I was in a rock band for three years. Sometimes 30-year-old women would look longingly at my lead-singer husband and 75-year-old men would flirt with me, but we never had 15-year-old girls scream at us. We were also not the Beatles, Elvis, or One Direction, although sometimes we made enough money to pay the babysitter during our gigs at a handful of local wine bars.

Do you scream at rock concerts? What pops into your mind when someone asks you to think about an audience of screaming fans at a rock concert? Media representation of this kind of image has tended towards young girls and women, which makes it important to think about this image from a feminist perspective. (I could also examine the age difference in concert behavior between my and my husband’s fans, but that is a different feminist issue.)

“But I’m not a 15-year-old girl,” you say. Of course we know that it is not just girls and young women who scream at concerts, even though we’ve seen the footage linked above (and it is not just the behavior of girls and young women that interest feminists). One of my friends noted that she hears lots of middle-aged men scream at country music concerts, for instance. But here’s the rub: the image of girls screaming is more common to see, and is evaluated differently from other images (of people, or screaming people), which makes it a good puzzle to sort out using feminism as a guiding lens.

Screaming is a physiological response to a stimulus, whether it is stress, fear, pain, sexual stimulus, or just excitement to see a rock star who has been hyped up as a dreamboat. Screaming at a concert, like the music performance itself, is a bodily experience, and calls to mind ponderings about bodies, control, and sexuality. Screaming at a concert, especially one where girls in the audience may be attracted to the main attraction (or even to the messages in the music), may be viewed as a form of free bodily sexual expression, an experience long touted by feminists of many types to be crucial if women and men are to be equal, egalitarian, and/or emancipated from their prescribed gender roles.

But it’s not that simple. This bodily and vocal sexual expression could have two paradoxical interpretations: either a girl screaming at a concert is defiantly protesting girls’ sexual repression in a highly sexualized society, or she is doing so as an unsuspecting part of the larger project to maintain girls’ sexuality as controlled, quiet, and contained.  more...

When I was a child my father never let us put bumper stickers on our cars. So my very first “bumper sticker” was actually a parking permit. This fall, I put the first real bumper sticker on my car, “I’m Ready Hillary.” Let me explain why I put it on and also why, ultimately, I took it off.

I did not think deeply about bumper stickers as an expression of identity until I moved to a small town in the deep south. I had preconceived notions about the conservative political and social climate here. Without generalizing, some of these —at least from my vantage point—were true, expressed not only though state level policies but within the public institutions of education, newspapers, and yes, bumper stickers.

I put a bumper sticker on my car to proclaim my liberal identity, not in reaction to a generally conservative environment but in response to an accumulation of events. The last straw, so to speak, was when my neighbor, with expletives, yelled “Yankee move back North!” (Read the full story here.) Why you might ask did our “preacher” neighbor scream this at us? He was upset by our dog, Bean, who would jump by the fence incidentally scaring his grandchildren.

This is Bean (left), a black lab and golden retriever mix, who can be obnoxious, but not vicious.

Had our neighbor just asked us to keep our dog away from the fence, we would have taken care of the issue. But after such a hostile interaction with our neighbor (while in the presence of my spouse who had been holding our four-year-old son at the time), I was angry and scared.

We were already outsiders to a small community. I am affiliated with the university in town and we were (are) “liberal Yankees from the North.” Confederate Pride is still strong in many places. If you Google “Yankee transplants to the South” you’ll see message boards and groups talking about us northerners. Many places here regularly feature “Sons of the Confederacy” flags and similar promotions. I took the photos below at a local parade a few weeks after I arrived in town.

Four days after “the altercation,” my spouse and I were both working from home when Animal Control arrived. During a conversation in our backyard (which could truly be another story in itself), the employee told us that our neighbor did not call animal control to complain but went in person the day after the incident, screaming about us “Damn Yankees” and our dog. We had already taken care to keep Bean away from the fence but were reprimanded just the same.

By this time I had already been asked over several months to attend a certain denomination of church that I do not believe in. This was the case even after I started going to a church of my choice, one that does fit with my social justice values. I also felt like my children, through everyday interactions and the public schools, were being indoctrinated into beliefs that were contrary to those of our family. (There is more to this story too, as the ACLU became involved in a religious controversy in the public schools).

I’d had enough. The incident with the neighbor was the tip of the iceberg. Just then, I received an email about getting a free “I’m Ready for Hilary” bumper-sticker. As soon as it came in the mail, I immediately slapped it on my bumper. My car is already noticeable, with dents and duct tape displayed proudly. I was not going to be afraid. I wanted my bumper sticker to say, “I am a liberal and I live here too.” I wanted people to know my identity. And I knew it was noticeable, as folks I know told me they knew my car by its bumper sticker. (Read more about this in my blog.)

