*updates

SocImages News:

Lisa appeared on the pop culture podcast Sounds Familiar to talk about the role of women in horror flicks.  Are slasher flicks feminist?  Well, kinda they are!

She also served as the guest expert on KPCC’s AirTalk for a conversation on the grandfather who was kicked out of a Barnes & Noble children’s book section for being a single male.  She called it  “gender profiling” (listen).

The folks from Office Hours, one of our sibling blogs at The Society Pages, posted a podcast with Lisa and Gwen discussing Sociological Images and public sociology more generally.

The Guardian reposted part of Matt Cornell’s SocImages post on his “man boobs” and Playboy Radio had him on for an “awkward” Q&A.

Quotes and Links:

We were quoted or linked at The Atlantic, the Kansas City Star, TV Tropes, the Huffington Post, and Jezebel.

New Resources:

Gwen added a section on politics to her Intro to Sociology Course Guide and Lisa put together a new Pinterest page, this one collecting all the images from our posts on Disney.

Social Media ‘n’ Stuff:

Finally, this is your monthly reminder that SocImages is on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and Pinterest.  Lisa is on Facebook and most of the team is on Twitter: @lisadwade, @gwensharpnv, @familyunequal, @carolineheldman, @jaylivingston, and @wendyphd.

In Other News…

We wanted to give a shout out to the anonymous fan who added this sticky note to the paperwork for a book Lisa ordered on interlibrary loan.   You made our day!  :)

SocImages Updates:

The University of Cinncinati’s J.A. Carter has put together a fabulous resource: a Course Guide for Sociology of Sport classes.

Gwen has put together a new Pinterest page.  This is our 16th and it covers various attempts by marketers to Masculinize Femininized Products in order to sell them to men.

An article tracing the history and philosophy of SocImages is now in pre-publication.  Feel free to email socimages@thesocietypages.org for a copy if you’d like one.

In the News:

Peggy Orenstein, author of Cinderella Ate My Daughter and other books, offered a blush-inducing review of SocImages at her website.

Peg Streep discussed Lisa’s research on hook up culture in Psychology Today: Finding Anastasia Steele and Looking for Christian Grey.

Matt Cornell’s fantastic post on his “man-boobs” was featured, in French, at Rue89.

Our fabulous four-part series on LEGO’s history of marketing (and not marketing) to girls, by David Pickett, was featured at Boing Boing, Neatorama, and HuffPo Parents.

Finally, this month we enjoyed being linked from sites the likes of Cracked, Kotaku, Utne Reader, TVTropes, Good, Gamasutra, AdWeek, and Business Insider.

Most Popular in May:

• Student’s Brain Flatlines During Class
• The Story of My Man-Boobs
• The Difference Between “i.e.” and “e.g.”
• Holes in the Social Fabric: An Artist Quilts the Foreclosure Crisis
• Depp’s “Tonto” Costume Based on a Non-Native’s Wild Imagination
• “Nude,” Racial Marginalization and the Wedding Industry
• Support for Gay Marriage Rising in Every Demographic
• Equal Opportunity for Idealized Employees
• The “Motherhood Penalty”
• The U.S. #1 in Health Costs
• Framing North Carolina’s Amendment One
• Historical Perspective on the LEGO Gender Gap

Social Media ‘n’ Stuff:

Finally, this is your monthly reminder that SocImages is on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and Pinterest.  Lisa is on Facebook and most of the team is on Twitter: @lisadwade, @gwensharpnv, @familyunequal, @carolineheldman, @jaylivingston, and @wendyphd.

Tenure!

Lisa Wade is celebrating the news that, come Fall, she will be a tenured professor at Occidental College!  Now that she’s in the “golden handcuffs,” she can say all the stuff she’s been holding back on Twitter and Facebook. :)

New Course Guide:

• The Sociology of Sports, by J.A. Carter

New Pinterest Page: 

• Sexually Suggestive Advertising

Best of April:

Two of our posts received over 1,000 “likes” on Facebook this month:

• Lisa Wade, Fat People Can Be as Healthy as Thin People
• Wendy Christensen, Lost in Translation: Tattoos and Cultural Appropriation

Other popular posts in April include:

• Lisa Wade, Welcome to the State Home for the Manic Pixie Dream Girls
• Martin Hart-Landsberg, We Are Not All In It Together
• Jenny Davis, Trayvon Martin: The Mistake of the Progressive Left
• Gwen Sharp, The Harsh Realities of Juvenile Detention
• Lisa Wade, Manipulated Women and High Fashion
• Lisa Wade, Portraying and Pushing Female Competitiveness
• Gwen Sharp, Race, Representation, and Reactions to the Hunger Games
• Caroline Heldman, The Hunger Games, Hollywood, and Fighting Fuck Toys
• Lisa Wade, Class Privilege and Parental Leave

Social Media ‘n’ Stuff:

Finally, this is your monthly reminder that SocImages is on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and Pinterest.

