D Waskul
Biographic Data
| ID | 38874 |
|---|---|
| NAME | D Waskul |
| GIVEN NAMES | D |
| FAMILY NAME | Waskul |
| SIGNATURE | WASKUL D |
| AFFILIATIONS | Minnesota State University, Mankato |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5231-1666 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 24 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 334 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 24 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1996 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 11 |
I'm a Good Guy Who Deserves Better, Yet Nobody Wants to Give me Better
Within Western popular culture and online discourse, a “Nice Guy” is someone who enacts niceness for which they believe they are owed, deserving of, or entitled to something in return-especially the romantic or sexual attention of women. In this study, we examine the use of accounts in personal narratives told in an anonymous online discussion forum about Nice Guys. In their stories of their failed pursuits with women, the men in our study often …
“Best invention, second to the dishwasher”
This study examines how people learn about vibrators, their attitudes toward them, fears or hesitations about acquiring and/or using one, and the significance of vibrators to participants’ sexualities. Based on 78–147 responses to an online open-ended survey, participants report: primarily learning about vibrators from media and peers; their interpretations of media representations of vibrators are juxtaposed as both a tool for great pleasure and…
Ghostly Encounters
The Senses in Self, Society, and Culture
The Senses in Self, Society, and Culture is the definitive guide to the sociological and anthropological study of the senses. Vannini, Waskul, and Gottschalk provide a comprehensive map of the social and cultural significance of the senses that is woven in a thorough analytical review of classical, recent, and emerging scholarship and grounded in original empirical data that deepens the review and analysis. By bridging cultural/qualitative sociol…
Making Sense of the Weather
Drawing on ethnographic data collected throughout British Columbia’s coastal regions, in this article, the authors examine people’s experiences of ordinary weather. Data show how people experience weather multisensorially and how the weather plays a central role in the way individuals and collectives define sense of place. Experiences of weather, the authors argue, are a reflexive and active form of dwelling. A focus on skillful embodied practice…
Moral Panics, Sex Panics
I began reading Moral Panics, Sex Panics just as the media had apparently exhausted Tiger Woods’ numerous infidelities, as salacious images of Rielle Hunter (mistress of former U.S. Senator John Edwards) saturated the mediascape, and Jessie James (then-husband of Academy Award winner Sandra Bullock) publically admitted to an affair with a tattooed exotic dancer. While none of these, “monogamy challenged” celebrities, nor the media frenzy surround…
Now the Orgy is Over
Based on six months of ethnographic fieldwork, this study explores the intersections between embodied flesh and digital (re)presentations by examining how participants experience virtual sex on Second Life. We explore how and to what extent Second Life avatars mediate personal desires and fantasies with others who, collaboratively, construct sexual adventures in forms of playful deviance that allow for the emergence of secret sexual selves, as we…
Sex(ualities) and Symbolic Interaction
What goes on sexually has to be placed in a context of meaning. This might seem a very simple and obvious idea. And yet this is what makes it so important: most people still cannot see sexuality in this way. We continue to think of our sexualities as remaining firmly locked in the chains of biology. Whereas for humans surely the biological is really the least interesting aspect of our sexuality. So, whilst there remain huge armies of sexologists …
Sound Acts
Drawing on reflection, nonparticipant and participant observation, and introspection this article examines the performative dimensions of sound, arguing that sounds of both the nonsemioticized and semioticized variety function as acts, not unlike speech acts. Through a layered text, the article offers analytical reflections and evocative writing focused on the exploration of acoustic environments such as movie theatres, airplanes, street music pe…
Symbolic Interactionism
The Aroma of Recollection
This study examines olfactory perception and nostalgic memories focusing on sense acts and the sensuous self as a dialectic of ritual sensations and sense-making rituals. Our data are drawn from a convenience sample of twenty-three participants who reflected on their olfactory experiences through the use of research journals. Our analysis illustrates how olfactory perceptions and memories are necessarily produced by active “idealizing activity” t…
My Boyfriend Loves it when I Come Home from this Class