I liked being honest and open about my liberal and social justice identity. I even thought about having a contest and asking friends across the country to send me all the liberal, social justice focused bumper stickers they could find so I could truly decorate my car. Full expression! But then I started to question having this bumper sticker both in terms of safety issues and well, as my partner asked, if people even knew who Hilary was. Thus, I wrote at the time:

But the other part of me wonders, and a lot of this stems from teaching sociology and criminology/criminal justice courses and students and their biases, will I get pulled over just because of my sticker? Will someone try to hurt my children because I have this bumper sticker? Or maybe as a few friends have asked me, do people here even know what this means?

I eventually took the sticker off. Why is is a hard question for me to answer, as a feminist, as a social justice advocate, a mother, and a spouse.

When I see injustice or inequality, I have a hard time not speaking up about them. I thank my parents for lessons on this as a child, and my sociology, women’s studies, and social work training. I would never say I am oppressed in the South—I am a middle class, cis-gender, white woman who is highly educated. But the politics are hard for me, as I am a liberal, pro-choice, LGBTQ ally, pro-immigrant rights, racial justice ally, supporter of welfare rights, and among other things believe in paying more taxes to help the common good. And I live in a small town where I am an outsider, not only because I am a “Northerner” who speaks differently and has different views on politics, but because I am not “from here.” I’m not oppressed, but there are times I feel like I don’t fit in.

While all these social justice issues are core to my work as a sociologist, activist, how I raise my children, and my own identity, I’ve come to a decision that I must engage in “Quiet Activism.” While some may say I should be speaking up more, I’ve decided that I do not want to display my identity through a bumper sticker. I’ve decided that my activism has to be “quiet,” and I must find ways to make a difference without sacrificing the safety of my family or my career.

I do not dislike the South. There are many things to like. But I stand strong by my social justice ideals that do not always match the visible environment here. There are many folks standing strong for social justice here. With permission from a colleague, there are those who are not covert about their identities.

In a small town people know your car. You learn quickly through small social networks the political and religious leanings of your children’s teachers and classmate’s families. And many times they are not the same as ours. And when you live in a state with “guns everywhere” laws and you find out that parents can have guns in their cars in the drop-off line at school, it is rational to question your difference and your safety. You learn that as a Northerner you can be seen as suspect as you are trying to change the social and political climate. There are other ways, through something as small as conversations with my children about our beliefs compared to what they hear, what and how I teach my courses, and mentoring my students who believe in social justice causes and have experienced oppression. Each day I live here, which is starting to feel less like a foreign country, I know my sociological imagination is stretching. In doing so, I am learning ways to make a difference without putting my kids, family, or career at risk.

For myself, as a dear friend told me, you have to learn to do the dance, which I am learning as a newcomer and Northerner. As I learn to do this dance, I reflect on my identity, outsider status, social justice, and how to teach my kids about diversity, oppression, and tolerance, I enjoy the long lasting warm weather in the South and creating my own oasis.

A few months ago, the research finding that many couples who don’t want kids reach the decision “after just one conversation” caught the attention of reporters. Many expressed shock and dismay, calling the decision a “snap choice” and referring to couples’ limited discussion about the matter “strange.”

Most reports poo-pooed the childfree who participated in the research, noting that the decision not to have kids deserves “further contemplation than whether to have pizza or Indian for dinner.”

Oddly, all of these reports seemed to overlook a crucial point: that the decision not to have kids is one often made by people who think deeply about their choice and then, hopefully, find mates who feel similarly. In my own study of childfree adults, I’ve examined how it is that people come to decide not to have kids. more...

I just read and reviewed Shannon Wooden and Ken Gillam’s Pixar’s Boy Stories: Masculinity in a Postmodern Age. And I thought I’d build on some of a piece of their critique of a pattern in the Pixar canon to do with portrayals of masculine embodiment. In Black Feminist Thought, Patricia Hill Collins coined the term “controlling images” to analyze how cultural stereotypes surrounding specific groups ossify in the form of cultural images and symbols that work to (re)situate those groups within social hierarchies. Controlling images work in ways that produce a “truth” about that group (regardless of its actual veracity). Collins was particularly interested in the controlling images of Black women and argues that those images play a fundamental role in Black women’s continued oppression. While the concept of “controlling images” is largely applied to popular portrayals of disadvantaged groups, in this post, I’m considering how the concept applies to a consideration of the controlling images of a historically privileged group. How do controlling images of dominant groups work in ways that shore up existing relations of power and inequality when we consider portrayals of dominant groups?

Pixar films have been popularly hailed as pushing back against some of the heteronormative gender conformity that is widely understood as characterizing the Disney collection. While a woman didn’t occupy the lead protagonist role until Brave(2012), the girls and women in Pixar movies seem more complex, self-possessed, and even tough.  [Side note: Disney’s Frozen is obviously an important exception among Disney movies. See Afshan Jafar’s nuanced feminist analysis of the film here.]  In fact, Pixar’s movies are often hailed as pushing back against some of the narratological tyranny of some of the key plot and characterological devices that research has shown to characterize the majority of children’s animated movies. But, what can we learn from their depictions of boys and men?

