culture

My post today comes from a class on ableism and disabled bodies that I taught earlier this past semester in my Social Problems course. Its inception came from the point at which I wanted to introduce my students to Donna Haraway’s concept of cyborgs, because I saw some useful connections between one and the other.

My angle was to begin with the idea of able-bodied society’s instinctive, gut-level sense of discomfort and fear regarding disabled bodies, which is outlined in disability studies scholar Fiona Kumari Campbell’s book Contours of Ableism. Briefly, Campbell distinguishes between disableism, which are the set of discriminatory ideas and practices that construct the world in such a way that it favors the able-bodied and marginalizes the disabled, and ableism, which is the set of constructed meanings that set disabled bodies themselves apart as objects of distaste and discomfort. In this sense, disabled bodies are imbued with a kind of queerness – they are Other in the most physical sense, outside and beyond accepted norms, unknown and unknowable, uncontrollable, disturbing in how difficult they are to pin down. Campbell identifies this quality of unknowability and uncontainability as especially, viscerally horrifying.

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Since you are probably going to spend today arguing about Occupy Wall Street with your conservative family members and helping your parents with computer questions we figured you would appreciate some slightly ligher fare: internet cooking shows. But because we are social scientists, we can’t be satisfied with uncritical review. Therefore, I want to discuss how these cooking shows interact with, perform, reify, and probelmitize constructions of gender and nationality. The three shows I want to cover (I’m gonna have to pass on this and this. There’s a great article at dailydot.com that lists most internet cooking shows.) are Epic Meal Time, Regular Ordinary Swedish Meal Time, and My Drunk Kitchen. Full disclosure: I have a profound weakness for all of these shows, with increasing affinity in the order I just presented them. In case you’re unfamiliar with these shows, I’ll briefly introduce them and then get into the theory. [Images after the break might be considered NSFW.] more...

Crossposted at Sociological Images

I am a huge fan of the television series “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia,” but I want to problematize some of the humor we often take for granted in the show. In a recent interview with Conan O’Brien, Charlie Day discusses some of the changes introduced into the current season of the show. Specifically, about 1:30 in, they discuss the weight gain that Rob McElhenney (“Fat Mac”) accomplished in pursuit of a “funnier” character. Notice how Charlie Day and Conan laugh—freely and unapologetically—at the prospect of Mac contracting diabetes (especially Conan’s mocking “Go America!” response to the image of “Fat Mac”): more...

A discussion of Burning Man may, at first, seem out of place on a technology blog; however, as sociologist Fred Turner has previously observed, the ideology of Burner culture is profoundly co-implicated with the prevailing ideology of Web.  It is more than mere coincidence that this particular festival has exploded in proximity to Silicon Valley.  It is also more than coincidence that Google and other tech company virtually shut down during this event.  The week-long temporary city in a desert attracts people from around the world. The community is founded upon the (seemingly paradoxical) principals of “radical self-reliance” and “communal effort.” For a week, Burners collectively construct a festive atmosphere that separates themselves from the institutions and customs of their everyday lives. There is a vibrant gift economy with a focus on the decommodification of goods and services (though, of course, like the Internet, much money changes hands behind the scenes: for infrastructure, transport, illicit ticket sales, drugs, etc.). Everyone is encouraged to participate in all aspects of the community (to “prosume” their surroundings), and in doing so, to reach a better understanding of self. This is all embodied in the Ten Principles of Burning Man. more...