The controversial Minuteman Project encourages citizens to volunteer their time guarding the U.S./Mexico border against illegal immigration. Well, if you are disinclined to wander the border desert, you can now be a virtual Minuteman. Sandra H. N. sent us a link to BlueServo where you can click on a series of webcams. Each webcam is pointed at a spot where there may be illegal border crossings. Here’s a screenshot of the webcams you can select from:
Here’s a description of a virtual border guard from an NPR story:
[He] pops a Red Bull, turns on some Black Sabbath or Steppenwolf, logs in to www.blueservo.net — and starts protecting his country. “This gives me a little edge feeling,” Fahrenkamp says, “like I’m doing something for law enforcement as well as for our own country.”
This is a fascinating convergence of patriotism, masculinity, class, and (likely) race. Minutemen protect (white) America by putting their bodies on the border, but now men can do so without the trappings of masculinity that Minutemen can lay claim to. Instead, if they have a computer with a (quick) internet connection, they can defend America from behind a computer screen and, perhaps, lay claim to at least some of the masculine capital that Minutemen on the border earn by putting their bodies on the line.
From another angle: I wish Foucault were alive today. Any Foucauldians out there who want to comment on this virtual panopticon?
Way back in December Sadie McC. sent in this Canadian ad for Tetley Red Tea, a variety that apparently originated in southern Africa:
We get several of the standard signifiers of “Africa”: tribal music with drums, elephants, and huts with thatched roofs (rooves? What’s the spelling consensus these days?). Both what mostly struck Sadie and I is our feeling that if we were marketing a food product, probably we would go with not choosing imagery that made the product look an awful lot like blood. My usual argument to students is that things in ads are not accidental; millions are spent on ad campaigns, and they are scrutinized, focus-grouped, and every detail is poured over by many individuals, all to add to the overall design. But in this case, I’m going to assume that somehow nobody noticed that the commercial kinda makes it look like wisps of blood creating scenes of Africa.
Anyway, I was looking around online for information about tea cultivation in Africa and found this short video about tea production in Kenya, including images of workers harvesting the tea:
It might be a good video to show if you’re talking about globalization and agricultural labor, to get students thinking about how our food gets to us and who is doing the often non-mechanized, back-breaking labor required for us to have such a wide variety of foods available year-round. In the video, the men don’t look obviously miserable, but my guess is that picking leaves with your bare hands for hours at a time, while carrying bags of leaves on your back, is pretty unpleasant, physically demanding work that probably isn’t highly paid. And I could be wrong, but I’m betting workers don’t wear protective gear to keep them from coming into contact with chemicals when the crop has been sprayed with fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, or whatever else they might spray on the fields.
Apparently, due to the perceived healthiness of green teas, imports to the U.S. were up 7% in 2008, to about 257 million pounds. I was surprised, however, to learn that we’re only the 7th biggest consumer of tea. Having grown up in Oklahoma, where sweet tea was ubiquitous and nearly mandatory, and is the only beverage served at my family’s get-togethers, I sort of have this idea that everyone drinks iced tea, all the time, and expected us to rank higher.
Random tea-and-Gwen-related story: I was a waitress in Wisconsin for a while, and one time a woman ordered “regular” tea. I brought her a glass of unsweetened tea in a glass. She stared at it and said “I just wanted plain tea.” I assured her I had brought the unsweetened kind, but she insisted again that she just wanted “normal” tea. I was pretty confused at this point and explained again it wasn’t the raspberry-flavored tea and it wasn’t sweetened, it was just plain. She then very slowly, in that extra-loud and enunciated voice people use to talk to people they think are either not too bright or maybe don’t speak their language very well, that she wanted “the kind that comes hot, in a teapot,” making exaggerated gestures like she was pouring tea into a cup. I called my mom later and she was as befuddled as I was to think that anyone would mistake that kind of tea for normal tea.
And then I found out the Brits drink milk in tea.
UPDATE: Commenter Christine says,
…red tea is not just from southern Africa, but very specifically South Africa, with strong historical ties to colonialism in the area. Even the other name the tea is known by, rooibos, is an Afrikaans word; the Afrikaans language developed among Dutch settlers in South Africa. Cultivation of the plant began in the 1930s; commercial production came about around WWII; apartheid laws were enacted in 1948.
