Sociological Images

Anders Behring Breivik has now joined the pantheon of homegrown domestic terrorists who have unleashed horror on their own countrymen. Sixteen years ago, Timothy McVeigh and other members of the Aryan Republican Army blew up the Murrah Office Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 of their own countrymen and women. It was the worst act of domestic terrorism in our history, and, indeed, until 9-11, the worst terrorist attack of any kind in our history. We know what Norwegians are going through; as Bill Clinton said, we “feel your pain.”

As pundits and policymakers search for clues that will help us understand that which cannot be understood, it may be useful to compare a few common elements between McVeigh and Breivik.

Both men saw themselves as motivated by what they viewed as the disastrous consequences of globalization and immigration on their own countries. Breivik’s massive tome, 2083: A European Declaration of Independence, paints a bleak picture of intolerant Islamic immigrants engaged in a well-planned takeover of European countries in the fulfillment of their divine mission. His well-planned and coldly executed massacre of 94 of his countrymen was, as he saw it, a blow against the policies promoting social inclusion and a recognition of a diverse multicultural society promoted by the labor-leaning government.

McVeigh also inveighed against both multinational corporate greed and a society that had become too mired in multiculturalism to provide for its entitled native-born “true” Americans. In a letter to the editor of his hometown newspaper, McVeigh, then a returning veteran of the first Gulf War, complained that the birthright of the American middle class had been stolen, handed over by an indifferent government to a bunch of ungrateful immigrants and welfare cheats. “The American dream,” he wrote “has all but disappeared, substituted with people struggling just to buy next week’s groceries.”

McVeigh and Breivik both sought to inspire their fellow Aryan countrymen to action. After blowing up the federal building – home of the oppressive and unrepresentative government that had capitulated to the rapacious corporations and banks — McVeigh hoped that others would soon follow suit and return the government to the people. Breivik cared less about government and more about the ruination of the pure Norwegian culture, deliberately diluted in a brackish multiculti sea.

For the past five years, I’ve been researching and writing about the extreme right in both the United States and Scandinavia. I’ve interviewed 45 contemporary American neo-Nazis, White Supremacists, Aryan youth, Patriots, Minutemen, and members of rural militias. I also read documentary materials in the major archival collections at various libraries on the extreme right. I then interviewed 25 ex-neo-Nazis in Sweden. All were participants in a government-funded program called EXIT, which provides support and training for people seeking to leave the movement. (This included twice interviewing “the most hated man in Sweden,” Jackie Arklof, who murdered two police officers during a botched bank robbery. Arklof is currently serving a life sentence at Kumla High Security prison in Orebro. To my knowledge, I’m the only researcher to date to have interviewed him as well as members of EXIT.)

I’ve learned a lot about how the extreme right understands what is happening to their countries, and why they feel called to try and stop it. And one of the key things I’ve found is that the way they believe that global economic changes and immigration patterns have affected them can be understood by looking at gender, especially masculinity. (Don’t misunderstand: it’s not that understanding masculinity and gender replaces the political economy of globalization, the financial crisis, or the perceived corruption of a previously pristine national culture. Not at all. But I do believe that you can’t understand the extreme right without also understanding gender.)

First, they feel that current political and economic conditions have emasculated them, taken away the masculinity to which they feel they are entitled by birth. In the U.S., they feel they’ve been emasculated by the “Nanny State” through taxation, economic policies and political initiatives that demand civil rights and legal protection for everyone. They feel deprived of their entitlement (their ability to make a living, free and independent) by a government that now doles it out to everyone else – non-whites, women, and immigrants. The emasculation of the native-born white man has turned a nation of warriors into a nation of lemmings, or “sheeple” as they often call other white men. In The Turner Diaries, the movement’s most celebrated text, author William Pierce sneers at “the whimpering collapse of the blond male,” as if White men have surrendered, and have thus lost the right to be free. As one of their magazines puts it:

As Northern males have continued to become more wimpish, the result of the media-created image of the ‘new male’ – more pacifist, less authoritarian, more ‘sensitive’, less competitive, more androgynous, less possessive – the controlled media, the homosexual lobby and the feminist movement have cheered… the number of effeminate males has increased greatly…legions of sissies and weaklings, of flabby, limp-wristed, non-aggressive, non-physical, indecisive, slack-jawed, fearful males who, while still heterosexual in theory and practice, have not even a vestige of the old macho spirit, so deprecated today, left in them.

