The "supercrip" athlete is often derided as a figure that is antithetical to the interests of people with disabilities. But few researchers have questioned the assumptions of this complaint or examined it empirically. In this article I problematize the supercrip critique and argue for a more nuanced view of dedicated disabled athletes as offering both a disempowering and an empowering experience for people with disabilities. I report on the results of indepth interviews of ballplayers and other personnel associated with a premier collegiate wheelchair basketball program, documenting the unintended social fissures that developed between elite athletes and nonathletes within this disability community, and revealing tensions between exclusionary and inclusionary aspects of the sport and between separatist and integrationist strategies of using sport for progressive social change and personal empowerment. I conclude by considering the broader implications of the study for the role of sport in the disability rights movement.

Cross‐national studies of crime are dominated by a Durkheimian‐Modernization theoretical perspective. We evaluate this perspective and present two alternatives, the Marxian‐World System and Ecological‐Opportunity perspectives. Each is for its theory of social change, causal explanation of criminal behavior, conceptualization of law and crime rates, and view of the relation between collective political behavior and crime. The empirical evidence is assessed and weak support is found for the dominant perspective. The article concludes by reconsidering the concepts of economic development and crime rates.

Largely as a result of the feminist movement, most states have passed some form of rape reform legislation. Most rape law research has attempted to ascertain whether the reformed laws have achieved specific instrumental goals. In contrast, this paper emphasizes rape law reform as a symbolic indicator of women's contemporary social status. We believe there is a need for a greater appreciation of the diversity of rape law reform across the country and of the coexistence of traditional and feminist elements in contemporary law. Through a comprehensive empirical assessment of state rape statutes, we identify the different dimensions of rape legislation and provide insight into the degree to which feminist conceptualizations of rape have achieved social legitimacy.

This article discusses feminist self-defense as a victim-prevention strategy, describes the nature and scope of the self-defense movement, examines a case history of a women's self-defense organization, and analyzes the mobilization and organizational dilemmas that confronted that organization. We compare self-defense services with victim services to help explain the development of the women's self-defense movement, and in particular, its feminist component.

If life history research is ever to truly fulfill the promise of the sociological imagination, it will need to engage insights from agency-structure theory that have hitherto been neglected. Relatively few life history researchers have explicitly interpreted their subject matter in terms of agency-structure theory, and those who do rarely go beyond Giddens' initial formulation to incorporate more recent theoretical developments. This article attempts to fill this gap, offering an exemplar theorized life history that frames an actor's experience in terms of agency-structure theory. More specifically, I examine the life history of a former urban gang member who was shot and paralyzed and subsequently became a world-class wheelchair athlete. I interpret the life history in terms of the iterative, projective, and practical-evaluative agentive processes that were operativesometimes simultaneously-at different points in time; and show how this individual's adaptation to disability was influenced by enabling structural conditions that facilitated his agentive actions and by prior experiences he was able to transpose to his new circumstances. In doing so, I also indicate how the body is an essential part of social experience and the vehicle through which agency and structure are enacted.Life history research is a time-honored tradition in sociology that has "vacillated in acceptance and popularity over the years" (Goetting 1995:5). Also termed interpretive biography and life story research, among other designations (Denzin 1989a; Luken and Vaughan 1999), 1 the life history method aims to advance what Mills (1959) famously called the "sociological imagination," a sociology that grapples with the intersection of biography and history in society and the ways in which personal troubles are related to public issues. By linking personal stories to collective narratives, this qualitative genre strives to recreate the "experiential integrity of human existence" (Goetting 1995:7), reveal the world of ordinary people's "problematic lived experience" (Denzin 1989b:7), and show how society "speaks itself " through the lives of individuals (Rosenwald and Ochberg 1992:7).The classic period of Chicago school life history research has long since passed, marginalized in the discipline as sociology become enamored with large data sets and quantitative analytical techniques (Maines 1993; Berger and Quinney 2005). To be sure, the genre of life history has not disappeared, and qualitative methods more generally, once considered the "soft" side of sociology, have become mainstream. 2 But if life history research is ever to truly fulfill the promise of the sociological imagination, it will need to engage some fundamental questions of sociological theory that it has hitherto neglected *Direct all correspondence to