Party Scene Research Articles

Two Dogs Fight and a Third Grabs the Bone. Reasons for the Electoral Success of Unexpected Candidates – the Croatian Political Scene after the Last Two Parliamentary Election Cycles (2015–2016)

Abstract The last two years in Croatian politics can be seen as an important turning point. The most recent two parliamentary election cycles (2015-2016), as well as the presidential race held a year earlier, were both more interesting and more unpredictable than the previous elections. The objective of this article is to analyse and identify their distinguishing features as well as their significance and implications for the further functioning of the Croatian political scene. Owing to the fact that in both electoral cycles an important voice in the shape of the ruling coalition went to the party that came third in the election and, also surprisingly, this was both a newly established formation and to a great extent with an anti-establishment appeal, particular attention is focused on the appearance on the party scene of new political groupings. The article attempts to place them within the framework of the existing new party typologies and point to the main reasons for their electoral success, as well as evaluating their chances for survival on the party scene.

Scenes as Micro-Cultures: Examining Heterogeneity of HIV Risk Behavior Among Gay, Bisexual, and Other Men Who Have Sex with Men in Toronto, Canada.

Using latent class analysis (LCA), we examined patterns of participation in multiple scenes, how sexual risk practices vary by scene, and psychosocial factors associated with these patterns among 470 gay, bisexual, and other men who have sex with men (GBM) recruited from Toronto. We calculated posterior probability of being in a class from participation in nine separate scenes. We used Entropy, the Bayesian information criterion and the Lo-Mendel-Rubin likelihood ratio test to identify the best fit model. Fit indices suggested a four-class solution. Half (50%) of the GBM reported no or minimal participation in any scene, 28% reported participating in the dance club scene, 16% reported participating in the BDSM, bear, and leather scenes, and 6% reported participating in circuit, party and play, and sex party scenes. Compared to GBM who did not participate in scenes, GBM participating in the BDSM-Bear-Leather scene were more likely to be older, white, to report higher sexual self-esteem, and to engage in condomless anal sex; Party and Play scene members were more likely to be of Asian origin, and to use drugs before and during sex, whereas Dance Club scene members were more likely to be younger and to report lower self-esteem but higher hope. LCA allowed us to identify distinct social niches or micro-cultures and factors characterizing these micro-cultures. GBM differ in their risk for HIV and STIs according to characteristics associated with participation in distinct micro-cultures associated with scenes. Tailored interventions may be needed that focus on reducing HIV risk and promoting sexual health in specific contexts such as the BDSM-Bear-Leather and Party and Play.

Creepers, Druggers, and Predator Ambiguity: The Interactional Construction of Campus Victimization and the University Sex Predator

In response to the pervasive problem of sexual victimization on campus, many colleges in the United States have adopted bystander intervention programs which seek to educate students and provide them with the tools necessary to intervene in potentially risky situations. Research shows that how potential bystanders construct potential victims and perpetrators of campus victimization significantly impacts their progression to intervention. As an extension of Pugh, Ningard, Vander Ven and Butler’s (Deviant Behavior, 2016) work on victim ambiguity, the present study drew from intensive interviews of 30 undergraduates from a large university in the American Midwest to examine how students construct perpetrators in situations that hold the potential for sexual assault. Findings suggest that common stereotypes about alcohol, sexual assault, and risk guided bystander constructions of potential perpetrators of sexual assault in the drinking scene, which influenced their self-reported intervention likelihood. Respondents referred to strangers, the transient type (i.e., those who suspiciously leave a party scene with a woman), “druggers,” “creepers,” and other social indicators when discussing typical predators and the informal strategies for recognizing them in the drinking scene. Program implications are discussed.

