Draws on documentary & academic/popular writings & research on friendship among gay men & lesbians to focus on the nature & functions of friendships in the gay male community, highlighting their potential for enacting sociopolitical change in the larger heteronormative society. The nature of communities as potential bases for social action is discussed, & the unique sense of community created among homosexuals, particularly in urban areas, is described. Gay males' perceptions of friendship are reported, drawing on narrative data obtained via interviews & questionnaires from 191 respondents, emphasizing the sense of belonging, acceptance, & identity that they foster. 40 References. K. Hyatt Stewart
"When strangers meet in social clubs, watch reality television, or interact on Facebook, they contribute to the social glue of mass society--not because they promote civic engagement or democracy, but because they enact the sacred promise of friendship. Where most theories of nationalism focus on issues of collective identity formation, Kaplan's novel framework turns attention to compatriots' experience of solidarity and how it builds on interpersonal ties and performances of public intimacy. Combining critical analyses of contemporary theories of nationalism, civil society, and politics of friendship with in-depth empirical case studies of social club sociability, Kaplan ultimately shows that strangers-turned-friends acquire symbolic, male-centered meaning and generate feelings of national solidarity."--
The article addresses friendship relations among male artisanal gold miners in West Africa, exemplified by case studies from Northern Benin. I will argue that friendship is an important element in understanding the fluid social configurations in the mining region. In the new social environment, immigrants develop new ties among themselves & to the local societies. I will explore the general logic of friendship bonds in that area & discuss their integrative strength as well as their limits. In the context of gold mining, strategies of economic as well as social risk minimization incline many migrants to create friendship bonds. Parity in income sharing is more likely to be established among friends than among kinsmen. Friendship is specifically relevant to integrate people of very different regional, ethnic, & social backgrounds. Despite the many divergent interests between different economic actors, locals & immigrants, there are multiple bonds that give rise to different levels of social integration. 35 References. Adapted from the source document.
This article explores when and under what circumstances the words starik and starina emerged as terms of friendship in standard Russian language. These terms were often used by male characters in the prose of the Khrushchev Thaw — students, scientists, and engineers. It was initially assumed that these words had become forms of address at that time. Analysis of data from the Russian National Corpus shows that these terms of friendship date back earlier than that. Starik was used to address a male friend in the 19th century and starina in the 1920s—30s. Decades apart, the two words started to function as terms of friendship in a very similar way. Both were used at first to address an elderly stranger. At some point, they turned into means of language play and speech stylisation to finally lose their connection to folk speech and the semantics of age. The first one to complete the transformation was the word starina. As to starik, it apparently began to be used as a term of friendship in languages of groups.
Crossroads --The Spaces in Between -- The Hiking Club: S.M. Abdullah and the Oettinger Women -- An Artist's View: Lisa Oettinger Between 'Civilizations' -- The Sting of Desire: Hugo Marcus's Theology of Male Friendship -- The Rebels: Luba Derczanska and Her Friends -- An Indian Muslim in Jewish Berlin: Khwaja Abdul Hamied.
One of the most powerful aspects of social network data is the fact that they can reproduce social relationships in a formal and comparable way. Relational matrices abstract from the hustle and bustle of everyday interaction, and systematise information in terms of presence or absence of ties expressing them in a directed or undirected, binary or valued form. While the formal approach represents an advantage of social network analysis, as it allows bracketing off the idiosyncratic and subjective content of social structures, the mathematization of the complex nature of social relationships has also been criticised for the lack of engagement with the subjective meaning and context of relationships. Such stream of critique has called for an increase of use of qualitative methods in social network research. The first goal of the paper is to address these critiques by rebalancing the argument and showing how social network analysis has always engaged with both formal and contextual aspects of social structures. The paper reviews some theoretical perspectives that discuss and systematise a mixed method approach, and explores the methodological advantages of using network visualizations together with qualitative interviews in the collection, analysis and interpretation of personal networks. The advantages of adopting a mixed method approach are illustrated over some examples of friendship networks of 23 single male and female people collected in Milan, Italy, in 2005. A classic name generator is used to reconstruct their egonets of friends, and the visualization is adopted as the input for in-depth interviews with specific attention devoted to the meaning of friendship relationships, the kind of resources they offer, the conflicts and constrains they entail, and how they have developed and evolved over time. By comparing information obtained respectively with name generators and in-depth interviews, the paper shows how the mix of data improves and specify the understanding of personal networks.
Afro-Asian cultural production and the rise of the global culture -- "You can stay at my crib, I will show you my 'hood": Interethnic male friendship -- "Scheming, treacherous, and out for revenge": Ethnic imperialism -- "Some things never change, and some things do": Interethnic conflict and solidarity.
