Studying Up: The Masculinity of the Hegemonic

1969 that "the one and only general sociological law that has ever been discovered... [is] that the oppressors research the oppressed.... What scientists are these who peer into everything below? " Alvin Gouldner (1975) had talked about this issue of subject position, too, in 1967. "We find [in sociology] ", he wrote, "a specific standpoint, a kind of underdog identification... a school of thought that finds itself at home in the world of hip, drug addicts, jazz musicians, cab drivers, prostitutes, night people, drifters, grifters and skidders: the 'cool world'. " This sociology noir was and is fixed on "deviance " and "social problems", and has had and continues to have a long association with voyeurism, something it shares with women's studies, men's studies, anthropology, studies of sexuality and a lot of fine literature. It involves, as Nicolaus (1975, p. 49) again so neatly put it, "taking notebook and conscience in hand and going slumming". Now, I suppose, after post-structuralism, we could call it "giving voice to difference", or then again, might it be called "victim sociology"? Either way, personal narratives of "non-dominant social groups " remained popular through the 1980s amongst sociologists, anthropologists and those engaged in the study of language, literature and women's studies. Thus, for those scholars in th