Philip Cohen has posted before on the imagery of gender dimorphism in children’s animated films. Despite some ostensibly (if superficially) feminist features in films like Tangled (2010), Gnomeo and Juliet (2011), and Frozen (2013), Cohen points to the work done by the images of men’s and women’s bodies—paying particular attention to their relative size (see Cohen’s posts here, here, and here). Cohen’s point about exaggerated gendered imagery of bodies might initially strike some as trivial (e.g., “Disney favors compositions in which women’s hands are tiny compared to men’s, especially when they are in romantic relationships” [here]), but it is one small way that relations of power and dominance are symbolically upheld, even in films that might seem to challenge this relationship.  How are masculine bodies depicted in Pixar films? And what kind of work do these depictions do? Is this work at odds with their popular portrayal as feminist (or at least feminist-friendly) films?

Large, heavily muscled bodies are both relied on and used as comic relief in Pixar’s collection. It’s also true that some of the primary characters are men with traditionally stigmatized embodiments of masculinity: overly thin (Woody in Toy Story, Flic in A Bug’s Life), physically awkward (Linguini in Ratatouille), deformed (Nemo in Finding Nemo), fat (Russell in Up), etc. Yet, these characters often end up accomplishing some mission or saving the day not because of their bodies, but rather, in spite of them. When their bodies are put on display at all, it’s typically as they are held up against a cast of characters whose bodies are presented as more naturally exuding “masculine” qualities we’ve learned to recognize as characteristic of “real” heroes. As Wooden and Gillam write:

Amidst ostensibly ironic inversions of power in the Monsters films and The Incredibles, male bodies are still ranked according to a tragically familiar social paradigm, whereby bigger, stronger, and more athletic men and boys are invariably understood as superior to smaller, more delicate, or intellectual ones. (here: 34)

Wooden and Gillam use Buzz Lightyear from Toy Story as, perhaps, the most glaring example . When we first meet Buzz in the Andy’s room, Buzz does not recognize himself as a toy. He is foolish, laughably arrogant, imprudent, and, quite frankly, a bit reckless. Yet, the audience is supposed to interpret Buzz as the other toys in Andy’s room do—we’re in awe of him. Buzz embodies a recognizable high status masculinity. Sulley in Monsters Inc. occupies a similar body and, like Buzz, he is instantly situated as occupying a recognizably masculine heroic role (a role that is bolstered by the comically embodied Mike Wazowksi, whose body works to shore up Sulley’s masculinity). While Buzz and Sulley—and similarly embodied men in other Pixar movies—are sometimes teased for conforming to some of the “dumb jock” stereotypes that characterize male action heroes of the 1980s, their bodies retain their status and still work as controlling images that reiterate social hierarchies.

In C.J. Pascoe’s research on masculinity in American high schools, she coined the term “jock insurance” to address a very specific phenomenon. Boys occupying high status masculinities were afforded a form of symbolic “insurance” that enabled them to transgress masculinity without affecting their status. In fact, their transgressions often worked in ways that actually shored up their masculinities. This kind of “jock insurance” is relied upon as a patterned narratological device in Pixar movies. Barrel-chested, brawny, male characters are allowed to be buffoons; they’re allowed to participate in potentially feminizing or emasculating behaviors without having those behaviors challenge the masculinities their bodies situate them as occupying or their status (in anything other than a superficial sort of way).  For instance, Sulley, Mr. Incredible, Lightning McQueen, and Buzz Lightyear perform domestic masculinities in ways that don’t actually challenge their symbolic position of dominance. Indeed, the awkwardness with which they participate in these roles implicitly suggests that these men naturally belong elsewhere.

In The Incredibles, Bob Parr’s incredible strength and monstrous body look silly accomplishing domestic tasks or even occupying a traditionally domestic masculinity. His small car helps is body appear laughable in this role as he drives to work. At work, Bob’s desk plays a similar role. His body is depicted as not belonging there—domesticity is symbolically holding him back. This sort of “crisis of masculinity” narrative plays out in the stories of many of these characters. So, when they occupy the role they are initially depicted as denying, the narrative creates a frame for the audience to collectively experience relief as they take on the heroic roles for which their bodies symbolically situate them as more naturally suited. The scene in The Incredibles in which Bob Parr (Mr. Incredible) quits his job by punching his boss (whose physically inferior body is regularly situated alongside Bob’s for comic relief) through a wall is perhaps the most exaggerated example of this. The pleasures these films invite us to share at these moments when gendered hierarchies of embodiment are symbolically put on display play a role in reproducing inequality.

Similar to Nicola Rehling’s analysis of white, heterosexual masculinity in popular movies in Extra-Ordinary Men, portrayals of masculinity in Pixar films work in ways that simultaneously decenter and recenter dominant embodiments of masculinity – and in the process, obscure relations of power and inequality. Indeed, side-kicks and villains are most often depicted as occupying masculine bodies less worthy of status. These masculine counter-types (like Randall in Monsters Inc., Sid Phillips in Toy Story, or Buddy Pine/Syndrome in The Incredibles) embody masculinities portrayed as “deserving” the “justice” they are served.

