Italian Sociological Review

Socialization in Sambo and Inter-Generational Transfer of Sambo Value

2024-01-08T08:33:25+00:00

The sport of sambo is the result of the Soviet legacy, embedded in a rich historical tradition that seek to guide its practitioners through life. Here, I explore how this legacy is expressed through its practitioners, specifically, post-socialist sambo-practicing migrants. I conceptualize sambo’s imprint as a structural and cultural conditioner according to Archer’s (1995) analytical dualism, predisposing them towards certain situational logics. When the sambo practitioners interact with local sport environments, several courses of action are discerned. For the first-generation migrants who are born into the ‘sambo way’, the influence of sambo weighs heavily in their decision-making. This is negotiated, and the agency plays a vital part when integrating into the mainstream sports-sphere. However, for migrants not born into the sambo doctrine, the influence is peripheral and diminished in favor of other, stronger, belief systems. In conclusion, sambo exerts a strong normative force, but the transmission between generations severely hampers the meaning and impact of sambo.

For a Sociology of Art: Dancing Cyborgs Between Digital Choreographies and Speculative Horizons

2023-10-25T20:57:46+00:00

Human creativity records and throws again the dynamics of social transformations. It expresses itself into poetics that must be costantly interpreted. These poetics exhort to think of the complex relationship between narrative fields, techno-communicative mutations and epistemological frontiers. The paper will focus on the analysis of the mirroring between the creative parable traced by contemporary digital choreographies and the speculative horizon. Object of the reflection will be some significant segments of imaginary, conceivable as transpositions into choreutical acts of theoretical assumptions. These theories can be intended as narrations of the present and of the future, particularly careful in the interpretation of the structural processes. It will attempt to demonstrate how by the actual acceleration of the computational power in the area of the simulation and in the area of the perceptual reorientation, the intersection between the spectacular domain and the conceptual one produces an extension of the operative sphere of the dance. Like many forms of narrative, the terpsichorean art is increasingly acquiring a heuristic valence. The dancers destined to inhabit the mathematized space of digital descriptions incarnate the connection between the political experience - meaning the latter term in its etymological significance - and the sociomorphic representation of the human body. The protagonists of the works examined represent on aesthetic level the sense-informational métissage realized by the process of cybernatization of the human being, reflect the suspension of the semantic duality between biology and technique, interpret therefore the chimerical reconfiguration of the statute of contemporary identities.

On the ‘Female Gaze’ in the Interview Setting: Methodological Insights From Fieldwork With Women

2023-03-29T07:21:54+00:00

Building on a constructivist understanding of the interview techniques common to the social sciences, in this paper I discuss and analyse through a feminist sociological lens the interview setting that I built and experienced during two years of fieldwork with a small sample of Canadian women. Relevant conversational gestures exchanged in such a setting usually encompass verbal and bodily cues, but what principally concerns me here is a further aspect of the interview setting: namely, its visuality, and the related act of gazing carried out by the (female) participants. Using the concept of the ‘female gaze’ (Riley et al., 2016) – i.e., the self-assessing, judgemental gaze that women direct at one another and at themselves in postfeminist contexts – I offer salient examples from my fieldwork in order to show the ways in which the female gaze shaped my understanding of how women look at themselves and at each other (including at me, as interviewer), both in person and in pictures. My goal is to analyse gazing as a competence, and more specifically as a structured and regulated female competence in postfeminist culture, but also to bring a greater reflexivity to bear on the embodied experience of fieldwork (Oakley, 1981; Pillow, 1997). As I came to learn in the course of this project, the act of gazing while conversing, accompanied by the corresponding verbal cues, played a crucial, if unexpected and unplanned, role in data production and in my subsequent choice of research questions.

Gender Reconstruction in Indonesian Muslim Families in Hadith Memes

2023-11-06T10:20:45+00:00

Hadith memes are individual expressions of daily socio-religious reality through social media, including negotiating gender in an open and free virtual space. This paper aims to explore gender construction in Muslim families through hadith memes on Facebook pages. Using qualitative methods and a feminist approach, the study shows that the gender reconstruction contained in hadith memes is part of the individuals’ and communities’ freedom of expression in understanding religion through the selection and interpretation of hadith texts according to their knowledge, and dissemination through social media. Gender reconstruction in Muslim families shows debatable opinions between conservative and progressive Muslim groups; Muslim feminists criticize the hegemony of men as a religious authority supporting the patriarchal ideology in social media. This trend is fostered simultaneously with the strengthening of individual religious authority in the digital space to reconstruct and negotiated gender based on the interpretation of the Islamic texts in religious memes.

