Virtual Library

To mobilize support for war and to control dissent, governments draw upon deeply engrained discourses regarding soldiering and the citizen's duty to support the troops. We identify the cultural and political evolution of the discursive legacy of “support the troops” from the Vietnam War through the Iraq War. Using longitudinal and comparative organizational analyses, we analyze how this discursive legacy was engaged by U.S. peace movement organizations (PMOs). PMOs frequently made positive references to U.S. troops during both the Gulf War and Iraq War, creating a stable discourse centered around supporting the troops. Moreover, during the Gulf War the movement expanded the web of support by asking who else should be cared about beyond the troops, thus de-coupling the support discourse from the nation and the state. During the Iraq War, PMOs also developed an elaborated “discourse of betrayal” by redefining what it means to support the troops. Here they deployed proactive, anticipatory discourses, turning the tables on the Bush administration. PMOs also increasingly criticized the troops during the Iraq War due to well publicized human rights abuses. The findings demonstrate that movement discourses are both stable and flexible, influenced by past rounds of discursive contention as well as contemporary political events. We highlight the cultural constraints imposed on movements by dominant discursive legacies, and the strategic responses made by movements in response to emerging discursive opportunities.

Finding Women in the State is a provocative hidden history of socialist state feminists maneuvering behind the scenes at the core of the Chinese Communist Party. These women worked to advance gender and class equality in the early People's Republic and fought to transform sexist norms and practices, all while facing fierce opposition from a male-dominated CCP leadership from the Party Central to the local government. Wang Zheng extends this investigation to the cultural realm, showing how feminists within China's film industry were working to actively create new cinematic heroines, and how they continued a New Culture anti-patriarchy heritage in socialist film production. This book illuminates not only the different visions of revolutionary transformation but also the dense entanglements among those in the top echelon of the party. Wang discusses the causes for failure of China's socialist revolution and raises fundamental questions about male dominance in social movements that aim to pursue social justice and equality. This is the first book engendering the PRC high politics and has important theoretical and methodological implications for scholars and students working in gender studies as well as China studies.

This article defends the claim that human rights is a legitimate subject of inquiry for sociologists, and proceeds to present the case for a particular application of sociological theory to the understanding of gross human rights violations. Sociology, it claims, is equipped to study the dynamics of social institutions – socially constructed language-structures within which social action is framed – and since the mid-20th century, human rights has become such an institution. The article advocates an intellectual project for the sociology of rights, drawing on a diverse range of sources, that recognises how human rights abuses are made possible when the very concept of the ‘human’ is subtly redefined through these language-structures.

Although the study of citizenship has been an important development in contemporary sociology, the nature of rights has been largely ignored. The analysis of human rights presents a problem for sociology, in which cultural relativism and the fact-value distinction have largely destroyed the classical tradition of the natural-law basis for rights discourse. This critique of the idea of universal rights was prominent in the work of Marx, Durkheim and Weber. However, recent developments in the organisation of nation states, the globalisation of political issues, the transformation of family life, and changes in medical technology in relation to human reproduction have brought the question of human rights to the forefront of social and political debate. The paper argues that a sociology of rights is important, because there are obvious limitations to the idea of citizenship, which is based on membership of a nation state. Existing conceptualisations of citizenship require the supplement of rights theory. It is argued that sociology can ground the analysis of human rights in a concept of human frailty, especially the vulnerability of the body, in the idea of the precariousness of social institutions, and in a theory of moral sympathy. These three analytical supports - ontological frailty, social precariousness, and moral sympathy - are partly derived from the philosophical anthropology of Arnold Gehlen, from Ulrich Beck's concept of the risk society, and Max Scheler's phenomenology of sympathy. Emodied frailty is a human universal condition, which is compounded by the risky and precarious nature of social institutions. Human vulnerability can be contained or ameliorated by the institution of rights which protect human beings from this ontological uncertainty. From a sociological perspective, rights are social claims for institutionalised protection. However, it is because of collective sympathy for the plight of others that moral communities are created which support the institution of rights. This thesis not only offers a sociological version of traditional notions of natural or inalienable rights, but also attempts to provide a sociological alternative to enlightenment theories of social contract and individual rights.

The rhetorical techniques by which governments deny, justify, and qualify alleged instances of torture have been well documented. Sociologists, however, have neglected the social contexts in which officials confront allegations of torture, as well as officials' use of evidence to strengthen their own or weaken competing claims about torture. Relying on findings from a qualitative content analysis of seven Senate Armed Services Committee hearings held in 2004 on “detainee abuse” at Abu Ghraib prison, this article examines the processes by which hearing participants portrayed the violence there as an isolated incident. Building on James A. Holstein and Jaber F. Gubrium's (2003) “constructionist analytics,” I examine the textual mediation of claims-making in the hearings, focusing on the interplay between textual realities of detainee abuse and the interpretive uses to which hearing participants put these realities. I show that developments in the textual environment of the hearings, particularly the development of a textually mediated vantage on events that “really occurred” throughout Afghanistan and Iraq, provided hearing participants with rich interpretive materials to downplay and rationalize instances of abuse that occurred in places other than Abu Ghraib prison. These findings suggest that official denial is sustained by diverse claims-making activities, including the production of a textual reality of human rights violations. The findings also extend the purview of social problems theory to account for the role of texts in the construction of social problems.

This article argues that the forms through which violence and atrocity are expressed – legal, statistical and testimonial – are important objects of analysis because credo is manifest in form, and an examination of form reveals something about the relationship between the ‘world view’ of human rights organizations and the ‘styles of thought’ that shape and inform their representations. The article considers what the discursive forms that seem indigenous to human rights and human rights advocacy both express (legalism, scientism) and repress (historicism), and discusses ways in which these forms of representation potentially facilitate and inhibit action.