Most classroom uses of new media technologies lack a pedagogy, aesthetic, or both. Performance methods offer a pedagogy; sensual learning offers an aesthetic. Combined, the two comprise a powerful teaching strategy and one that is especially well suited to the use of explicit media in sexualities courses. This article offers some ideas about pedagogy and aesthetics, and, grounded in 35 student evaluations, explores the potential uses of new media…
Smell, Odor, and Somatic Work
Sensation (noun) is emergent in joint acts of sensing (verb). To sense, in other words, is to make sense, and sense making entails what we call “somatic work.” We investigate these dynamics in the context of olfaction, highlighting how olfaction intersects with social, cultural, and moral order—thus compelling reflexive forms of somatic work by which people manage smell (as an act) and odor (as a sign). Our data are drawn from a convenience sampl…
Women and Their Clitoris
Under continued, broad, and pervasive conditions of symbolic clitoridectomy—a bracketing of the clitoris by means of linguistic and discursive erasure—the carnal discovery of the clitoris poses circumstances where women often confront and negotiate symbolic purgatory, a situation in which most women discover “it” long before they fully acquire the symbolic knowledge that it, indeed, is a clitoris. Based on the written reports of fifteen women, we…
Mundane Life in a Media Age
Review of Edward Castronova’s Synthetic Worlds (2005, University of Chicago Press), Elaine Lally’s At Home with Computers (2002, Berg), and Bill Osgerby’s Youth Media (2004, Routledge)
Managing the Uncertainties of Gulf War Illness
Based on observation and in-depth interviews with fifty-five respondents, we provide a detailed analysis of the Gulf War illness experience. All chronically ill people experience troublesome physical symptoms, but most reasonably expect to receive medical answers and treatment, in addition to the support of family, friends, employers, and coworkers. This research addresses a circumstance where neither sick people nor the medical establishment has…
Symbolic Interaction as Music
Analytical frameworks such as dramaturgy and narrative analysis are respectively grounded in metaphors of life as theater and life as a story. In related fashion, in this article the authors argue for the creation of another metaphor: life as music. Viewing selfhood and symbolic interaction as music sensitizes us to observe and understand an important but much too neglected dimension of social life: the esthetic. Drawing from the pragmatist philo…
Ekstasis and the internet
Anthropologist Victor Turner suggested that all social worlds are composed of two parallel, yet seemingly contrasting models: society as social structure and society as communitas. The relationships between these two basic elements of human social and cultural life are mediated by ephemeral experiences of liminality. Other major theoretical traditions also recognize these relationships, representing a distinct conceptual framework of direct signi…
Role-Playing and Playing Roles
In fantasy role-playing games, participants collectively create and play fantasy personas in an imaginary universe by using a vast system of rules that function as guidelines for make-believe action and interaction. Consequently, role-playing games obligate participants to occupy a liminal role located in the boundaries of persona, player, and person. This study, based on approximately ninety hours of participant observation and forty interviews …
The Abject Embodiment of Cancer Patients
The body is the empirical quintessence of the self. Because selfhood is symbolic, embodiment represents the personification and materialization of otherwise invisible qualities of personhood. The body and experiences of embodiment are central to our sense of being, who we think we are, and what others attribute to us. What happens, then, when one's body is humiliating? How does the self handle the implications of a gruesome body? How do people ma…
The Naked Self
Unlike text-based cybersex, televideo is an embodied experience. Participants present their bodies as an object to be looked at. Through in-depth interviews this study examines the relationships among selfhood and the body and the context in which both are located. The body, much like the self, exists as both a viewed object and an experienced subject. Televideo cybersex participants manipulate this relationship by presenting themselves as only a…
Cybersex
The increased popularity of the Internet invites the possibility of repackaging familiar activities in a new medium. Sex is one such activity-an age-old topic with a new cybertwist. The new technologies of computer-mediated communication allow us to examine the nature of human interaction in a uniquely disembodied environment that potentially transforms the nature of self, body, and situation. Sex-fundamentally a bodily activity-provides an ideal…
Camp staffing
