The Trouble with Feelings

Abstract

By using fieldwork data from an ethnographic study of a competitive sailing subculture in Australia, this work explores how gender and power are done through a complex and contradictory bricolage of subjectivities (defined as bodies of feelings), social practices, and social structures. It suggests that analytical frameworks that incorporate these three levels of analysis may contribute to the accessibility of social constructionist critiques of various cultural forms, practices, and gender regimes. Furthermore, it seeks to assist the development of conceptual frameworks that can place subjectivities into the center of analyses, without raising the spectre of either essentialism or complete reductionism.