Kultūra ir visuomenė: socialinių tyrimų žurnalas 2019, nr. 10(1)

While sexual and gender self-determination became an inseparable part of the official state policies in the Western world, the opposite process of the retradicionalization of gender and sexual norms occurred in Lithuania during the last decade. It is comprised of an ineffective partnership law for either heterosexual or same-sex couples, the enactment of the discriminatory Law on the Protection of Minors against the Detrimental Effects of Public Information (the last version approved in 2011), the refusal to implement sex reassignment law and to ratify the Istanbul Convention and continuous attempts to prohibit abortions by the current Parliament of Lithuania. Neoconservative NGOs such as the “Institute of Free Society” and “Lithuanian Association of Human Rights” disseminating everyday sexism, homophobia and transphobia have also been popping up recently. The current Parliament discussions on sexual addictions and prohibitions of advertising of sexual commodities such as condoms or sex toys also point to intensifying attempts to regulate sexual market. In this context of state and institutional regulation of sexuality, this article focuses on alternative intimacies and sexual practices from a bottom-up perspective. In describing alternative intimacies, I use the term “precarious” to emphasize a necessary relation between sexual and gender norms and the historically shaped distribution of vulnerability across LGBTQ+ sexualities and bodies. By analyzing my own sociological novel Endless Summer: A Memoir of Love and Sex (2017) that contains a specific postsocialist sexual ethnography, I not only examine the ways in which Lithuania’s socio-economic and political institutions produce unequal conditions for different intimate behaviors but also detail how vulnerable communities create possibilities of love and sex amidst the toxic political waste of failed sexual revolution.

The continued presence and place of the Confederate battle flag in the modern United States of America is the focus of significant contemporary debate. Originating from the American Civil War the presence and use of the flag has spread through the United States of America and internationally, and its meaning has developed and changed far beyond its origins as a military flag. This paper addresses some of the contemporary uses of the flag. It situates the flag within current U.S. domestic political debates and considers how these relate to its usage in the UK and continental European rockabilly scene. It explains the reasons for the recent, widespread focus on the flag as a symbol of racism and white supremacy. The paper argues that despite some members’ shared view of the flag as a supposedly apolitical, longstanding symbol of the rockabilly scene, the rising threat of white supremacy and far right politics internationally has made the defence of the flag in these terms insufficient. It goes on to conclude that the rockabilly scene in the UK and Europe could, and should, abandon their use of the flag with no loss to its identity.

In modern society, alcohol consumption is part of culture associated with a sense of pleasure, stress and anxiety, but at the same time an unwanted form of harmful behavior with many negative consequences (diseases, accidents, violence, crime, health risks, etc.). For these reasons, the use of alcohol in scientific discourse is studied in various ways. This paper introduces to the Socio-environmental Context Model (SECM) (Ward 2011), which is based on the widely used Theory of Social Norms. SECM allows identifying the environmental impact of alcohol consumption and social norms related to it. Social norms are distinguished into two types: injunctive norms (acceptance of behavior in a particular group) and descriptive norms (behavior specific to a particular group). The influence of the various environmental factors identified by SECM is revealed in four dimensions: physical-geographical, temporal, social and personal-historical, which interacts simultaneously. Other aspects of relgion, social and economic status, and the formation of an individual’s gender identity can be easily integrated into SECM. Therefore, this paper aims to further expand approach to social norms by including a personal identity factor. Personal identity, especially for men, can be an essential part of alcohol consumption. The purpose of this paper is to construct a theoretical model based on SECM and the theoretical approaches of male identity, which would allow revealing a more comprehensive approach through various aspects of the environment and male identity.

