Archive: Feb 2011

On this last day of Black History Month, let us return to posts past.

We have been urged to celebrate Black History Month…

• …with fried chicken and collard greens.
• No really, with fried chicken and collard greens! (pictured)
• …by relaxing our hair.
• …with a “Compton Cookout” complete with blackface and nooses!
• …by buying stuff from companies that do nothing but acknowledge Black History Month.

<sarcasm> Good times. </sarcasm>

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.

Last year I wrote about a series of billboards in Atlanta that re-framed the abortion debate as a race issue. The billboards featured a child’s face and read “Black Children are an Endangered Species.” A new billboard, in the same theme, has appeared in New York City and was sent in by Kristy H. and Kelly.  Featuring a young girl, it reads: “The most dangerous place for an African American is in the womb”:

Three points:

(1) People without economic resources —  including, disproportionately, black women — are more likely to end pregnancies in abortion. This is not a trivial matter; many women in the U.S. have abortions because they can’t afford (more) children.  It’s terribly saddening to think that some women abort children they want.  And some members of the Black community do argue that this is a form of genocide.

(2) This ad, however, doesn’t come across to me as sympathetic to Black women.  The language in the ad leaves the aborting woman unstated, but still culpable.  She is simultaneously reduced to a womb and accused of placing her child in danger (of being a murderer?).  As Michael Shaw at BagNewsNotes suggests, this ad appears to happily trigger our thoughts of Black people and Black spaces as violent.  Is this ad appealing to the Black community?  Or is it appealing to stereotypes about Black people as a strategic move in the anti-abortion debate?

(3) Finally, as I wrote in my previous post, and on a different note, the message illustrates something very interesting about social movements and framing.

The fact that abortion is highly politicized in the United States, deeply connected to feminism (but not race or class movements), and framed as a specifically-gendered contest between “life” and “choice” seems natural to most Americans. Indeed, it’s hard for many Americans to imagine a world in which the procedure is less politicized or debated differently.  But the politics of abortion in the U.S. is not the only kind of abortion politics that could exist… [see, for example, Shaping Abortion Discourse].  So, whether you agree or disagree with the claims in these billboards, they nicely jolt us out of our acceptance of abortion politics as is.  How might thinking about abortion as a race issue or a class issue change the debate?

Source: Gawker.

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.

Melissa sent in a trailer for the video game, inFAMOUS2.  The game features a white male protagonist who is advised by a bad influence and a good influence.  Melissa notes that these are a black woman dressed skimpily and a white woman dressed (relatively) modestly, respectively.  So here we have, again, an affirmation that black is bad and white is good.

Screenshot:

Trailer (2 minutes):

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.

Joanna S. sent us a link to an application designed by Jonathan McIntosh where one can “re-mix” toy commercials aimed at boys versus girls.  You choose the visuals of one and the sounds of another, and have fun watching the wackiness.  We can’t embed the fun results, but you might enjoy visiting and playing a few for fun.

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.

Lester Andrist (of The Sociological Cinema) sent in a clip by Feminist Frequency’s Anita Sarkeesian. She looks at the way that the movies that are rewarded with Oscars tend to be highly centered around male characters and male-dominated plots. It seemed appropriate for Oscars day:

(Transcript after the jump below.)

Lester also pointed out The Girls on Film, a group that recreates male-centered scenes from movies with a female cast. They’re fun and also highlight the types of roles we do and don’t expect to see women in. Here’s Lester’s favorite, a recreation of a scene from J. J. Abrams’s Star Trek:

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Harkening back to a day when grocery and ‘convenience’ stores did not exist, one was intimately aware of where one’s food was coming from. This is because leading a life of subsistence meant growing one’s own food. It meant raising animals and growing crops and then processing them into food.

As foodstuffs began to be commodified, that is, rendered a marketable good to be exchanged for capital — and largely controlled by transnational corporations — we began to lose understanding to where our food comes from. Arguably, the dearth of this understanding is illustrated by the fact that increasingly children believe that fruit and vegetables are something that comes from the grocery store rather than from the farm or the earth.

The effects of this phenomenon, known as distancing, have social, political and economic ramifications. Typically grocery store produce is devoid of any clues as to the conditions under which it was produced, save for the country of origin. This serves to make invisible the labour taken to cultivate the produce and instead presents the consumer with the end product. The conditions under which bananas are produced, for example, are particularly problematic given their use of toxic pesticides and lack of environmental and worker protection measures.

Accordingly, I was particularly struck when I noticed this produce sign at a local grocery store.

Here the source of the bananas is specified in a way that might help combat distancing.  But, in fact, knowing that these bananas are from the “tropics” does more to obfuscate than illuminate.  The tropics refers to no place in particular – technically referring to parts of South America, Africa, Asia, and the South Pacific.  Instead of a concrete agricultural source, then, pointing to the tropics simply creates a false sense of understanding, one that plays on consumers’ desires for (and stereotypes about) all things lush and tropical, leaving the consumers’ ignorance intact.

Kristina Vidug is pursuing a masters of arts degree in sociology at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada. Her research is on post-industrial risk management with a focus on women’s avoidance of synthetic chemicals in the domestic sphere. You can follow her “adventures in thesising” on her blog, jeez (kristina) louise.

