Society最新文献

Middle-aged and older queer men are socially invisible across the world, especially in countries with a long history of criminalisation of homosexuality, such as India. The heteronormative society they grew up in and the perceived ageist gay culture within the queer community have contributed to the development of two stressors—internalised homophobia and internalised ageism, respectively—as adapted from Meyer’s minority stress model. However, the convergence of the two minority stressors can potentially affect the psychological well-being of individuals uniquely and is under-researched. Using in-depth interviews with 30 middle-aged to older gay men in urban Mumbai, India, the study contextualised this merged minority stressor in India—internalised gay ageism. Thematic analysis revealed three themes that discussed the social triggers leading to internalised homophobia, perceptions about ageism, and the development of internalised gay ageism among the participants. While participants presented with internalised homophobia and internalised ageism separately, the narratives also indicated the prevalence of internalised gay ageism, which likely influenced their late-life decision-making. By questioning the intersection of different minority stressors, this study underscores the need to understand further the complex impact of ageing on the psychological well-being of queer men in India.

The article shows, first, how Sociology has approached the concepts of “hope” and “war” and how throughout the history of the discipline these terms have gone from being neglected to arousing considerable interest. Second, the paper analyzes how and why avant-garde artists understood the First World War as a motif of utopian hope to annihilate a civilization in crisis and to transform it through its aesthetic formalization. Third, the essay tries to find out whether that hope was preserved over time or, on the contrary, was soon dissolved as a result of the drama of the events. It is shown here that the savagery of the fighting dissolved all European values of modernity and progress, including artistic ones. In fact, theoretical and stylistic conceptions, aesthetic categories, ethical postulates, and artists’ aspirations for conscience to rule the world were blurred. For the artistic avant-garde, utopian promises of a better world broke down. Consequently, this obliges sociologists to pay more attention to both phenomena—that of the war and that of the avant-garde—and to seek a more objective and critical interpretation of modernity, calling for its actualization, and of Sociology itself.

The main aim of this Symposium is to bring out the significance of qualitative research in the field of public health in India. The diverse articles are thematically interconnected and jointly provide socio-historical perspectives of different health concerns prevalent in colonial and postcolonial India. These are located at the crucial intersections between gender, sexuality, and health. While pointing towards the need for more qualitative research, this Symposium is a step towards creating new pathways and broadening the scope of public health research in India.

This article argues that love and care, and more specifically, the hope of a new world, were central to the ethos of the US Civil Rights movement of the late 1960s and the decolonial projects inspired by it. Starting from the work of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and other central activists of the era, this article explores how hope guided their visionary work. This article examines what differentiates the forms of hope deployed by civil rights activists and those of more recent US nationalist movements. This piece also traces the work of US third-wave feminists in creating a theory around radical hope, and the creation of what I define as a standpoint of hope: a type of consciousness that rejects the consumption of hope for selfish purposes and promotes a style of life that looks after the most vulnerable beyond one’s own group. As the article explains, hope works multi-dimensionally, as it can help people navigate their everyday struggles, envision a different outcome, and critically analyze their own history and experiences of oppression.

The article focuses on the bio-moral politics of semen in India. By engaging with religious, ascetic, scientific, and medical discourses on semen in the context of India, it emphasises that semen and the regimes of its control were shaped by complex discourses on health, immortality, and modern politico-medical notions of immunity. Based on sociohistorical and ethnographic perspectives, the article is an exploration of the modern scientific turn to semen in the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and how the politics of Indian (Hindu) nationalism enmeshed science, morality, and politics into a biopolitics of semen control. Based on my ethnographic fieldwork in the bayam samitis (traditional gymnasiums) and akharas (places of wrestling) of Kolkata, India, at present, I argue that the bio-moral politics of semen continues to remain entangled with the constitution of the virile and potent body of men and their national and community identities, sexuality, masculinity, health, and fitness with the help of songjom (self-restraint) exercised over masturbatory practices, diet, and night emissions. I conclude the article with the possibility to further think about the relation between the concepts of immortality and immunity that constitute masculine health based on the cultivation of a potent body through embodied practices of bayam (exercise), healthy diet, and semen control.