SOCL-202 Final Exam Flash Cards

Micro

Interaction, creating meaning, face-to-face situations.

Macro

Gender, class, and race rule about which emotions are allowed, whose feelings count, and which jobs demand smiles.

Organismic

Emotions come from inside the individual (biological drives, universal effects).

Social life shapes expression, but the engine is internal.

Interactional

Emotions are produced/organized in interaction (definitions of situations, norms, roles, status, "what is happening here?").

Emotions are social signals and social accomplishments.

Shame and embarrassment — Erving Goffman

Embarrassment, face-work, interaction order.

Shame and embarrassment — Norbert Elias

Shame/embarrassment has historically been produced through "civilizing" self-restraint.

Arlie Russell Hochschild

Emotion work, feeling rules, commercialization of feelings, and care work.

Feeling Rules (Hochschild)

Norms telling you what you should feel in a situation.

Emotion Work (Hochschild)

Managing feelings to meet those rules (deep acting/surface acting).

Commercialization of Feelings (Hochschild)

When workplaces sell emotions (smiles, calm, warmth) as part of the product.

Care Work (Hochschild)

Emotionally and relationally sustaining others (often feminized and undervalued).

Gender

Emotional labor and care work are disproportionately expected from women; "nice," soothing, and accommodating affects are gender-coded.

Class

Service work demands emotional performance; professional-managerial norms often reward "emotional control" and punish "messy" affect.

Race

Expectations about "appropriate" emotion are racialized (e.g., who is read as "angry," "threatening," "sassy," "unprofessional," "exotic," etc.), and who must regulate themselves to be safe/credible.

Pierre Bourdieu

Habitus, field, symbolic violence.

Habitus

Durable embodied dispositions (tastes, reflexes, "what feels natural") are shaped by your social conditions.

Field

A structured social arena with its own rules and power struggles (art, academia, law, etc.).

Symbolic Violence

Domination that works through meanings, legitimacy, and "common sense" (people misrecognize power as natural).

Bourdieu vs Frankfurt School

Frankfurt School often foregrounds ideology, mass culture, rationalization, and domination at the level of political economy/culture critique and tends to be more explicitly normative/philosophical.

Bourdieu is more relational-empirical: mapping fields, capitals, and how domination gets reproduced through everyday practice/taste/credentials—less "big philosophical diagnosis," more "power reproduced through ordinary life and institutions."

Norbert Elias

"The civilizing process".

Civilizing Process

Over long periods, people internalize stronger self-restraint (manners, shame thresholds, bodily regulation) as societies become more interdependent and states consolidate power.

Connection to Modernity

Modern states + markets increase interdependence → greater pressure for predictability/self-control → emotions and bodies get disciplined.

Other key Elias Contributions

Figuration (networks of interdependence), long-term historical sociology of the self/state, and emotion regulation as a social-historical process.

Role of the Body and Embodiment in Agency/Structure Integration

Agency isn’t just “ideas in the head.” It’s trained bodies: posture, tone, timing, comfort/discomfort, what you can do without thinking.

Habits, skills, and emotional reflexes are embodied social history. Structure lives in muscles, nerves, and instincts—then shows up as “choice.”

Materiality vs Language

A big debate: is social reality mainly built through discourse/meaning (language, representation), or through material practices/things (bodies, technologies, infrastructures)?

Many contemporary theorists say: it’s a messy co-production—language shapes perception, material arrangements shape what’s possible.

Practice, Training, Attunement, Manners/Etiquette

The classic "structure becomes habit" mechanisms.

Practice/training

Repeated doing creates dispositions (habitus).

Attunement

Learning to "read the room," calibrate affect/body to context.

Manners/etiquette

Historically shifting rules that discipline bodies and feelings (Elias/Goffman vibes).

Antonio Gramsci

Hegemony, intellectual vanguard ("cultural leadership"), revolution via education.

Hegemony

Ruling-class power is maintained not just by force, but by winning consent—making their worldview feel like common sense.

Intellectual vanguard / cultural leadership

"Organic intellectuals" help build a counter-hegemonic culture.

Revolution as Education

Change people's consciousness through institutions/culture, not only through seizing the state.

Georg Lukács

False consciousness, reification.

Reification

Social relations appear as things; people experience the world as objects/markets/bureaucracy rather than human relations.

Neo-Marxism/What was added by Lukács

He pushes Marx toward a theory of consciousness and lived experience under capitalism and links it to modern rationalized systems (often taught alongside Weber's rationalization).

Hegelian Marxism

Puts consciousness, subjectivity, dialectics, and culture front and center.

How Hegelian Marxism is different from Marxism

Less "economy determines everything" and more "how social reality is mediated through meaning, ideology, consciousness, and contradiction."

