Last week guest blogger Christina Barmon posted health promotional material from 1922 that emphasized physical fitness for boys and men and grace for girls and women.  She concluded suggesting that such associations were still out there.

Indeed. Katrin, Greta P., and Sophie J. sent in a nice, succinct example of the divergent expectations for men’s and women’s bodies around today.  We know, if we’re well-socialized, that women are supposed to be thin and men are supposed to be athletic.  And, here, in this ad posted in the London Underground for Wellwoman and Wellman “sports” drinks, the message comes through loud and clear.

Wellman for “high performance health & vitality”:

Wellwoman “low calorie” drink:

Media depictions of trans people (almost entirely produced by non-trans individuals) tend to be fascinated by bodies. Since the (presumed) inappropriately gendered body is automatically monstrous, weird — or at the very least, available to be gawked at — the accessibility of trans bodies becomes a feature of their depiction.

A big thread that runs through most visual media depictions is a fixation on stripping trans people naked, implying the naked body as “true.” The Crying Game’s big reveal comes when Del undresses, while the penultimate moment of self-fulfillment for Bree in Transamerica is represented by her naked in the tub, touching her vagina. Pre-op Bree’s “parts” trap her in-between, as the movie poster so helpfully informs prospective audiences—without surgery, she’s “really” just a man in a dress.

Chest surgery fills much the same function for images of trans men. The body-centrism was so prevalent in the recently released Becoming Chaz, the documentary following Chaz Bono’s transition, one critic titled his review: “About a Boy or About a Body?”  We see a similar interest in trans-bodies in Boys Don’t Cry and the teen soap Degrassi:

(Still shot from film Boys Don’t Cry. Courtesy of Fox Searchlight Films)

(Still shot from Degrassi. Courtesy of Alliance Atlantis)

In all of these cases, the trans person’s emotional and social existence is tied to the state of their body. Bree can’t possibly be fulfilled until she’s had surgery and can strip naked in front of an audience. Bono can “really” be a man only after top surgery and he can go shirtless. Most importantly, trans people appear to have no life outside of their body, and their transition sometimes forms a narrative arc of beginning (bad body), middle (fixing the body), and end (good body).  They are allowed to be a part of the story only as a person transitioning, their trans-status overwhelming everything about them that makes them unique individuals with complex personal stories.

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Avery Dame is currently a master’s candidate in American Studies at the University of Kansas, where he studies media depictions of trans folks and trans vloggers on YouTube. He also blogs at the improbably named Ping Your Spaceman.

If you would like to write a post for Sociological Images, please see our Guidelines for Guest Bloggers.

Mary Nell Trautner — University at Buffalo, SUNY — has developed a fantastic new Course Guide for instructors teaching Sociology of Gender. We hope you think it’s as awesome as we do!

Gwen is also hard at work on her Introduction to Sociology Course Guide.

See our Instructors Page for more info on writing Course Guides and other useful stuff.

Yesterday Hasbro announced a new model of the Easy Bake Oven designed in response to the growing efficiency of light bulbs.  This sounded to me like a perfect opportunity to bring back our post on the evolution of the toy.  You’ll see the new model at the end.

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My niece got an Easy Bake Oven for Christmas this year and I was shocked.  Shocked!

No, not because of gendered gift giving, socialization, blah blah blah… (I don’t know where you would get that idea).  Instead, I was shocked by what cooking apparently looks like in 2009.  But let me start at the beginning…

The first Easy Bake Oven was released by Hasbro in 1963 (history here).  It looked like a range with a stove top and an oven:

It looked like this, with minor changes in color and amenities, for a while.

1964:

1971:

Then, 1978.  It turns out, in 1975, for the first time, sales of microwave ovens exceeded those of gas ranges.  And, what do you know, the Easy Bake Oven was suddenly a microwave with a digital clock:

1983:

Presumably, between 1963 and 1978, what cooking looked like changed dramatically and the evolution of the Easy Bake Oven reflected that.  This is what surprised me when I saw my niece’s oven.

Ironically, this year’s Oven is painted in the original turquoise, as a nod to 1963, but it is still clearly a microwave:

2011: Commercially available light bulbs are no longer inefficient enough to bake goodies.  This year’s model, then, is actually a real oven, reaching temperatures up to 375 degrees:

So that’s technological and socioeconomic change as signified by the Easy Bake Oven.

A QR, or Quick Response, code on a bulletin board of a college campus:

Steve Grimes shared this image and some interesting thoughts about how Quick Response codes, or QR codes, can contribute to inequality. That is, QR codes such as these serve to make certain content and information “exclusive” to those who have smartphones. He states,

There is a general thinking that technology can create a level playing field (an example of this is can be seen with the popular feelings about the internet). However, technology also has a great ability to create and widen gaps of inequality.

