodern Subjects, Postmodern BodiesThinking Fragments: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and Postmodernism in the Contemporary WestYearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural PoliticsGender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

Presentation of self (via Goffman) is becoming increasingly popular as a means for explaining differences in meaning and activity of online participation. This article argues that self-presentation can be split into performances, which take place in synchronous “situations,” and artifacts, which take place in asynchronous “exhibitions.” Goffman’s dramaturgical approach (including the notions of front and back stage) focuses on situations. Social media, on the other hand, frequently employs exhibitions, such as lists of status updates and sets of photos, alongside situational activities, such as chatting. A key difference in exhibitions is the virtual “curator” that manages and redistributes this digital content. This article introduces the exhibitional approach and the curator and suggests ways in which this approach can extend present work concerning online presentation of self. It introduces a theory of “lowest common denominator” culture employing the exhibitional approach.

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The Presentation of Self in the Age of Social Media: Distinguishing Performances and Exhibitions Online.

This article suggests that American sociology has developed a de facto tradition in the sociology of the marked that devotes greater epistemological attention to “politically salient” and “ontologically uncommon” features of social life. Although the “unmarked” comprises the vast majority of social life, the “marked” commands a disproportionate share of attention from sociologists. Since the marked already draws more attention within the general culture, social scientists contribute to re-marking and the reproduction of common-sense images of social reality. This has important analytic consequences. This article argues for developing a stronger tradition in a sociology of the unmarked that explicitly foregrounds “politically unnoticed” and taken-for-granted elements of social reality. Three strategies are proposed toward this end: (1) reversing conventional patterns of markedness to foreground what typically remains unnamed and implicit, (2) marking everything by filling in all the shades of social contin...

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/202213.pdf

A sociology of the unmarked : Redirecting our focus

The dilemma of domestic work in postapartheid South Africa should not be viewed as an isolated phenomenon of marginal interest to sociologists. The globalization of paid domestic work means that hundreds of thousands of women from poor countries in the global South are living in a form of servitude, as they work for low wages, under abusive conditions in wealthier countries as part of a ‘‘global care chain.’’ In this brilliant study, Shireen Ally demonstrates how these relations of servitude have resisted change in ‘‘the national care chain’’ in contemporary South Africa. Post-apartheid South Africa is a contradictory place. On the one hand there is deepening inequality, poverty and widespread collective violence in the form of xenophobic attacks against foreigners and violent protests about the failure of the local state to deliver substantive social citizenship in the shape of access to housing, jobs, water, electricity and sanitation. On the other hand the new constitution embodies a powerful vision of participatory democracy, new institutions to protect human rights, and the redrafting of apartheid labor legislation included one of the most extensive and expansive efforts anywhere in the world to recognize paid domestic work as a form of employment. These state efforts to modernize and professionalize domestic work as a form of employment were remarkable. Existing labor legislation was extended inter alia to include a landmark national minimum wage, mandatory formal contracts of employment, extensive leave, formal registration, as well as access to unemployment insurance benefits, which Ally points out was a ‘‘world first.’’ However, a central thesis of the book is that the outcome has been disempowering for domestic workers. With analytical depth and sensitivity, Ally demonstrates the persistence of servitude. Paradoxically, the book suggests that domestic workers’ lives have not changed much under democracy and many feel that ‘‘things are worse than before.’’ While they are the beneficiaries of ‘‘an extensive democratic statecraft’’ attempting to turn ‘‘servants’’ into workers with the same rights as other workers, their social position as migrant ‘‘mother-workers,’’ often caring for their employers’ children at the expense of their own, has not been affected. Ally explains this paradox in the tension between the forms of formal power deployed by the post-apartheid state in its efforts to protect these ‘‘vulnerable’’ workers and the forms of informal power generated by the intimate nature of their work. This involves a ‘‘contradictory collision of depersonalizing rights and personalizing intimacy’’ (p. 187). In the absence of state protection under apartheid, South African domestic workers had elaborate ‘‘practices of power’’ rooted in their highly personalized relationships with employers, as a way to control their work. ‘‘In the absence of labor rights defining leave provisions, sitting down every morning with tea and talking to one’s employer about her problems became a way to ensure an extended Christmas vacation’’ (p. 13). These informal mechanisms for negotiating working conditions have continued and demonstrate these women’s creativity and assertiveness. Another paradox Ally identifies in this highly original exploration is that the political inclusion of domestic workers has ironically depoliticized them. Making domestic workers the subjects of rights through their construction as ‘‘vulnerable’’ defined their political status as incapacitated and inert. With the state positioning itself as the representative and protector of domestic workers’ interests, they were demobilized, their unions displaced and weakened and their voices muted. Thus Ally argues that ‘‘the attempt to turn ‘servants’ into workers through liberal democratic rights, rather

Out in the Country: Youth, Media, and Queer Visibility in Rural America

Peacocks, Chameleons, Centaurs: Gay Suburbia and the Grammar of Social Identity

This article theoretically develops the concepts of social markingand mental coloringas processes in assigning and maintaining other-defined sexual identities in the United States. While most studies of sexual identity focus exclusively on sexual orientation as the foundation for identity construction, I demonstrate that contemporary sexual identities are formed along six hierarchically arranged dimensions represented as continuums. These dimensions include (1) quantity of sex, (2) timing of sex, (3) level of perceived enjoyment, (4) degree of consent, (5) orientation, and (6) social value of agents. Along these dimensions, the social marking process is used to construct discrete identities at each extreme. Social marking is a rigid, asymmetrical classification process that accents one side of a contrast as unnatural, thereby tacitly naturalizing the unmarked side. Mental coloring intensifies the rigid contrast by figuratively painting all members of the marked category under a single stereotypical image. I introduce two ideal-typical classification conventions for assigning marked identities: the mental one-drop ruleand the mental entire-ocean rule.These conventions maintain the rigidity of the marking process by preventing identity categories from overlapping. I conclude that the cognitive sociological processes outlined in this article are generalizable to the broader study of identity constructions. Ultimately the social marking of identity legitimates unequal treatment of marked categories by creating the illusion that they are less natural than the unmarked.

Wayne H. Brekhus

Papers

A sociology of the unmarked : Redirecting our focus

Out in the Country: Youth, Media, and Queer Visibility in Rural America

Peacocks, Chameleons, Centaurs: Gay Suburbia and the Grammar of Social Identity

Social marking and the mental coloring of identity: Sexual identity construction and maintenance in the United States

The stranger next door : the story of a small community's battle over sex, faith, and civil rights