The films in Pixar’s collection show a patterned reliance on controlling images associated with the embodiment of masculinity that shores up the very systems of gender inequality the films are often lauded as challenging. To be clear, I like these films – and clearly, many of them are a significant step in a new direction. Yet, we continue to implicitly exalt controlling images of masculine embodiment that reiterate gender relations between men and exaggerate gender dimorphism between men and women.

Sometimes, when you point out how patterns reproduce inequality, people expect you to provide a solution. But, what would challenging these images actually look like? That is, I think, a more difficult question than it might at first appear. A former Dreamworks animator, Jason Porath, might help us think about this in a new way. Porath’s blog—Rejected Princesses—was recently featured on NPR’s All Things Considered. On the site, Porath plays with “princessizing” unsung heroines unlikely to hit the big screen.  His tagline reads: “Women too awesome, awful, or offbeat for kids’ movies.” Yet, even here, Porath relies on recognizable embodiments of “the princess” to depict these women—like his portrayal of Mariya Oktyabrskaya, the first woman tanker to be awarded the “Hero of the Soviet Union” award. Similarly, cartoonist David Trumble produced a series of images that “over-feminize” real-life heroines like Anne Frank, Susan B. Anthony, Marie Curie, Sojourner Truth and Ruth Bader Ginsberg. While both of these projects make powerful statements, we need more cartoon imagery that challenge these gendered embodiments alongside narratives and characters that support this project. What that might actually look like is currently unclear. What is clear, I think, is that we can do better.

Every once in awhile I write something that hits a nerve and brings about a caustic response. One of the images I used to illustrate sexual objectification in breast cancer awareness campaigns in 2012 elicited, just recently, an angry message from the creator.

Here is the message I received, with identifying information removed.

Hi, I am the founder and creator of the [X] project… You listed my project in a rather bad light and used my images without permission. I’m curious why you made no attempt to contact me or get any of the real info about the project or even talk to some of our participating survivors or fans who have been touched or helped through the selflessness of our survivors sharing their stories. Often life is about perspective and I think if you made an effort you would see this project does NOT objectify these survivors or women at all. All have instead experienced a feeling of empowerment. You should make an effort to dig a bit deeper. We even have a magazine… now as well. I was very disappointed to see you disparaging the project and these survivors and making assessments and judgements based on zero background…I think you owe them an apology…They are much more then “eyecandy” and have proven to be a wonderful form of…therapy for both the participants and the viewers.

When I first received this message I was taken aback. It’s never easy to be yelled at, misunderstood, diminished. My breath got reedy as my heart folded into my chest. Where’s that thick skin I was supposed to develop to handle slings and arrows? My skin is just as thin as anybody’s. So every time I do that feminist/public sociology thing, I make myself more vulnerable. It would be easier and less risky to keep quiet.

But social thinkers taught me that understanding complexity and sharing it with others can inspire change. And provocative feminists showed me that “our silence will not protect us” anyway. Still, when speaking out makes me a target, I reflect. Is the response justified even if the delivery was not as skillful or generous as it could have been?

I thought about this person’s criticism for a few days. When he accidentally Googled my article, I think he might have felt the same way I did when I received his message — yelled at, misunderstood, diminished. This was not my intention, so I wrote him back.

Dear …,

Thank you for your inquiry. Clearly you are quite upset, and I’m sorry you feel this way. I actually do know about your project. In fact, I’m in occasional contact with one of the participants, who also found the project to be personally meaningful.

That said, my research as a social scientist requires me, often, to put intentions and motivations aside in order to look at trends and representations from a more detached perspective. This isn’t easy, especially for someone who is deeply committed to a topic and has been personally affected by it. I’ve lost many people to breast cancer over the years, and I do not take it lightly. That is why I study this illness and look at elements of the culture and the industry that frequently fall beneath the radar.

I’ve been studying breast cancer for almost 15 years and have, in that time, observed a number of trends. Commercialization of the disease took hold by about 1996, and by the 2000’s commoditization shot well past advocacy in terms of time, attention, and resources. Medicalization has been on the rise, and controversies about what is the “right” amount of medicine continue today often in a contentious way. Pink ribbon visibility started to replace deeper understanding of the complexities of the disease or the diversity of women’s (and men’s) experiences of it. The sexualization of women in cultural representations, both the diagnosed and non-diagnosed, increased dramatically especially in the last ten years. Breast cancer has gone from a hyper-feminine moral cause to a sexy cause. You don’t see the same kinds of representations for brain cancer or pancreatic cancer, prostate cancer, or any other disease for that matter.

As with all of my research, I try to identify trends and figure out how they work. My research question for the article you found (which is a series of two that builds from concepts discussed in my book on breast cancer culture) was:

How do breast cancer campaigns utilize sexual objectification techniques?

In accord with social science methods, I collected and analyzed cultural artifacts (image, music, text). Images from large awareness campaigns to posters and billboards to products to Facebook and magazine ads are included in this collection. It was straightforward to classify them into categories.