‘We achieve the impossible’: Discourses of freedom and escape at music festivals and free parties

In this article, we explore the notion of freedom as a form of governance within contemporary consumer culture in a sphere where ‘freedom’ appears as a key component: outdoor music-based leisure events, notably music festivals and free parties. ‘Freedom’ is commodified as central to the marketing of many music festivals, which now form a highly commercialised sector of the UK leisure industry, subject to various regulatory restrictions. Free parties, in contrast, are unlicensed, mostly illegal and far less commercialised leisure spaces. We present data from two related studies to investigate how participants at three major British outdoor music festivals and a small rural free party scene draw on discourses of freedom, escape and regulation. We argue that major music festivals operate as temporary bounded spheres of ‘licensed transgression’, in which an apparent lack of regulation operates as a form of governance. In contrast, free parties appear to ‘achieve the impossible’ by creating alternative (and illegal) spaces in which both freedom and regulation are constituted in different ways compared to music festival settings.

‘Crazy Clown Time’ and David Lynch’s parties

This essay addresses David Lynch’s transition from feature-length filmmaker to musician by focusing on his first studio album, ‘Crazy Clown Time,’ and in particular the music video he directed for the title track. Through its depiction of a suburban backyard party gone awry, the music video immediately opens onto the party motif found throughout Lynch’s film corpus. By using this link as a point of departure, the essay explores Lynch’s commentary on interpretation, the inseparability of the aural and the visual in his oeuvre and the role of parties and fun throughout his cinema. Lynch’s party scenes offer perhaps the clearest example of what is often called the ‘Lynchian,’ a term that this essay argues complicates rather than condenses Lynch’s signature.

Review | Out of Order: A Photographic Celebration of the Free Party Scene

Review | Out of Order: A Photographic Celebration of the Free Party Scene

Resisting Paradise: Tourism, Diaspora, and Sexuality in Caribbean Culture by Angelique Nixon

Reviewed by: Resisting Paradise: Tourism, Diaspora, and Sexuality in Caribbean Culture by Angelique Nixon Nilak Datta (bio) Nixon, Angelique. Resisting Paradise: Tourism, Diaspora, and Sexuality in Caribbean Culture. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2015. A short while ago, I was traveling to New Delhi from Goa. I had received Angelique Nixon’s Resisting Paradise: Tourism, Diaspora, and Sexuality in Caribbean Culture in the mail. As I was reading it on my return flight to Goa, where I live and work, I found myself seated next to a couple who were en route to India’s “beach paradise” for a short getaway. The monsoon was in full swing and Goa, the one state in the Indian union that relies almost exclusively on tourism for its state revenue, was in the “off-season” mode. Beaches are not the fun-filled spaces they are for most part of the year and the party scene is not too fetching. Goa makes do with monsoon trekking, a less economically profitable (but more eco-friendly) substitute for mainstream beach tourism. When I informed the couple what they were in for, they were unhappy. The husband, an investment banker, exhibited signs of anger and disappointment. The wife tried to console him. They had booked resort rooms (at throwaway prices) with the high hope of living it up and enjoying paradise, far away from the hurry of metropolitan life. The prospect of having to make do with monsoon trekking seemed a let-down. It would have been—and it was—difficult to let them know that Goa had a unique history of colonialism, having been sort of a Portuguese enclave surrounded by large British dominions. In that sense, Goa has a unique heritage of being a Portuguese enclave while the vast Indo-Pakistan subcontinent was under British occupation. I ventured to suggest they might enjoy the culture and the cuisine instead of being encased in a tourist bubble. The conversation did not go too well. Angelique Nixon deals with a similar phenomenon: the touristic construction of the Caribbean as “paradise” and its roots in the nexus between colonialism and slavery. The [End Page 942] colonial (white, male) gaze constructed the region as “Paradise”; the illusion continues to be sustained by the North American and Anglo European globalized tourist circuit through cruise ship tourism, sex tourism, tourist brochure rhetoric, the neocolonial Bahamian school education system, the neo-imperial travel genre, diaspora tourism, and heritage tourism. The book offers two arguments. First, if colonialism and slavery fashioned a way of looking at the Caribbean and its peoples as a consumable paradise filled with sun, sand, and desirable black bodies, the neocolonial governments in association with foreign investment banks and multinational corporations have sustained the image through different forms of tourism. Writers, artists, and intellectuals have been (since the 1950s) resisting this construction, the colonization of locals’ minds, and the way locals are forced to see themselves. Second, contemporary writers like Jamaica Kincaid, Edwidge Danticat, Paule Marshall, Audre Lorde, Marion Bethel, Michelle Cliff, Oonya Kamala Kempadoo, Christian Campbell, and artist-activists like Arlene Nash-Ferguson, Dionne Benjamin-Smith, Erna Brodber, and Esther Figueroa expose the connections between colonialism and neocolonialism through their artistic work and question the dominant representations of paradise by showing the exploitative consumption of the Caribbean. These are the book’s chief arguments. As such, when one approaches the diverse materials in the book, one might easily misunderstand Nixon’s Resisting Paradise as performing a familiar cultural studies maneuver that is loosely based on Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s famed culture industry thesis. So, a hasty reading of the book produces the impression that Nixon represents the packaging of peoples, places, and cultures through commercialization of the Caribbean and against which, artists and intellectuals have been fighting—and continue to fight—a near-losing battle with global capitalism to salvage something authentic and worth preserving. However, a careful reading reveals that Nixon accomplishes two important objectives in this book. First, she analyzes the social and economic processes by which the Caribbean has been constituted as paradise. Second, and more importantly, she shows how the international tourist expectations reinforce established patterns of heteronormativity and class privilege during visits to...