Dolores R., Kelly, and Elyse all sent links to a new website, PlaySpent, designed to help people understand the challenges and trade-offs faced by low-income people with insecure employment.  The “game” begins when you’ve been unemployed, have only $1,000 left in your bank account, and need to get a low wage job.

I failed the typing test (seriously), so I got a job as a warehouse worker:

The site asked me if I wanted to pay for health insurance:

The site then asks me to find a place to live, balancing gas costs:

And it asks the player to choose between things your children need/want and your budget:

And then, of course, there’s groceries:

And the game goes on…

The site would be an excellent internet field trip for students in sociology classes or anyone who wants to better understand the many trade-offs that poor people are forced to make and the difficulty in making ends meet when you’re part of the working poor.

Says Kelly:

I thought this was an interesting tool to highlight the difficult choices that low-income families have to make.  It also points out how our society often disadvantages the lower class, such as how I was charged a fee for going below the minimum balance in my account, or by telling me how long it would take to pay off credit card debt only paying the minimum balance.

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 an earlier post, I discussed growing trends of body modification as illustrative of the new cyborg body. Although it is debatable whether these trends are in fact “new,” (after all, various indigenous cultures have been practicing body modification long before European colonists began taking note of it in their travel diaries), I would like to continue this conversation by looking at one subculture of body modification: tattooing.

As an avid “tattoo collector” myself, I have spent the past few years attending tattoo conventions, hanging out with tattooers, and getting heavily tattooed, all while working on my research regarding the popularization of tattooing. What I notice are changing norms regarding appropriate use of the body as canvas. I would like to draw your attention to one particular trend that is growing in the tattoo subculture: facial tattoos.

What was once the purview only of convicted felons has become an increasingly normative way of expressing one’s commitment to the subculture. (For a case in point, simply Google “facial tattoos” and see what pops up.) What I notice from my interviews and discussions with tattooers and clients alike is a sharp disparity between those who see the face as a legitimate space for artistic display and those who see the face as “off limits.” Traditionally, tattooers were wary of getting tattooed on “public skin” (e.g., face, hands, and neck), as employment in the industry was unpredictable and one never knew if she would need to find another job amongst the masses. Having tattoos on public skin was almost certain to prevent employment. But things may be changing.

As the tattoo industry has become somewhat of a pop culture phenomenon, and many consumers have become visibly tattooed (full sleeves, bodysuits, and the like), tattooers have begun to see the face as a legitimate space for getting tattooed. Many of the artists I have spoken with now have prominent facial tattoos, and the ones that don’t often plan on getting them (usually something small beside one or both eyes). For many, it is now the only way to differentiate themselves from tattoo collectors or other body modification enthusiasts who now sport full body suits, stretched earlobes, and other prominent modifications. Where having full sleeves once denoted one’s status as a tattoo artist – a professional in a tightly-knit and guarded community of craftsmen – now facial tattoos serve to display one’s commitment to the profession, lifestyle, and artform.  As such, facial tattoos have become a new form of (sub-)cultural capital, where those who were on the “inside” of the subculture now find themselves defending their turf from a onslaught of newcomers wanting to jump on the bandwagon.

However, even among tattooers, there is a resistance to this growing trend. Many of the traditional tattooers (those who were trained long ago or received a formal apprenticeship) that I have spent time with spoke strongly against facial tattoos. In fact, most traditional tattooers refuse to tattoo clients on public skin entirely. It is simply not a part of their habitus (to borrow Bourdeiu’s terminology). This was certainly the case for the likes of Bert Grimm, Charlie Barrs, or Amund Dietzel, traditional tattooers from the 40s, 50s, and 60s, as well as many other artists who were trained prior to the Tattoo Renaissance of the 70s. For the young man who walks into the tattoo shop and asks for his lover’s name emblazoned across his neck, he now has to find a “friend” in the industry who is willing to do it. Either that or he must risk receiving a poorly-rendered tattoo from a “scratcher” (someone untrained and unaffiliated with a tattoo shop, who purchased their equipment online) who will agree to do the piece at a dramatically reduced rate at a tattoo party or out of somebody’s basement.

In conclusion, as tattooing has become more popular, tattooers and those whose lives revolve around the art of tattooing must create new forms of distinction to differentiate themselves from the masses. This goes back to Bourdieu’s notion of the social field, and how forms of distinction change after the entrance of new social actors with much different forms of capital and very different habituses. Although many a Nu-Skool tattooer (those who recently joined the tattooing profession, often with art school training) sees no problem tattooing their face, hands and neck, many traditional tattooers still see it as a questionable practice and refuse to do it themselves. However, with pressure resulting from the increasing popularity of tattooing and the increasing numbers of individuals with their faces prominently tattooed, we may see an increase in traditional tattooers who choose to tattoo their face.

David Paul Strohecker is getting his PhD in Sociology at the University of Maryland. He studies cultural sociology, theory, and intersectionality. He is currently working on a larger project about the cultural history of the zombie in film.  This post originally appeared at Cyberology.

For more on Bourdieu, see our posts on The Evangelical Habitus, Dumb vs. Smart Books, and The Hipster and the Authenticity of Taste.