“If you don’t believe that childcare is work, then try telling your parents or whoever took care of you that raising you was not work.  I don’t imagine that would go over well.”  I say this in my social problems class as a counterpoint to the assertion that welfare-recipients are lazy and immoral.  Most recently the sentiment was employed to defend wealthy “stay-at-home mom,” and wife of presidential candidate, Ann Romney.  The sentiment that childcare is work is fairly uncontested when referring to the non-poor.  In class, I urge students to consider whether the sentiment is equally valid for their (likely) non-poor parents and for poor parents.  I make this statement in the context of welfare to point out that both the ability to stay at home and the status of “stay-at-home mom” are class privileges and not merely reflections of moral or ideological choices.  Indeed, even for women who have privilege the vernacular meaning of “choice” rarely applies. (more…)

Editor’s note: This post has been reprinted with permission of the author. The original can be found on the University of Missouri-Kansas City Department of Criminal Justice and Criminolgy Blog: http://umkccjc.blogspot.com/2011/12/hate-crime-statistics-report-gender.html.

By Dr. Jessica Hodge

I’ve read a lot about the shocking revelation that a former coach at Penn State allegedly molested up to 8 boys and raped at least one.  The story is all the more shocking given the grand jury testimony that points to a possible cover up by Penn State officials.  Indeed, media coverage of who knew what and when has almost eclipsed coverage of the original alleged crimes.  Two Penn State administrators were charged with perjury and amid the outrage the University board fired the University President and long-time football coach Joe Paterno.

Like every scandal or tragedy, news reporters have called this a teachable moment.  Here I want to consider how such a case is teachable for sociologists.  I am somewhat hesitant about these kinds of events.  After all, one case does not make a social trend or constitute the kind of empirical evidence from which sociologists make claims about society.  In addition, social claims do not automatically predict or explain single incidents.  Indeed, I consistently remind students that to make such assumptions is a misuse of sociology.  So, after spending the semester explaining the sociological imagination how can I use a single case as a teachable moment? (more…)

AJ shrugged when I asked him why he didn’t even mention the panel. He had been working on it since last semester. Yet during the class period when the very theme of his panel was central to the topic at hand in his upper-level Gender and Families seminar, AJ said nothing of his own work.

He spoke, of course. And as usual, his teacher and his classmates seemed engaged in what he said. They nodded; they looked at him when he was speaking. Some responded to his comments directly. At least one made reference to “what AJ was saying” when making a contribution later in the discussion.

AJ’s panel centered on experiences shaping Black male identities and the development of supportive relationships around those identities. The class discussion that day and the assigned readings for it were billed under the heading of Men and Masculinities. The instructor was White and female. Over half the students in the class appeared to be White. As in many of his college classrooms, AJ was the only African American male. And now, here he was, leaving class with me, a White, female graduate student and researcher with whom he’d consented to spend an inconveniently large number of hours. Here he was shrugging his shoulders as he searched for a verbal answer that might skirt any sensitivities I might have and still answer my question about why he had not discussed his own work where it seemed so relevant and so important to furthering the discussion at hand. Softly he critiqued that powerful discussion I (and perhaps also his professor, the college deans, and the University Viewbook for prospective students) were imagining as he shrugged his shoulders and said: “It’s not going to go as far as you want it to.”

I thought about this experience with AJ when I was reading through The Educational Experience of Young Men of Color, a report released Monday (20 June 2011) by the College Board’s Advocacy and Policy Center. The College Board report makes “six clear recommendations” toward addressing some of the issues that young men of color face, including teacher education for culturally responsive pedagogy in the college classroom and the strengthening of campus multicultural centers. Sounds great to me, but what about AJ’s classroom and countless other classrooms quite like it? What about those class discussions that hold so much potential, but that “don’t go as far as you want [them] to” because one student feels looked to, again and again, to represent a  provide a neat and tidy synopsis of the myriad perspectives and experiences of  myriad others who share his race and gender? What about those deliberations and disagreements and questions and shared experiences that students like AJ want to participate in but have learned not to look for in the classroom? What about the cultural and disciplinary messages students receive day after day, semester after semester, to channel their classroom energies and efforts have to go into preparing for tests of discrete skills rather than into dialogue and collaborative knowledge construction?

