Transnational logic of gratitude: Marriage migrants’ narratives on marital satisfaction in South Korea

Scholarship on marriage migrants has examined the impact of class and gender ideology of receiving countries on their marital satisfaction. However, little is known about the role of transnational background in explaining women’s feelings of gratitude for husbands. Drawing on qualitative in-depth interviews with marriage migrant women residing in the eastern side of Seoul, Korea, this article explores the micro-level cognitive processes in understanding women’s gratitude for their husbands. Categorizing marriage migrants into two groups, ‘gratified’ and ‘ungratified’ wives, the author demonstrates how the gratified wives’ feelings of contentment is mediated by their active comparison of Korean husbands with local men in their homelands, and how these viewpoints conversely affect their aspirations for return. Bringing the sociology of emotion into an explanation of marriage migrants’ marital satisfaction, this study aims to develop a transnational frame of reference as an underlying dynamic for comprehending marriage migrants’ (in)gratitude.

Abu Ghraib and the commemorative violence of war trophy photography

The photographs from the Abu Ghraib scandal are horrific, but they are also understandable. Simply put, the Abu Ghraib photos are purposeful compositions that highlight victory over the enemy Other in war. The photos illustrate sexual and racial violence, founded upon postcolonial narratives, but this is only a starting point for their significance. I address how meaning is made for the U.S. military personnel who took photographs of naked Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib, by looking backward to soldiers’ photography from WWI and II, and by considering soldiers’ online sharing of photographs in the present, examining roughly fifty photos total. The relationships between photographic materiality, emotional and gestural communication, and the production of cultural memory, disseminated via networked circulation, all shape how soldiers’ wartime photographs come to be regarded. Employing an interdisciplinary approach, this research draws upon war photography; visual culture and communication; sociology of groups and ritual; sociology of emotion; combat histories; memory studies; and online photo sharing practices. In so considering, the Abu Ghraib photos are not unique, and are instead grouped within the greater concept of the “war trophy.” I expand on this concept by defining “war trophy photography” as the entwined practices of war photography and trophy collection, rooted in ritual and group solidification. Staged to depict the violent conquering of the enemy, I argue that war trophy photography recognizes war efforts through the construction of a visual record, one that reproduces relations of dominance and submission. I call this representation “commemorative violence,” a central concept I develop to define the war trophy photograph. In addition to grounding the Abu Ghraib photos historically, I review their visual semiotic, cultural significance, such as with the “Doing a Lynndie” meme, which features civilians gesturing in thumbs-up toward a downtrodden individual, copying the same gesture as often used in the images from Abu Ghraib, and the now defunct site “Now That’s Fucked Up,” which briefly allowed soldiers in 2005 to trade gruesome war trophy pictures for pornography. The conclusion reflects on war trophy photography with the topical consideration of drones, ultimately suggesting that drone warfare photos are expressionless because of the overt absence of people.

Abu Ghraib and the commemorative violence of war trophy photography

The photographs from the Abu Ghraib scandal are horrific, but they are also understandable. Simply put, the Abu Ghraib photos are purposeful compositions that highlight victory over the enemy Other in war. The photos illustrate sexual and racial violence, founded upon postcolonial narratives, but this is only a starting point for their significance. I address how meaning is made for the U.S. military personnel who took photographs of naked Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib, by looking backward to soldiers’ photography from WWI and II, and by considering soldiers’ online sharing of photographs in the present, examining roughly fifty photos total. The relationships between photographic materiality, emotional and gestural communication, and the production of cultural memory, disseminated via networked circulation, all shape how soldiers’ wartime photographs come to be regarded. Employing an interdisciplinary approach, this research draws upon war photography; visual culture and communication; sociology of groups and ritual; sociology of emotion; combat histories; memory studies; and online photo sharing practices. In so considering, the Abu Ghraib photos are not unique, and are instead grouped within the greater concept of the “war trophy.” I expand on this concept by defining “war trophy photography” as the entwined practices of war photography and trophy collection, rooted in ritual and group solidification. Staged to depict the violent conquering of the enemy, I argue that war trophy photography recognizes war efforts through the construction of a visual record, one that reproduces relations of dominance and submission. I call this representation “commemorative violence,” a central concept I develop to define the war trophy photograph. In addition to grounding the Abu Ghraib photos historically, I review their visual semiotic, cultural significance, such as with the “Doing a Lynndie” meme, which features civilians gesturing in thumbs-up toward a downtrodden individual, copying the same gesture as often used in the images from Abu Ghraib, and the now defunct site “Now That’s Fucked Up,” which briefly allowed soldiers in 2005 to trade gruesome war trophy pictures for pornography. The conclusion reflects on war trophy photography with the topical consideration of drones, ultimately suggesting that drone warfare photos are expressionless because of the overt absence of people.