Second, they use gender to problematize the “other” against whom they are fighting. Consistently, the masculinity of native-born white Protestants is set off against the problematized masculinity of various “others” – blacks, Jews, gay men, other non-white immigrants – who are variously depicted as either “too” masculine (rapacious beasts, avariciously cunning, voracious) or not masculine “enough” (feminine, dependent, effeminate). Racism, anti-Semitism, nativism, and homophobia all are expressed through denunciations of the others’ masculinity.

Third, they use it as a recruiting device, promising the restoration of manhood through joining their groups. Real men who join up will simultaneously protect white women from these marauding rapacious beasts, earn those women’s admiration and love, and reclaim their manhood.

American White Supremacists thus offer American men the restoration of their masculinity – a manhood in which individual white men control the fruits of their own labor and are not subject to the emasculation of Jewish-owned finance capital, a black- and feminist-controlled welfare state.

At present, I am working my way through 2083: A European Declaration of Independence, the 1,518 page manifesto written in London by Anders Behring Breivik (under the Anglicized name Andrew Berwick) in the months leading up to his attack. These same themes are immediately evident. (Quotes are from the document.)

(1) Breivik associates feminism with liberal, multicultural societies. He claims that feminism has been responsible for a gender inversion in which, whether in the media or the military, we see the “inferiority of the male and the superiority of the female.” As a result of this widespread inversion, the “man of today” is “expected to be a touchy-feely subspecies who bows to the radical feminist agenda.”

(2) Breivik spends the bulk of the document playing off two gendered stereotypes of Muslim immigrants in Europe. On the one hand, they are hyper-rational, methodically taking over European societies; on the other hand, they are rapacious religious fanatics, who, with wide-eyed fervor, are utterly out of control. In one moment in the video, he shows a little boy (blond hair indicating his Nordic origins), poised between a thin, bearded hippie, who is dancing with flowers all around him, and a bearded, Muslim terrorist fanatic – two utterly problematized images of masculinity. 3:58 in the video:

(3) In his final “call to arms” and the accompanying video, he offers photos of big-breasted women, in very tight T-shirts, holding assault weapons with the word “infidel” on it and some Arabic writing, a declaration that his Crusader army members are the infidels to the Muslim invaders. 9:02 in the video:

This initial, if sketchy, report from Oslo, and Breivik’s own documents, indicate that in this case, also, it will be impossible to fully understand this horrific act without understanding how gender operates as a rhetorical and political device for domestic terrorists.

These members of the far right consider themselves Christian Crusaders for Aryan Manhood, vowing its rescue from a feminizing welfare state. Theirs is the militarized manhood of the heroic John Rambo – a manhood that celebrates their God-sanctioned right to band together in armed militias if anyone, or any governmental agency, tries to take it away from them. If the state and capital emasculate them, and if the masculinity of the “others” is problematic, then only “real” white men can rescue the American Eden or the bucolic Norwegian countryside from a feminized, multicultural, androgynous immigrant-inspired melting pot.

————————

Michael Kimmel is a professor of sociology at the State University of New York at Stonybrook.  He pioneered the study of masculinities and is routinely featured as a keynote speaker at academic and activist events. Michael has written or edited over twenty volumes, including Manhood in America: A Cultural History and Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men.  You can visit his website here.

If you would like to write a post for Sociological Images, please see our Guidelines for Guest Bloggers.

A polished version of this post was published in Contexts. You can download it here.

Most of our readers are probably familiar  with the now-iconic “We Can Do It!” poster associated with Rosie the Riveter and the movement of women into the paid industrial workforce during World War II:

It is, by this point, so recognizable that it is often parodied or appropriated for a variety of uses (including selling household cleaners). The image is widely seen as a symbol of women’s empowerment and a sign of major gender transformations that occurred during the 1940s.