1. Use women’s bodies as literal objects.
2. Hone in on the breasts.
3. Use objects in place of breasts.
4. Objectify breasts with language.
5. Depict breasts as things to be touched or groped.
6. Show women to be objects of the male gaze.

Your project was classified under technique 1 (bodies as objects). If a person’s body is transformed into a canvass, which is an object, it fits the definition. If sexualized body parts are part of that canvass, it becomes a sexualized object.

Of the thousands of images in my collection, I chose images in my reporting that would clearly illustrate the trends. I share them in accord with the terms of Fair Use, which allows for the use of other people’s work for analytical and educational purposes.

The negative implications of sexual objectification are well known, and I include pertinent research in my reports. The question you raise, I think, is can objectification also lead to positive outcomes? You have personally witnessed an empowerment potential with [your project]. But to find out, as a social researcher, I would have to ask this question in an empirical way, and study a range projects with the same kind of detachment I used in this one. I don’t know what I would find. The trends I write about, and there are many, are an attempt to flesh out the picture of breast cancer advocacy and industry more fully to deepen understanding and give people a chance to think about aspects that may otherwise be ignored.

I’m not sure where this leaves us, [NAME], if anywhere. It would be highly unethical of me, and fraudulent, to remove a data point simply because its creator did not like the findings. I hope that is not what you are asking me to do. I don’t think it is. I think you want clarification and want me to know that you and others have witnessed positive outcomes to this project. I also believe that you have very good intentions with the project, as do the participants. If I have misinterpreted this, or you would like to discuss further, please get back in touch.

Sincerely,

Gayle Sulik

I have not (yet) heard back from my non-fan. But explaining my intents and methods clarified for me that they were ethical, sound, legal, and grounded in a desire to elucidate rather than to quell. They too reminded me that intentions matter, and don’t matter.

After I sent my reply, I learned that the project creator had also posted his grievance on his project’s Facebook page:

Wow – that’s not very nice and it is a ton of assumptions about our project. Plus she made no effort to ever contact us for background info – survivor quotes or interviews or even to ask permission to use our images… I’m certain many of our fans and survivors would readily dispute that this project is objectifying in any manner… very sad

His posting engendered negative comments from his fans.

– This author has made a name for herself by creating an angry, negative anti-pink culture. Not a fan.

– good to know – too bad she seems to be such an authority… curious as I’m not sure if she is even a survivor??

– Not sure; she is a feminist and has a PhD behind her name. I think she gives feminists a bad name. While I agree with some of her theories, I think she goes over the top with some of her observations, such as the one on your organization.

– As my husband states, if you don’t like it, don’t look.

The project creator also lodged his complaint on the Breast Cancer Consortium Facebook page and, there, asked me to delete the images.

Mr. X’s attempt to thwart critique of his project is not surprising. If people consider its objectifying aspects they may no longer wish to support it. However, the Fair Use doctrine limits the copyright protection of cultural producers like Mr. X for purposes of criticism and comment, education, reporting, parody, benefit to the public, and a range of other uses.

The project remains in my analysis as a concrete example of sexual objectification, however I did honor Mr. X’s request to delete the images from my public writings. I instead included an additional notation to the analysis, stating that the images were deleted at the request of the project creator. I’m not so sure this was the right thing to do. When should one cultural producer’s protected expression override another one’s?

For more information on sexual objectification in breast cancer awareness campaigns, see the following articles on Psychology Today:

• Do Sexy Breast Cancer Campaigns Demean Women?
• Sexy Breast Cancer Campaigns Do Demean Woman. So What?

For a couple of decades I have been an “applied sociologist,” meaning that my sociology leaves the classroom and situates itself in organizational contexts. There are many ways that applied sociologists “do sociology.” For the most part my work focuses on evaluating a range of programs and policies to help organizations get stronger and ultimately, bring in more funds so they can continue to do their work.

Applied sociology may be perceived by some as the step child of academic sociology.  “Professor” is a far classier title than Senior Research Associate or even, Wowza Evaluation Research Expert!  But academic and applied sociology are equally good options; the choice to pursue one or the other has more to do with the job market and one’s career goals and interests. That said, applied sociologists have fewer institutionalized steps along the career ladder to achieve “success,” and we experience less institutionalized scrutiny.  For better or worse, applied sociologists also don’t generally have a “family” of colleagues for life!

A lot of us “applied folks” are happy with our choice. The work is challenging, and the potential to improve programs and policies that improve people’s health, education, incomes, and more is satisfying. Many of us also love to teach, but generally when we do, we’re on the lowest rung of the totem pole as adjuncts, with low wages, no benefits and, depending on the institution, no status, even if one is a stellar teacher whose students adore you. But unlike adjuncts who are scraping a living together teaching multiple single courses, we may choose to teach a course, without fully depending on this income.

Sociology in Action

This spring, I discovered another way to put my sociology into action, when I joined with a friend to organize a neighborhood music festival on porches called “Jamaica Plain Porchfest.”