This study analyzes junctures in the experiences of a summer camp staff from the perspective of structural interactionist theory, emphasizing the process by which staff construct and maintain a wilderness community, social roles, and identities. Data were collected by means of three qualitative methods: open‐ended surveys, in‐depth interviews, and participant observation. Findings indicate that staff brought varied expectations to camp yet constr…
Considering the Electronic Participant
Ethical issues arise at all phases of the research act. However, this article is intended to identify and discuss ethical issues that researchers should consider during the research act at the phase of methodology construction and in the course of data collection. During this phase, researchers must be keenly aware of the experiential dimension of the phenomena they are studying, taking great care not to harm the participants or the context of th…
Making Sense of the Weather
Drawing on ethnographic data collected throughout British Columbia’s coastal regions, in this article, the authors examine people’s experiences of ordinary weather. Data show how people experience weather multisensorially and how the weather plays a central role in the way individuals and collectives define sense of place. Experiences of weather, the authors argue, are a reflexive and active form of dwelling. A focus on skillful embodied practice…
The Senses in Self, Society, and Culture
The Senses in Self, Society, and Culture is the definitive guide to the sociological and anthropological study of the senses. Vannini, Waskul, and Gottschalk provide a comprehensive map of the social and cultural significance of the senses that is woven in a thorough analytical review of classical, recent, and emerging scholarship and grounded in original empirical data that deepens the review and analysis. By bridging cultural/qualitative sociol…
Smell, Odor, and Somatic Work
Sensation (noun) is emergent in joint acts of sensing (verb). To sense, in other words, is to make sense, and sense making entails what we call “somatic work.” We investigate these dynamics in the context of olfaction, highlighting how olfaction intersects with social, cultural, and moral order—thus compelling reflexive forms of somatic work by which people manage smell (as an act) and odor (as a sign). Our data are drawn from a convenience sampl…
The Aroma of Recollection
This study examines olfactory perception and nostalgic memories focusing on sense acts and the sensuous self as a dialectic of ritual sensations and sense-making rituals. Our data are drawn from a convenience sample of twenty-three participants who reflected on their olfactory experiences through the use of research journals. Our analysis illustrates how olfactory perceptions and memories are necessarily produced by active “idealizing activity” t…
The Abject Embodiment of Cancer Patients
The body is the empirical quintessence of the self. Because selfhood is symbolic, embodiment represents the personification and materialization of otherwise invisible qualities of personhood. The body and experiences of embodiment are central to our sense of being, who we think we are, and what others attribute to us. What happens, then, when one's body is humiliating? How does the self handle the implications of a gruesome body? How do people ma…
Managing the Uncertainties of Gulf War Illness
Based on observation and in-depth interviews with fifty-five respondents, we provide a detailed analysis of the Gulf War illness experience. All chronically ill people experience troublesome physical symptoms, but most reasonably expect to receive medical answers and treatment, in addition to the support of family, friends, employers, and coworkers. This research addresses a circumstance where neither sick people nor the medical establishment has…
The Naked Self
Unlike text-based cybersex, televideo is an embodied experience. Participants present their bodies as an object to be looked at. Through in-depth interviews this study examines the relationships among selfhood and the body and the context in which both are located. The body, much like the self, exists as both a viewed object and an experienced subject. Televideo cybersex participants manipulate this relationship by presenting themselves as only a…
Considering the Electronic Participant
Ethical issues arise at all phases of the research act. However, this article is intended to identify and discuss ethical issues that researchers should consider during the research act at the phase of methodology construction and in the course of data collection. During this phase, researchers must be keenly aware of the experiential dimension of the phenomena they are studying, taking great care not to harm the participants or the context of th…
Women and Their Clitoris
Under continued, broad, and pervasive conditions of symbolic clitoridectomy—a bracketing of the clitoris by means of linguistic and discursive erasure—the carnal discovery of the clitoris poses circumstances where women often confront and negotiate symbolic purgatory, a situation in which most women discover “it” long before they fully acquire the symbolic knowledge that it, indeed, is a clitoris. Based on the written reports of fifteen women, we…