In their article, “Visual Rhetoric Representing Rosie the Riveter: Myth and Misconception in J. Howard Miller’s ‘We Can Do It!’ Poster,” James Kimble and Lester Olson argue that our current interpretations of the poster don’t necessarily align with how it was seen at the time.

While the poster is often described as a government recruiting item (Kimble and Olson give many examples in the article of inaccurate attributions from a variety of sources), it was, in fact, created by J. Howard Miller as part of a series of posters for the Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company — the Westinghouse logo is clearly visible just under the woman’s arm, and the badge on her shirt collar is the badge employees wore on the plant floor, including an employee number. The War Production Co-ordinating Committee was an internal Westinghouse committee, similar to those created by many companies during the war, not a government entity.

The assumption of current viewers of the image is usually that it was meant to recruit women into the workforce, or to rally women in general — an early example of girl power marketing, if you will — and was widely displayed. But the audience was actually only Westinghouse employees. The company commissioned artists to create posters to be hung in Westinghouse plants for specific periods of time; this poster specifically says, “Post Feb. 15 to Feb. 28″ [1943] in small font on the lower left. There’s no evidence that it was ever made available to the public more broadly. For that matter, the poster doesn’t identify her as “Rosie,” and it’s not clear that at the time she would have been immediately identifiable to viewers as “Rosie the Riveter”.

The image that was more widely seen, and is often conflated with the “We Can Do It!” poster, was Norman Rockwell’s May 29, 1943, cover for the Saturday Evening Post:

Here, the woman is clearly linked to the idea of Rosie the Riveter, through both the name on her lunchbox and the  equipment she’s holding. She is more muscular than the woman in Miller’s poster, she’s dirty, and her foot is standing on a copy of Hitler’s Mein Kampf. Rockwell’s image presents the woman as a vital part of the war effort; her work helps defeat the Nazis. The image also includes fewer details to make her look conventionally attractive than Miller’s, where the woman has emphasized eyelashes and visibly painted fingernail.

Most interestingly, Kimble and Olson question the female empowerment message presumed to be the point of the “We Can Do It!” poster. We see the poster on its own, through the lens of a narrative about World War II in which housewives left the kitchen in droves to work in factories. But Westinghouse workers would have seen it in a different context, as one of a series of posters displayed in the plant, with similar imagery and text. When seen as just one in a series, rather than a unique image, Kimble and Olson argue that the collective “we” in “We can do it!” wouldn’t have been women, but Westinghouse employees, who were used to seeing such statements posted in employee-access-only areas of the plant.

Of course, having a woman represent a default factory employee is noteworthy. But our reading of the poster as a feminist emblem partially rests on the idea that this female worker is calling out encouragement to other women. The authors, however, point out a much less empowering interpretation if you think of the poster not in terms of feminism, but in terms of social class and labor relations:

…Westinghouse used “We Can Do It!” and Miller’s other posters to encourage women’s cooperation with the company’s relatively conservative concerns and values at a time when both labor organizing and communism were becoming active controversies for many workers… (p. 537)

…by addressing workers as “we,” the pronoun obfuscated sharp controversies within labor over communism, red-baiting, discrimination, and other heartfelt sources of divisiveness. (p. 550)

One of the major functions of corporate war committees was to manage labor and discourage any type of labor disputes that might disrupt production. From this perspective, images of happy workers expressing support for the war effort and/or workers’ abilities served as propaganda that encouraged workers to identify with one another and management as a team; “patriotism could be invoked to circumvent strikes and characterize workers’ unrest as un-American” (p. 562).

And, as Kimble and Olson illustrate, most of Miller’s posters included no women at all, and when they did, emphasized conventional femininity and the domestic sphere (such as a heavily made-up woman waving to her husband as he left for work).

Of course, today the “We Can Do It!” poster is seen as a feminist icon, adorning coffee cups, t-shirts, calendars, and refrigerator magnets (I have one). Kimble and Olson don’t explain when and how this shift occurred — when the image went from an obscure piece of corporate war-time propaganda, similar to many others, to a widely-recognized pop cultural image of female empowerment. But they make a convincing argument that our current perceptions of the image involve a significant amount of historical myth-making that helps to obscure the discrimination and opposition many women faced in the paid workforce even during the height of the war effort.

