Everyday Inequalities

Thirteen newly published articles on case studies performed by sociologists demonstrating the everyday interactions that reinforce dominance and resistance in modern society.

List of Contributors vii

Foreword xi
Mary Romero

Preface xvii

Acknowledgments xxi

Introduction: Differences and Inequalities 1
Jodi O’Brien

Part I. Everyday Interaction 41

Doing Studs: The Performance of Gender and Sexuality on Late-Night Television 43
Jocelyn A. Hollander

"I Need a Screw": Workplace Sexualization as an Interactional Achievement 73
Linda Van Leuven

Acknowledgment Rituals: The Greeting Phenomenon Between Strangers 97
Carl Edward Pate

"Are You Male or Female?" Gender Performances on Muds 131
Lori Kendall

Part II. Managing Self/Society Conflicts 155

Frederick the Great or Frederick’s of Hollywood? The Accomplishment of Gender Among Women In the Military 157
Melissa S. Herbert

Sisyphus In a Wheelchair: Men with Physical Disabilities Confront Gender Domination 189
Thomas J. Gerschick

Class Dismissed? Quad City Women Doing The Life 213
Martha L. Shockey

Managing Everyday Racisms: The Anti-Racist Practices of White Mothers of African-Descent Children in Britain 237
France Winddance Twine

Frontlines and Borders: Identity Thresholds for Latinas and Arab American Women 253
Laura M. Lopez and Frances S. Hasso

Part III. Institutional Dynamics 281

The Image That Dane Not Speak Its Name: Homoerotics in New Deal Photography 283
Shelley Kowalski

Reproducing Racial and Class Inequality: Multiculturalism in the Arts 309
Jennifer L. Eichstedt

The Politics of Race and Sport: Resistance and Domination in the 1968 African American Olympic Protest Movement 337
Douglas Hartmann

Belongings: Citizenship, Sexuality, and the Market 361
Anthony J. Freitas

Afterthoughts 385
Judith A. Howard

Index 397

"O'Brien and Howard have brought together an engaging and lively collection of articles that demonstrate the various ways that people create, re-create, and sometimes challenge social inequalities in our everyday interactions. This collection challenges the current simplistic tendency to see the 'doing of difference' as mere racial, gender, social class, or sexual 'performance'; Instead, the authors in Everyday Inequalities creatively illuminate various situations - in media, workplaces, the arts, or the street-in which people are actively negotiating their identities and their positions within socially-structured contexts of inequality." Michael A. Messner, University of Southern California Jodi O'Brien is Associate Professor of Sociology at Seattle University. She co-edited with Peter Kollock The Production of Reality, 2nd edition, (1997). She writes and lectures in the area of cultural politics, marginal identities and communities.

Judith A. Howard is Professor of Sociology at the University of Washington. She lectures and researches in the area of gender and the intersections of gender dynamics with race, class and sexuality. She is currently co-editing SIGNS: Journal of Women in Culture and Society.

This collection provides, the everyday practice of structural and cultural hierarchies is revealed through empirical case studies by cutting edge sociologists. Everyday Inequalities demonstrates practices of dominance and resistance in a variety of settings through a series of essays on gender, race, class, sexuality, disability, and their complex intersections. These essays powerfully reveal how these practices continually reinscribe hierarchies of power and privilege in society.

Containing essays by up-and-coming scholars as well as more established researchers, Everyday Inequalities uses techniques found in cultural studies and empirical methods of sociological inquiry to theorize the everyday practices of social inequalities through grounded demonstrations and analyses.