This article investigates how the Italian Jesuit Matteo Ricci (1552-1610) regarded friendship as an attribute of the Chinese literati and how the importance of this male bonding helped him shape the notion of a "literatus" in Ming China, which he eventually communicated back to his European readership. A first section of the article analyzes Ricci's treatise on friendship, the Jiaoyou lun (1595), his first work written in Chinese. A genuine interest in the theme of friendship became his first—and well-aimed—approach to the literati elites. The Jiaoyou lun reflects a winding path of literary adaptations of classical western authors juxtaposed with Confucian notions of friendship. A second section of the article is dedicated to the friends Ricci made in different cities and from different intellectual traditions and schools. Ricci experienced different kinds of friendship with different types of literati, which did not, however, prevent him from narrowing the category of "literatus" to that of "Confucian". Ricci defined Confucianism as the "sect" of the literati, which in Ricci's eyes comprised scholars engaged in literary activities and scholarly debates on the one hand, and a strong sense of duty to contribute to good, stable government on the other. Ricci saw now problem uniting these two major orientations and being embodied in the Confucian literatus. Finally, a third section is dedicated to some concluding remarks on how Ricci exploited the experience—and redefined the notion—of friendship in Ming China. By taking on the task of defining the identity of the Confucian literatus, Ricci became a versatile friend to the Chinese literati, ably adopting "multiple identities" and roles.
AbstractIn this research, we considered how various structural aspects of friendship networks relate to marital quality according to gender. To investigate this issue, we drew on data from a large longitudinal survey on marital functioning based on 903 heterosexual couples living in Switzerland. Using reports from male and female partners, we explored the extent to which joint contacts, transitivity, and overlap in friendship structures affect various indicators of marital quality for husbands and wives in the long run. Our results indicate that separate, low transitive friendship networks affect marital quality negatively for women, but not for men. We also discuss the importance of the results for understanding the dynamics of heterosexual couples within larger relational contexts beyond dyadic interactions, as well as the relevance of separately analyzing husbands' and wives' marital dynamics.
Objective: To diagnose Friendship as a teaching device. Methods: Exploratory and descriptive qualitative study. Main question: What does Friendship mean and a friendly teacher? Results: Psychosomatic Medicine classroom, 2015/2nd Semester; 16 white students of 6th, 7th and 8th semesters of medical school; two at 2nd graduation; 12 female/4 male; mean age 25 years; most have two siblings; from Southeast and one from Midwest; three were married; two had children. Friendship as a feature of human essence, a communication of the sensitive body. They think teacher as someone fulfilling their will. Conclusion: Educational activities in education, training and health actions should include feeling and will of students. The teachers need to acquire teaching skills of human spirituality.
In this study, I analyzed changes over time in networks consisting of closest friends in the context of the Turkish white-collar class. I also examined how life events affect these changes. I collected data using interviews (conducted 5 years apart) with 32 male and 37 female respondents. The data show that a significant amount of change in the friendship networks was associated with certain life events; geographical mobility was the most important of these. The data also suggest that there are some significant gendered differences in friendships that change as a result of social circumstances.
The article is devoted to the study of scenarios of gender behavior in situations of violence, gender patterns of friendship / maintenance of horizontal relations after marriage by representatives of men and women, tolerance / intolerance towards minority gender representatives, gender maturity / separation and heterophobia in marriage and gender legitimization of male friendship and women. This topic is relevant in the context of the study of gender hierarchies and latent discriminatory practices regarding men in matriarchal gender culture. The subject matter of the article is actualized, first and foremost, in connection with the social consequences of applying double standards of evaluation and violations of gender justice and equality arising from gender racism. The attitude of men and women in Ukraine to the gender standards of friendship with representatives of the sexes, as well as the attitude towards minority gender representatives, can be generalized using the concept of gender xenophobia. This concept allows you to analyze the empirical research of women's ambitions regarding male friendship (as well as the slight discovery of the relevant crimes and expectations of men about women's friendship) in the context of understanding gender identity. The functional link between gender xenophobia and gender identity is considered in the visual analysis and sociology of visual symbolism, taking into account the following key ideas: a) xenophobia sets the bias of women's gender consciousness on the basis of the opposition «we-them», «theirs-aliens», using distrust, fear , hatred of «strangers» as the basis of group communication, integration and consolidation of actions for the implementation of group gender repression against men; b) the essential characteristics of matriarchal gender xenophobia are binary oppositions in the design of gender relations (high / low, significant / insignificant, etc.) and the structural evaluation of feminized men as «their», and masculinized men and representatives of minority gender groups - as «strangers»; c) the negative attitude of masculinized men and representatives of minority gender groups to «strangers» is significantly higher (by comparison with the male part of the sample) from the part of the female respondents; The basis of gender xenophobia, both for men and women, can be the affections of fear, anger, disgust, contempt, and envy; d) hostility towards masculinized men and representatives of minority gender groups as «alien» can be manifested in various hidden-aggressive actions towards identified «alien» not only in situations of real deviant behavior, but also in its absence; e) Generation of negative social feelings of women towards men can be caused by any situation of male friendship, which is automatically stigmatized as latent-homosexual and requiring control, mediation and regulation by women; e) the corresponding stereotypes of deviance of male friendship in the Ukrainian gender culture can be applied in the process of gender socialization by inducing homophobia to men who, on the basis of the suggestion of fear, disgust, shame, turn into the actual identification of male friendly relations as deviant (or questionable, normal), and women's friendly relations - both natural and legitimized in gender morals; g) hostility towards manhood as an identified «alien» is constructed with the help of social morality, gender mythology, religion and part of scientific or quasi-scientific ideas.