It's Marxism with more attention to how people experience and reproduce capitalism, not just how capitalism works as a machine.

Frankfurt School / Critical Theory

Common core: Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Walter Benjamin, Erich Fromm (plus later Jürgen Habermas).

Primary influences / Classical Ties

Strongly influenced by Marx (capitalism, ideology, exploitation) and Weber (rationalization, bureaucracy, "iron cage").

Also Freud (psychic life, repression) is huge for several of them; plus German philosophy (esp. Hegel).

Herbert Marcuse

"One-dimensional" society

One-dimensional

An advanced industrial society absorbs dissent by turning it into consumption/administration; people lose the capacity to imagine alternatives. Opposition gets neutralized ("managed").

Adorno + Horkheimer

Culture Industry.

Mass culture becomes industrial production: standardization, pseudo-choice, entertainment as social control—people are shaped into passive consumers.

Marcuse

Repressive desublimation.

Some "liberation" (sex, pleasure, expression) is allowed, but in a way that doesn't threaten the system—release valves that keep domination intact.

Main critiques of Modern Society/Capitalism

Instrumental reason: rationality reduced to calculation/efficiency/control.

Mass culture as domination (culture industry).

Alienation and conformism.

Domination is reproduced through everyday life, not just force.

Different from symbolic interactionists

Symbolic interactionism: bottom-up meaning-making in micro interaction; often descriptive/interpretive.

Frankfurt School: macro critique of capitalism/modernity; explicitly normative ("this is domination; it blocks human flourishing") and focused on systemic power.

Critiques of Biological race / Essentialism

"Race" isn't a natural biological essence with clear boundaries; biology doesn't map neatly onto racial categories.

Race categories shift across time/place, which is a big clue that they're social classifications.

Race as Socio-political / Socio-Historical Construct

Race is made through institutions, laws, labor markets, violence, migration, state policy, and cultural meaning—it's "real in its consequences," but not a fixed biological type.

Hypo-descent

"One-drop rule" logic: any known African ancestry classifies someone as Black (in U.S. history, especially). It's a racial boundary-making rule.

Michael Omi and Howard Winant

Racial formation.

Racial Formation

Race is produced through racial projects linking meaning + structure (how we interpret race + how institutions allocate resources and power).

Racialization (U.S. focus)

The process by which groups become "raced" (assigned meanings, stereotypes, presumed traits) in ways tied to power (immigration, policing, housing, labor, schooling, media).

Which theorists are associated?

Omi & Winant (racial formation).

Often paired with: W.E.B. Du Bois (color line, double consciousness).

Main associated theorists (CRITICAL RACE THEORY)

Common CRT anchors: Derrick Bell, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Richard Delgado, Patricia Williams, Mari Matsuda, Charles Lawrence.

Origin (CRITICAL RACE THEORY)

Emerges in U.S. legal studies (law schools) in the 1970s-1980s, as a response to the limits/backsliding of civil rights liberalism and the idea that racism would fade through colorblind law.

Seven Tenets

1. Racism is ordinary/structural, not aberrational

2. Interest convergence (racial progress when it benefits elites)

3. Race is socially constructed

4. Differential racialization (groups racialized differently across time)

5. Intersectionality / anti-essentialism

6. Critique of liberalism (colorblindness, incrementalism, neutrality)

7. Voice-of-color / storytelling / counter-narratives as knowledge.

Micro vs Macro Racism

Micro: everyday interactions, stereotypes, "common sense," institutional encounters.

Macro: laws, policies, political economy, segregation, incarceration.

CRT insists they feed each other: macro structures shape micro life; micro "common sense" legitimates macro policy.

Racial Idealism vs Racial Realism

In CRT, racial realism (often linked to Derrick Bell): racism is enduring and deeply embedded; progress is partial and reversible.

Racial idealism: belief that rational law/education alone will steadily resolve racism.

Liberalism + CRT's critique

Liberalism: individual rights, neutrality, incremental reform, colorblind equality.

CRT critique: "neutral" rules often preserve unequal starting conditions; colorblindness can protect existing advantage.

Critique of "Rights" Discourse

Rights can be unstable, symbolic, and unevenly enforced; they can legitimize the system without transforming material conditions.

Procedural vs Substantive Rights

Procedural: fair process (rules applied correctly).

Substantive: fair outcomes / real equality in lived conditions.

De facto vs de jure racism

De jure: by law (explicitly mandated).

De facto: by practice/outcome (segregation and inequality produced without explicit legal commands).

Postcolonialism - Which Theorists + Influences

Big postcolonial anchors: Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, (often) Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha.

Influences often include Marx, psychoanalysis (esp. for Fanon), and European philosophy; classical sociological ties vary by course.