The College Board study finds that campuses with strong multicultural centers that reach out to students and families tend to have higher retention rates. Indeed many of the students in my study have indicated that the campus multicultural center at our University has been a key resource for academic advising, extracurricular activities, peer mentoring programs, and summer opportunities. I can’t help but think, though, about a comment from Chloe, another student in my study, a rising senior, who transferred last year from an HBCU (Historically Black College/University):

There’s just a lack of diversity [on this campus]. This is a predominantly white university. I think you can call it a PWI. I looked that up. And I don’t care any type of way, but the fact that there’s even a multicultural center, this one separate place, that says a lot about the lack of diversity.

The College Board’s six recommendations are indeed clear and worthwhile. But recommendations that suggest changes that can be made around the margins without reconstructing the center are, like AJ’s class discussion, “not going to go as far as you want it to.”

In a new study from the Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism at the University of Southern California, it was revealed that women are both underrepresented and sexualized in the mainstream motion picture industry. The study, headed by Dr. Stacy L. Smith and Marc Choueiti, evaluated 100 films released in 2008 though survey and content analysis methodology and focused on the gender of all speaking characters, behind-the-scenes employees, and the hypersexualization of on-screen characters. Overall, their findings show that only 32.8 percent of speaking characters were female, 8 percent of directors were female (i.e., 92% were male), 13.6 percent were writers, and 19.1 percent of producers were females. Lastly, the findings report that females, especially 13- to 20-year olds, are sexualized on screen through sexually revealing attire, partial nudity, and an emphasis on a small waist and physical attractiveness. In their conclusion, Smith and Choueiti report that, “Our findings reveal that motion picture content is sending two consistent and troubling messages to viewers. The first is that females are of lesser value than are males. This is evidenced by their on screen presences and the lack of employment opportunities behind-the-camera. The second is that females are more likely than males to be valued for their appearance.”

While these findings work to substantiate the concern over both the symbolic annihilation of women in media (both in front and behind the camera) and the sexualization of young girls, this report does not directly address the question: Why do these findings matter? On page four of their report, the authors offer a slight mention of “effect,” but fail to elaborate on why these troublesome findings matter. In other words, how do these findings impact the industry, future constructions of media texts, and audience reception? They write, in reference to hypersexualization, “These findings are troubling given that repeated exposure to thin and sexy ideals may contribute to negative effects in some viewers and reinforce patterns of lookism in the entertainment industry.” What are the negative effects? What is “lookism?” As media scholars continue to grapple with the question of “effects,” it would have been extremely helpful to gain insight to Smith and Choueiti’s understanding of how these findings will “effect” audiences and cultural practice. While these scholars most likely have a theoretical framework for effects and audience reception, it was lost in the pages of the available report. So the question remains: What do these findings tell us about media’s relationship to gender inequality? What do these findings tell us about the status of hypersexualization in the film industry? In the end, these findings are extremely important, but without support from a cultural analysis, remain couched as an “industry update” and miss out on an opportunity for a critique of gender inequality, the sexual division of labor, and the continued social sexualization of women at the societal and cultural level.

Sexualised culture and young people’s sexual health: A cause for concern? By Clare Bale (Sociology Compass)

As is often the case with graduate students, I just spent several months in a dissertation-induced haze and only recently had a chance to go through the latest issues of Gender & Society. Among these was the February 2011 issue that included a symposium on Paula England’s 2010 article on the “uneven/stalled gender revolution.” England’s over-reliance on the structural and institutional aspects of gender was underscored by several savvy pieces of Sociology, including a response by Sara Crawley that emphasizes the cultural and micro-level pieces of the puzzle. Crawley takes England and other scholars to task for the assumption that institutionally-derived identity frames (such as mother, principal, or senator) are more specific and organized than those identities not bound directly to a single institution (i.e. race, class, gender, sexuality, subculture—or, “cultural identities”). The latter identity projects may be more diffuse but are arguably omni-relevant: their meaning is embedded in all social action.

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David Orr half-smiled at me from the pages of the New York Times Book Review this morning. In his dark blue button down shirt, head cocked sympathetically to the side, wire-rimmed glasses gracefully seated at the bottom of a long forehead, this man has clearly selected an author photo of himself that represents his belief in the power of ideas. His own, surely, and those of others so long as they are expressed in poetry. But Orr’s new book Beautiful and Pointless: A Guide to Modern Poetry bears a title that says volumes about how he sees those ideas. They’re “pointless.” They’re just pretty. Addictively pretty, apparently. Pretty enough to obsess over. Pretty enough to love, even if it never makes a  ”point.” Which begs the question: what the heck is a “point”? And who gets to decide when one is made?