Berlin without Borders? Urban Anthems in Twenty-First-Century Popular Music

Popular Berlin “anthems” both attest and contribute to the social, political, and cultural tensions that accompany the complex process of identity formation in the urban capital and the projection of its global image. An integral aspect of its cosmopolitan identity, Berlin hosts an international party scene that incorporates the city's history of divisions and borders into a discourse about its own brand of “hipness.” This article analyzes several Berlin-based musicians and the songs that reflect a process of deterritorialization, recoding, and reterritorialization, consciously inserting Berlin-specific signifiers into the syntax of cultural globalization. These contemporary anthems acknowledge social realities while recoding musical genres in the service of a more multicultural, creative, and tolerant metropolis. The marketing and mainstreaming of edgy, urban soundscapes include the dislocations characteristic of a globalizing capital. Increasingly, songs about Berlin engage in remapping the local, provincial, and subcultural onto Berlin as a world media city.

Party-Going in Fitzgerald and His Contemporaries

Abstract This essay examines the visual techniques that Fitzgerald applies in the party-scenes in his fiction. It explores the tension between spectatorship and participation throughout and argues that he draws on the resources of the cinema in his fine control of perspective, close-up, and long shots—as well as montage. Although he acquired the reputation of the chronicler of the new generation, the essay argues that Fitzgerald constantly brought out the ironies of parties, particularly their fleeting and theatrical aspects, especially their dependence on material display. Comparisons are drawn with Zelda Fitzgerald's party scenes and with contemporaries such as Carl Van Vechten in order to bring out Fitzgerald's implicitly critical dramatization of sexual motifs.

Party-Going in Fitzgerald and His Contemporaries

AbstractThis essay examines the visual techniques that Fitzgerald applies in the party-scenes in his fiction. It explores the tension between spectatorship and participation throughout and argues that he draws on the resources of the cinema in his fine control of perspective, close-up, and long shots—as well as montage. Although he acquired the reputation of the chronicler of the new generation, the essay argues that Fitzgerald constantly brought out the ironies of parties, particularly their fleeting and theatrical aspects, especially their dependence on material display. Comparisons are drawn with Zelda Fitzgerald's party scenes and with contemporaries such as Carl Van Vechten in order to bring out Fitzgerald's implicitly critical dramatization of sexual motifs.

Understanding Gay Community Subcultures: Implications for HIV Prevention.

