Drawing on an online ethnography at PeniSanity.com, a support site for men who perceive their penises to be small, this article examines site members' descriptions of their everyday experiences of exposure to the gaze of other men. Site members describe offline exposure as inducing anxieties about having their 'small penises' seen. In contrast, online exposure, particularly at the website itself, is often described as liberating. I conclude with a discussion of the contextual resources available in these settings that account for these differences.
Recent studies suggest that denial is a socially organized and culturally mediated process. This article furthers the study of socially organized denial by theorizing and empirically examining the role of texts in official denial. I examine the ways that institutional documents serve as resources for state officials to interpret and typify instances of state violence. To do so, I draw on a qualitative content analysis of 10 U.S. Congressional hearings that focus on the violence against detainees in U.S. custody at Abu Ghraib and Guant anamo. Though comparable acts of violence were committed at both facilities, I show that military officials employed different variants of interpretive denial to account for the two cases. Underlying these variants of denial were different descriptions of the connection between the violence and institutional texts that established authorized interrogation practices. Specifically, military officials causally isolated Abu Ghraib, denying the link between Interrogation Rules of Engagement in Iraq and the violence at the prison. Officials, on the other hand, interpreted the instances of violence at Guant anamo as expressions of lawful, institutionally available interrogation techniques. I conclude by discussing the implications of these findings for the study of denial, interpretive work in organizational contexts, and human rights.
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