[The article appears in Rhetoric & Public Affairs 9(4): 533-570, 2006.]

Lester Andrist, at The Sociological Cinema, alerted me to a 9-minute short film revealing “Hollywood’s relentless vilification and dehumanization of Arabs and Muslims.”   Created by Jaqueline Salloum and Dr. Jack Shaheen’s book, Reel Bad Arabs, it is a stunning and disturbing collection of clips.  The depictions are grossly prejudiced and relentlessly violent.  Andrist summarizes:

The Media Education Foundation also made a full length documentary based on Shaheen’s book.  The 5-and-a-half-minute trailer is a good indication of its content.  It contains many similar disturbing depiction, including a discussion of Disney’s Aladdin, but also points to how Arabs are frequently shown as buffoons (“rich and stupid,” “oversexed,” and “uncontrollably obsessed with the American woman”).

See also our posts on how Arabs are portrayed in video games and Reel Injun, a documentary about the representation of American Indians in Hollywood.

As you may have heard, this week the Republican Party released what they’ve termed a “Pledge to America,” a document that lists their agenda for the next legislative session. Erin Echols, a student at Kennesaw State U., took a look at it and was struck by the contents, particularly the images.

Of the 48 total pages of the document, 14 consist of images, either a single one or a collage of several. Of course, in a document of this sort, you’re going to have the required patriotic images — the Statue of Liberty, Mount Rushmore, the Capitol and other buildings in D.C. Nothing surprising there. But Erin points out that the cowboy seems to be a recurring theme. There’s a full-page silhouette:

Two pages prominently show people wearing cowboy hats (these are both from collages):

It reminded me of a post by Macon D. over at Racialicious a while back about some ads by a Republican primary candidate for Agricultural  Commissioner in Alabama:

The hat, the horse, the rifle, the sweeping music that makes me think of old Western movies…it all evokes what Macon D. calls the “Independent (White) Cowboy Myth,” a version of rugged, stand-alone, honest manhood. Macon D. quotes Mel at BroadSnark:

In this mythology, the cowboy is a white man. He is a crusty frontiersman taming the west and paving the way for civilization. He is the good guy fighting the dangerous Indian. He is free and independent. He is in charge of his own destiny.

Here’s the follow-up ad he made after losing:

And, for the record, I’m not arguing this presentation of Dale Peterson is necessarily fake; for all I know he dresses and acts like that all the time. People do; I’m related to some of them. I’m not saying Peterson is a fraud who really wears tuxes and has never been on a horse. That’s irrelevant. What I’m interested in is the power of a particular cowboy mythology, the one on display in Peterson’s ads.

As Macon D. points out, Ronald Reagan actively appropriated the cowboy persona, often wearing cowboy hats and jeans, sometimes alongside a horse (he had also played cowboys in a couple of movies). He openly identified with the “Sagebrush Rebellion,” an effort by groups in the western U.S. in the ’70s and ’80s to stop designation of federal lands as protected wilderness areas, push for more mining and livestock grazing rights on public land, and oppose some other environmental and land use regulations, depicted as impositions from distant elites.

Macon D. quotes Sarah Watts on the appeal of the White cowboy myth when Theodore Roosevelt first used it:

…he met the psychological desires in their imagination, making them into masters of their own fate, propelling them into violent adventure and comradeship, believing them at home in nature, not in the hothouse interiors of office buildings or middle-class homes.

The cowboy myth, then, arose partly to allay deep anxieties about changes in American society. But the myth is just that — a myth, a romanticized notion largely unmoored from the realities of cowboys’ lives. Mel says,

Cowboys were itinerant workers who, while paid fairly well when they had work, spent much of the year begging for odd jobs.  Many did not even own the horse they rode.  Frequently, they worked for large cattle companies owned by stockholders from the Northeast and Europe, not for small family operations (a la Bonanza).  The few times cowboys tried to organize, they were brutally oppressed by ranchers.