Sound Acts
Drawing on reflection, nonparticipant and participant observation, and introspection this article examines the performative dimensions of sound, arguing that sounds of both the nonsemioticized and semioticized variety function as acts, not unlike speech acts. Through a layered text, the article offers analytical reflections and evocative writing focused on the exploration of acoustic environments such as movie theatres, airplanes, street music pe…
Symbolic Interaction as Music
Analytical frameworks such as dramaturgy and narrative analysis are respectively grounded in metaphors of life as theater and life as a story. In related fashion, in this article the authors argue for the creation of another metaphor: life as music. Viewing selfhood and symbolic interaction as music sensitizes us to observe and understand an important but much too neglected dimension of social life: the esthetic. Drawing from the pragmatist philo…
Ekstasis and the internet
Anthropologist Victor Turner suggested that all social worlds are composed of two parallel, yet seemingly contrasting models: society as social structure and society as communitas. The relationships between these two basic elements of human social and cultural life are mediated by ephemeral experiences of liminality. Other major theoretical traditions also recognize these relationships, representing a distinct conceptual framework of direct signi…
Cybersex
The increased popularity of the Internet invites the possibility of repackaging familiar activities in a new medium. Sex is one such activity-an age-old topic with a new cybertwist. The new technologies of computer-mediated communication allow us to examine the nature of human interaction in a uniquely disembodied environment that potentially transforms the nature of self, body, and situation. Sex-fundamentally a bodily activity-provides an ideal…
Sex(ualities) and Symbolic Interaction
What goes on sexually has to be placed in a context of meaning. This might seem a very simple and obvious idea. And yet this is what makes it so important: most people still cannot see sexuality in this way. We continue to think of our sexualities as remaining firmly locked in the chains of biology. Whereas for humans surely the biological is really the least interesting aspect of our sexuality. So, whilst there remain huge armies of sexologists …
Role-Playing and Playing Roles
In fantasy role-playing games, participants collectively create and play fantasy personas in an imaginary universe by using a vast system of rules that function as guidelines for make-believe action and interaction. Consequently, role-playing games obligate participants to occupy a liminal role located in the boundaries of persona, player, and person. This study, based on approximately ninety hours of participant observation and forty interviews …
Now the Orgy is Over
Based on six months of ethnographic fieldwork, this study explores the intersections between embodied flesh and digital (re)presentations by examining how participants experience virtual sex on Second Life. We explore how and to what extent Second Life avatars mediate personal desires and fantasies with others who, collaboratively, construct sexual adventures in forms of playful deviance that allow for the emergence of secret sexual selves, as we…
My Boyfriend Loves it when I Come Home from this Class
Most classroom uses of new media technologies lack a pedagogy, aesthetic, or both. Performance methods offer a pedagogy; sensual learning offers an aesthetic. Combined, the two comprise a powerful teaching strategy and one that is especially well suited to the use of explicit media in sexualities courses. This article offers some ideas about pedagogy and aesthetics, and, grounded in 35 student evaluations, explores the potential uses of new media…
Camp staffing
This study analyzes junctures in the experiences of a summer camp staff from the perspective of structural interactionist theory, emphasizing the process by which staff construct and maintain a wilderness community, social roles, and identities. Data were collected by means of three qualitative methods: open‐ended surveys, in‐depth interviews, and participant observation. Findings indicate that staff brought varied expectations to camp yet constr…
Mundane Life in a Media Age
Review of Edward Castronova’s Synthetic Worlds (2005, University of Chicago Press), Elaine Lally’s At Home with Computers (2002, Berg), and Bill Osgerby’s Youth Media (2004, Routledge)
Considering the Electronic Participant
Ethical issues arise at all phases of the research act. However, this article is intended to identify and discuss ethical issues that researchers should consider during the research act at the phase of methodology construction and in the course of data collection. During this phase, researchers must be keenly aware of the experiential dimension of the phenomena they are studying, taking great care not to harm the participants or the context of th…
Camp staffing
