p.183: "This state is what Csikszentmihalyi (1982, 1990) calls 'flow', occurring 'when a person's mind or body is stretched to the limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile'..." (like defining "flow"?)
Even if this concept is as nebulous as a disturbance in The Force, your offending sentence isn't especially hand wavy by sociology standards (which isn't saying much), but perhaps the authors were up Csik's creek without an effluent metaphor... while I agree that reading this sort of research can be a tool for clearing one's mind of all thoughts, I can't disparage the soft sciences for attempting to find meaning in bathroom stalls and Yahoo! Answers; in spite of some delusions of objectivity ("Academic politics is the most vicious and bitter form of politics, because the stakes are so low"
, I don't find this "partial framework" of "objectification theory" any more troubling than liberation psychology in general or niche-based academia in particular (e.g., Into the Abyss and Back Again: How Nietzsche's Übermensch and Convergent 'Ring' Cycle Motifs Prefigured the Archetype of Frodo Baggins)
I think Parts I and II/III might belong in different papers, and every paragraph heading in Part II starts with "Objectification may contribute to..." which hardly inspires confidence as far as causality or predictability are concerned (and if you believe Ethan Watters of Crazy Like Us, blaming something as universal as "sexualized gazing" for endemic mental health phenomena might be ethnocentric* to boot), but the theoretical basis of the first third of the paper (the parts I skimmed through, anyway) seems to correspond with consensus reality at least through the looking glass of social science. I mean your point is taken about the verbification of otherwise unpretentious nouns, and the tendency to isolate a real problem before declaring it the root of all oppression, but, I dunno, it's better than nothing, or at least believing it's better than nothing is better than nothing. Unless it isn't.
[p style="font-size:10px"]* "There is now good evidence to suggest that in the process of teaching the rest of the world to think like us, we’ve been exporting our Western “symptom repertoire” as well. That is, we’ve been changing not only the treatments but also the expression of mental illness in other cultures. Indeed, a handful of mental-health disorders — depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and anorexia among them — now appear to be spreading across cultures with the speed of contagious diseases. These symptom clusters are becoming the lingua franca of human suffering, replacing indigenous forms of mental illness. <...>
What is being missed, Lee and others have suggested, is a deep understanding of how the expectations and beliefs of the sufferer shape their suffering. “Culture shapes the way general psychopathology is going to be translated partially or completely into specific psychopathology,” Lee says. “When there is a cultural atmosphere in which professionals, the media, schools, doctors, psychologists all recognize and endorse and talk about and publicize eating disorders, then people can be triggered to consciously or unconsciously pick eating-disorder pathology as a way to express that conflict.”" (source)
Edit history
= new reply since forum marked as read