Drawing from 26 life story interviews of recent American veterans, this paper analyzes the identity struggle faced by soldiers returning from Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom and reentering the civilian world. Instead of examining veterans' problems as a consequence of post-combat mental illnesses such as PTSD and major depression, we analyze the contrast between the participants' identities as soldiers and their identities as civilians. We find that the postwar transition causes adverse mental health effects that stem from contrasts between the military's demands for deindividuation, obedience, chain-of-command, and dissociation and the civilian identity expectations of autonomy, self-advocacy, and being relational. Veterans' reintegration to civilian society is further hindered by a culture that is perceived (by veterans) as having decreased understanding of the soldier/veteran experience itself. These identity conflicts-what we term warring identities-have an important yet understudied effect on veterans' combat-related mental health problems.

This paper presents a case of jointly produced passion work. Passion work is emotional labor designed to elicit a strong response from subjects through an impression of extreme states such as pain, agony, or suffering. Based on an ethnographic investigation of professional wrestling participants, this study analyzes the backstage emotion teamwork that takes place within the self and with other performers. The study traces how performers do this physical labor and the social consequences of such work. The findings demonstrate that a) social rewards are intrinsic to performances of passion work, b) jointly produced passion work allows for the sort of breadth that is difficult to achieve in solo emotional work, and c) emotional labor shapes identity in recreational performances of the body.

Is there a distinct disciplinary core (or foundation of agreed on knowledge) in sociology? Should we define a core in our broad field to build consensus? If so, what should it look like? We address these questions by presenting three viewpoints that lean for and against identifying a core for department curricula, students, and the public face of sociology. First, “There really is not much, if any, core.” Second, sociology is “a habit of the mind” (a sociological imagination). Third, key content of a sociological core can be identified using a long or short list. Centripetal forces pressure the discipline to define itself for assessment, transfer articulations, general education, the trend toward interdisciplinary courses, and the public face of sociology. We describe previous efforts for the introductory course and sociology curricula. We conclude with a discussion of everyday practices in sociology that are built on the conception of a core.

This paper draws upon the relational turn in the study of pain to understand and explain the ways in which professional wrestlers manage and make sense of physical suffering. The paper focuses on how pain-laden interactions in the ring and the gym give form to the ways in which participants of wrestling think and feel about pain. The research is based on a long-term ethnography of professional wrestling. The article does two things: (a) explores the bodily skills that wrestlers cultivate to handle a context of ever-present pain, and (b) explains what the wrestlers' interactions tell us about the meanings of pain that wrestlers come to share. Based on the reconstruction of participants' lived experience of pro wrestling, I suggest that pain becomes attractive to wrestlers because it is given substantive meaning which encompasses denial, authenticity, solidarity, and dominance.