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Week 4
25 April 2007
Intro
theorizing about emotions – 1980s – Hochschild
what are the social functions of emotions?
how is the very experience of emotions a domain of social action / social shaping?
how is something we feel a product of social processes / social forces?
moving away from thinking about emotions as organismic/biological phenomenon
sociology of emotion helped us grasp what social functions of emotions are. conceptual
link between experiences of illness/ourselves/others and social relationships
awareness context
what’s the value added in conceptualizing these different levels of awareness? what’s the
purpose, what’s the point of specifically identifying these levels?
rules of how social situations evolved.. elaborately choreographed interactions re: dying
patient, based on how much patient knew
one of the hallmark’s of Strauss’ contribution – many different forms of work (e.g.,
sentimental work)
joint fitting-together of how this family is going to figure out what the patient should know,
when the patient should know, and what should happen should the patient find out
this is why awareness context has conceptual salience
Cindy: this is clearly professional dominance
within medical sociology, people finally started to give credence to and problematize the
patient’s experience
Martine: sociology in medicine (sociology in the service of medicine) vs. sociology of
medicine (problematizes the system of medicine)
Glaser and Strauss do talk about the four stages, but they stipulate that one should not make
the mistake of thinking they constitute a linear, unidirectional process
what does each article (Timmermans, Mamo) add to awareness context?
Timmermans
Beth: framework essentially analytic
doesn’t that presume that emotion and analysis are inherently at odds with one
another?
Beth: to an extent, in this article, yes and no. he couldn’t have gone to further
analysis w/o emotional experience, but he doesn’t problematize the emotional exp.
Martine: no structure or vocabulary available in sociology to talk about emotions
one of last week’s discussion questions re: difficulty of putting into language some of
the things we’re talking about
some of the stuff is alinguistic/prelinguistic
a lot of our analytic/scientific vocabulary is an artifact of these Cartesian dualisms
that embodied sociology is trying to overcome
it really is a communicative struggle and analytic struggle to get a handle on what is
going on here
this welter of bodily experience and emotional experience.. always involves some
level of abstraction and generalization
in some ways, we don’t have a vocabulary or language to put it into a space where we
can discuss it intersubjectively
one of the common critiques of Timmermans is that he purports to center emotions in
his theoretical elaborations of Glaser and Strauss, but it has this flavor of being
aemotional, being very analytical.
• where Janet found his emotions was that in part, it’s the patients and family
members’ emotional responses to information, to prognostic information, that in
fact problematizes the notion that open awareness means the same thing to
everybody. when people hang on to hope and dismiss the negative side of
ambiguity, interpreting it as doors that may still be open.. that’s an emotional
response arising out of the need to hang on to hope. that, in part, led him to
contend that open awareness is not one and the same thing
• the other part where his emotions become important is in his taking very seriously
that the meanings we take from certain situations impacts our interpretations of
those situations. he had an emotional reaction to the information re: his mother.
sometimes more information leads to more questions. information alone has no
social significance or personal significance
Mamo
acceptance, active participation
we must be careful not to psychologize as we read about what we identify as
‘dysfunctional’ situations
one sees one’s own identify in terms of one’s relationships w/ others
power
feeling rules really dictate how one is supposed to feel and how one is supposed to act in
different situations
the underside of ideology (p. 566 – “Rules for managing feeling are implicit in any
ideological stance; they are the ‘bottom side’ of ideology.”)
Martine: the ways ideology comes to being in everyday situations; feeling rules are the
facilitators of that
people are actually engaging in deep acting to feel what the ideology is saying what
they’re supposed to feel (“this war is just”; “we are liberating Iraq”)
she’s talking about the differentiation between doing and feeling. there are these sort of
dominant narratives, dominant scripts, cultural ideologies that dictate how we’re
supposed to look at a situation, what meanings we’re supposed to derive, and how we’re
supposed to act in a situation
it’s not that we attempt to behave and act in these socially prescribed ways, but in fact the
feeling rules, deep acting is done to align with / meet the ideal/ideology
Kim: how do we develop an ideology?
what is ideology, and where does it come from?
fundamentally in sociology, there are different strategies to make a group act a certain
way. you can make them do something by coercion. or you can use ideology = the
noncoercive aspects; getting people to do what you want them to do; manufacturing
consent.
Hochschild talks about feeling rules as the underside of ideology: we are reinforcing
the ways in which we accede and consent to domination, to social relationships being
structured in the ways that they are.
why ideologies make sense is b/c they’ve been made to have sense. the normative
ways we look at each other are constructed in particular ways to serve particular kinds
of interests.
Becker/Kaufman: to extent that patients work hard at their own recovery
(responsibility for actualizing / rehabilitation).. it actualizes, enacts certain ideological
structure that emphasizes autonomy/responsibility