Archive: Apr 2010

Or, as Angry Asian Man noticed, the white cast of Glee.

I get it, these are the show’s main characters. It’s just a obvious reminder that it’s awesome to see such great diversity on Glee… but never forget who the show’s real stars are supposed to be, and who usually gets relegated to the periphery.

With panties, of course.  Because without panties, there would be nothing at all going on on this cover.  Booooriiiiiiing.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

A 6-year-old I know brought home a reading assignment from kindergarten. It’s called The New Nest, by Sandra Iversen, with illustrations by Peter Paul Bajer. An innocent tale of Mama Bird and Papa Bird working together to build a nest from 20 twigs, straw and wool. At the end, Mama Bird is sitting on her eggs wearing pearls. Papa Bird is in a white collar and blue tie.

It’s curious to use men’s and women’s accessories (tie, necklace) to identify the gender of the couple, when the species itself provides a reasonable degree of sexual dimorphism.

That’s seems comparable to the dimorphism found in humans.

Using both gendered clothes and bodies is not necessary, but together they are a powerful teaching tool for children, forming a lesson on the concordance of gender and sex differences: matching the different bodies with the appropriately different clothes.

This book is actually featured in a write-up on teaching reading from the journal The Reading Teacher.

I don’t know what the intentions of the article writers were, but there is nothing in there about teaching about sexual dimorphism, or gender norms and practices.

Philip N. Cohen is a professor of sociology at the University of Maryland, College Park, and writes the blog Family Inequality. You can follow him on Twitter or Facebook.

Orion submitted this gorgeous music video for the song, Tightrope, by Janelle Monae, featuring Big Boi. It’s a great example of how dancing doesn’t have to be sexualized or gendered by movement or attire. It’s just creative and interesting and mesmerizing!

On a completely different note: Any dance historians out there? To me this looks to be inspired by the adaptations of Charleston in Black America (Trankey Doo, Shim Sham, etc), like in this clip featuring Al Minns and Leon James (it’s filmed in 1961, but these dances emerged in the ’30s and ’40s):

I’d love to hear more about the evolution of this kind of movement.

UPDATE!  Thank you so much to our Reader, Anna, who is also a dance scholar and was able to give us some history in the comments thread:

Dance scholar here! I really enjoyed the dancing in the Janelle video. It should be read as an homage to rhythm dancing of African-descent from the 1920s through new Jack Swing (kidding, not sure there is a cut off date). The historical footage is in fact cited in Janelle’s video and as one poster pointed out, the dancing in her video is stylized as if it were being done on a tight rope… In my opinion (cause other scholars might see different things based on their training) her dance has some Camel Walkin’ mixed in with some dancehall hip articulation and a big dose of James brown, to be sure.

As for the claim that you cannot get from Al Minns and Leon James to 2010, that is shortsighted, very short! We get James and poppin and lockin and jazz itself from a peculiar mix of Bambara ethnic dances (modern-day Senegal, The Gambia, & Mali) and dance cultures of the people of the Kongo region (Angola, DRC, Congo among others) that intersected in New Orleans during the slaving period. You can also add in there “shipping music,” hybridized forms of music that emerged on slave ships with their transnational crews drawn from Europe, Africa, and the Mediterranean.

The hips and 6/8 syncopated shenanigans come to us from Kongo culture (but the Irish had some there, too). The Charleston, jitterbug and other high kicking dances come from the Senegal region and still reflected patterns from mandjiani in particular. Origins are always tricky, I try to avoid staking big claims based on them, but this conversation string was peculiar in that discussions of ethnic origin were not possible because race and gender were eliding the historical work done in Jenelle’s video. Yes I know the question was about gendered movement. And like a lot of the other folks, I am wondering while a male normative is held as neutral.

That said, from a dance perspective, the moves in Janelle’s video are without gender assignment, but there is an expectation that one’s gendered identity will be, must be expressed through the execution of the moves. That is the evolution of these forms which still have strong gender-based repertoire in Senegal. The Congo, people tend to do the same moves. The men MOVE their hips. It is de rigeur in pop as well as “traditional” dance music.

The last bit of the two guys dancing together was a comedy routine, a send up of a very famous dance riff from a couple in Harlem. I think that original “duet” appears in “Stormy Weather,” but I am not sure.

Thank you for putting up the two videos!

Thank YOU for your insight Anna!

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

It’s all over the web: Fox and ABC have resisted airing Lane Bryant’s new lingerie ad featuring plus-sized women (e.g., Adweek).  But I don’t think it’s, straightforwardly, because of a bias against fat women.  I think it’s a little more complicated than that.  I think it’s because the ads are scandalous… that they seem more overtly sexual than they would if they featured very thin models.