Gay and bisexual men (GBM) who participate in gay community subcultures have different profiles, including differing risk behaviors. We examined men's participation in gay community subcultures, and its association with risk behavior. In a cross-sectional survey, 849 GBM provided information about men in their personal networks. We devised measures of their participation in five subcultural groupings and explored their associations with sexual behavior. We identified five subcultural groupings: sexually adventurous; bear tribes; alternative queer; party scene; and sexually conservative. Higher scores on the sexually adventurous measure was associated with being older, having more gay friends, being HIV-positive, and being more sexually active. It was also independently associated with unprotected anal intercourse with casual partners (AOR 1.82; 95% CI 1.20-2.76; p=0.005). HIV prevention strategies need to account for the different subcultural groupings in which GBM participate. Measures of engagement with gay subcultures are useful indicators of differential rates of risk behavior and modes of participation in gay community life. Men in more sexually adventurous subcultures are more likely to engage in sexual risk behavior.

Risk Factors Associated with Unsafe Injection Practices at the First Injection Episode among Intravenous Drug Users in France: Results from PrimInject, an Internet Survey.

Background. New drug use patterns may increase the risk of human immunodeficiency virus and hepatitis infections. In France, new injection patterns among youths with diverse social backgrounds have emerged, which may explain the persistently high rates of hepatitis C virus infection. This study explores factors associated with injection risk behaviours at first injection among users who began injecting in the post-2000 era. Methods. A cross-sectional study was conducted on the Internet from October 2010 to March 2011, through an online questionnaire. Multivariate logistic regression identified the independent correlates of needle sharing and equipment (cooker/cotton filter) sharing. Results. Among the 262 respondents (mean age 25 years), 65% were male. Both risk behaviours were positively associated with initiation before 18 years of age (aOR 3.7 CI 95% 1.3–10.6 and aOR 3.0 CI 95% 1.3–7.0) and being injected by another person (aOR 3.1 CI 95% 1.0–9.9 and aOR 3.0 CI 95% 1.3–7.1). Initiation at a party was an independent correlate of equipment sharing (aOR 2.6 95% CI 1.0–6.8). Conclusions. Results suggest a need for innovative harm reduction programmes targeting a variety of settings and populations, including youths and diverse party scenes. Education of current injectors to protect both themselves and those they might initiate into injection is critically important.

Sentimentalizing Daisy for the Screen

Copyright © 2014 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA Daisy Buchanan is one of the most enigmatic characters in American literature. Many first-time readers of The Great Gatsby are frustrated by Nick’s account of Daisy and wonder why Gatsby would risk so much for such a woman. However, they miss the point. Daisy represents something indefinable—an idealized love. As Roger Lewis says in “Money, Love, and Aspiration in The Great Gatsby,” “the love becomes more important than the object of it” (49). Daisy herself is not his goal. Gatsby’s goal is to keep hold of the love that she once inspired, the memory of her, which is colored by his idealization of her. This nostalgic longing for a feeling rooted in the past is sentimentality at a profound level. In fact, at the end of chapter 6, Nick listens to Gatsby recount his first kiss with Daisy and describes Gatsby’s words as “appalling sentimentality” (Gatsby 111). Daisy’s effect on Gatsby is perhaps the biggest paradox of the novel. Based on her actions, it is difficult to gauge how she exerts a hold on Gatsby. Nick comes closest when describing her voice, which, Gatsby later notes, is “full of money” (120): “When the melody rose, her voice broke up sweetly, following it, in a way contralto voices have, and each change tipped out a little of her warm human magic upon the air” (108). Daisy’s “magic” is hard to define, and Nick seems to catch glimmers of it; but he is always at the periphery, unable to tell exactly what Gatsby sees in her. Especially after the car accident, Nick is amazed that Gatsby endangers himself by staying when he is, in Nick’s words, “worth the whole damn bunch put together” (154). Film producers are uncomfortable with ambiguity, however. In general, all the film versions of Fitzgerald’s novel have followed a predictable route. Their marketing campaigns claim that they have tried to evoke the spirit of the novel, yet they boost the sentimentality of the story with great deliberation, pushing the use of pathos far beyond what Fitzgerald would have sanctioned. Most egregiously, producers and filmmakers try to make Daisy a more sympathetic character by changing her storyline. For Fitzgerald readers, this change in Daisy’s character is a continual disappointment. There have been five big-budget, filmed adaptations of The Great Gatsby: 1926, 1949, 1974, a 2000 television production, Sentimentalizing Daisy for the Screen

