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Gwen and I ran our favorite posts from 2012 over the last six days.  Just in case you missed them, here’s our best of 2012!

Social Theory

• Stairs and the New York City Habitus
• “Too Much Mother Love”: Proving the Necessity of Nurture (pictured)

Parenting

• How do We Define Family?
• Gender and the Dual Career Academic Couple
• When Intensive Mothering Meets Special Needs (pictured)

Race and Ethnicity

• How Census Data Collection Changed Race in America
• Watermelon: Symbolizing the Supposed Simplicity of Slaves
• Racialized Representations of Evolution (pictured)

Transnational Politics and Neocolonialism

• Is the Sky Blue?
• The Politics of “Discovery”: The Case of the Lesula (pictured)
• IKEA Erases Women for Saudia Arabian Audience: Balancing Feminism and Cultural Sensitivity

Class

• Who Benefits from a Rise in the Stock Market? (pictured)
• Class Privilege and Parental Leave

Gender and Sexual Orientation

• Women and Exclusion from Long Distance Running (pictured)
• “I Fancy the Lead Singer”: Bands, Fans, and Gender
• Gaydar Study Calibration
• Gender and Biased Perceptions: Scientists Rate Job Applicants

Health and Body Weight

• Evidence: Fat People Can Be as Healthy as Thin People (pictured)

History and Vintage Stuff

• The “Sworn Virgins” of Albania: Social Rules and Accommodations
• Male Affection in Vintage Photos (pictured)
• The Manly Origins of Cheerleading
• Child Labor and the Social Construction of Childhood

Media

• The Bachelor Pad: Myth and Reality (pictured)
• Myths and the Media: A Case Study of the “Boomerang Generation”

See also, last year’s highlights:

• The Mental Burden of a Lower Class Background
• Of What are We Capable? Human Echolocation
• A Thoughtful Response to the “Asians in the Library” Rant
• Formula for a Successful American Movie
• Gender, Obentos, and the State in Japan
• Babies Learn How to Have a Conversation
• In Defiance of Title IX: Colleges Report Male Athletes as Women
• Art and Attribution: What is an Artist?
• How to Make an Art: By Hennessey Youngman
• The Innovation Trap: How the iPhone Isn’t Saving America
• Change Blindness
• Cultural Differences in Cognitive Perception
• Luxury and the Consumption of Labor
• Are Game Show Audiences Trustworthy
• Gender, Sexualization, and Rolling Stone
• Best Comic Ever: The Scientific Process
• Cousin Marriage
• The Hidden Beneficiaries of Federal Programs
• A Critique of Capitalism by G.A. Cohen
• What Makes a Body Obscene?

And a Happy New Year to everyone!!!

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.

For the last week of December, we’re re-posting some of our favorite posts from 2012.

We often hear that Christopher Columbus “discovered” America, a word that erases the 50 million-plus inhabitants of the continent that were already here when his boat arrived. A person can’t discover something that another person already knows about.  In the American telling of the story, however, the indigenous population don’t count as people. They’re knowledge isn’t real.

This dismissal of knowledge-of-a-thing until the “right” people know about it is a common tendency, and another example was sent in by Jordan G. last week.  CNN, ABC, CBS, and the Los Angeles Times, among other news outlets, reported that a new species of monkey was “discovered.”

So where did they find this monkey?  Tied to a post in a Congolese village; it was a pet.  

So someone knew about these monkeys.  It just wasn’t the right kind of person.  In this case, the right kind of person was a (bonafide) scientist (with credentials and institutional privileges not un-related to living in the West).

Now I’m not saying that it doesn’t matter that a trained scientist encountered the monkey and established it as a unique and previously undocumented species.  The team did a lot of work to establish this.  As the Times, which otherwise does a fine job on the story, explains:

Convinced the species was novel, team leader John Hart began an exhaustive three-year study to describe the monkey, and to differentiate it from its nearest neighbor, the owl face monkey. The study included geneticists and biological anthropologists, who helped confirm that the monkey was different from the owl face, though the two share a common genetic ancestor.

In other words, something significant happened because those scientists happened upon this monkey.  But to say that they “discovered” it is to mischaracterize what occurred. The scientists write that it was “previously undescribed,” which is far more accurate. Their language also doesn’t erase the consciousness of the people of the Congo, where this monkey is “endemic.”   In fact, they recommend the short-hand name “lesula,” “as it is the vernacular name used [by people who’ve known about it, probably for generations] over most of its known range.”  In doing so, they acknowledge the species’ relationship to a population of human beings, making them visible and significant.