Think about it. In the media, the thin, young, beautiful, able-bodied white woman is the idealized woman. And the idealized woman is sexy, indeed, but not sexual. Sexy women attract attention; they inspire desire, but they don’t have desires of their own.  A sexy woman hopes that a man will like the look of her and take action.  But she’s not sexual.  She doesn’t take the action herself.  Doing so immediately marks her as suspiciously unfeminine.

Sexual women — women who have desires and express and act on them — are almost always presented as deviant in some other way. They’re working class, they’re Black or Latina, they’re mentally ill, or… they’re fat. Fat women are often characterized as sexual threats.  How many comedies have relied on the scary fat woman (of color) trying to get some?  It’s so funny, right?  Because she’s gross and aggressive!  She wants you and she doesn’t care what you want and so the fact that she’s fat doesn’t stop her.  Scary!

So, there is something innocent and asexual about very thin women.  As the feminine ideal, they are sexy, not sexual.  They incite desire, but they do not have it.

In contrast, fat marks a woman as overtly sexual.  She is a woman with appetites and, you better watch out, she might just eat you up.

This, I contend, is what is so scandalous about plus-sized women in lingerie. They are just too damn hot for TV.

Here’s the commercial:

What do you think?

UPDATE: Maura Kelly, a PhD Candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Connecticut, let us know that Fox did air the commercial on April 28th. Thanks for the update!

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Crossposted at Jezebel.

The role of women as both fans of and participants in organized sports has varied greatly in the U.S., as Karlene Ferrante demonstrates in her article* about gender and baseball. In the Victorian Era, a number of women’s baseball teams existed, and some women even played on men’s teams. For instance, Jackie Mitchell joined the Chattanooga Lookouts, a men’s team, when she was 17. In an exhibition game against the Yankees, she struck out Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig…which people then attributed to them being nice and striking out on purpose. Discomfort with women in baseball increased over time, and eventually softball was created to provide an alternative perceived as being less strenuous and fast-paced.

In baseball and other sports, a taboo against women emerged. Many sports were seen as too rough to be appropriate for women to watch, but players and fans also worried that women presented a threat to male players, who might be distracted by the presence of women and thus not focus exclusively on the game (for a more recent example, see our post about Jessica Simpson and Tony Romo). Many believed that sex sapped a player’s strength, and many players avoided sex for several days before a game. Ferrante writes,

…in the early days of baseball women were allowed to watch games only if they were escorted. Unescorted women, and sometimes even escorted women, were harassed by cursing, spitting [fans]. (p. 249-250)

I thought of this when I saw the article Larry Harnisch (of The Daily Mirror) sent me from the L.A. Times, published on April 17, 1910. The story is about Maud Effinger, a woman who dressed in her husband’s clothing so she could attend a prizefight, which women were barred from attending (she writes about having to slip past police at the entrance):

The story, written by Maud herself, who seems rather saucy (sorry the last image is so small):

I don’t know why, exactly, women weren’t allowed into boxing matches. I suspect it might have been a combination of a belief that it was too rough for women’s delicate sensibilities, that scantily-clad men were inappropriate for them to see, and the taboo against women and their distracting ways. But the fact that she had to go incognito, slip past police, and sit in an area where she wouldn’t attract much attention indicates that the ban on women was taken quite seriously.

* Karlene Ferrante. 1994. “Baseball and the Social Construction of Gender.” Women, Media and Sport: Challenging Gender Values.

A recent CBS/New York Times poll reveals how words matter. They asked 500 respondents how they felt about permitting “homosexuals” to serve in the military; then they asked a different 500 how they felt about “gays/lesbians” serving in the military.  It turns out, people like gays and lesbians more than they like homosexuals:

Also in words: frankenfoods, atomic, soda vs. pop, tradition, hispanic, feminism, woman, average, nurse, George Lakoff on metaphor, professional, Jon Steward on re-branding, development, organic, the third world, man vs. girl, natural, honorifics, Africa, dithering, terrorism, the rape and other violent metaphors, and flesh-colored.

And also see our post on the war against “gay.”  (Poll discovered via Montclair SocioBlog.)

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

In “Women and Their Hair: Seeking Power through Resistance and Accommodation,” Rose Weitz* discusses how women use their hair — its color, how they style it — to send messages about themselves. For instance, some women with professional careers (lawyers, etc.) talked about cutting their hair shorter because they felt they’d be taken more seriously if they downplayed their femininity. African American professionals said they often straightened their hair to counter the stereotype of the “angry Black woman.” Hair styles may also send signals about our political views or religious affiliations.

