Sociological Images

Sonita M. sent in a report from the Movement Advancement Project about the state of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) families.

LGBT families are more likely to be poor than non-LGBT families.  Nine percent of married cis-gender different-sex couples live in poverty, compared to 21% of gay male couples and 20% of lesbian couples:

LGBT couples may be more likely to be in poverty in part because of wage differentials between gays, lesbians, and their heterosexual counterparts.  Research shows that gay and bisexual men earn significantly less money than heterosexual men, whereas lesbians make somewhat more money than straight women.  Gay men would be more likely than heterosexual men to be in poverty, then.  But what about women? Women in same-sex couples face the same wage disadvantage that all women face, but also are not married to the heterosexual men that are making so much money (making it so that heterosexual women can make less money than gay women, but still be less likely to live in poverty). Make sense?  I hope so.

The second reason that LGBT couples with children are more likely than cis-gendered different-sex couples with children to live in poverty is that Black and Latino LGBT people are more likely than White LGBT people to be parents, and Blacks and Latinos are disproportionately poor to begin with:

Among same-sex couples, being a parent is also correlated with immigration status, which also correlates with class.  Non-citizens are more likely to be parents than citizens:

The two million children in America being raised by LGBT parents, then, are more likely to suffer from class disadvantage.  The authors of the report go on to discuss the ways in which formal policy and informal discrimination contribute to this state of affairs.

Via Andrew Sullivan.

(source)

In this post I’m happy to feature two short clips of sociologists at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas talking about the sex industry in Las Vegas.

First, in this two-minute clip, Barb Brents discusses the way that the sex industry in Las Vegas is set up in ways that protect “referral services” (the organizations that arrange for what often includes sex work), while exposing sex workers to policing and criminalization:

Second, Crystal Jackson, takes two minutes to explain that the stereotype of sex workers — women who have sex with men — makes male sex workers invisible and transgender sex workers seem deviant. This has consequences. It means that men in the sex industry are more able to evade the police (who aren’t looking for them), while transgender sex workers are even more likely than women to experience abuse from both the police and clients. This means that patriarchy is an insufficient theory with which to theorize sex work.

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

Media depictions of trans people (almost entirely produced by non-trans individuals) tend to be fascinated by bodies. Since the (presumed) inappropriately gendered body is automatically monstrous, weird — or at the very least, available to be gawked at — the accessibility of trans bodies becomes a feature of their depiction.

A big thread that runs through most visual media depictions is a fixation on stripping trans people naked, implying the naked body as “true.” The Crying Game’s big reveal comes when Del undresses, while the penultimate moment of self-fulfillment for Bree in Transamerica is represented by her naked in the tub, touching her vagina. Pre-op Bree’s “parts” trap her in-between, as the movie poster so helpfully informs prospective audiences—without surgery, she’s “really” just a man in a dress.

Chest surgery fills much the same function for images of trans men. The body-centrism was so prevalent in the recently released Becoming Chaz, the documentary following Chaz Bono’s transition, one critic titled his review: “About a Boy or About a Body?”  We see a similar interest in trans-bodies in Boys Don’t Cry and the teen soap Degrassi:

(Still shot from film Boys Don’t Cry. Courtesy of Fox Searchlight Films)

(Still shot from Degrassi. Courtesy of Alliance Atlantis)

In all of these cases, the trans person’s emotional and social existence is tied to the state of their body. Bree can’t possibly be fulfilled until she’s had surgery and can strip naked in front of an audience. Bono can “really” be a man only after top surgery and he can go shirtless. Most importantly, trans people appear to have no life outside of their body, and their transition sometimes forms a narrative arc of beginning (bad body), middle (fixing the body), and end (good body).  They are allowed to be a part of the story only as a person transitioning, their trans-status overwhelming everything about them that makes them unique individuals with complex personal stories.

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Avery Dame is currently a master’s candidate in American Studies at the University of Kansas, where he studies media depictions of trans folks and trans vloggers on YouTube. He also blogs at the improbably named Ping Your Spaceman.

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The Stonewall Inn is a bar in Greenwich Village in New York.  In the ’60s the bar was frequented by, among others, gay, lesbian, and transgender locals.  On June 28, 1969, in response to frequent harassment by police, the patrons rioted.  The description on Wikipedia, I must admit, is worth the read.  Suffice to say that the police were roundly trounced.  The riot is often cited as the birth of the LGBT rights movement.

This is purported to be the only photograph of the riot:

And this is a picture of the Inn, three months later, with a sign in the window that reads:

We homosexuals plead with our people to please help maintain peaceful and quiet conduct on the streets of the Village.

Images borrowed from Wikipedia.

Sociologists use the term “androcentrism” to refer to a new kind of sexism, one that replaces the favoring of men over women with the favoring of masculinity over femininity. According to the rules of androcentrism, men and women alike are rewarded, but only insofar as they are masculine (e.g., they play sports, drink whiskey, and are lawyers or surgeons w00t!). Meanwhile, men are punished for doing femininity and women… well, women are required to do femininity and simultaneously punished for it.

Illustrating this concept, much more concisely, is this altered photograph of James Franco in drag. Sent along by Stephanie V., the photo was originally for the cover of Candy, a “transversal style” fashion magazine.  I’m not sure who added the copy,* but I like it:

* So Caro Visi, where I found the image, credits Virus, but I can’t find it there.  I’m happy to properly credit if someone can point me in the right direction.