You can also follow Gwen’s great Twitter feed or find Lisa on both Twitter and Facebook (she just joined this month!).

Most of the rest of the team is on Twitter too: @familyunequal, @carolineheldman, @jaylivingston, and @wendyphd.

Links this Month: 

• i09, Fat People Can Be as Healthy as Thin People
• TVGuide, Notre Dame’s Fighting Irish Mascot
• PhD in Parenting, Adultification and Sexualization of Girls in French Vogue
• Tofugo, Yaeba: Culture and Cosmetic Infantilization
• Corporate Governance, Boys Want Success, Girls Want Boys

SocImages Meet Up in the Twin Cities!

On the weekend of April 2oth Gwen and I will be visiting the University of Minnesota to attend the Sociology Research Institute and humbly accept an award on behalf of SocImages.  We’d love it if you’d come and celebrate with us on Saturday, April 21st 6pm to 8pm.  Stay tuned for a location…

Social Media ‘n’ Stuff:

Please feel free to follow SocImages on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and Pinterest. Gwen and I and most of the team are also on Twitter, too.

Upcoming Lectures and Appearances:

Next month I’ll be giving my talk about hook up culture at CSU Northridge (11:00am on Apr. 26^th) and in September I’ll be at Indiana State University to give a featured lecture at the International Crime, Media & Popular Culture Studies Conference (Sept. 17^th).

A big thank you to the staff, students, and faculty at Harvard, Dartmouth, and Boston University!  I had a wonderful time sharing my research and ideas last week!  Special thanks to Harvard Sex Week for letting me debut my new talk on media stereotypes and sexual pleasure. Reviews of the talks in The Harvard Crimson and The Dartmouth are linked from my website.

And thanks, too, to Amy Schalet and the rest of the faculty at UMass-Amherst for giving me the opportunity to talk in depth about Sociological Images!  It’s such a treat to be able to talk about our little blog.

SocImages in the News:

Our post on the racially-charged Disney-themed candy raised some eyebrows. The story was covered at The Root, Business Insider, Babble, Gawker, Jezebel, The Daily Meal, The Week, and in the Phoenix New Times.

Miss Representation, the fantastic documentary featuring SocImages contributor Caroline Heldman, is getting amazing reviews!  Here’s the latest at CNN.

Reuters gave me the opportunity to weigh in on a controversy over a San Antonio mural featuring the “sleepy Mexican” stereotype.

Finally, The Frisky picked up on our post about pink in Saudi Arabia.

We’re happy to announce a new Pinterest Board:

• The Tyranny of Pink and Blue

I’m thinking about putting together one that includes subliminal and not-so-subliminal uses of sex in advertising. I’ll try to get to that in April.

Best of March:

Our hard-working intern, Norma Morella, collected the stuff ya’ll liked best from this month. Two of our posts received over 1,000 “likes” on Facebook this month:

• Distrust for Atheists and the New Relevance of Faith
• The Manly Origins of Cheerleading

Other popular March posts include:

• Exotic Dancers in 1890 and the Plump Body Ideal
• Not Quite White: Arabs, Slavs, and Whiteness in the U.S.
• Women’s Parts as Urinals and Sinks
• Boys Want Success, Girls Want Boys
• Gingerism: Prejudice Against Redheads
• Bad Romance: Woman’s Suffrage, a Gaga Re-Make
• Gender and ESPN’s Coverage of March Madness
• Head Covering as a Common Practice
• The First Black Disney Princess Loves Watermelon

Thanks so much to all our readers!

 Los Angeles SocImages Meet Up this Sunday!