Sentimentalizing Daisy for the Screen

Sentimentalizing Daisy for the Screen

Michael Wilding’s Texas Story

ALTHOUGH MOST OF MICHAEL WILDING'S SHORT STORIES ARE SET IN AUSTRALIA, SOME take place in his native England, and a few are scattered among Europe, North Africa, and the US. Of the American stories one of the best is An for Political Dissidents in Texas. Neglected by critics, the story deserves be better known. A story, it combines narrative inventiveness with familiar Wilding themes. Wilding published the story originally in the UK, in Iron (1973), and in Australia, in Westerly (1974), and then collected it in The West Midland Underground ( 1975).He based his story on his experiences during a visit Austin in February 1969. At that time Wilding was returning Australia take up a permanent teaching position the University of Sydney where he had taught from 1963 through 1966, followed by two years the University of Birmingham. Wilding detoured through New York and on his way back Australia. The reason he came Austin was visit his friend John Sullivan, the former dean of Lincoln College, Oxford, who had joined the University of faculty in 1961 (Re: conferences, etc.). Sullivan's best known works include Ezra Pound and Sextus Propertius: A Study in Creative Translation (1966) and The Satyricon of Petronius: A Literary Study (1968). He also translated The Satyricon. (John P. Sullivan 1).Many strands went into the making of the story. Wilding's stay in New York is described in NY 1969, collected in This is for You (1994). It is something of a companion piece the one, though not in style or technique. NY 1969 is rendered in a flatter, more reportage style. The story offers a quick five-page window into the radical protest scene of American life in years of anti-Vietnam demonstrations, Black Power, takeovers of universities, Janis Joplin concerts, and drugs. A party scene conveys the flavor of that era: talked a black girl from Pittsburgh about the English class system and the sufferings of the English working class. And the dope went round in a hookah. Generally the whites talked the whites and the talked the blacks (102). The highlight of the visit New York was Wilding's introduction marijuana. His friends smoked nonstop and soon he did too, finding himself laughing hilariously about such mundanities as shoveling snow. Everything that was right-or wrong-with the Sixties is in the story. The link between NY 1969 and An Afternoon is apparent in the last paragraph: caught a flight and talked the girl in the seat beside me (This is for You 103). The big surprise in the second story is that was also a place of political dissidents. An for Political Dissidents in Texas is divided into nine numbered sections. Number 1 is a one-paragraph commentary on the process of writing, letting an undefined audience know that what we're reading will be shorter than the first draft (which we do not have) and that in this version, the one we're reading, there will be cuts, specifically those revelations that come through untransmuted, undisguised; rents through which one's unprotected personality can be glimpsed (153). So, presumably, some things will be hidden, kept disclosed from us.Number 2 introduces an audience inside the narrative, a you, a girl who has been talking the narrator, an unnamed Wilding surrogate, about unicorns. Wilding considers the story sort of a 'to' story addressed her, though, he adds, don't know if I ever had her address write her. Can't recall (Re: Conferences, etc.). A to story is be distinguished from an at story. The first is more benign than the second. Examples of at stories abound in Wilding's short stories. Many of them are directed Frank Moorhouse, fellow editor and writer with whom Wilding was close friends for a number of years. Wilding also wrote several stories for/at Vicki Viidikas, the gifted writer and poet with whom Wilding had a brief affair and a lifelong friendship. …

Queer Women in the Hookup Scene

The college hookup scene is a profoundly gendered and heteronormative sexual field. Yet the party and bar scene that gives rise to hookups also fosters the practice of women kissing other women in public, generally to the enjoyment of male onlookers, and sometimes facilitates threesomes involving same-sex sexual behavior between women. In this article, we argue that the hookup scene serves as an opportunity structure to explore same-sex attractions and, at least for some women, to later verify bisexual, lesbian, or queer sexual identities. Based on quantitative and qualitative data and combining queer theory and identity theory, we offer a new interpretation of women’s same-sex practices in the hookup culture. Our analysis contributes to gender theory by demonstrating the utility of identity theory for understanding how non-normative gender and sexual identities are negotiated within heteronormatively structured fields.

