<p> In 1895, French sociologist Gustave Le Bon proclaimed the era of crowds upon us, in his influential work, <i>The Crowd</i>. Le Bon's work was translated into English a year later, inspiring a number of similar works by American sociologists, and almost single-handedly creating the discipline of crowd psychology. Interest in the new masses was not limited to sociologists, however. Due to advances in transportation and communication technologies, and the rise of the city, the problem of &ldquo;man in the mass&rdquo; came to pervade the atmosphere of America, at the turn of the twentieth-century. </p><p> Thus, American writers also wrestled with the difficulty of representing this catch-all entity &ldquo;the crowd,&rdquo; often speculating about what the psychology of the crowd might mean for the future of democracy. But, whereas early crowd theory was overwhelmingly conservative in its depiction of the crowd mind as a site of primitive impulses, irrational emotions, and affective contagion, authors like Frank Norris and Sherwood Anderson, though largely ceding to this description, saw in the crowd the possibility for an entirely new social consistency. </p><p> Contrary to sociological prescriptives designed to brace the individual against the imminent threat of crowd contagion, however, Norris and Anderson identify what contemporary theorist Roberto Esposito terms the &ldquo;immunity regime&rdquo; as the true difficulty to overcome. For Esposito, the biopolitically engendered immunitary <i>dispositif</i> protects modern individuals from &ldquo;a risky contiguity with the other, relieving them of every obligation toward the other and enclosing them once again in the shell of their own subjectivity&rdquo; (<i>Terms</i> 49). It is this hard shell of subjectivity that Norris and Anderson attempt to break down in their works. </p><p> In this way, the two authors represent a small segment of a genealogical thread in American fiction&mdash;one stretching from Whitman, to Steinbeck, and beyond--that takes a gambit on what Badiou calls the &ldquo;communist hypothesis.&rdquo; Perhaps most importantly, though, the texts of Norris and Anderson demonstrate, either deliberately or otherwise, that such a gambit must preclude any recourse to substantialist notions of innate gregariousness, primitive sympathy, or herd instinct. Thus, while refusing to endorse the immunitarian paradigm as the final word on being-together, Norris and Anderson demonstrate how we must work and think <i>through</i> immunity to arrive at an adequate concept of collective life in the modern era. </p><p> While other studies of the crowd or the masses often ask what the multitude <i> stands for</i>, in a metonymical or metaphorical register, this one asks how it is formed, how it functions, and what it could mean for the possibility of collective life in modernity. Similarly, whereas other studies often judge a particular representation of the crowd against a preformed model of what constitutes the properly political, the following study attempts to unearth the crowd's immanent possibilities to potentially change those very models. </p>

<p>This dissertation examines how Mexico City workers, workers&rsquo; families, state officials, unions, employers, and others perceived, performed, and shaped masculinity during the period of the Mexican Revolution. I argue that Mexico City&rsquo;s workers, officials, and employers negotiated working-class gender beliefs in such a way as to express multiple, performed, and distinctly working-class masculinities and sexualities. Scholars who study gender in Mexico argue that during the 1930s a particular type of working-class masculinity became dominant: the idea of the male worker as a muscular breadwinner who controlled both machines and women. I agree with this claim, but the existing scholarship fails to explain how this &ldquo;proletarian masculinity&rdquo; developed prior to the 1930s. My dissertation studies the period right before this proletarian masculinity became dominant and explains the processes through which it gradually developed. During the 1920s, the state held a relatively unstable position of power and was consequently forced to negotiate terms of rule with popular classes. I demonstrate that the 1920s represent a period when no one form of masculinity predominated. A complex range of multiple masculine behaviors and beliefs developed through the everyday activities of the working class, employers, officials, and unions. A Catholic union might represent a rival union as possessing an irresponsible form of manhood, a young man might use bravado and voice pitch to enact a homosexual identity, and a single father might enact a nurturing, self-sacrificing form of manhood. My sources include labor arbitration board records, court records, newspapers, plays, poetry, and reports by social workers, police, doctors, labor inspectors, juvenile court judges, and Diversions Department inspectors. Each chapter in this dissertation analyzes a particular facet of workers&rsquo; masculinity, including worker&rsquo;s masculine behaviors among youth, within the family, in the workplace, in popular entertainment venues, and within unions. </p>