Gwen Sharp, Caroline Heldman, and I will be at The Escondite (downtown L.A.) on Sunday, March 4th starting at 6pm.  All ages.  Food and drink.  Great company guaranteed.

Please RSVP to socimages@thesocietypages.org.  Thanks to Dolores R. for picking the place!  And, yes, she’ll be there too!

SocImages News:

Sociological Images has been awarded a Public Sociology Award from the Sociology Research Institute at the University of Minnesota!  Thanks so much to our nominators, the professors who support us, and to our readers who make it all worthwhile!

I have a new paper out tracing 30 years of academic debate about female genital “mutilation” (full text). I try to tease out the constructive and destructive parts of the discussion, closing with some observations about how these lessons translate to other topics.

Ben Martin put together a nice interview, hoping to help advertise my talks at Harvard University later this semester.  Meanwhile, Yale student Anya Grenier did a nice follow up piece to my visit there.

And, well shucks, Gwen Sharp and I are among the top 50 sociologists on Twitter.

Upcoming Lectures and Appearances:

Gwen and I will both be visiting the University of Minnesota to accept our award.  That fun day will be Apr. 20th, during the annual Sociology Research Institute.

I’m also looking forward to giving talks at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst (Mar. 27), Boston University,  (Mar.  27 and 28), Harvard (Mar. 26 and 28), Dartmouth (Mar. 29), and Indiana State University (Sept. 17-19).  If you’re in town, I would love to meet you! Details here.

New Pinterest Boards:

I admit, I’m a little bit in love with our Pinterest page.  New this month:

• The Great Recession
• Comics and Cartoons

Best of February

Our hard-working intern, Norma Morella, collected the stuff ya’ll liked best from this month.  Here’s what she found:

• Jay  Livingston, Christian Privilege: Santorum Tries to Woo the Jews
• Lisa Wade, Defining Women’s Oppression: The Burka vs. the Bikini
• Dan Rose, The Economics of Disease Prevention and Treatment
• Celia Emmelhainz, The Rhetoric of Luck Among the 99%
• Gwen Sharp, Embodying Gender Differences
• Lisa Wade, Fox News Versus the Netherlands

Social Media ‘n’ Stuff:

Finally, this is your monthly reminder that SocImages is on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and Pinterest.  Gwen and I and most of the team are also on twitter:

• @lisadwade
• @gwensharpnv
• @familyunequal
• @carolineheldman
• @jaylivingston
• @wendyphd

Los Angeles Meet Up:

Plan ahead! We’ve scheduled a SocImages Meet Up for March.  Please join us The Escondite (downtown L.A.) on Sunday, March 4th.  All ages.  Food and drink.  Great company guaranteed.

(P.S.: If you’re in Boston, I’ll be visiting Harvard and Boston University at the end of March. Will try to schedule a meet up then as well.)

SocImages News:

Amanda Jungels has put together a fantastic SocImages Course Guide for Sexuality and Society.  Check out all of our Course Guides here.

We’re having great fun with our Pinterest account; our collection of sexy toy makeovers showed up as a slideshow at the Huffington Post.  We’ve also added two new boards:

• what color is flesh?
• sexualized/gendered food

A super big “thank you” to Ron Anderson!  Dr. Anderson notified us that he nominated us for the ASA Section on Communication and Information Technologies Public Sociology Award.

We’re in Portuguese!  Thanks to Dr. Claudio Cordovil, some of our posts are appearing at the University of Brazil’s Conhecimento Prudente.

I think this is our first appearance as a source on Wikipedia… on the page about the online game, Evony… of all things.

Are you on Google Plus? So are we!

Authors and Contributors in the News:

Contributor Philip Cohen was discussed in an NPR story about using Google searches as data.

I was quoted in an NPR story about photographer Shelby Lee Adams’ portrayal of Appalachia and I enjoyed a few fun minutes on air with CKNW’s Bill Good talking about the recent trend of sexualizing toys for young girls.

