This article advances a sociological perspective on how people use prototypes to understand social categories. Prototypes are mental representations of best-fitting cases within categories that conserve cognitive effort by efficiently representing phenomena. While simple prototypes are well understood, what remains unclear is how more complex aspects of social life are understood in prototypical terms as well as how prototypes relate to boundary work and multiple axes of inequality. To stimulate a sociological perspective on prototypes, we investigate conceptualizations of prototypical meat-eaters and vegetarians. A longstanding cultural schema relating meat-eating to masculinity and plant-focused diets to femininity has been shown to powerfully guide everyday thinking about meat; yet, multiple axes of identity are also implicated in meat consumption or abstention, raising the possibility that people will hold more complex ideas about these categories. Based on 131 semi-structured interviews, our analysis reveals a range of understandings about the social locations of meat eaters and vegetarians. We find this evidenced in the presence of four intersectional prototypes: 1) the multicultural meat-eating muscle man; 2) the meaty fat man; 3) the skinny rich vegetarian; and 4) the religious vegetarian. In interrogating these four prototypical figures, we show how prototype analysis can help explain how people think in ways that both perpetuate and deviate from gender schemas, advance the study of perceptions of intersectional identities, and illuminate the link between culture and action. In this case, prototypes reinforce but also complicate normative gendered performance and also suggest limits for adopting plant-based diets.

本文提出了关于人们如何使用原型来理解社会类别的社会学观点。原型是类别中最适合案例的心理表征，通过有效地表示现象来节省认知努力。虽然简单的原型很好理解，但仍然不清楚的是如何用原型术语来理解社会生活的更复杂方面，以及原型如何与边界工作和不平等的多轴相关。为了激发对原型的社会学观点，我们调查了原型肉食者和素食者的概念化。将肉食与男性气质和以植物为中心的饮食与女性气质联系起来的长期文化模式已被证明有力地指导了人们对肉类的日常思考。然而，多个身份轴也与肉类消费或戒酒有关，这增加了人们对这些类别持有更复杂想法的可能性。基于 131 次半结构化访谈，我们的分析揭示了对肉食者和素食者的社会地位的一系列理解。我们发现这在四个交叉原型的存在中得到了证明：1）多元文化的肉食肌肉男；2）多肉的胖子；3) 瘦瘦丰富的素食者；4）宗教素食者。在询问这四个原型人物时，我们展示了原型分析如何帮助解释人们如何以延续和偏离性别图式的方式思考，推进对交叉身份认知的研究，并阐明文化与行动之间的联系。在这种情况下，