MAY CONTAIN MARKUP

Edwin M. Schur

In "Labeling Women: Deviant," the intricate interplay between gender, stigma, and social control is meticulously examined. This thought-provoking exploration delves into the ways in which societal labels and norms are applied to women, shaping their identity and influencing their place in the world. Through insightful analysis and compelling examples, this book challenges readers to reconsider the implications of labeling women as deviant and calls for a more nuanced understanding of the complex forces at play. A must-read for anyone interested in social justice, gender studies, and the dynamics of power in society.

NY. RANDOM HOUSE. 1984. 294p.

MAY CONTAIN MARKUP

Edited by NANETTE HEIMAN and JOAN GRANT

Else Frenkel-Brunswik: Selected Papers offers a comprehensive collection of the pioneering psychologist's most significant works. Frenkel-Brunswick's insightful research on authoritarianism, prejudice, and personality dynamics continues to be influential in the field of psychology. This curated selection provides readers with a deep dive into her groundbreaking theories and empirical studies, shedding light on the complexities of human behavior and societal attitudes. A must-read for scholars, students, and anyone interested in the intersection of psychology and social issues.

International Universities Press, 1974, 333 pages

By Katrine Rummelhoff

This thesis addresses the, now infamous, incel community. The term Incel is an abbreviation of “involuntary celibate”, and is defined by the incel community, as a person who desires, but is unable to obtain a romantic or sexual relationship. Over the last decade incels have gained notoriety due to the unabashed misogynistic rhetoric that is cultivated within the online communities they have created for themselves. Additionally several mass killers have been linked to the group, and as a whole the community is said to be responsible for a death toll of over 47. As such incels have been designated a domestic terrorism thereat by, among others, International Center for Counter Terrorism and The Texas Department of Public Safety. Yet, there is still much that remains unknown about incels and the online world they have created for themselves. In order to broaden this understanding I have performed a netnographic (Kozinets 2010, 2015) study of the website incels.co, an international forum site exclusively catering to self-proclaimed incels, and dedicated to the discussion of inceldom. Through daily observation of the site and an analysis of over 100 forum threads I have tried to determine the overarching values, beliefs, worldviews, and ideologies present within their discourse. Further, this study attempts to create an understanding of the appeal this community has to its members. The material collected in this study is first placed within its historical, cultural and material context, in order to understand the circumstances surrounding the resurgence of male supremacist ideology in online spaces. Subsequently the data from incels.co is analyzed using political, sociological and psychological theories on radicalization, evaluating the claim made by others that incel terrorism is a growing threat. Findings indicate however, that although the incels.co community is engaging in a radicalization of beliefs there is insufficient evidence to support a radicalization of behaviors. To make sense of the structure and organization that facilitates the radicalization of beliefs, the incels.co community is then examined through a subcultural lens. Finding that the site offers a succinct sense of subcultural belonging, providing a community of shared identity, shared meanings, countercultural values, and guidelines and justifications for behavior. Yet, it is also apparent that the notion of involuntary celibacy extends beyond this subculture, and as such I make the claim that not all incels are subcultural, but that a distinct incel subculture exists. Lastly, this study looks at the collectivist aspects of the incel community and makes the claim that incels.co functions as a platform for extremist beliefs to be cultivated and subsequently internalized by its users. With the help of Interaction Ritual Theory (Collins 2004) the interplay performed online is seen as a ritual engagement, where users will entrain around central ideas and objects, resulting in an experience of collective effervescence, emotional energy and group solidarity. Through such collective focus, ideas, beliefs, moral codes, myths and sacred objects pertaining to women, social hierarchies, and sexuality are cultivated and become part of the groups’ social reality. Overall, this thesis uses theories on radicalization, subculture and interaction ritual in order to make the claim that the incels.co platform is hosting an extremist collectivist subculture that experiences radicalization through a collective entrainment around sacred objects. In doing so this thesis provides new dimensions to work on radicalization as it places an emphasis on shared and collective processes in the cultivation of radical and extremist beliefs.