My type of applied sociology had, for the most part, been stuck in a room, or on occasion, at an event or rally. But I felt ready to break out. While I have been evaluating arts-based programs for a number of years, I found that I could bring my sociological eye to designing and implementing a participatory arts-based musical event. Luckily I was partnered with a dear friend who brought the same sensibility and perspective.

Our sociological eyes went into motion from the beginning, as we identified the “outcomes” we wanted to achieve. We live in a community that is considered very diverse in terms of race/ethnicity, class, and sexual/gender orientation. But in reality, the community is very divided. There is a “Latin Quarter” which houses Cubans, Dominicans, Puerto Ricans and Central Americans; there are public housing developments that cloister poor people in large high rises; there are new mixed-income housing developments; there are sections of “town” that are entirely working class, and others that are entirely middle class. Our goal was to bring the various strains of the community together – bridging race/ethnicity and class – using music as the vehicle.

The phenomenon of “porchfests” is not new.  The first one was organized in Ithaca, New York in 2007, and now there are 20 of them in cities and towns throughout the U.S., including Tucson, Napa Valley, Boulder, Buffalo (my home town!), Salt Lake City and in Somerville, Massachusetts, the porchfest that initially inspired us. From the looks of the incredible photos on each of their porchfest websites, we can see that they are joyous events that build community. From our conversations with the Ithaca and Somerville porchfesters, we also know how successful they are in promoting community bonding, as people come out on the streets to enjoy music together.

In contrast to some of the neighborhoods where other porchfests take place, around half of Jamaica Plain’s residents are people of color, including 25 percent Latino, 14 percent African-American, 4 percent Asian, and 50 percent white. Our commitment was to promote bridging and bonding, by pursuing three strategies: include a diverse range of musicians in terms of their racial/ethnic backgrounds as well as musical genres; locate and include porches throughout the neighborhood where musicians can play; and engage and bring out diverse audiences. We hoped that these strategies would help to overcome some of the “tri-furcation” or “quadri-furcation” in the ‘hood.

Initially, we created a Facebook page with a call for musicians and porch hosts. But a lot of people don’t go on Facebook, including 27 percent of online adults who don’t use social media, and another group of people defined as Facebook “resisters.”

So we reached out to local non-profit organizations, some of whom serve youth, others who manage low-income housing, others who coordinate small business activity, and yet others who run programs around maintaining a beautiful, large park in one of the neighborhood’s low-income neighborhoods. We also reached out to students at a highly renowned local music college. We even “scouted” musicians, sometimes at a local park or other venue, as well as musicians we heard of through friends.

My organizing partner and I started with the idea that we’d do a “pilot” event with three bands and three porches. But if were to stay true to our goals, we needed to do more than that. Ultimately, we had 60 bands sign up and enough porches committed so that two bands could play on each porch. We spent hours poring over the mix of bands and porch hosts we would match, focusing on bringing together a mix of people from diverse backgrounds by race/ethnicity, gender, and where possible, class. In the end, diverse bands and solo musicians shared a stage – a.k.a. porch – hosted by a third party who generously offered her/his porch.

We had been informed that one of the other porchfests almost got shut down one year because there were crowds of people roaming the streets, obstructing traffic and trashing neighbor’s lawns. So we created a tiered structure, in which each porch had a “Porch Fun Manager,” each cluster of porches in a particular part of the neighborhood had a “Cluster Manager,” and the overall event had two “Network Managers” (me and my partner), who kept an eye on the whole thing. Organizational sociology in action…

While the two of us organized this event, we realized we were operating within the construct of social institutions that needed to be privy to our plans, offer advice, and inform us of limitations. We met with officials from the City and the police, and from a neighborhood services department that does city permitting. (We were committed to NOT having permits for each porch! We didn’t have the budget, and we didn’t want to deal with the bureaucracy.)

And did I mention that we had NO budget whatsoever? This was one of the appeals of the event. Nothing commercial. No “brought to you by” banners, logos or even food trucks! We received a few in-kind donations: one from a friend, another from the City of Boston which paid for printing colorful maps of the porch routes to be used on the day of the event, and another from a printer who didn’t charge us for printing postcards to announce the event. For many people, the fact that JP Porchfest was commercial-free was a breath of fresh air.

So how did it go?

On the day of the event, we had 7,000-8,000 people roaming throughout the neighborhood listening to music and hundreds show up at a local restaurant, Bella Luna Restaurant, and Milky Way Café for an after-party that served $5 all-you-can-eat pizza!

Anecdotally, it seemed that everyone loved the event from the audience to the musicians to the porch hosts. But a good “action sociologist” can’t just leave it there! We needed to evaluate the impact of the event.

To count the numbers in attendance we used porchfest stickers. We had intended to count the leftovers to gauge the size of the crowd, except we ran out of stickers in one hour! We consulted an audience researcher on how to calculate the final numbers and it’s her figures – 7,000-8,000 – we are citing.

We also distributed very short surveys with a few questions that would help us learn what worked and what didn’t as well as to identify the demographics of the porchfesters. Nearly 100 percent reported that the event was “excellent” or “very good” (we’re still working on analyzing this data).  In addition, we had two sociology graduate students from Brandeis University (my alma mater) traversing the event and interviewing participants about their experience.