Occupational Gender Segregation and Social Conflict: Segregation and Credentialism Among Young Workers in Two Occupational Classes

2024-03-01T14:59:38+00:00

Drawing from social conflict and credentialist theory, we analyze how the field of education influences young women’s chances of access to male-dominated occupations in two occupational classes: professionals and technicians.

We further four hypotheses: 1) Women’s default chances of access differ between professionals and technicians. 2) Models of capitalism have little influence over the field of education’s moderation effect. 3) STEM fields of education increase women’s chances of access to male-dominated occupations. 4) Moderation is stronger for male-dominated STEM educational fields.

We gather data from the European Labour Force Survey for workers between 25 and 34 years of age and compute logit models for each class. We perform decomposition analysis with the Karlson-Holm-Breen method and then compute logit models with interaction terms.

Women’s default chances of access are higher among professionals. The field of education significantly increases women’s chances of access. However, STEM fields such as natural sciences and agriculture, where women represent roughly 50% of graduates, perform worse than male-dominated fields of education such as ICT and Engineering. This is more pronounced among professionals, suggesting that we witness a more substantial reaction to preserving male dominance when women close their gap in opportunities compared to men.

Exploring the Italian Space of Lifestyles: Food, Class, and Their Homology

2024-01-09T15:29:33+00:00

In his prominent Distinction, Bourdieu captured a homology between spaces of lifestyles and social positionings in 1960s France, in which he discerned a relationship between tastes of necessity and tastes of luxury, regarding numerous culturally-defined consumables, food included. Ever since, the relation between social actors’ positionings, food consumption, and tastes has been explored in other European countries, but not yet in Italy. Against this background, from cultural-sociological and post-structuralist points of view, this study argues that to comprehend how food, invested with cultural and moral meanings, is being used to differentiate, it is necessary to map the homology between tastes and positions. It explores this relationship by using quantitative data from the Italian household budget survey, focusing on the expenditure on food. The study finds that regardless of previously recorded regional variations in foodways and cuisines, tastes of necessity and luxury can be identified. In the case of the former, consumed foods are predominantly associated with function, substantiality, cheapness, heaviness, and tradition, while in the case of the latter, it distances itself from necessity through foods that are exclusive, lighter, more expensive, fiddly to eat, exotic, and are consumed in all due form. Positioned relationally, such distinction through taste points towards a mechanism whereby ingesting said foods, social actors likewise embody the associated moral properties and participate in a constant struggle of worth. The article concludes with recommendations for the necessary further explorations of spaces of positionings and lifestyles in Italy.

Intimacy, Passion and Commitment in Consensual Non-monogamies. An Empirical Study on an International Sample

2024-01-17T15:37:48+00:00

The transformations of intimacy represent an important field of study for contemporary sociology. Among these, consensual non-monogamies are forms of relationship in which all partners give explicit consent to engage in romantic, intimate, and/or sexual relationships with multiple people. These new forms of relationship reflect some characteristics of the contemporary world: the flexibility, the reversibility of choices, the redefinition of gender relations, the centrality of open communication among partners.

In this study, we applied the well-known Sternberg Triangular Love Scale to measure intimacy, passion and commitment in an international sample consisting of 558 people from 33 countries, who practice forms of consensual non-monogamy and who had at least two simultaneous emotional or romantic relationships at the time of the research.

Results seems partially similar to that found in previous studies applying the same scale to monogamous relationships. In particular, it is partially confirmed that the commitment dimension increases with the duration of the relationship, and that the intimacy dimension is substantially stable. Contrary to previous studies that described a progressive waning of passion as the relationship progressed, in our sample this dimension proved to be substantially stable over time. Furthermore, the three dimensions in one relationship are all positively and significantly correlated to the three dimensions in the other relationship. A possible interpretation of this finding is that there is a “virtuous” effect among multiple relationships experienced by the same person: the liveliness, the duration and depth of a relationship do not necessarily subtract resources from the other (or from the others).