This study analyzes junctures in the experiences of a summer camp staff from the perspective of structural interactionist theory, emphasizing the process by which staff construct and maintain a wilderness community, social roles, and identities. Data were collected by means of three qualitative methods: open‐ended surveys, in‐depth interviews, and participant observation. Findings indicate that staff brought varied expectations to camp yet constr…
Cybersex
The increased popularity of the Internet invites the possibility of repackaging familiar activities in a new medium. Sex is one such activity-an age-old topic with a new cybertwist. The new technologies of computer-mediated communication allow us to examine the nature of human interaction in a uniquely disembodied environment that potentially transforms the nature of self, body, and situation. Sex-fundamentally a bodily activity-provides an ideal…
The Abject Embodiment of Cancer Patients
The body is the empirical quintessence of the self. Because selfhood is symbolic, embodiment represents the personification and materialization of otherwise invisible qualities of personhood. The body and experiences of embodiment are central to our sense of being, who we think we are, and what others attribute to us. What happens, then, when one's body is humiliating? How does the self handle the implications of a gruesome body? How do people ma…
The Naked Self
Unlike text-based cybersex, televideo is an embodied experience. Participants present their bodies as an object to be looked at. Through in-depth interviews this study examines the relationships among selfhood and the body and the context in which both are located. The body, much like the self, exists as both a viewed object and an experienced subject. Televideo cybersex participants manipulate this relationship by presenting themselves as only a…
Role-Playing and Playing Roles
In fantasy role-playing games, participants collectively create and play fantasy personas in an imaginary universe by using a vast system of rules that function as guidelines for make-believe action and interaction. Consequently, role-playing games obligate participants to occupy a liminal role located in the boundaries of persona, player, and person. This study, based on approximately ninety hours of participant observation and forty interviews …
Ekstasis and the internet
Anthropologist Victor Turner suggested that all social worlds are composed of two parallel, yet seemingly contrasting models: society as social structure and society as communitas. The relationships between these two basic elements of human social and cultural life are mediated by ephemeral experiences of liminality. Other major theoretical traditions also recognize these relationships, representing a distinct conceptual framework of direct signi…
Managing the Uncertainties of Gulf War Illness
Based on observation and in-depth interviews with fifty-five respondents, we provide a detailed analysis of the Gulf War illness experience. All chronically ill people experience troublesome physical symptoms, but most reasonably expect to receive medical answers and treatment, in addition to the support of family, friends, employers, and coworkers. This research addresses a circumstance where neither sick people nor the medical establishment has…
Symbolic Interaction as Music
Analytical frameworks such as dramaturgy and narrative analysis are respectively grounded in metaphors of life as theater and life as a story. In related fashion, in this article the authors argue for the creation of another metaphor: life as music. Viewing selfhood and symbolic interaction as music sensitizes us to observe and understand an important but much too neglected dimension of social life: the esthetic. Drawing from the pragmatist philo…
Women and Their Clitoris
Under continued, broad, and pervasive conditions of symbolic clitoridectomy—a bracketing of the clitoris by means of linguistic and discursive erasure—the carnal discovery of the clitoris poses circumstances where women often confront and negotiate symbolic purgatory, a situation in which most women discover “it” long before they fully acquire the symbolic knowledge that it, indeed, is a clitoris. Based on the written reports of fifteen women, we…
Mundane Life in a Media Age
Review of Edward Castronova’s Synthetic Worlds (2005, University of Chicago Press), Elaine Lally’s At Home with Computers (2002, Berg), and Bill Osgerby’s Youth Media (2004, Routledge)
Smell, Odor, and Somatic Work
Sensation (noun) is emergent in joint acts of sensing (verb). To sense, in other words, is to make sense, and sense making entails what we call “somatic work.” We investigate these dynamics in the context of olfaction, highlighting how olfaction intersects with social, cultural, and moral order—thus compelling reflexive forms of somatic work by which people manage smell (as an act) and odor (as a sign). Our data are drawn from a convenience sampl…
Symbolic Interactionism
The Aroma of Recollection
