Thomas S. Weinberg

G. W. Levi Kamel

Studies in Sadomasochism

S and M

Thomas Weinberg

SandM, Studies in Sadomasochism

Staci Newmahr

Offering an anthology of original articles on sexuality from a sociological perspective, Selves, Symbols, and Sexualities: An Interactionist Anthology focuses on the diverse and multi-layered meanings of sexuality, sexual behaviors and sexual identities. Thomas S. Weinberg and Staci Newmahr bring you essays that explore sexuality as a social process. As a whole, the book takes the perspective that what each of us understands to be sexual is constructed through everyday social processes and interaction, situated in particular spaces and moments, identified through our social-sexual presentations, and symbolized through language, objects and practices. The book is organized around these four distinct but interrelated processes, and augmented by personal narratives around relevant issues. The authors’ goals for the book are to engage students in the sociological enterprise by providing interesting and insightful entries that emphasize the importance of meaning-making in human sexuality, and to provide them with conceptual tools to understand human sexuality in a complex and quickly changing sexual landscape.

An Interactionist Anthology

Selves, Symbols, and Sexualities

Gerhard Falk

Ursula Adler Falk

The American Drug Culture uses sociological and other perspectives to examine drug and alcohol use in U.S. society. The text is arranged topically rather than by drug categories and explores diverse aspects of drug use, including popular culture, sexuality, legal and criminal justice systems, other social institutions, and mental and physical health. It covers alcohol, the most widely used drug in the United States, more extensively than other texts on this subject. The authors include case studies from their own field research that give students empathetic insights into the situations of those suffering from substance and alcohol abuse.

The American Drug Culture

Alcohol use is an integral part of the gay world. According to some estimates, the rate of problem drinking is about three times higher among gays than in mainstream society, but few researchers have examined this phenomenon in depth. Thomas S. Weinberg's ethnographic study provides new insight into the role of drinking in the gay male community. Weinberg utilizes interviewing and participant observation techniques in a variety of drinking-related settings in the gay subculture of "Paradise City," the fictitious name of a large western city where he carried out his research. Emphasizing drinking as social behavior, Weinberg explores the ways social contexts?such as bars, love relationships, and reference groups?affect individual drinking patterns and concludes that drinking is intimately entwined with friendship networks and extended families in the gay world. Weinberg is concerned not only with alcoholism but with variation in alcohol use and changes in alcohol use over time. He employs the concept of "career" to explain why and how an individual's drinking might either increase or decrease over the course of his lifetime. Letting his informants speak for themselves, Weinberg directs attention to their own perspectives on the meaning of their drinking behavior. After creating a typology of drinkers, including self-defined as well as researcher-defined alcoholics, Weinberg considers alternative explanations for gay problem drinking. He thoroughly explores the gay bar scene, its importance in gay life, and the way that interactions within the bar environment affect drinking and risk-taking, specifically as they relate to HIV. Weinberg also looks closely at self-defined gay alcoholics and considers three alternative explanations for gay problem drinking: the alienation thesis, the influence of parental role models, and reference group theory. He rejects the alienation thesis and the influence of parental role models because these causal factors were not borne out by his statistical correlations. Instead, Weinberg finds the most powerful explanation in reference group theory, which links individuals' behavior to the norms of the social groups they identify with. Finally, he arrives at a processual model of gay problem drinking based on his data analysis. By comparing alcohol use in the homosexual and heterosexual communities, Weinberg provides a new perspective on gay problem drinking that will interest sociologists, psychologists, and clinicians, as well as concerned lay readers in the gay community. He cites examinations of large-scale survey research on tavern attendance and drinking, ethnographic studies of bar behavior, literature on special groups, and studies of marital interaction in alcoholic families, concluding that gay drinking is a special situation that only reference group theory and a processual model adequately address. The closing chapter contains policy recommendations for reducing alcohol use in the gay community.

Gay Men, Drinking, and Alcoholism

Thomas S. Weinberg

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