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The experiences of victims show that in general, ‘hate crime’ offenders are not an aberration, or politically motivated extremists confined to the margins of society. Instead, many are ‘ordinary’ people who offend in the unfolding contexts of their everyday lives. The ordinariness of offenders and offending is arguably a further key dimension in the conceptualisation of ‘hate crime’, when victims' experiences are placed at the centre of understanding about ‘hate crime’. This line of argument is pursued in this chapter in the spirit of conceptualising ‘hate crime’ as a scholarly domain characterised by an analysis of the commonalities and differences between various forms of oppressive violence. In that spirit, this chapter unravels the situational dynamics of anti-Jewish, anti-Muslim and other racist incidents, incidents against people with a disability and homophobic incidents. It illuminates the connections between background structure and the foreground of offender action in cases of ‘hate crime’, providing the missing link between the macro-societal ideological edifice and the micro-level actions of offenders.

This chapter lays out an analysis of its topic as multi-faceted. It sets out the post-war period as a special moment of Italian melodrama’s greatest success, mentions the intertwining of understandings of ‘Italian’ and of ‘melodramatic’, and defines melodrama, amidst a history of pathos and tragic arts, through the representation of misery occurring within a definite ordinariness. It discusses the previous works on Italian melodrama and establishes its distinctiveness as offering a sustained investigation into the aesthetic functions of popular culture. It summarises the subsequent chapters and ends with the book’s working hypothesis, that melodrama acts as a border, the line at which excess pulls with restriction, formal expressivity with representation, and art with reality.

In Chris Ware’s comic strip “Building Stories,” the protagonist is a 30-year-old woman who is an amputee and sometimes wears a prosthetic limb. Ware’s description strangely elides disability as a characterization of the woman, relegating it to a de-privileged position in his account of the narrative. This chapter examines the ways in which Ware represents the woman in “Building Stories,” with the goal of demystifying her physical difference by situating her within an aesthetic of the ordinary. After discussing the politics underlying images of bodies and disability as a politicized identity, it considers Ware’s aesthetic of ordinariness and narrative structure. The chapter then argues that Ware imagines the disabled experience to be not radically different from the daily rituals of the other inhabitants of the building, thus opening a space for the protagonist that the chapter refers to as “idiosyncratic belonging.”

This afterword considers how the online video has become the quintessential form of the everyday, capturing life's smallest moments and disseminating them globally through websites such as YouTube. Focusing on online videos provided by Asian American artists, actors, and entrepreneurs, it highlights the ordinariness of Asian Americans, in large part by strategically inserting spectacular performances of everyday practices. It cites one such video, Wong Fu Productions's “Yellow Fever,” which defamiliarizes the mundane to engage with racial and gender stereotypes specific to Asian American men. It examines how the racial mundane establishes the online videos' concerns as commonplace, and makes possible a turn to caricature and theatrics that sets the Asian American performer as ordinary.

This chapter examines the concept of ‘ordinary’ as a way of categorizing and describing people who are non-media professionals participating in mediated discourse, specifically in relation to the emergence of reality television as one of the most significant and widespread formats of 21st-century broadcasting. Using the notion of middle-space performances, the chapter argues that these participants are not displaying ordinariness in the sense of being like us, recruited from the population who constitute the audience, but rather categorizable social identities based on specific, recognizable characteristics which broadcasters can then draw upon to produce watchable performances of difference. The question of style becomes relevant as a set of discursive choices in three domains: lifestyle, production style, and the styling of a social identity as ‘other.’

This chapter argues that school bullying in Japan is sustained by interactions between emotional processes of envy and traditional cultural contexts that value interdependence, ordinariness, and power distance. Specifically, it offers a cultural-psychological interpretation (i.e., a cultural-emotional entangled process model) regarding how certain cultural contexts might interact with both benign and malicious types of envy, and culture-specific ways in which people socially compare themselves to others, engage in self-improvement, and maintain harmony, which may result in indirect, closed, hidden, and seemingly justified types of bullying in Japanese student life. It also extrapolates as to how these intertwined processes of culture and emotion might produce broader examples of power abuse during the present period of cultural change and technological development.

The first section considers the attack on the pious handling of relics in the Reformation, via the translation into English of Erasmus’s satirical colloquy on pilgrimage, which construes relics as objects too disgusting to touch. It is then argued that this apparent rejection of tactile holiness is less unequivocal than it seems. Erasmus’s own writings leave room for the embracing of the divine as an expression of a pious life, while English reformers often treated printed bibles much like relics. This ambivalence also characterizes discussions of the Eucharist, in which English reformers tended to elide the relationship, explored by medieval writers such as Reginald Pecock, between the literal and metaphorical touching of Christ. This was eminently true of Thomas Cranmer, whose careful inclusion of the seemingly innocuous phrase ‘as it were’ allowed him simultaneously to reject and retain devotional touch.

This chapter focuses on the interviews and ethnographic observation conducted by a group of sociologists with Tyneside shipbuilders in 1968–71. Re-examining the interviews suggests several conclusions: class was important to many of the men, but its significance varied depending on context and was closely linked to gender identity. Many closely associated class with snobbishness and hierarchy, and these were things the shipbuilders generally condemned. Instead, they emphasized ordinariness, authenticity, and individuality, all values with deep roots in male, working-class culture. In their attitudes to politics, the effects of the decline of deference were visible: a significant minority of men voiced sceptical or hostile comments about the Labour Party, politics, and/or trade union hierarchies. Individual self-interest was the basis of trade union solidarity for many, and the decline of deference therefore drove greater unofficial strike activity, restless militancy, and even outright insubordination.

This chapter reuses interviews conducted in 1985–8 for Paul Thompson’s ‘100 Families’ study to examine interviewees’ thoughts about class in the middle of the Thatcher decade. It finds that ambivalence and ordinariness were key themes in the discussions of many. Many did not want to class themselves, for ‘class talk’ was associated with snobbishness, superior and inferior attitudes, and because many thought that changes in the occupational structure, housing, and lifestyles had created a large ‘ordinary’ group in the middle of society: not workless but also not privileged. Some interviewees confidently claimed a working-class identity; this was usually the case where individuals had trade union experiences and/or a close-knit, working-class community to draw on. Among younger generations, however, some said that, though older class markers had disappeared, new ones had grown up to take their place.

This chapter uses responses to Mass Observation’s 1990 directive on ‘social divisions’ to examine what the Mass Observers thought about class. It concludes that earlier accounts have overstated these (largely middle-class) writers’ comfortableness with technical, sociological class language. Rather, many were hostile to or ambivalent about using such terms, and drew on popular culture, especially humour, when talking about class. A rejection of ‘class’ and snobbishness, and an emphasis on ordinariness and authenticity, were again central to many Mass Observers’ writings about class. In their testimonies, we can also see that new ethnic diversity and new, more diverse norms of gender in post-war Britain had disrupted the old class categories. Upwardly mobile people were particularly over-represented among the Mass Observers and their writing shows that upward social mobility—which expanded in the post-war decades—could lead to a cultural ‘homelessness’ and critiques of both traditional working-class and traditional middle-class cultures.