Sarah Glassman, a graduate student at Michigan State University spotted this sign in a campus dining hall restroom. It’s a neat example of how a sign can avoid centering whiteness and instead be inclusive of people with different skin tones.
Thanks Sarah!
Princeton sociology professor Viviana Zelizer wrote a wonderful succinct editorial for the New York Times about the idea of giving money as a gift. Money, she explains, is used in the most impersonal of transactions (even antagonistic ones, as someone who recently paid a parking ticket recalls), so giving money to loved ones can be seen as crass, tasteless, or thoughtless.
Zelizer explains that cultural elites have been worrying about this since the early 1900s. The solution: “camouflage money inside a traditional gift.” Offering some examples, Zelizer writes:
In the December 1909 Ladies’ Home Journal, for instance, the writer Lou Eleanor Colby said she had found a way to “disguise the money so that it would not seem just like a commercial transaction.” She explained how she had incorporated $10 for her mother into artwork. She inserted dollar bills into two posters; one showed five sad bills not knowing where to go, and the other depicted the happy ending: “five little dollars speeding joyfully” toward her mother’s purse.
Housewives hid gold coins in cookies and boxes of candies; dollar bills could decorate belt-buckles or picture frames. Women boasted when the recipient failed to realize that the actual present was money. Men also disguised the money they gave to their wives as gifts, to distinguish it from their allowances. If you give her a check, The Ladies’ Home Journal advised, “put it in an embroidered purse, or a leather sewing basket or a jewel box which will be a little gift in itself.” The better the disguise, the more successful the gift.
Today these tokens are probably familiar to many of you. One site suggests making the money into a gift basket:
Another suggests that you give the gift of (money) origami:
Soon, Zelizer explains, companies figured out how to cash in on this cashing out, inventing the idea of decorated money orders and telegrams:
…in 1910, American Express began advertising money orders as an “acceptable Christmas gift.” Western Union improved on the idea by creating distinctive telegrams for sending money for special occasions, while greeting card companies started selling decorative money holders for birthdays and holidays.
Thus the “money holder” card was born:
(source)
And what do you think these really are?
(source)
While it may seem obvious to many of us now that gift certificates and money holders exist, Zelizer shows that these objects have a cultural history, devised to solve a particular problem that emerged with the spread of a wage-based economy.
Via Kieran at OrgTheory.
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.
Pop culture is always popping out new catch phrases, symbols, and characters that then get churned up into our larger universe of discourse and sometimes recycled in creative ways. As much as I did not like Avatar, the movie did inspire many Americans to identify with a fictional indigenous population, the Na’vi, who desired to protect their environment. Recognizing the impact of the movie, real environmental activists have been trying to transfer some of those feelings to their own movements by drawing connections between themselves and the Na’vi.
This is a good example of how the discursive resources available to movements are changing, unpredictable, sometimes come from unexpected places, and are increasingly global. Avatar was an opportunity for environmental movements, some of whom are trying to preserve the momentum that began when movie-goers watched the home tree come crashing down in flames.
Cross-posted at Jezebel.
Our intern, Lauren McGuire, found this fat-shaming ad for Mini Mentos. Text: “I love hanging out with you. All the boys keep looking at me.”
The ad uses the same strategy as a previously covered Bacardi campaign in which they encouraged women to “get an ugly girlfriend.” Both suggest that being fat (or ugly, and they’re often conflated) is undesirable. They also both treat fat people like they’re aren’t deserving of respect and dignity; that is, it’s okay to use them. In this case, the skinny girl is literally hoisting the fat girl into the air, so aggressively that her shoe is falling off. The fat girl is like a thing that the skinny girl owns and can pick up and toss about.
Notice also that it’s taken-for-granted as simply true that, if a “boy” were to see these two girls together, he would look at the skinny girl and ignore the fat one. This is a pathologization of sexual attraction to fat women, the same pathologization that leads us to call it “fat fetishism” or come up with terms like “chubby chasers” to try to explain “weird” sexual proclivities. It assumes that it’d be unnatural to find the fat woman sexier than the skinny one.
Notice also the stylization of the drawings. Both the fat and the skinny girl are drawn with wildly exaggerated proportions. This makes fat and skinny people seem like members of different species, entirely alien to one another. Skinny people are sticks; fat people are essentially circles. In reality, fat and skinny people look more alike than this. They both have human bodies with all the same parts. Some people just have more fat than others and fat is distributed differently in everyone. Fat is human, fat is natural, fat is okay. But a fear of fat is stoked when we see images like this that threaten us. This image says, “if you are/get fat, you will be a downright FREAK; you will be a circle when you should be a stick. And skinny girls will wave you around to draw attention to themselves.”
The message is pretty clear:
Fat people might as well not be human…
…and skinny women are bitches.
UPDATE: A representative from the company that distributes Mentos, Perfetti Van Melle, emailed to let us know that the ad above was a spec ad, one unendorsed by the company and never used. The rep writes that they will take efforts to have the ad removed from the advertising website where it appeared.
Thank you for making Perfetti Van Melle aware of the offensive MENTOS® ad you saw which portrays an overweight woman. This creative execution was part of a series of ads that an advertising agency submitted to our company in another country but it was rejected because of its unacceptable content. It has never been used in our advertising campaigns.
We do not know how this unapproved creative was ever made public and have asked the advertising agency responsible to provide a public apology and take appropriate actions to remove the creative from the website where it was published. We regret this unfortunate incident and appreciate your willingness to bring it to our attention.
Sincerely,
Dan Marquardt
Marketing Director
Perfetti Van Melle USA
Women’s and men’s washrooms: we encounter them nearly every time we venture into public space. To many people the separation of the two, and the signs used to distinguish them, may seem innocuous and necessary. Trans people know that this is not the case, and that public battles have been waged over who is allowed to use which washroom. The segregation of public washrooms is one of the most basic ways that the male-female binary is upheld and reinforced.
As such, washroom signs are very telling of the way societies construct gender. They identify the male as the universal and the female as the variation. They express expectations of gender performance. And they conflate gender with sex.
I present here for your perusal, a typology and analysis of various washroom signs.
[Editor: After the jump because there are dozens of them... which is why Marissa's post is so awesome...]
Sociologists distinguish between the terms “norm,” “normal,” and “normative.”
The norm refers to what is common or frequent. For example, for Christian Americans, celebrating Christmas is the norm.
Normal is opposed to abnormal. Even though celebrating Christmas is the norm, it is not abnormal to celebrate Hanukkah. To celebrate Hanukkah is perfectly normal.
In contrast to both of these, normative refers to a morally-endorsed ideal. Americans may think that you should celebrate the Fourth of July because it is patriotic to do so. Celebrating U.S. Independence may be both the norm and normative in the U.S. Many things that are not the norm are nonetheless normative. For example, a nuclear family with a married man and woman and their biological children is normative in the U.S., but it is certainly not the norm.
I thought of these distinctions when I looked at a submission by Andrew, who blogs at Ethnographer. Bike lanes in Philadelphia used to be designated with this figure:
Today, however, they’re designated by this one:
Do you see the difference? The new figures are wearing bike helmets. The addition is normative. It suggests that bikers should be wearing bike helmets. It may or may not be the norm, and it certainly isn’t normal or abnormal either way, but the city of Philadelphia is certainly attempting to make helmets normative.
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.
© 2012 Sociological Images