And reader Steve W. sent in two photos of some coffee he saw for sale at Panera Bread, where the package assures buyers that “every detail matters” and that the coffee is made from “handpicked beans that are carefully selected”:
As Steve points out, for most of us, when we see descriptions like “handpicked,” we usually don’t connect it to actual people doing actual work. It’s also interesting that the phrase “handpicked” is used to imply that the product is somehow special and carefully produced. But the video above shows handpicked tea, and I don’t think you can argue it was being carefully chosen (the workers, after all, need to pick as quickly as possible to increase their pay), but also you’ll see the phrase used in situations where most of the crop is harvested by hand, meaning that it doesn’t indicate any special production process at all.
Gwen Sharp is an associate professor of sociology at Nevada State College. You can follow her on Twitter at @gwensharpnv.
Degree genders their deodorant with color (turquoise and lavender versus blue and yellow), pattern (bold lines versus curving spirals), language (women are “emotional” and men “take risks”). Really, Degree? We’re still going there?
Even the scents are gendered and, further, they reveal how we place men and women in a hierarchy (e.g., “Extreme Blast” versus “Summer Rain”). Men even get a scent called “Power.”
Degree also markets their product differently towards adult and t(w)een girls. Women are “emotional,” girls are “OMG!” let’s dance!!!
OMG! Let’s take a look!
“DEGREE MEN. PROTECTS MEN WHO TAKE RISKS.”
“Absolute Protection.”
“Responds to increases in adrenaline.”
“Proven at the hottest temperature on earth.”
“Unbeaten in competitive dryness testing.”
Scents include “Cool Rush,” “Extreme Blast,” “Arctic Edge,” “Intense Sport,” “Clean Reaction,” and “Power.”
“DEGREE WOMEN. DARE TO FEEL.”
“Emotional sweat can cause body odor more than perspiration from physical activity… you need extra odor protection to kick in when you’re stressed or emotional.”
Scents include “Classic Romance,” “Spring Fusion,” and “Fresh Oxygen,” “Pure Satin,” “Delicious Bliss,” and “Sexy Intrigue.”
“DEGREE GIRL. PROTECTION FOR EVERY OMG! MOMENT.”
“Crazy, exciting or embarrassing, OMG! moments happen to everyone.”
“Sign up 4 Cool Stuff! OMG SIGN UP.”
Scents include “Fun Spirit,” “Tropical Power,” and “Just Dance.” See also “Pink Crush.”
In the wake of the embarassing incident where car company executives were called out for flying in private jets to beg Congress for money, Cessna, manufacturer of private jets, is fighting back. At their new website, www.cessnarise.com, they’re framing the attack as skeptical hyperbole that doesn’t take into account the facts and recommending that potential purchasers of private jets “rise” above it all. Some screenshots:
Notice that Cessna frames the resistance to private-jet-flying chastisement as a “challenge” that should be overcome.
I don’t know whether private jet ownership is, in fact, economically smart. I am rather sure that it depends on the company/person. I do, however, think it’s interesting the way that Cessna is framing a rejection of the point made by Congress (that it is, perhaps, indulgent to insist upon private jet travel) in moral terms. Customers should “rise” above, take on the “challenge,” fight the “naysayers,” beat the “skeptics.” Real economics, then, appear to take a backseat to resisting the accusation that some of us enjoy extreme class privilege that is not necessarily justified by the books.
Katie M. sent in a link to a post at Vast Public Indifference about gender in Pixar films, specifically how they tend to focus on male characters, with female characters in smaller or supporting roles. As Caitlin says in the original post,
The Pixar M.O. is (somewhat) subtler than the old your-stepmom-is-a-witch tropes of Disney past. Instead, Pixar’s continued failure to posit female characters as the central protagonists in their stories contributes to the idea that male is neutral and female is particular. This is not to say that Pixar does not write female characters. What I am taking issue with is the ad-nauseam repetition of female characters as helpers, love interests, and moral compasses to the male characters whose problems, feelings, and desires drive the narratives.
