I already wrote on the difference of culture-making and culture-preserving strategies. In starting and maintaining a blog culture, you ought to start ritualizing certain practises (I think, Rebecca Blood would appreciate such an approach). At Odradek I usually post a “sunday citation” of my current readings. Here I want to go for a different ritual: I will link and appraise a blog tackling with sociological problems I find worthwhile to read.
I want to start this tradition-to-be with a US American blog called
As i understand, this blog is online for about one year. Macon, its host, aggregates and discusses texts, social phenomena and everday’s trivia from a point of view interested in the counterpart to to the racialized “other”: whiteness.
This is a not an easy way of analyzing social constructions. From what I know, there are still dicussions whether gender studies are a progression or a regression vis a via women’s studies or not. And even childhood sociology relies mostly on the construction of the child and its concept of the child as an actor, less is said on the construction of adultness. The adultocentric imperative works in wicked ways. The same goes for the category of whiteness.
But as Antonio Gramsci knew, hegemony operats via the culturally dissemination of a interpretion of the world: people are not only to be convinced to accept a social order, but the images and ideas of normalcy have to get culturally unconscious or opaque in order to get hegemonic. You have to forget to be white, male and adult (and of course middle or upper class) to make this position powerful – read powerful as in the typical Weberian meaning: as a chance to make one’s own will or porpuses real. The first mean to call a dominant structure into question is to show, on which elements of common sense it is based.
Macon is chasing after such everday traces of making “being white” a culturally unconscious element of America’s common sense. Thank you.