Oslo: University of Oslo, 2020. 101p.

By Aleksandra Dier and Gretchen Baldwin

While only a small percentage of men become involved in violent extremism, the majority of violent extremists are men. Across the ideological spectrum, violent extremist and terrorist groups exploit male sentiments of emasculation and loss of power and appeal to ideas of manhood in their recruitment efforts. Yet policymakers rarely focus on gender to help them understand why some men engage in violence and others do not or what role peaceful notions of masculinity play in preventing radicalization and terrorism. Similarly, male-dominated counterterrorism institutions rarely pose the question of how masculinities shape these institutions and their approaches to counterterrorism and countering violent extremism (CVE).

This report discusses masculinities—the socially constructed ideas of what it means to be a man—as they are constructed and used by violent extremist groups, as they exist in and interact with society, and as they interplay with the state. It draws on examples pertaining to both “Islamist” and extreme right-wing terrorism, considering differences not just between but also within these ideologies.

New York: International Peace Institute and UN Security Council Counter-Terrorism Committee Executive Directorate, 2022. 22p.

Edited by Magaly Rodríguez García, Lex Heerma van Voss, and Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk

Selling Sex in the City offers a worldwide analysis of prostitution that takes a long historical approach which covers a time period from 1600 to the 2000s. The overviews in this volume examine sex work in more than twenty notorious “sin cities” around the world, ranging from Sydney to Singapore and from Casablanca to Chicago. Situated within a comparative framework of local developments, the book takes up themes such as labour relations, coercion, agency, gender, and living and working conditions. Selling Sex in the City thus reveals how prostitution and societal reactions to the trade have been influenced by colonization, industrialization, urbanization, the rise of nation states, imperialism, and war, as well as by revolutions in politics, transport, and communication.

Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2017. 909p.

Edited by Maria Isabel Romero-Ruiz and Pilar Cuder-Domínguez.

A Mediterranean Approach to the Anglosphere. This Open Access book considers the cultural representation of gender violence, vulnerability and resistance with a focus on the transnational dimension of our contemporary visual and literary cultures in English. Contributors address concepts such as vulnerability, resilience, precarity and resistance in the Anglophone world through an analysis of memoirs, films, TV series, and crime and literary fiction across India, Ireland, Canada, Australia, the US, and the UK. Chapters explore literary and media displays of precarious conditions to examine whether these are exacerbated when intersecting with gender and ethnic identities, thus resulting in structural forms of vulnerability that generate and justify oppression, as well as forms of individual or collective resistance and/or resilience. Substantial insights are drawn from Animal Studies, Critical Race Studies, Human Rights Studies, Post-Humanism and Postcolonialism.

Cham: Springer Nature, 2022. 241p.

By Asbjørn Grønstad.

This book explores the figuration of screen violence, as well as its historical and institutional contexts, in a number of metaviolent films both celebrated and vilified, and attempts thereby to forge a new understanding of a phenomenon whose defining feature seems to be perpetually elusive. As Transfigurations grapples with a series of issues that at times may seem only tenuously interrelated, I shall here take the liberty to summarize and pinpoint its major preoccupation. The objective is to re-establish an awareness of the transtextual opacity of film fiction, an awareness long occluded both by theoretical fallacies and by the petrification of our acquired ways of seeing.

Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2008. 278p.

By Samantha Caslin.

The title of this book is taken from a statement made by a Liverpool based women’s refuge, the House of Help, in 1918. Having offered its services to women for two decades, the House of Help looked towards the end of the First World War with the hope that their organization could be part of the ‘building’ of a ‘new world by helping to save the womanhood of our country’.1 Their work providing temporary shelter to women who found themselves lost, stranded or penniless in Liverpool was just one element of local, social purity inspired philanthropic efforts to save young, typically working-class, women from the supposedly corrupting effects of urban life and the temptation to earn money via prostitution. This was a moral war, waged around the docks, the city’s main train station at Lime Street, in city centre entertainment districts and in working-class neighbourhoods. Many of the women who stayed at the House of Help had been directed or brought there by women patrollers from the Liverpool Vigilance Association (LVA) and the local Women Police Patrols. Together, the activities of these patrollers and moral welfare workers proliferated a gendered sense of urban space that was predicated upon the idea that some women required moral guidance in order to deter them from the temptations of vice and sexual immorality.

Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2018. 248p.

By Anthony McEnery and Helen Baker.

Corpus linguistics has much to offer history, being as both disciplines engage so heavily in analysis of large amounts of textual material. This book demonstrates the opportunities for exploring corpus linguistics as a method in historiography and the humanities and social sciences more generally. Focussing on the topic of prostitution in 17th-century England, it shows how corpus methods can assist in social research, and can be used to deepen our understanding and comprehension. McEnery and Baker draw principally on two sources – the newsbook Mercurius Fumigosis and the Early English Books Online Corpus. This scholarship on prostitution and the sex trade offers insight into the social position of women in history.

London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016. 271p.

By Terah J. Stewart.

Sex Work On Campus examines the experiences of college students engaged in sex work and sparks dialogue about the ways educators might develop a deeper appreciation for—and praxis of—equity and justice on campus. Analysing a study conducted with seven college student sex workers, the book focuses on sex work histories, student motivations and how power (or lack thereof) associated with social identity shapes experiences of student sex work. It examines what these students learn because of sex work, and what college and university leaders can do to support them. These findings are combined in tandem with analysis of current research, popular culture, sex work rights movements, and exploration of legal contexts. This fresh and important writing is suitable for students and scholars in sexuality studies, gender studies, sociology, and education.

London; New York: Routledge, 2022. 219p.

By Eirini Avramopoulou and Irene Peano.

Porno-Graphics and Porno-Tactics asks whether, and how, it is possible to re-appropriate pornography and think through it critically and creatively for a project of liberation. In the different contributions which make up this deliberately heterogeneous collection of short, non-canonical essays, such a quest proceeds by re-articulating the aporias of desire, intimacy, touch and seduction. It also relates them to claims of visibility, visions of emancipation and its failures, as well as to the politics of violence that we get exposed to through circulating images and affects. This is an attempt to exceed the limits set by and for ourselves in relation to how we connect to our own bodies, to the bodies of our lovers and to the bodies of the theories we live with, sleep with and dream about – in short, to all that we get attached to. The editors and contributors of this collection do not claim the euphoric potentiality of pornography as necessarily subversive and emancipatory, but are nevertheless open to the possibilities of re-shaping it (in textual, contextual, intertextual, but also affective and embodied forms) through different graphic and tactical/tactile inscriptions. On the one hand, authors reflect on definitions and practices of pornography as a genre adopting specific codes and canons, whether it is concerned with sex acts and the industry of porn or with other predominant forms of representation and the structures of power underlying them. On the other hand, chapters relate to the more affective, libidinal, synaesthetic and inter/subjective dimensions of pornography, and on the capacity of different reappropriations to subvert its limits.

Punctum books. (2016)

By Eleanor L. Hannah.

During the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era, thousands upon thousands of American men devoted their time and money to the creation of an unsought—and in some quarters unwelcome—revived state militia. In this book, Eleanor L. Hannah studies the social history of the National Guard, focusing on issues of manhood and citizenship as they relate to the rise of the state militias. In brief, the National Guard of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is best interpreted as one of a host of associations and organizations that American men of those eras devised to help them negotiate their location and purpose in the strange new world of industrial capitalism. The National Guards brought men from a wide array of regions, ethnicities, races, and economic backgrounds together in a single organization. These men were united by a shared understanding of ideal manhood and civic responsibility that could be expressed through membership in a state militia. Once committed to the power of the word and the image evoked by the term “soldier” to bring diverse men together in one common bond, the men who volunteered their time and money had to give soldiering their serious attention. By 1900 a commitment to soldiering that was founded on shared social needs took on a life of its own and refocused National Guard members on an individualized, technical, professional military training—on a new kind of manhood for a new age.

Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2007. 304p.