This article builds on data collected in research on the everyday lives of gay men and lesbians in Slovenia, focusing on the families of origin and family relations. It pays special attention to the process of coming out and its consequences for further relationships among family members. It concentrates on the process of negotiating new family relations after coming out. The authors introduce the concepts of transparent closet and family closet to describe a situation in which family members are informed about a child's homosexuality but refuse to accept the consequences of their child's coming out. All of this holds important consequences for gay men and lesbians and their family members.
COBISS.SI-ID: 32494429
The main focus of the article is on the use of derogatory discourse and discrediting in order to present poor people as ethically questionable and therefore not deserving support by the state. Social benefits recipients are assumed to be passive and to lack initiative and motivation. These characteristics are believed to be part of their personal makeup but also a result of the “generosity” of the welfare state that allegedly supports or even creates such behaviour. Welfare fraud and moral judgment of the poor is becoming a prevailing speech that leads to a behaviour conditionality. The main research question that is explored in the article concerns the consequences of focusing social policy on frauds and fraudsters. To show how the welfare state has been turned into a punitive state, the case of Slovenia is used and changes in its social legislation that stipulate the level and scope of social rights.
COBISS.SI-ID: 4200037
The monograph addressed various angles of the social role and influence of contemporary medicine. It depicts health as a largely social phenomenon and medicine as a social science, overviews the notions and concepts of health and illness, the cultural and ideological meanings of illness, including its use as a metaphor for social deviance, as well as the process of the medicalisation of everyday life. Using empirical evidence, it sets out to explore how deeply conceptions of health and illness are embedded in the social reality. The 'presence' of modern medicine in the day-to-day lives of people seems substantial, particularly in the context of the ageing population where medicine seems to have replaced religion as the primary resource that can 'alleviate' the onset of old age. To providing an empirically informed overview of contemporary theoretical debates for interested scholars and students, another of the book’s contributions is that it brings to wider attention the 30-year-long Slovenian time-series of health indicators. It is quite a rarity to be able to examine subjective health trends in the context of two political systems and observe how this relationship is affected by major episodes of social stress and economic crises.
COBISS.SI-ID: 32797277
The article aims to illuminate this issue by applying the cultural capital theory to the processes of health production and distribution. It questions social marketing's role in addressing cultural resources as barriers to and/or facilitators of behavioural change. Social marketing is often criticized for its limited ability to enhance social goals and for aiding the reproduction of social inequalities. The theoretical framework of this conceptual paper is based on the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu's theory of human capital forms. It establishes an association between cultural capital and social marketing in solving social problems. All social marketing interventions affect cultural resources that people might use in the field of health. The findings endorse the utilization of cultural capital as a strategic analytical tool in social marketing. The article demonstrates how Bourdieu's capital theory can be applied to help social marketers make important strategic decisions. In particular, it argues that using specific notions of embodied cultural capital and objectified cultural capital can inform decisions on adopting a downstream, midstream or upstream approach. A relatively neglected concept in the social marketing field is introduced: cultural capital. It aims to contribute to the theoretical debate with regard to strategic social marketing orientations.
COBISS.SI-ID: 32845149
The article deals with the comparison of the characteristics, experiences and perceptions of everyday life of gays and lesbians living in rural and urban areas of Slovenia. We focus on the following thematic aspects: (1) coming out; (2) intimate partnerships; (3) the access and the use of gay infrastructure; (4) violence against gays and lesbians. The article also addresses and discusses the urban/rural divide as a Western construct that might not be completely applicable to other social and cultural contexts. Taking Slovenia as an example, this article questions theself-evidence of rural/urban divide as an analytical concept. On the basis of our research we conclude that this concept requires continuous revisions and re-interpretations in a concrete social and cultural context(s). The characteristics of gay and lesbian everyday life either in rural or in urban context in Slovenia lead to the conclusion that even within a specific social and cultural context, the concept of urban/rural divide should be used carefully, taking into account complexities of everyday lives and various factors that influence them.
COBISS.SI-ID: 32494685