The American tradition of action theory failed to produce a useful theory of the possible existence of trans-individual consistencies in sexual desirability. Instead, most sociological theorists have relied on market metaphors to account for the logic of sexual action. Through a critical survey of sociological attempts to explain the social organization of sexual desiring, this article demonstrates that the market approach is inadequate, and that its inadequacies can be remedied by studying sexual action as occurring within a specifically sexual field (...) , with a correlative sexual capital. Such a conception allows for historical and comparative analysis of changes in the organization of sexual action that are impeded by the use of a market metaphor, and also points to difficulties in Bourdieu's own treatment of the body qua body. (shrink)

Throughout the 19th century and early decades of the 20th century, milk was a dangerous food that required state intervention to make it safe. Throughout this period, the germ theory of contagious disease came to prominence, but could not explicitly determine the causal relationships linking germs, milk, and human illness. Using the notion of an ideational regime, I examine how (1) knowledge claims move from uncertainty to certainty and become privileged claims within ideational regimes that (2) result in an unintended, (...) but necessary deployment of a biopolitical strategy for governance. The argument here is that theoretical uncertainty meant managing populations as a uniform undifferentiated reality using pasteurization technologies. I use two historical moments as evidence of these processes. The first is the 1901 British Congress on Tuberculosis when I argue germ theory came to a theoretical standstill and the second is Ontario’s 1938 amendment to the province’s Public Health Act that permanently institutionalised province-wide compulsory pasteurisation laws organised around the notion of nutritional equivalency. This genealogical exploration should provide some insight into how bacteria became the singular cause of illness and into the conditions that led to targeting milk as the main site of intervention instead of treating individual bodies. (shrink)

Using the phenomenological perspective provided by the concept of embodiment, this article shows that in Cuenca, Ecuador, knowledge about the body is fluid and during illness women can seek reassurance and explanations from multiple knowledge systems, including locally understood subordinate ones. Employing the concept of `character', as described by Ricoeur, as an explanation for why some women are more vulnerable to illness than others, the author argues that gender ideologies and notions of self-identity intersect in Ecuadorian conceptions of weakness and (...) illness. Women's narrative descriptions of themselves and their experiences with envy illness (envidia) indicate that the experience of illness is an extremely powerful one and that women's interpretations of it cross typical social class divisions. Embodied illness creates a place and moment for revealing that which is often hidden. (shrink)

Based upon a collaborative autoethnographic research project, this article explores from a sociological perspective the emotional dimension of the injured sporting body. It takes as its analytic focus the journey, rehabilitative, emotional and narrative, of two middle-aged, non-élite, middle/long-distance runners who encountered serious, long-term knee injuries. The paper examines in particular the interactional and narrative elements of the rehabilitative journey, focussing on dimensions of the emotion management, emotion work, and emotional intersubjectivity of the researcher/author and her training partner as they (...) struggled to contend with the liminality of the injured athletic role, and to maintain positive identities in the face of serious threat to their running selves. (shrink)