Here are some images showing main characters from a number of Pixar films. Clearly there are a lot I left out; I chose these both because they were mentioned in the original post by Caitlin, because I’ve seen them, and because they illustrate the general trend.
From “Cars,” a movie in which almost all the characters are male and female characters are mostly car-groupies who swoon over the main character (though there is a female attorney car who doesn’t fall into that category):
“Monsters, Inc.,” where the two central characters are male:
“Toy Story,” same as above:
“A Bug’s Life,” in which not only is the main character male, the actual behaviors of male and female ants have been switched to fit in with our ideas of appropriate gender roles (for another example of changing the behavior of animals to fit human gender norms, see this post on “Bee Movie”):
We do see a Pixar film with a female main character, however: the upcoming”The Bear and the Bow”:
According to Wikipedia, this is Pixar’s “first fairy tale.” So apparently though we get a female lead here, she’s of the spunky-princess type often found in fairy tales.
I have read, in discussions of gender in children’s films, that there is a general belief in the industry that everyone will watch a movie with a male lead character, but boys will be turned off by movies with a female lead. So we see the pattern Caitlin points out: males are the neutral category that are used when the movie is meant to appeal to a broad audience, while females get the lead mostly when the movie is specifically geared toward girls. The assumption here is that girls learn to look at the world through the male gaze (identifying with and liking the male lead, even though he’s male), while boys aren’t socialized to identify with female characters (or actual girls/women) in a similar manner.
I’m torn as to whether I think boys would avoid movies that had female leads. On the one hand, a big part of masculinity is rejecting all things feminine, so I can imagine boys deciding they hated any movie that seemed to be for or about girls. On the other hand, I wonder what would happen if we had more films aimed at kids that had female leads but didn’t fall into the traditional “girl’s movie” categories (such as fairy tales). If “A Bug’s Life” had a female lead but was otherwise the same type of movie–one aimed at a general audience, not specifically girls–would boys reject it? Most of the animated movies I can think of that had females as the main character were focused around romance and other topics deemed feminine (except maybe “Mulan,” where that’s not the main focus), which obscures the issue of whether boys would watch a movie with a female character if it was treated as a general-audience movie. [Note: See the comments for some other examples of movies with female leads that weren’t necessarily romantic-centered, such as “Lilo & Stitch” and “Alice in Wonderland,” as well as some non-animated ones.]
I dunno. Thoughts?
UPDATE: In the comments, Benjamin L. makes a great point:
Something to consider is that most of the people working on Pixar films are men. It’s possible that they might feel unable to successfully create and write dialog for compelling female characters. Take a look at this list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Pixar_films Out of the all the writers and directors of Pixar’s films, one is female–Rita Hsiao. Significantly, the films she has worked on, Mulan and Toy Story 2, are unique in that they both have prominent female characters.
Miriam at The Oyster’s Garter offered a nice discussion about fragile ecosystems and human intervention. She uses Macquarie Island (located between Antarctica and Australia) as an example (based on an article in the New York Times). She writes:
Like on many isolated islands, the native birds evolved without predators and live in burrows. Introduced cats were eating the birds and running amuck. So researchers embarked on an intensive cat-elimination program… The only problem is that there [were] also introduced rabbits and introduced plants. With no more cats, the rabbits bred like rabbits and ate all the native plants. Introduced plants took over the bare slopes and prevented the native birds that this was all supposed to help in the first place from nesting in the best burrowing sites.
Human intervention, then, changed the landscape (before on the left, after on the right):
(Of course, human intervention had also shaped the landscape on the left. )
This before and after picture is useful for thinking about the interaction of humans with their environment, the way in which humans are part of ecosystems, and the difficulty of figuring out how to manage environments once we’ve taken on the role of custodian.
Amanda M. submitted this commercial for a bikini razor and trimmer. Notice how order, beauty, and civility in horticulture is linked with taking the razor and scissors to your pubic hair. God forbid it be unruly, as bushes are in nature.
I suppose I should be glad that none of the bushes just shriveled up and disappeared entirely. And I am.
Sociological Images encourages people to exercise and develop their sociological imaginations with discussions of compelling visuals that span the breadth of sociological inquiry. Read more…