I thought of that article when I saw a video sent in by Tom Megginson (author of the blog Change Marketing). The video was produced by HairLoss.com; they describe it as a public service announcement. From a story at PRWeb:

HairLoss.com, the Internet’s most comprehensive resource for unbiased consumer information and education concerning hair loss solutions and conditions, has released the second of a series of animated, one-minute-long public service announcements titled “Hair is Important”.

According to Michael Garcia, spokesman for HairLoss.com, this second video release “aims to illustrate to the public that men and women who are trying to restore their hair are really trying to restore much more than just their hair.”

Here’s the video:

The video illustrates Weitz’s point: hair is presented here as a way to “project who we are, what we believe in…and how we view the world.” The right hairstyle — which clearly means having hair — gives you the confidence to do something extraordinary. A lack of hair keeps us from “looking like ourselves and feeling like ourselves again.” If you go bald, you’ll lead a sad, lonely life and won’t get married.

HairLoss.com sponsors a video contest. Part of the description:

Create a 60-second “Public Service-Style Announcement” that captures one or more of the following ideas and concepts:

• Hair Loss is no Laughing Matter.
• Restoring Hair is about Restoring Life
• Hair is important.
• Accept Your Hair Loss (I am More than my Hair)
• You may also create a video designed around your own compassionate and positive message.

The fourth option in that list — Accept Your Hair Loss (I am More than my Hair) — is an interesting contrast to the others. Clearly hair loss is presented as problematic by the organization; it’s “no laughing matter,” getting it back “restor[es] your life,” and hair loss may require compassion…something you generally feel toward people facing a serious difficulty. Throwing in the option of accepting hair loss feels like women’s magazines that have a one-page article on accepting your body, surrounded by pages of articles on dieting and using fashion to camouflage your “problem areas.”

A HairLoss.com rep also warns that you may not realize how miserable you are if you’re experiencing hair loss until you find a cure to your sad condition:

“Restoring hair is about restoring self-confidence and self-esteem,” said Garcia. “There’s an emptiness that follows losing one’s hair. Oftentimes, the hair loss sufferer doesn’t even realize just how much they have lost, besides hair, until they find a solution to their hair loss and get it all back.”

In his post about this “PSA,” Tom points out individuals with bald heads (voluntarily or otherwise) who still managed to inspire, entertain, lead, express a political viewpoint, and so on.

This emphasis on the need for men to have a full head of (not-too-grey, of course, definitely not grey) hair is interesting given that men are increasingly told they need to eliminate hair on other parts of their bodies (when not being ridiculed for doing so).

It also illustrates how we think about aging. The “real” you is a youthful you, before any signs of hair loss appeared. Hair loss robs you of your essential personhood, turning you into another person; getting your hair back makes you look and feel like yourself again. The message here is that aging isn’t a natural process that you go through. An aging you isn’t really you at all. Signs of aging steal your true self, turning you into a different, inferior, person. The way you looked in, say, your 20s and 30s, is the essence of you, and you must maintain/regain that look to remain truly you.

* In The Politics of Women’s Bodies: Sexuality, Appearance, and Behavior, 3rd edition (2010), p. 214-231.

French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu popularized the notion of the habitus. The term refers to both the knowledges and physicalities that maintain distinctions between groups (examples in a sec). It’s a great concept for helping us understand the reproduction of class differences without relying strictly on economics. It takes more than money to make money, it also takes knowing the right things, the right people, and the right way to act.

The habitus, then, is one way to show that you “belong” to the group. Imagine being on a really fancy job interview for a really fancy job. Can you talk knowledgably about what vintage of which wine was really excellent in any given year? Do you know which fork is the salad fork? What parts of your body are allowed on the table? When? How quickly do you eat? What is the sign that you are finished with your food?

People who grow up in wealthy families that prioritize these things tend to absorb this knowledge naturally while growing up, just as a kid who grows up on a farm knows how to wrassle a lamb for fixin,’ mend a barbed wire fence, and spot a good steer at the auction. Both of these types of knowledges are useful, but they don’t transfer; my colleagues, for example, are forever unimpressed that I can tell the breed of most horses just by looking.

In any case, while these examples refer to class and rural or urban upbringings, Missives from Marx offered a great example of the habitus as a marker of religious belonging.

In the video below, made by evangelicals, the evangelical habitus is satirized. “Lost at an evangelical meeting?” the video asks, “Here’s how to do evangelicalism!”

* Title, post idea, and video stolen from Missives From Marx.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.