Neoliberalization and Politics of Shaming

Drawing on Norbert Elias’s writing and sociology of emotion literature, this study proposes viewing neoliberalization as a “civilizing process,” which is enabled by politics of shaming. By tracing two streams of protests triggered by neoliberal transformations—by farmers and schoolteachers—in the 1990s and how they were handled by the ruling elite publicly in the mass media, this article finds that, in post-Soviet and neoliberal Latvia, in moments of tension between the state and society, rule occurred through a politics of shaming that utilized three instruments: the neoliberal ideology of a good citizen, essentializing language, and dividing language. This article contributes to the post-Soviet studies’ scholarship, the growing body of scholarship that explores relationships between neoliberalization and emotions, as well as social movements literature.

Capturing emotion with audio diaries

Research on emotion is fraught with methodological limitations, as feelings can have non-discrete, ephemeral, and ineffable qualities. Audio diaries offer a method for capturing the sequential and varied experience of emotions as they emerge from everyday life. Following theory and methodological development in the sociology of emotion, we examine how audio diaries might be used to capture (a) candid emotions that emerge spontaneously and may reflect unpopular or negative social views and experiences, (b) the self as unfinished, and (c) processes of emotional reflexivity that exist alongside the diverse emotions that infuse everyday life. We explore how waveform visualization of audio recordings might be meaningfully combined with qualitative analysis of transcribed data to illustrate emotional contours in situ. We draw on audio diaries collected from 48 nurses from two US hospital systems to explore the possibilities and limitations of using audio diaries in emotion research.

Uncovering Hidden Emotional Work: Professional Practice in Paediatric Post-Mortem

The concepts of emotional labour and emotion management have been extensively explored across a range of health and social care occupations. Less is known about emotionality in ‘hidden’ and ‘taboo’ realms of health work. Drawing on data from an ethnographic study on fetal and neonatal post-mortem, we explore the ways in which professionals across occupation and status positions both articulate and manage their emotions. Post-mortem involves a range of practices which take place around the edges of life and death, medicine and hospital space. Although often concealed from members of the public (and from some professionals), such practices tend to be highly valued by professionals and parents. Our analysis moves beyond the current sociological focus on occupation, illuminating instead how emotional work is performed across multi-disciplinary teams in this secret context. In doing so we seek to contribute to the conceptual and empirical development of the sociology of emotion work.

Emotions and Emergence

The sociology of emotion remains divided. One group of social scientistsadheres closely to positivism and formulates lengthy lists of abstractpropositions and predictions (Collins, Turner, Kemper, etc.). In contrast,the other group’s epistemology is enmeshed in interpretivism and producesthick-descriptions of emotion labels, scripts, and understandings(Hochschild, Katz, Wetherell, etc.). Neither positivist nor interpretivistapproaches adequately theorize the causal and conjunctural status of humanemotions in social-historical sequences; thus, they both fail to show how,why, and when accounts of emotional states may be necessary in socialexplanations. Critical realism (CR) offers a better way to conceptualizethe influence of the psychophysiological subsistence of emotion withinsocial interactions. A CR-inspired approach to the sociology of emotionshould include three insights: (1) *Emotions as Evolved Capabilities:* Fromour evolutionary prehistory, humans have inherited distinctive emotionalcapabilities, including a complex palette of emotional experience andimpressive emotional mechanisms for rapid-fire sublinguistic communication.(2) *Emotions as Emergent Causal Powers:* Human emotions are themselves‘emergent’ neurophenomenological entities belonging to themicrosociological domain of ontology. Emotional experiences emerge from butare not reducible to labels, bodies, gestures, minds, social situations,scripts, etc. Integrating these multicomponent ingredients, thepsychophysiological coherence of emotions indicates the existence ofemergent properties, including possibilities of upward and downwardcausation. (3) *Emotions as Situational Dispositions*: Emotions realizetheir causal power as psychological dispositions to action, inaction, andcommunication. By embracing critical realism, sociologists can avoid bothan upward conflation of emotion into higher-level social structures, likelanguage (an error of the interpretivists), as well as a downward reductionof the psychology of social emotion to neurobiology or behavioralism (anerror of the positivists).