This isn’t true just in the past. I know people who work as hired hands on ranches now. They love many aspects of the life. But most of them aren’t particularly well-paid; they don’t have retirement benefits or health insurance; they aren’t on a path to being able to buy their own ranch and be a self-reliant family farmer. Some become managers, with more responsibility and money, as in any occupation. But sometimes what initially seemed like a great deal — getting free housing as part of the job — turns out to have downsides, such as being expected to be available round-the-clock since you’re right there on the property, or fearing that if you piss off your employer and get fired, you’re out of a place to live immediately as well.

The examples I’ve given here have all been Republicans. Democrats use the cowboy mythology as well — Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar is well known for often appearing in a cowboy hat and nearly always wearing a bolo tie rather than a necktie. However, Republicans seem to appropriate the cowboy persona more often, or at least more successfully.

Anyway…back to Erin’s analysis of the “Pledge to America.” The other interesting feature of the images is their overwhelming Whiteness. Some examples of group photos:

This one has what in a larger version appears may be an Asian-American woman, in the red dress on the lower left:

The photo on the second tier on the right here looks like it might have a Black woman in it, seated second from the right:

Overall, the photos show a sea of Whiteness. As Erin says, whether it’s an unintentional oversight or a calculated choice, the resulting message is that America’s citizens, the hard-working, patriotic folks who matter and to whom the party is making pledges, are White. Given the current racialized tone of much of our political debate (especially regarding Hispanic immigrants and Muslims, a racialized group often conflated with “Arabs”), it’s a portrait of America that is likely to speak to, and soothe, the fears of some groups more than others.

I found this Levi’s ad a while back and kept forgetting to post it:

What I think is interesting is the implicit class element, in which “men in suits” (presumably middle- and upper-middle-class white-collar workers) are less authentically American. The message is that hard working, jeans-wearing people are true Americans (notice the flag). Of course, it’s also a commentary on masculinity; the type of men who dominate economic and political life today are, from this perspective, lesser men compared to earlier generations of blue-collar workers.

For other examples of class and masculinity in ads, see old vs. new money in a Smirnoff video, upper-class dogs are sissies, and Acura says trust-fund money is out.

Dmitriy T.M. sent us a link to a story at Slate about (mostly European) “national personifications” — that is, human figures used to represent particular countries, their citizens, or ideas of the national character.  Personification is contentious in that it aims to represent a diverse society with a single person, often representing a simple idea.  Accordingly, we sometimes see divergent, or even conflicting, personifications.

Many personifications in Europe and areas once colonized by them connect the nation to noble ideas and values through the use of Latin-derived names and the use of robes, poses, and other elements of classic statues and paintings to adorn a female figure. For instance, the United Kingdom’s Britannia (an emblem that first emerged when Britain was still ruled by Rome) is a goddess-like figure wearing a Roman-style helmet who has, over time, come to represent the nation and the idea of liberty:

The U.S. has a similar figure, Columbia:

More popular characterizations also emerge, often representing the national character not through goddess-like imagery but as an Average Citizen.  For instance, much more familiar in the U.S. than Columbia is Uncle Sam. He differs from many other national personifications in that he doesn’t represent the U.S. citizenry or the idea of the nation in general; he specifically represents the U.S. government and is best known for wanting “you” to join the military, buy war bonds, and such:

And in addition to Brittania, the U.K. is also personified by John Bull:

According to the Slate article, John Bull presents the British people as middle-class, smart in a common-sense way, and also somewhat suspicious of authority — that is, John Bull is a personification that separates the citizenry from government (the source of authority) to some extent, and thus has been used in many political cartoons to question government policies (whereas Uncle Sam has often been used to advocate them, since he represents the government itself).

Going a step further, Portugal’s Zé Povinho, a working-class personification, actively mocks the powerful, including political elites:

Competing personifications may be used by different political factions. For instance, those in favor of and opposed to Irish independence used female emblems of Ireland. Opponents of Irish nationalism used the figure of Hibernia, represented as the younger sister of Brittania and in need of her sister’s protection from the brutish (male) nationalist forces:

Nationalists responded with Kathleen Ni Houlihan, “generally depicted as an old woman who needs the help of young Irish men willing to fight and die to free Ireland from colonial rule, usually resulting in the young men becoming martyrs for this cause”:

The gender element in these competing personifications is interesting: in both cases Ireland is a woman in need of protection, but who see needs protected by (a stronger sister or men) and from (men in both cases) differs.