Fanon: Black Skin, White Masks

Colonization produces psychic alienation: internalized racism, desire for whiteness, split self, language, and recognition as domination.

Race is lived in the body; oppression becomes intimate.

Fanon: The Wretched of the Earth

Colonialism is violence; it dehumanizes.

Decolonization is not just political—it's social/psychic re-creation.

Violence is discussed as a route to breaking colonial domination (your course may emphasize the controversy and the psychological-political argument).

Orientalism — What and Relation

Edward Said.

"Orientalism" = a Western system of representation that constructs "the East" as exotic/inferior/backward—knowledge production that supports imperial power.

Critiques of Colonialism and of Decolonization

Postcolonial theory critiques colonial domination and also warns that post-independence elites can reproduce colonial structures, borders, and categories.

Trauma and Catharsis

Colonization produces collective trauma; decolonization involves psychic and social rupture—sometimes framed as cathartic, sometimes as ongoing injury.

Violence—when necessary?

Fanon argues colonial rule is founded on violence, so liberation may require confronting that reality; many courses treat this as a contested claim to analyze rather than a slogan to endorse.

What is Gender (in sociology)? Relation to Sex/Sexuality

Gender: socially organized meanings/practices of masculinity/femininity (and beyond).

Sex: biological traits (also socially interpreted and not as binary as people pretend).

Sexuality: desire/identity/practice; shaped by norms and institutions.

Waves/Tendencies (broad)

1st: legal/political equality (suffrage, formal rights)

2nd: patriarchy in everyday life (work, family, sexuality; "the personal is political")

3rd: intersectionality, difference, critique of universal "woman," identity complexity

Contemporary/4th (sometimes): digital activism, transnational feminism, renewed focus on power/violence, intersectional praxis

Bifurcation of consciousness — who? drawing from who?

Dorothy E. Smith.

Often framed as women navigating everyday lived reality vs dominant institutional/"objective" standpoint; commonly linked to a critique of male-centered knowledge traditions (your course may connect this to Marxist and phenomenological roots).

Intersectionality — who?

Most directly: Kimberlé Crenshaw (coining the term in legal scholarship).

Also foundational in Black feminist thought more broadly (e.g., Combahee River Collective; Patricia Hill Collins builds the framework sociologically).

Matrix of domination — who? what mean?

Patricia Hill Collins.

Interlocking systems (race, class, gender, sexuality, nation) operate across levels (personal, cultural, institutional) to structure power.

"Master's tools..." — who?

Audre Lorde.

The idea: you can't dismantle oppressive systems using the same logics and power tools that built them.

Why Black feminist thought matters + leading theorists

It forces sociology to stop pretending there’s a “default human” experience.

It centers interlocking power and lived knowledge from marginalized standpoints.

Key figures often taught: Patricia Hill Collins, bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Angela Davis, Crenshaw, Combahee River

Collective.

Main arguments: domination is interlocking; knowledge is situated; liberation requires transforming structures, not just attitudes.

Main concepts defining Poststructuralism + who

Concepts: discourse, power/knowledge, deconstruction of "natural" categories, subject formation, contingency (things could be otherwise).

Major names: Michel Foucault (central), often alongside Derrida (deconstruction) depending on course framing.

Queer theory — critique of Liberal Identity

Queer theory argues identity categories ("gay/straight," "man/woman") are not just labels for inner truths; they're produced and policed by norms.

Critiques liberal identity politics for treating identities as fixed and for seeking inclusion without questioning the system that created exclusions.

Queer theory relation to Feminism

Commonly linked to later feminist turns (often associated with 3rd-wave/poststructural feminism) emphasizing discourse, performativity, and the instability of gender/sex categories (Judith Butler is the name that often shows up here).

Poststructural notion of Discourse

Discourse = systems of language/practice that define what can be said, known, and treated as true.

It doesn't just describe reality; it helps produce reality.

Knowledge and Power

For Foucault: knowledge is never neutral; institutions produce "truths" that organize bodies, populations, and norms.

Power works by shaping what counts as normal, healthy, deviant, legal, sane, etc.

Biopolitics / Biopower — who and what

Foucault.

Biopower: power over life—managing bodies (discipline) and populations (health, fertility, risk, statistics).

Biopolitics: the political strategies and practices through which life becomes governed.

Affect theorists expanding Biopolitics

Broad idea: they emphasize pre-conscious intensities, atmospheres, bodily capacities—how power works not only through rules and identities, but through moods, fear, desire, contagion, and "felt" environments.

Necropolitics / Necropower — who and how it expands Biopolitics

Achille Mbembe.

Expansion/critique: biopolitics emphasizes “making live and letting die”; necropolitics spotlights how power also works through organized exposure to death, disposability, and zones where killing/letting die becomes normal (often linked to colonialism, war, borders, and racialized state violence).