Mass media discourse has a strong impact on the public opinion about various religious communities. Needless to say, mass media’s content is created with news framing rules in a space, where all mass media channels are competing for audience attention. Headlines often become one of the most important part of the article, which not only attract readers’ attention and present the content of the article, but also, with the help of various rhetorical strategies and emotional words, strengthen certain representations of various religious communities. The analysis of 1990 – 2015 Lithuanian daily newspaper “Lietuvos rytas” headlines demonstrates that the headlines are more expressive than neutral. The percentage of negative rhetoric headlines has increased proportionally since 1990. Various rhetorical strategies were found in the analysed headlines: metaphors, irony, critique, assumptions, hyperbolization, subjectivity, and modality. There were also inaccurate and misleading headlines. The results enable to disclose the rule of news selectivity – most of the foreign news had negative rhetoric headlines. Roman Catholic community has double-sided portrait: it is shown as a part of Lithuania’s society, which creates a sense of belonging and contributes to a various social issues; and as a community with clergy who justify human sins. The headlines portraying other traditional or non-traditional religions communities highlight strategies that symbolize fear, threat and otherness of these communities.

This article discusses the changing current employment structure and its impact on working family’s chances to balance personal life and paid work and to reconcile personal, economic, social and psychological interests. Because of the changing employment nature manifested by flexible, less formalized market relationships and growing social insecurity, working families increasingly experience normalization and institutionalization of precarious employment forms in the job market and political sphere. On the one hand, the appearance of new employment forms creates new possibilities for some people but, on the other hand, they also accelerate very intense social problems such as the increasing number of divorces or distanced families, the expansion of depression, overwork, burnouts or even work-based suicides, late childbirth, working people’s poverty, the intensifying sense of social insecurity and gradually decreasing possibilities to ensure appropriate life chances to live a “liveable life.” For this reason, it is very important to stimulate an interdisciplinary and deeply contextual dialog about such dimensions as family, care, paid work and time. The article examines all these dimensions by attempting to elaborate ideas for further discussions and to stimulate more humanistic narrative about a “liveable life” and work-personal life balance in contemporary society.

The concept of territorial capital describing the specificity of spatial socioeconomic differences in municipalities is underused in the Lithuanian academic discourse. The article focuses on different dimensions of territorial assets related to locally based resources including natural resources, socioeconomic dynamics, service provision infrastructure, and place-making initiatives. It also examines the question of the interrelatedness of different local municipal, business, and community stakeholders that enhances the innovative territorial mechanisms in complex ways. In using the data of qualitative interviews with the local authorities, business and community stakeholders in three selected – urban, suburban and rural – localities, the article contributes to the debates on territorial capital. By prioritizing the inter-connectedness and inter-dependence of social ties and networks rather than natural resources, this methodological approach allows us to gain insights into the identification and re-structuring of the territorial capital dimensions in the municipalities of different size.

The article focuses on the question of whether the inter-municipal cooperation can be analyzed by referring to democratic representation and democratic legitimacy concepts. We focus on the democratic input, output, and throughput legitimacy dimenions that reveal how municipal cooperation arrangements deal with the problems of democratic deficit. The article offers a theoretical discussion on network governance that analyzes different interactions between local actors and emphasizes the forms of decentralization and horizontal cooperation and involvement strategies of various stakeholders. We propose the theoretical model of democratic legitimacy in inter-municipal cooperation that is complemented with the data of a quantitative survey of inter-municipal cooperation motivations and potential conducted in January-May of 2018. The aim of the survey was to investigate the drivers and outcomes of inter-municipal cooperation forms in Lithuanian municipalities; reveal the inter-institutional coordination mechanisms used by different local interest groups; evaluate the distribution of power among cooperative partners in delivering municipal services; assess the role of municipalities and social stakeholders in improving the provision of public services. The results of the structural model show the significant differences in treating the initiatives, motives, and outcomes of collaborative arrangements. The main decision-making power is associated with the municipality bureaucrats and local politicians that use their mandate to foster inter-municipal cooperative initiatives. The internal mutual networks and high level of trust enable the more effective inter-municipal cooperation that is associated with a greater impact on municipal service quality and public interest. [...]