Best of January

Our hard-working intern, Norma Morella, collected the stuff ya’ll liked best from this month.  Here’s what she found:

• Heather Cromarty, The Marilyn Meme
• Lisa Wade, Beauty and the New Lego Line
• Caroline Heldman, Voter Suppression: The New Disenfranchisement
• Jason Eastman, Newt Racism: The Racially-Coded Language of Presidential Candidates
• Lisa Wade, Income Ineqaulity is Bad for Society
• Gwen Sharp, National Geographic Genders Animal Sexuality
• Sarah Wanenchak, Disabled Bodies and Ablest Acceptance
• Gwen Sharp, Fotoshop by Adobé
• Lisa Wade, 125 Years of Holding Women Responsible for Laundry
• Lisa Wade, Mariah Careys All I Want for Christmas Is You: 1994 vs 2011

Social Media ‘n’ Stuff:

Finally, this is your monthly reminder that SocImages is on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and Pinterest.  Gwen and I and most of the team are also on twitter:

• @lisadwade
• @gwensharpnv
• @familyunequal
• @carolineheldman
• @jaylivingston
• @wendyphd

Appearances and Publications:

After I posted about the Jimmy Kimmel prank in which he encouraged parents to film their kids getting “bad” presents, I had the opportunity to inform a New York Times article about the subject.  I discussed the social rules of the Christmas gift-giving (and the importance of teaching kids how to be the butt of a joke).  My first time in the NYT. w00t!

Also, I’m proud to report that a paper I co-wrote with Caroline Heldman has been published in a new book titled Sex For Life: From Virginity to Viagra, How Sexuality Changes Throughout Our Lives (edited by Laura Carpenter and John DeLamater, and published by NYU Press).  Our chapter is about first-year college students experiences with hook up culture.  You can get a sneak peak here.

Pinterest!

Over the holiday I went sort of bonkers and decided to start up a Pinterest site for SocImages.  Pinterest is a virtual “pin board” where people can collect images from around the web.  I uploaded our entire archive to the site: 4,002 posts and 8,040 images.  It will let you peruse our images much more quickly. If anything inspires, you can click through to the blog to read the analysis.  These are the “boards” we have so far:

• All SocImages Content
• Re-Touching and Photoshop
• Vintage Ads and Products
• Racial/Ethnic Objectification
• Sexy Toy Make-Overs
• Gendered Parenting and Housework
• Heteronormativity
• Social Construction
• The Social Construction of Race

They look like this (then you scroll down):

 Best of December:

Meanwhile, our fabulous intern, Norma Morella, collected the stuff ya’ll liked best from this month.  Here’s what she found:

• Jay Livingston, Graphic Design the Fox News Way
• Lisa Wade, Why I’m Not Married
• Gwen Sharp, Example of Socialization: Baby Rapper
• Gwen Sharp, Marketing by Masculinizing the Feminine
• Sophy Bot, A Hipster By Any Other Name
• Lisa Wade, American vs. International News: Time and Newsweek
• Caroline Heldman, Pennsylvania Public Service Announcement Blames Rape Victims
• Lisa Wade, Behind the “Perfect” Body: Models and Bodybuilders
• Lisa Wade, Now You’ll Never Forget What a Venn Diagram Is

Best of 2011:

Gwen and I ran our favorite posts from 2011 over the last five days.  Just in case you missed them, here’s a list:

• The Mental Burden of a Lower Class Background
• Of What are We Capable? Human Echolocation
• A Thoughtful Response to the “Asians in the Library” Rant
• Formula for a Successful American Movie
• Gender, Obentos, and the State in Japan
• Babies Learn How to Have a Conversation
• In Defiance of Title IX: Colleges Report Male Athletes as Women
• Art and Attribution: What is an Artist?
• How to Make an Art: By Hennessey Youngman
• The Innovation Trap: How the iPhone Isn’t Saving America
• Change Blindness
• Cultural Differences in Cognitive Perception
• Luxury and the Consumption of Labor
• Are Game Show Audiences Trustworthy
• Gender, Sexualization, and Rolling Stone
• Best Comic Ever: The Scientific Process
• Cousin Marriage
• The Hidden Beneficiaries of Federal Programs
• A Critique of Capitalism by G.A. Cohen
• What Makes a Body Obscene?

Over at his blog, Family Inequality, SocImages Contributor Philip Cohen made a list of his best liked posts from 2011 too.  Check them out here.

Social Media ‘n’ Stuff:

Finally, this is your monthly reminder that SocImages is on Twitter, Facebook and, now, Pinterest.  Gwen and I and most of the team are also on twitter:

• @lisadwade
• @gwensharpnv
• @familyunequal
• @carolineheldman
• @jaylivingston
• @wendyphd