And we queried musicians and porch hosts to provide more detailed feedback on their experiences performing at JP Porchfest and learned that they made great connections with the band with whom they shared their porch, and with their porch hosts. They were pleased that they were able to add people to their mailing lists and increase their CD sales.

We heard that small businesses had also increased sales. One of our colleagues and friends from a local nonprofit conducted her own short survey to see if business picked up in the “Latin Quarter” and interestingly, small shops like the local beauty shop and local rotisserie chicken take-out place increased their business by anywhere from 100 to 400 percent!

Finally, we wanted to document the event. We put together a team of professional filmmakers who shot the event and will produce two videos.  One is a documentary about JP Porchfest that centers on three narratives: a long-time Latina political activist who had just moved into affordable housing and wanted to use porchfest as a way to unite her racially divided neighborhood; a veteran rock musician who writes songs about JP, and is a staple in the ‘hood; and a group of youth leaders from a local non-profit organization who were accompanied by two filmmakers who documented their response to the event and the different types of music. The other is a 5-minute “how-to” video, which will be accompanied by a training guide that we write, in order to help other communities produce their own porchfests!

Reflecting Back, Looking Forward

My organizing partner and I were initially worried that no one would show up, and then after the event, we worried that we would experience a post-event malaise. But we have been disproven twice!

We are now planning JP Porchfest 2015, this time knowing a lot more than we knew before we started. Soon we’re going to launch a Kickstarter campaign, and Bella Luna/Milky Way has offered us their venue for two fundraisers.

In the end, we determined that we had done a pretty good job, maybe even a really good job! While roughly one-third of our musicians were people of color, we want to increase the diversity of the audience, and we are developing a strategy to do so.

In a follow-up conversation I had with Ayanna Pressley, a brilliant African-American City Councilor who spoke at the event, I lamented that the audience wasn’t as diverse as we wanted it to be, and she told me, “you are acting like a woman!”  I was startled. What did she mean? She told me that the event was a great success, but I was focusing on the negative. “We’ll work on that for next year,”she reassured me.

Watch this video of Rick Berlin and the Nickel and Dime Band:  “I Love My Street.”

Mindy Fried, M.S.W., Ph.D. is a sociologist with 30 years of experience conducting research, teaching, and conducting policy analysis on work and organizational issues. She is Co-Founder and Principal of Arbor Consulting Partners. Through Arbor and in her independent consulting, Mindy has worked with a wide range of diverse organizations, both on evaluation design and implementation, as well as in providing technical assistance on research design and organizational issues. Mindy has been teaching a Women’s Studies class at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology called Gender, Power, Leadership and the Workplace, and will soon be teaching evaluation research to Sociology graduate students at Boston College. Over the past four years, she has been writing “Mindy’s Muses.” Mindy received her Masters and Doctorate degrees in Sociology from Brandeis University, and a Masters in Social Work from Syracuse University, with a focus on Community Organizing and Social Policy Planning.

I often write from a personal perspective when I blog, and my research also relates to questions I am interested in personally. I’m not a specialist kind of expert with a long list of formal publications. I’m what you might consider a “generalist” sociologist with a wide range of interests. I love to teach and do research. I worked as an editor for a short time. Yet I find that after finishing graduate school, I now approach writing with trepidation. Blogging has been a way for me to rediscover my voice, to write what matters to me, to overcome my fears. I associated with Feminist Reflections because when I write about personal experiences I already tend to think about them from feminist sociological perspectives.

As one of most junior scholars in this blogging group I’ve published the least, but I write a lot. I started my own blog,Ms Knowledge Speaks,  a few years ago after I left a job in the business world where I felt silenced and needed an outlet. My blogging was sporadic for a while. Then after a major change in my life – landing a tenure track job and relocating my family from a liberal metropolitan area to a small town in the Deep South (what sometimes feels like a foreign country to me) – I felt compelled to blog again. This was in part for my own sanity but also to get back to the practice of writing. Still, I sometimes feel like I’m not getting it right.

On Facebook I am connected to colleagues all over the world who often share links to academics’ blogs in Sociology and related fields. It’s all great and interesting commentary on news and academic articles. When compared with these, I wonder if my personal reflections on my own blog appear to be just “naval gazing”? Is there a risk in exposing too much about myself, even though I do put limits on what I write? If I write about personal experiences within a more formalized sociological feminist framework, will this make me a legitimate feminist sociological blogger? Or am I an imposter?

I feel like an imposter when I blog because I do not always write about my research or offer a sociological analysis of current events, nor do I have my research cited in other’s blogs. I also feel like an imposter since I do not see myself as a “specialist” like many of the colleagues in my discipline. Gender is one of my areas of concentration, with a focus on reproduction issues, but I had to become a generalist when I worked as an adjunct instructor for many years and teaching any class available. After receiving my PhD in sociology, I continued to teach as an all-things-for-all-people adjunct. I worked as an analyst in market research, was a research manager and managing editor for a Center in a business school, and spent a summer working for the U.S. Census. Subsequently, and prior to my current academic position, I obtained a Master’s Degree in social work with a focus on clinical mental health, at the time intending work in mental health rather than academia.