So here we have just a small handful of national personifications that may coexist fairly harmoniously while serving different purposes (say, Brittania and John Bull) or actively conflict (representations of Ireland). Various groups in a nation (political elites, different social classes, rebels, etc.) are unlikely to identify equally with a single personification; thus, the figures used to represent a country or its citizens can become sites of political or cultural contention, defining who has the most legitimate claim to being the backbone of the nation (the middle-class John Bull, the working-class Zé Povinho) or framing independence or other political movements.

In the article “‘White Men Are This Nation:’ Right-Wing Militias and the Restoration of Rural American Masculinity,” Michael Kimmel and Abby Ferber discuss the particular ideas about masculinity that form part of the ideologies of the militia movement. This movement sees American manhood as endangered, under attack from feminists, minorities, and a feminized government that have collectively weakened the nation. From this perspective, a major goal of those in the militia movement is to return the U.S. to a position of global dominance by re-masculinizing it, a process that falls primarily to White men.

I thought of that article when Kiera S. let us know about the website of Harley D. Brown, a candidate in the Republican primary for Idaho’s Congressional seat. Brown is running on a platform of military aggression and a very clear connection between such aggression, a strong nation, and masculinity:

Brown served in the Navy; his website includes a lot of camouflage and calls to pursue an aggressive military policy and save the nation from its current weakness. His rhetoric draws on a particular type of masculinity, one that relies on violence, sexism, and homophobia. Some quotes from his website:

…many U.S. politicians are spineless jellyfish

…attack and annihilate that monstrous national debt…

Mighty War Department

Keep the Queens out of the Marines

Combat is NO place for women

Part of his bio:

I was also a Taxicab driver and evangelist in Boise, ID where I led approximately 1,000 lost souls to the Lord Jesus Christ: Drunks and Winos, Hookers and Strippers, Bums, and Homeless; Hippies and Rainbow people, Bikers, and Villains, Truckers and Construction workers, Businessmen and Proletarians, psychos and weirdo’s, homos and lesbians; even some people who looked normal and smelled nice.

I don’t claim to be an expert on the subject, but I wouldn’t think you’d want to publicly ridicule the groups you’ve brought to the light and saved from their sinfulness.

As far as I can tell, he’s a fringe candidate. According to Talking Points Memo, he ran for mayor of Boise in 2001 and got 2.88% of the vote. But I think his website is a great example of a right-wing ideology that uses feminism, non-Whites, and an image of effeminate liberals as a counterpoint to define what a “real man” is.

In another example of the use of gender in a political campaign, this time by a group that can’t be dismissed as being on the fringe, Emily’s List pointed out a line in the Republican Review, a newsletter of the Republican Executive Committee of Medina County, Ohio. The sentence refers to Ohio’s Democratic representative, Betty Sutton, and seems to imply that she’d be better off at home doing housework:

The response from Medina County’s GOP chair when called on this (from TPM):

County GOP chairman Bill Heck told TPMDC that the newsletter was “an attention-getter” in terms of its political rhetoric. “I’m not sure that it was intended — in fact I’m positive that it was not intended to be sexist,” said Heck. “In fact, it was speaking to the people of that district, and not intended to be a sexist comment.”

In both cases, the effect is to claim the political realm for men — well, real men — by using sexist and/or homophobic language as part of political rhetoric. And I’m not claiming this is unique to Republicans, just offering them up as two examples that I happen to have (though I have a feeling that given their constituencies and stated platforms, Democrats would be less likely to draw so obviously on sexist/homophobic language, for practical reasons if nothing else; if you have examples, though, I’d love to see them).

Ah, campaign season. Brings out the best in everybody, including a willingness to assert straight male privilege.

[Article published in 2000 in Rural Sociology, vol. 65, issue 4, p. 582-604.]