Although ethical vegetarianism has been the subject of considerable theoretical attention and debate among feminists, the subject has received little empirical attention. This research note summarizes an interview study with ethical vegetarians of college age, and describes gendered responses to the adoption of a vegetarian diet. While friends and family were neutral or favourable to men’s vegetarianism, women vegetarians encountered significant hostility from male family members, in particular. The study is by no means conclusive, but the evidence may suggest that this hostility is rooted in a double standard, wherein men are seen as capable of governing their bodies, while women are not. Despite opposition from male intimates, women participating in the study persisted in their diets, suggesting a high degree of moral autonomy. This tension between individual agency and constraining social and economic structure is at the centre of the ongoing feminist debate on vegetarianism, and the findings presented here invite further discussion and more targeted research.
strategy of ''archiving'' the consequences of normalized state violence shows how everyday discourses of deservingness and belonging to the normative community work as social control to justify regressive policies. LeBrón also shows the great courage and resourcefulness of those who attempt to create new alternatives on the ground. The politics of resistance receive equal analytic attention alongside the politics of repression, resulting in a complex account of Puerto Rican life in the current moment.
Judgment and distinction have been topics of persistent interest for cultural sociologists. Recent theory has particularly emphasized social interaction and cognition as key sites for understanding judgment, and a number of studies examine gatekeeping practices as a means of understanding the interactive and perceptual determinants of judgment. This article builds upon previous work by presenting the results of an eighteen-month ethnography at a long-running little magazine based in a large American city. In addition to providing an empirical description of an important but understudied domain of cultural production, this article has two findings of theoretical interest. First, without strong external constraints on processes of group evaluation, editors’ judgments became markedly negative, and their deliberations were often inconclusive. Second, negative and positive evaluations were not symmetric, but were produced by two differing sets of evaluative practices. These findings are broadly consistent with developing field theoretic descriptions of social life, but also raise many empirical and theoretical questions.Citation: Merriman, Ben. 2017. “The Editorial Meeting at a Little Magazine: An Ethnography of Group Judgment.” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 46(4): 440-463.
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