All Our Pretty Songs by Sarah McCarry (review)

Reviewed by: All Our Pretty Songs by Sarah McCarry Karen Coats McCarry, Sarah . All Our Pretty Songs. St. Martin's Griffin, 2013. [224p]. Trade ed. ISBN 978-1-250-04088-6 $18.99 Paper ed. ISBN 978-1-250-02708-5 $9.99 E-book ed. ISBN 978-1-250-02709-2 $7.12 Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 9-12. This sensually rich, richly sensual urban fairy tale channels Weetzie Bat (BCCB 2/89) as its unnamed narrator and her friend Aurora move through the music and party scene in the Pacific Northwest. Their entrée is Aurora's dead father, a wildly successful punk musician who lived hard and died young, and though Aurora has never wanted for money, she is desperately in need of parental love and attention, as her mother has disappeared into her addiction. The narrator and her mother become Aurora's surrogate family, but it isn't enough, so when Aurora meets an enigmatic stranger, Minos, who promises her he can take her to her father, she is hooked. The narrator hooks her own enigmatic stranger, Jack, a gifted musician who mesmerizes everyone when he plays. Since people are always more attracted to Aurora, she is heartbroken but not surprised when Jack and Aurora go with Minos to LA, leaving her behind. Unable to shake a feeling of dread where Minos is concerned, the narrator goes to LA herself, where she can no longer deny what she suspects—that Minos is a minion of hell itself, and it's up to her to play Orpheus to Aurora's Eurydice. The decadent glamour of this world as the narrator portrays it hardly needs a hell to haunt it, but McCarry takes the plunge anyway, painting word pictures that rival a Hieronymus Bosch painting in their manic intensity. The narrator is an adept foil for this world of overstimulated angst and unwise compromise; she is practical and mean, and while she readily embraces the heat of her feelings for and with Jack, she doesn't lose focus: "I'm not the kind of girl they're looking for in hell. I'm not pretty; I don't play instruments; half the time I can barely draw. But I'm the girl they'll never forget, because I'm the girl who'll win." So while she may be channeling the whimsy of Block, there's a touch of recent butt-kicking heroines in there as well, making her an appealing guide through a terrifying but seductive landscape. [End Page 36] Copyright © 2013 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

The Modernist Party ed. by Kate McLoughlin (review)