In a practical sense the company may be looking for students who are tech savvy. Using the matrix barcode may serve that purpose. However, the ad also shows how technology can exclude individuals; primarily in this case, students without smart phones. Ironically it is especially the students who need work (“need a job”) who may not have the money to afford a smart phone to read the ad.

Grimes’ thoughts are judicious, and reveal the inherent structural difficulties in alleviating inequality.  QR codes are one form of “digital exclusivity,” the tendency of technology to re-entrench (mostly) class disparities in access to information. Though they may be able to access the information later when they have access to a computer, the person who has the smartphone is certainly living in a much more augmented world than the person without.

If we take as our assumption that access to information is a form of capital, than we can easily see how such technologies are implicated in the field of power. We can also see how digital exclusivity can contribute to the larger digital divide. In this sense, digital exclusivity, as a characteristic of particular technologies and forums (in this case as an access-point to particular forms of knowledge and information), contributes to larger inequalities of power and access to information in the digital age.

QR codes, though, may not be the best example of a digitally-exclusive technology. That is, QR codes have yet to serve as a common conduit of important information—access to such information has similarly meant little in terms of social or economic capital. It turns out that even most people with smartphones don’t know what they are or aren’t interested in using them. Grimes’ understandable frustration the digital divide, combined with the uneven usage of QR codes among mobile phone-using countries, leads us to believe that those black and white squares do more to instill a feeling of digital exclusivity than anything else.

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David Paul Strohecker (@dpsFTW) is getting his PhD from the University of Maryland, College Park. He is currently doing work on the popularization of tattooing, a project on the revolutionary pedagogy of public sociology, and more theoretical work on zombie films as a vehicle for expressing social and cultural anxieties.

David A. Banks (@DA_Banks) is a M.S./Ph.D. student at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.  His research interests include space, place, cyborgs, and networked bodies.  He is currently working under the NSF’s GK-12 fellowship program, teaching science in urban school districts and developing new learning technologies. More at www.davidabanks.org.

Strokecker and Banks both blog at Cyborgology.

If you would like to write a post for Sociological Images, please see our Guidelines for Guest Bloggers.

Victoria and Paul (a sociologist from the University of Turku, Finland) sent in an ad for a woman’s guitar that nicely illustrates the way that we unnecessarily gender size difference.  The Daisy Rock ad specifies that the guitar is “lighter weight,” with a “slimmer neck,” and designed exclusively for women:

On the one hand, this guitar may be great for women who are on the smaller side.  In that sense, a smaller guitar may make it easier for more women to play guitar.

On the other hand, size is only related to gender, it’s not synonymous with gender.  There are women who are built in such a way as to make a traditional guitar perfect.  And there are men on the smaller side who may also benefit from a guitar built for slighter frames. The mistake is to suggest that small = female and large = male.  In contrast to this girl-only company, one that simply offered guitars in different sizes would be embracing of both women and the 1/2 of guys on the smaller side of the bell curve.

According to a 2008 market research study, 72% of yoga practitioners in the U.S. are women; 71% are college educated and 27% have postgraduate degrees; and 44% have annual incomes of $75,000 or more.  Yoga practitioners, then, do not reflect the general population.

So how inclusive is yoga?  A collection of covers from the magazine Yoga Journal, spanning the years 1975 to 2010, sent in by Janet T., gives us a clue.

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Christie Barcelos is a doctoral student in Public Health at the University of Massachusetts who rarely sees anyone who looks like her in yoga class.

If you would like to write a post for Sociological Images, please see our Guidelines for Guest Bloggers.

In Reshaping the Female Body: The Dilemma of Cosmetic Surgery, Kathy Davis upended the common sense view that people undergo plastic surgery because they want to be beautiful or handsome.  Instead, she found that most people sought cosmetic correction because they felt ugly or strange.  They didn’t want to be great-looking, or even good-looking, they wanted to be normal, unremarkable, to blend in with the crowd.

I thought of Davis’ book when I scrolled through Zed Nelson‘s photographic commentary on beauty, Love Me, sent in by zeynaparsel.  There’s a lot to see there, but here I’ve pulled out some of the pictures that I think resonate with Davis’ findings.

“I’m competing with men 20 years younger than me.”

“To be honest I never thought that I needed it [labiaplasty]. But I read about the procedure in a magazine.”

“Men’s Health magazine (USA) hasn‘t had a hairy chest on it’s cover since 1995.”  

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.