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2008. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 69-11, Section: A, page: 4468. Adviser: Nils Jacobsen. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 167-177) Available on microfilm from Pro Quest Information and Learning.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2006. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 67-11, Section: A, page: 4308. Adviser: Nils Jacobsen. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 449-494) Available on microfilm from Pro Quest Information and Learning.

This dissertation methodologically analyzes triangulated qualitative data from a critical race and feminist standpoint theoretical approach in order to explore American Sociology's contemporary process of institutionalized knowledge reproduction, as well as how race structures that process. American Sociology is institutionalized knowledge that is structured into academic departments or an "institutional-structure"(Wallerstein 2007). Prestige structures the discipline, where the top-20 departments enact social closure through hiring practices and as such represent an element of elite power within the institutional-structure (Burris 2004; Lenski 1966). To be sure, institutional-structures are sites of collective memory, knowledge reproduction, professionalization and cognitive socialization processes. Therefore this dissertation data includes PhD-level required theory course syllabi, interviews with faculty that study race, Ph.D. candidates that study sociology, and defended dissertations from the year 2011, from the top-20 U.S. sociology departments that read as cultural representations of how race structures the reproduction of American Sociology's institutionalized knowledge. This study has implications for the teaching, learning, and practice of American Sociology, as well as future scholarly research on the reproduction of knowledge and the sociology of sociology. / Ph. D.

Submitted by Suelen Reis (suziy.ellen@gmail.com) on 2013-04-11T20:02:13Z No. of bitstreams: 1 Tese Marieze Torresseg.pdf: 1307389 bytes, checksum: d7d33f1b576fc9e82a85d9c01c36cbb8 (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Rodrigo Meirelles(rodrigomei@ufba.br) on 2013-05-26T11:03:36Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 Tese Marieze Torresseg.pdf: 1307389 bytes, checksum: d7d33f1b576fc9e82a85d9c01c36cbb8 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2013-05-26T11:03:36Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Tese Marieze Torresseg.pdf: 1307389 bytes, checksum: d7d33f1b576fc9e82a85d9c01c36cbb8 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2009 / A presente tese examina a discussão teórica sobre emoções no âmbito da produção sociológica norte-americana recente, através de algumas posições e polarizações recorrentes, que demarcam as fronteiras entre escolas de pensamento de perspectivas distintas de análise das emoções de um ponto de vista sociológico. As polarizações são abordadas no âmbito dos debates travados entre as posições caracterizadas como “biossocial,” representada por Theodore Kemper e Jonathan Turner, e “construtivista” por Arlie Hochschild, Susan Shott e Steven Gordon. No debate, as divergências dizem respeito à própria definição de emoções e de seus elementos componentes ou causais. Trata-se de saber se as emoções são inatas e universais, pré-fixadas no organismo e distinguidas por certos hormônios, ou se as emoções são “culturais-específicas” e a sua definição um produto da interpretação do ator. Essas discordâncias, transpostas para as proposições de articulação dos níveis macro e micro de análise, contrastam a posição construcionista de que a vida social é organizada por “regras de sentimento” e “vocabulários de emoções”, com a posição biossocial que propõe os conceitos de poder e status como dimensões estruturantes, universais, fisiologicamente correlacionadas, de todas as relações sociais humanas. Considera-se que as divergências tornadas explícitas nesses debates, retomam e atualizam questões polemizadas pelos pragmatistas William James e John Dewey. Concluise que uma análise sociológica e integradora das emoções em seus nexos com o corpo ainda precisa ser buscada, embora já se configurem. / Salvador