Reviewed by: The Modernist Party ed. by Kate McLoughlin Victoria Kuttainen (bio) THE MODERNIST PARTY, edited by Kate McLoughlin. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013. viii + 240 pp. £70.00 cloth, £19.99 paper. This elegant gathering of essays addresses the significance of the party for the modernist period and its literature, both as a conduit for sociality and as a literary topos. It represents a brilliantly unique approach not only to the editorial task of shaping a collection of varied thematic conversations but also to gathering deeper material for a textual understanding of modernist literature. In the collection’s reception room, Kate McLoughlin’s marvelously clever introductory “Welcome From the Host” invites consideration of the great diversity of actual and fictional modernist parties: from the bland tea party or luncheon to the convivial cocktail soirée, the extended and often socially fraught dinner party, and the more risqué and bohemian house party, all of which lit and limned the modernist period in its salons, bookshops, living rooms, nightclubs, and artist studios. These parties come in all modes: from edifying, tasteful, and intellectually stimulating to over-animating, decadent, bacchanalian, and carnivalesque. Several of the collection’s contributors draw on Habermasian ideals of the party as the epitome of public-private social interaction at the height of modernity—a salon space in the public sphere on the cusp of fracturing into class interests and splintering in the face of Fordist massification and the rise of privatized bourgeois global capitalism.1 Contributors examine the party as a recurrent symbol in modernist literature, as a mode of reading, as a way of understanding reception and the literary community, and as a [End Page 232] frequent occurrence in the modernist period. On the whole, the prospect of a party raises the promise of piquant, witty fun but frequently deflates as readers come to discover, unsurprisingly perhaps, that the likes of T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce were not convivial doyennes of the party scene, bantering witty repartee across London or Paris or Boston like bright sparklers, but were instead (it must be said) party poopers. In the face of brutalization caused by World War I, several of the most famous modernist partiers were nervous and unsettled guests and hosts. Eliot—McLoughlin renders him in the collection’s second chapter as both creator and correlative of “Prufrock, Party-Goer: Tongue-Tied at Tea”—was, like the protagonist J. Alfred Prufrock, “[d]istinctly lacking in conviviality” and wearied by “[s]ocial banalities” and “small talk,” which did “weary and repel the serious-minded, contemplative” poet (45, 46). Bryony Randall tells us in her chapter on Woolf that she experienced routine sexual abuse after parties at the hands of her half-brother George and that she understandably found “the whole experience of party-going fraught with potential distress” (95). “Party Joyce,” as Jean-Michel Rabaté renders him in his rich chapter “Party Joyce: From the ‘Dead’ to When We ‘Wake,’” reflects upon the author’s early work from his position in exile in a mode of nostalgia, regretful about the harsh tone with which he portrayed Dublin and its parochialism in the famous party thrown by the Misses Morkan. Yet despite his regrets, Rabaté suggests a reading of a Joyce unable to make amends for that harsh picture in “The Dead,” because the “hospitable party [of Dubliners] is fraught with tension and ambivalence” (68). As Rabaté astutely observes, “[t]he constant tension between the ecumenism of the ‘party’ and the fractiousness of antagonistic political parties is recurrent in Joyce” (70). Ultimately, Rabaté connects Joyce’s final party, the wake, to the author’s own social life in Parisian exile, marked, as it were, by ritualistic gatherings such as book launches, birthdays, or weddings, occasions during which he was known to dance the Italian tarantella (76). Rabaté reads these Joycean reactions to ritualized sociality in terms of extended correlatives in Finnegans Wake, in which Joyce portrays an Irish culture in the death embrace of the Catholic Church and British imperialism, yet nonetheless bursting to life with a subaltern and resilient “carnivalesque inversion of ‘high’ values” (77). As this might suggest, while each of the contributors offers deep...

To sexually perform or protect: masculine identity construction and perceptions of women's sexuality on a university campus in the Midwestern USA

Modern universities in the USA are places of recreation and leisure in addition to institutional spaces of education. Often characterized by alcohol-fueled socializing and sexualized interaction, university social life rivals the formal curriculum, and hooking up – or recreational sexual interaction outside of committed relationships – has become a defining feature. This article examines the spatiality of sexual and gender identities among heterosexual men at a 4-year residential university located in the Midwestern USA. Drawing on in-depth and focus group data, the article examines how men from contrasting peer cultures construct masculine identities in relation to casual sex and perceptions of women's sexuality. Particular attention is paid to how men negotiate senses of self in relation to the sexual practices, processes, and identities played out in the dominant party scene on campus.

Negotiating with Gender Stereotypes on Social Networking Sites: From 'Bicycle Face' to Facebook

Research indicates that stereotypical representations of girls as sexualized objects seeking male attention are commonly found in social networking sites. This paper presents the results of a qualitative study that examined how young women read these stereotypes. Our participants understood SNS as a commoditized environment in which stereotypical kinds of self-exposure by girls are markers of social success and popularity. As such, these images are socially facilitative for young women. However, the gendered risks of judgment according to familiar stereotypical norms are heightened by the intense surveillance enabled by SNS. While our participants indicated that a mediatized celebrity culture inculcates girls with messages that they must be attractive, have a boyfriend and be part of the party scene, girls are much more likely than boys to be harshly judged for emphasizing these elements in their online profiles. Girls are also open to harsh criticism for their degree of publicness. The risk of being called a slut for having an open profile, too many friends or posting too much information suggests that continuing discriminatory standards around public participation may effectively police girls’ capacity to fully participate online and complicate their ability to participate in defiant gender performances.