This study examines olfactory perception and nostalgic memories focusing on sense acts and the sensuous self as a dialectic of ritual sensations and sense-making rituals. Our data are drawn from a convenience sample of twenty-three participants who reflected on their olfactory experiences through the use of research journals. Our analysis illustrates how olfactory perceptions and memories are necessarily produced by active “idealizing activity” t…
My Boyfriend Loves it when I Come Home from this Class
Most classroom uses of new media technologies lack a pedagogy, aesthetic, or both. Performance methods offer a pedagogy; sensual learning offers an aesthetic. Combined, the two comprise a powerful teaching strategy and one that is especially well suited to the use of explicit media in sexualities courses. This article offers some ideas about pedagogy and aesthetics, and, grounded in 35 student evaluations, explores the potential uses of new media…
Moral Panics, Sex Panics
I began reading Moral Panics, Sex Panics just as the media had apparently exhausted Tiger Woods’ numerous infidelities, as salacious images of Rielle Hunter (mistress of former U.S. Senator John Edwards) saturated the mediascape, and Jessie James (then-husband of Academy Award winner Sandra Bullock) publically admitted to an affair with a tattooed exotic dancer. While none of these, “monogamy challenged” celebrities, nor the media frenzy surround…
Now the Orgy is Over
Based on six months of ethnographic fieldwork, this study explores the intersections between embodied flesh and digital (re)presentations by examining how participants experience virtual sex on Second Life. We explore how and to what extent Second Life avatars mediate personal desires and fantasies with others who, collaboratively, construct sexual adventures in forms of playful deviance that allow for the emergence of secret sexual selves, as we…
Sex(ualities) and Symbolic Interaction
What goes on sexually has to be placed in a context of meaning. This might seem a very simple and obvious idea. And yet this is what makes it so important: most people still cannot see sexuality in this way. We continue to think of our sexualities as remaining firmly locked in the chains of biology. Whereas for humans surely the biological is really the least interesting aspect of our sexuality. So, whilst there remain huge armies of sexologists …
Sound Acts
Drawing on reflection, nonparticipant and participant observation, and introspection this article examines the performative dimensions of sound, arguing that sounds of both the nonsemioticized and semioticized variety function as acts, not unlike speech acts. Through a layered text, the article offers analytical reflections and evocative writing focused on the exploration of acoustic environments such as movie theatres, airplanes, street music pe…
Making Sense of the Weather
Drawing on ethnographic data collected throughout British Columbia’s coastal regions, in this article, the authors examine people’s experiences of ordinary weather. Data show how people experience weather multisensorially and how the weather plays a central role in the way individuals and collectives define sense of place. Experiences of weather, the authors argue, are a reflexive and active form of dwelling. A focus on skillful embodied practice…
The Senses in Self, Society, and Culture
The Senses in Self, Society, and Culture is the definitive guide to the sociological and anthropological study of the senses. Vannini, Waskul, and Gottschalk provide a comprehensive map of the social and cultural significance of the senses that is woven in a thorough analytical review of classical, recent, and emerging scholarship and grounded in original empirical data that deepens the review and analysis. By bridging cultural/qualitative sociol…
Ghostly Encounters
“Best invention, second to the dishwasher”
This study examines how people learn about vibrators, their attitudes toward them, fears or hesitations about acquiring and/or using one, and the significance of vibrators to participants’ sexualities. Based on 78–147 responses to an online open-ended survey, participants report: primarily learning about vibrators from media and peers; their interpretations of media representations of vibrators are juxtaposed as both a tool for great pleasure and…
I'm a Good Guy Who Deserves Better, Yet Nobody Wants to Give me Better
Within Western popular culture and online discourse, a “Nice Guy” is someone who enacts niceness for which they believe they are owed, deserving of, or entitled to something in return-especially the romantic or sexual attention of women. In this study, we examine the use of accounts in personal narratives told in an anonymous online discussion forum about Nice Guys. In their stories of their failed pursuits with women, the men in our study often …
Psychology (18 works) · Sociology (16 works) · Social Psychology (12 works) · Aesthetics (11 works) · Epistemology (10 works) · Art (8 works) · Philosophy (8 works) · Computer Science (7 works) · Gender, Feminism, and Media (7 works) · Psychoanalysis (7 works)