White privilege is a system of benefits, advantages, and opportunities experienced by White persons in our society simply because of their skin color. In this article, the authors present the results of a descriptive, exploratory study of White privilege in battered women's shelters in the Deep South. Based on a qualitative analysis, the authors show how White privilege is intricately connected to executive directors' claims of color blindness, the othering of women of color, and viewing White as the norm. The authors conclude the article with implications for service provision to battered women and directions for future research.

This article examines the work narratives of midwives practicing in the United States, specifically in the State of Florida. We focus analytic attention on how the discourse of medicine is used as a resource in constructing a sense of legitimation for midwifery. Data are drawn from in-depth interviews with 26 direct-entry, licensed midwives and certified nurse-midwives. Historically, social scientific literature on midwifery has placed a midwifery, or a holistic, model of childbirth in polar opposition to a technocratic or medical model. In practical work, however, midwives demonstrate knowledge of, and make use of, a discourse of medicine to serve their purpose-at-hand. In these 'narratives of legitimation', the medical model does not emerge as an entity definable as separate and necessarily at odds with the midwifery model. Rather, the medical model is a resource through which midwives work narratively to construct the validity of their profession.The midwives interviewed use the discourse of medicine in three specific ways. First, they draw upon it as a contrast device, setting themselves and their work apart from the medical establishment. Second, midwives use the medical model to communicate necessary daily aspects of their work. Finally, they construct a story of medical collaboration to equate their work with that of physicians.

Because midwifery in the United States is an occupation at the margins of medicine, midwives must frequently negotiate competing identity claims. This article examines the public identity work of a group of midwives by focusing on two important tools they use to accomplish this work: boundary negotiation and impression management. Drawing on data from in‐depth interviews with twenty‐six licensed, nurse, and empirical midwives in the state of Florida, this article illustrates the ways in which midwives frame their identities in relation to history and media representations and manage public identities through boundary negotiation and impression management. I argue that the marginality of this occupation lends itself to competing categories of identity that midwives must negotiate. These categories become salient when midwives confront historical and media representations of childbirth and midwifery as well as the perceptions of the general public, consumers, lawmakers, and medical professionals.

This article considers how a social movement group in the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender (GLBT) movement engages in discursive contention with the Religious Right over the meaning of traditional family values. By utilizing an understanding of framing as interpretive practice, we return to a more active conceptualization of framing and illustrate how the meaning making of PFLAG (Parents, Families, and Friends of Lesbians and Gays), though bound by the dominant discourse of traditional family values, appropriates this discourse by doing "real family values." We close by considering how PFLAG's interpretive practice subverts and reproduces hegemonic meaning and by noting how our understandings of movement framing are extended by analyses of interpretive practice.

This is an exploratory, descriptive study of relationship redefinition. Using symbolic interaction theory, this paper examines the contours of post-dating relationships, asking the following questions: 1) how do people orient themselves to one another after a dating reltaionship ends?; and, 2) what is the power dynamic between one's social network and his or her post-dating relationship? Using a snowball sample (N = 30), interview data are analyzed as narratives about the respondents' construction of post-dating relationships. Until recently, research has focused on postdivorce relationships and has characterized these as maladaptive (Weiss 1975; Spanier and Casto 1979; Berman 1985). This study joins recent research which suggests that relationships between former spouses or lovers may satisfy legitimate needs such as friendship, shared history, and extended social networks (Metts, Cupach and Bejlovec 1989; Aydintug 1995).