Now that I’m back in the Academy, being a generalist is a plus for teaching because I’m using these experiences and education to teach sociology and social services courses. But it sometimes seems like sociologists who have general knowledge of the field or an ability to speak to other disciplines are not recognized for these skills. Someday I do hope to be seen as a specialist in an area that few sociologists study. I’ve already started a project on maternal mental health, specifically mental illness during pregnancy. But at times I feel like I know too much about the many subfields of sociology, feminist studies, and the related field of social work to be valued in a traditional way. So, to blog from this generalized, but well-informed perspective, scares me, especially when I talk about personal experiences. I’m afraid that I will be seen as a writer who lacks “expert legitimacy.”

Nate Palmer of Sociology Source, wrote a post titled, “I May Be an Impostor, but…” that also speaks to this self-doubt. He writes about how he felt like a fake because of his position in the hierarchy of academia and how the “imposter syndrome” held him back, resulting in missed opportunities. He also explains why sociologists, academics, applied sociologists, and activists do not blog more. First, we have a readily available platform to share our research and perspectives. Second, academics may have a harder time blogging because these writings are not published in a scholarly journal, which equates with polished work and prestige. Still, he believes we should take this risk and to share our research, teaching, and perspectives, to start a conversation.

To follow Nate’s advice, I need to get over my fears, overcome feeling inadequate or like an imposter, and write about what I find meaningful and relevant. A conversation could start. New ideas could be generated. Yet I still ask, is there room for my kind of blogging within these feminist and sociological spaces? To answer this, I refer to the first post on Feminist Reflections by Gayle Sulik, ” A Feminist Reflection on the Discipline of Sociology.”

Gayle begins with a story about speaking at a “woman’s” university and ties this back to the history of women in sociology. Many of the women sociological theorists analyzed social inequality because they wanted change it. They faced discrimination for this and for simply being women. This was also a time in sociology, where being “objective” was equated with being “academic.” Supposedly the discipline has moved on to become more inclusive of different perspectives and “more connected with the real world” as we do “public sociology” and applaud “public intellectuals.” However, as Gayle argues, and as I think most of us in Feminist Reflections would agree, we still need a feminist sociological place. In her words,

“We need a formal communal setting that is open to intellectual curiosity, the musings of everyday life and the emotions that set their tone…. We need to examine power, influence, and the construction of knowledge… We need to reflect, with a feminist perspective, on our lives as sociologists and human beings.”

In thinking about Gayle’s post on “needing a feminist room of our own,” Nate’s post on the “imposter syndrome,” and our rationale for starting Feminist Reflections, the notions of legitimacy, risk, and space come to mind. Even if other “academics” or “public intellectuals” blog about their specialty areas and their research, or have others blog about these and are therefore viewed as “legitimate,” those of us who teach, who are generalists, and/or who write from a personal perspective are also legitimate sociologists. We may be taking greater risks when writing about the personal, especially if we are not tenured or on a tenure track, but from a feminist perspective the personal matters. It is vital that we make more room for feminist sociologists of differing perspectives who write about different things. Feminist Reflections is a place to do this.

“I don’t know why women need to have children to be seen as complete human beings.” —Marisa Tomei

In sixteen short words, Marisa Tomei sums up pretty much everything I think about having kids. It’s not for me but I understand it’s a choice that has meaning for lots of people. Whatever any woman’s choice, Tomei is right: it has nothing to do to with our completeness as human beings.

Tomei isn’t the only celebrity who’s been asked to account for her status as a non-mom. Last month, Cameron Diaz made headlines by sharing her thoughts about (not) having kids. Diaz explained,

“It’s so much more work to have children. To have lives besides your own that you are responsible for — I didn’t take that on. That did make things easier for me.”

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Do you know a hipster when you see one? Have you ever been in the company of a hipster and tried to bring up the subject?

Talking about hipsters in front of hipsters is more taboo than you might think. The term is rarely lobbed in the presence of those who would fit the label. Most often it is used to describe other men in a disparaging way –like calling a guy a “douchebag” or a “fag.” At the same time, hipster has a different ring to it. It is calls the authenticity of one’s masculinity into question.

When I was studying a young, straight, white group of men who frequented the same bar, I regularly encountered the term. I learned quickly that if men found out they’d been “hipster’d” when they weren’t around, they were deeply offended. Part of hipster identity seems to be explicitly about NOT identifying as such. Hipsters have a casual form of detachment about identity and tastes—a gendered nonchalance that I call “practiced indifference.” more...

When we had a baby girl, her super hip grandmother asked “Is there an Internet site where we can buy books that feature strong girls?”

At the time there wasn’t. But lo and behold, it has arrived. And it is a sensation. We have to thank the feminist blogosphere for helping us to get here. more...