UPDATE: Sarah and John, in the comments thread, pointed out that the language is borrowed from a movie titled The Cement Garden.  Jennifer points out that Madonna used it, as well, in her song What it Feels Like For A Girl.

Clip from The Cement Garden:

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More posts on androcentrism: “woman” as an insult, making it manly: how to sell a car, good god don’t let men wear make up or long hair, don’t forget to hug like a dude, saving men from their (feminine) selves, men must eschew femininity, not impressed with Buzz Lightyear commercial, dinosaurs can’t be for girls, and sissy men are so uncool.

Last week we received ten requests* to discuss the furor over a J. Crew ad featuring a 5-year-old boy in pink toenails, with his mom, Jenna Lyons, the President and Creative Director of J. Crew.

Fox News, Media Research Network Center (MRNC), and One Million Moms criticized the ad for supporting a liberal agenda aimed at mainstreaming gender-bending behavior and causing this particular child to be confused about his gender or sexual orientation.  Their criticism was picked up by mainstream news outlets, including ABCNews, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, and the Los Angeles Times, who mostly just posed the question as to whether they were correct, while balancing opposing views in support of the idea that painting a son’s toenails pink was consequence-less.

Frankly, I’m not sure what to make of this “furor” (as I called it).  On the one hand, the criticism of the ad is a cautionary tale to all companies and a lesson to us all.  Here at SocImages, we frequently criticize companies that portray and assert rigid gender roles, especially for boys.  But look what happens when a company dares to do something different?  Outrage!  Accusations! Perhaps we’re short-sighted to imagine that companies can just tell whatever cultural story they want to tell.

On the other hand, perhaps this isn’t a story about advertising, perhaps it’s a story about media more generally.  It’s true that there were objections to the ad.  But I didn’t find many of them; just a few high-profile examples.  Perhaps what really happened was what is sometimes colloquially referred to as a “slow news day.”  Only the choir would have been preached to if the criticisms weren’t picked up and highlighted by many more media outlets.  And those outlets, as I did above, beg audiences to pay attention to the “furor.”  A furor that might have been largely of their own making.  Say “hello” to ratings.

These are my thoughts. Yours?

*  Many thanks to Katrin, Zoe S., Jeff H., Prof. Mary Reiter, Sara P., Andrew Slater, p.j., Brian K., Ben Y., and Dmitriy T.M. for the submissions!

In Afghanistan, girls are not supposed to obtain an extensive education, be in public without a male chaperone, or work outside the home.  This is typically discussed as a burden for girls and women but, as an article in the New York Times sent in by Dmitriy T.M. explains, it can also be a burden on families.  Families with sons can send all of their children out in public with the boy as a chaperone.  This is useful for the whole family: the girls get more freedom and the parents can send their children on errands, to school, or on social visits without their supervision.  Since boys can also work outside the home, boys can be a source in extra income for a family.  Families with all girls, then, are not only pitied from a social perspective (because girls are devalued compared to boys), but from a practical perspective (because gendered rules make daily life more difficult).

One solution is to bend the rules.  Journalist Jenny Nordberg explains that some families without sons pick a girl-child to be a boy.  One day they cut her hair, change her name, and put her in boy clothes.  They then send her out into the world as a boy.  This picture is of six-year-old Mehran Rafaat (left), dressed as a boy, and her sisters, Benafsha and Beheshta:

Mehran playing with other boys:

Her mother explains:

People came into our home feeling pity for us that we don’t have a son… And the girls — we can’t send them outside. And if we changed Mehran to a boy we would get more space and freedom in society for her.  And we can send her outside for shopping and to help the father.

Her father concurs:

It’s a privilege for me, that she is in boys’ clothing… It’s a help for me, with the shopping. And she can go in and out of the house without a problem.

The practice isn’t new, but long-standing.  Here is a picture of Shukria Siddiqui, second from the right, at 16-years-old:

Nordberg is unsure how many families do this, but it is common enough that most people are unsurprised when a biological girl suddenly becomes a social boy before their very eyes.  Teachers have become accustomed to such sudden shifts.  Relatives, friends, and acquaintances accept and participate in the farce. There is even a name for this kind of child, “bacha posh,” which translates into “dressed up as a boy.”  Later, when the child reaches puberty, she typically becomes a girl again.  Meanwhile, the family might choose a younger sibling to take over her role.

One of the interesting things about this, from a sociological perspective, is how easy it turns out to be to break these extremely rigid gender rules.  If the family simply decided that their daughter should be able to go outside without supervision, get higher education, work outside the home, and interact as an equal with men, it would be a slap in the face of the gender regime.  By dressing her a boy, however, they are effectively nodding to the rules, even as they break them.  They are saying, “Yes, it is true that girls should not be able to do these thing,” but we need a boy in the household for social and practical reasons.  And, because other Afghanis understand, they are willing to look the other way.

These sorts of adaptations are often lost when we hear about the cultural rules in places we deem oppressive.  People in these narratives often seem unbelievably oppressed.  Often they are living under extreme conditions, but it’s important to also be exposed to the ways in which individuals find ways to wrest autonomy from rigid rules through ingenuity and creativity.  This wresting of autonomy, further, is often part and parcel of the culture, allowing for far more flexibility than outside observers are sometimes capable of seeing.