Ideas for Orr apparently get to float around outside of everyday social practices. And because ideas are so detached, he figures, they must just be beautiful and pointless. Perhaps Orr should have engaged in discussions with poetry lovers whose experiences were different than his own. People whose experiences with poetry had nothing to do with luxuriating in the beautiful and the pointless.

Poetry is not a luxury. The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the changes which we hope to bring about through those lives. It is within this light that we form those ideas by which we pursue our magic and make it realized. This is poetry as illumination, for it is through poetry that we give name to those ideas which are, until the poem, nameless and formless-about to be birthed, but already felt. That distillation of experience from which true poetry springs births thought as dream births concept, as feeling births idea, as knowledge births (precedes) understanding.

Audre Lorde, from Sister Outsider (1984)

Poetry is not a luxury, Audre Lorde writes, but how can someone like David Orr, whose economic and social access to “art supplies” (or at least to folks who recognize, either through his intellectual-looking picture or his publicly stated delight in “beautiful and pointless” ideas, that his creative work, his thought-work, is stuff of value) conceive of the real, material inequalities around whose knowledge “counts” that make poetry necessary. Not just the poetry that goes in great collections or chapbooks or  coffee-shop goers’ Moleskins, but the stuff through which real people who don’t have the luxury of Orr’s social position share the knowledge that they create.

As Lorde observes, poetry can be written on scraps of paper, in dark pantries, between double work shifts, or on the bus. It can emerge in conversation. It can be  spoken but never written, yet repeated again and again across contexts and across differences. Or spoken once, and never again, but the knowledge shared knowledge that shapes whole ways of knowing, ways of seeing the world. Poetry does not require reams of paper (like, say, a book defending poetry would). Nor does it require long leaves of absence from work and daily life in order to complete a manuscript for publication. Poetry is an art form that cuts across material inequalities and enables, encourages the very human and humanizing act of sharing knowledge.

And in just about one sentence, Audre Lord moves us beyond the whole problematic of another man whose author photos bear a striking similarity to Orr’s: here I’m thinking of Michel Foucault and his anxiety over the repressive power of “the gaze”. Lorde writes: “As we learn to bear the intimacy of scrutiny and to flourish within it, as we learn to use the products of that scrutiny for power within our living, those fears which rule our lives and form our silences begin to lose their control over us” (1984: 36). Poetry is where those silences can be broken.

On March 25, The International Women’s Media Foundation revealed its two-year study, “Global Report on the Status of Women in the News Media” during its Leaders Conference in Washington, revealing that – not surprisingly – there is gender disparity in newsrooms worldwide. According to the final report (2011), “More than 150 researchers interviewed executives at more than 500 companies in 59 nations using a 12-page questionnaire” (p. 7). Although the report offers a regional breakdown of findings, the global results suggest that, overall; women are not in a position to make choices that impact the production of news. The findings of the study show that, “In this long-awaited extensive study, researchers found that 73% of the top management jobs are occupied by men compared to 27% occupied by women. Among the ranks of reporters, men hold nearly two-thirds of the jobs, compared to 35% held by women. However, among senior professionals, women are nearing parity with 41% of the newsgathering, editing and writing jobs” (p. 9).

Facing these numbers, the female media executives that met at the International Women Media Leader’s Conference in Washington were faced with developing a plan of action, and according to The Women’s Media Center blog, one of those strategies included quotas in order to level the playing field. Further, goals were developed based on the needs of specific regions. For example, for North America, delegates made a “pledge” to “Create a cross-platform executive-level coalition with an emphasis on salary transparency and negotiation.” Although the continued condition of the gender wage gap makes these findings appear predicable, the difference lies in the generation of nuanced findings rather than abstracted support for the disparity. In other words, the “Global Report” allows for the development of both globally- and regionally-specific strategies that can assist in the development of policy, social action and ultimately, change. And, drawing from the work of political economy of communication scholars such as Robert McChesney, John Nichols, and Ben Bagdikian, a policy of “leveling the playing field” in journalism affords an environment that is directed more toward democracy and inclusiveness and less toward the profit-motive and exclusivity. (more…)