Which way is up?: Essays on sex, class, and culture

by Raewyn W. Connell

From the back For sixteen years Bob Connell has been writing on society while being active in politics and the labour movement. This book presents a selection of his new writing on three key issues of modern social analysis - sex and gender, class and power, and culture. The essays range from psychoanalysis and contemporary feminism to role theory, from the analysis of class and culture to the debate about intellectuals and the 'new class'. In critically reviewing contemporary thought on these issues, the author has developed a perspective centered on the analysis of social practice. Easy to read, often witty, the essays represent an attempt to shift social theory into the real world of the late twentieth century, to go beyond the limits of orthodox sociology and radical dogmas, to think through theoretical questions without losing touch with practical politics. At on level, Which Way is Up? is a chronicle and a criticism of the sociological imagination; at another, it gives a picture of an intellectual at work.

Hardcover

Published January 1, 1983

About the author

Raewyn Connell (also known as R.W. Connell and Robert W. Connell) is an Australian sociologist. She gained prominence as an intellectual of the Australian New Left. She is currently Professor Emeritus at the University of Sydney and known for the concept of hegemonic masculinity and southern theory.

Reviews

[Malcolm · Rating 3 out of 5]

Connell's work is some of the sharpest and most insightful critical engaged sociology there is. Although this collection is nearly 30 years old (it was first published in 1983) most essays remain vital and engaging piece that pose significant challenges to contemporary scholarship. It would be good, for instance, if more current scholars would consider Connell's critique of 'reproduction theory' - Althusser may have passed from popularity but both Bourdieu and Lefebvre are still called to support analyses (Bourdieu more often than Lefebvre). Equally important, some of these essays show Connell's early thinking about gender and explore sociological relations between gender & class in ways that few have done so effectively since. The essay 'The concept of the role and what to do with it' still, 32 years after it was written, provides a compelling basis for arguing against the simplistic and reactionary politics of the 'role model'.