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.

For the last week of December, we’re re-posting some of our favorite posts from 2012. Originally cross-posted at Ms.

Mojca P., Jason H., Larry H., and Cindy S. sent us a link to a story about a Saudi Arabian version of an IKEA catalog in which all of the women were erased.  Here is a single page of the American and Saudi Arabian magazines side-by-side:

After the outcry in response to this revelation began, IKEA responded by called the removal of women a “mistake” “in conflict with the IKEA Group values.”   IKEA seems to have agreed with its critics: erasing women capitulates to a sexist society and that is wrong.

But, there is a competing progressive value at play: cultural sensitivity.  Isn’t removing the women from the catalog the respectful and non-ethnocentric thing to do?

Susan Moller Okin wrote a paper that famously asked, “Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?”  The question led to two decades of debate and an interrogating of the relationship between culture and power.  Who gets to decide what’s cultural?  Whose interests does cultural sensitivity serve?

The IKEA catalog suggests that (privileged) men get to decide what Saudi Arabian culture looks like (though many women likely endorse the cultural mandate to keep women out of view as well).  So, respecting culture entails endorsing sexism because men are in charge of the culture?

Well, it depends.  It certainly can go that way, and often does.  But there’s a feminist (and anti-colonialist) way to do this too.  Respecting culture entails endorsing sexism only if we demonize certain cultures as irredeemably sexist and unable to change.  In fact, most cultures have sexist traditions.  Since all of those cultures are internally-contested and changing, no culture is hopelessly sexist.  Ultimately, one can bridge their inclinations to be both culturally sensitive and feminist by seeking out the feminist strains in every culture and hoping to see those manifested as it evolves.

None of this is going to solve IKEA’s problem today, but it does illustrate one of difficult-to-solve paradoxes in contemporary progressive politics.

Christmas Across Cultures

• Befana, the Christmas Witch
• Christmas Cultures
• Santa’s Evil Side Kick
• Black Pete (NSFW; trigger warning for images of blackface)
• Protestantizing Christmas Gift Giving: The ChristKind
• Politics and the Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree
• The Pagan Roots of Christianity
• Snegurochka: Santa’s Granddaughter
• Global Christmas

The Economics of Christmas

• International Comparison of Christmas Spending
• Christmas has an Economy
• The Christmas Tree Industry

Racializing Christmas

• White Privilege and the Snow White Santa (pictured)
• New York Times Gift Guide for People of Color
• Black Pete (NSFW; trigger warning for images of blackface)
• Holiday in the Hood
• The Hazards of Historical Amnesia

Christmas and Gender

• Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas is You”: 1994 versus 2011
• 12 “Mums” Makes the Workload Light
• Christmas is Women’s Work
• Tis the Season for Reinforcing Gender Differences

Gift Guides and the Social Construction of Gender

• Gender, Technology, and Toys ‘R Us
• Gender in Toy Catalogs
• Body Messages in Christmas-Themed Ads
• Gift Giving with Gender Stereotypes
• More Gender Gift Giving and Advertising
• Another Gendered Gift Guide
• And more Gendered Gift Guides
• And more Gendered Gift Guides!
• Or, you could just buy her a clothesline

Sexifiying Christmas

• Sexy Women as Toys
• O-O-Oh Santa!

Christmas Marketing

• Support the Troops. Shop Walmart?
• Fun with the 2009 Target Catalog
• Guns for Christmas
• 1930s Ad Touting Razor Technology
• Gap Thinks Girls are Vapid

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.

2013

• Animal Abuse, Oil Leaks, and the Freedom of the Press
• Rising Rates of Narcissism and Being “Unlimited”
• Framing the Occidental Fight for a New Sexual Assault Policy
• Rape and Other Crimes: Sexist Policy and Campus Safety
• Disability Rights and the International Symbol of Accessibility
• Family Members in Need: Why Some Middle-Class Blacks Can’t Get Ahead
• Class Privilege and Parental Leave
• From Manly to Sexy: The History of the High Heel
• Most Women Would Rather Divorce than Be a Housewife
• Why Women Have So Many Clothes
• Are African Americans Changing Their Minds About Gay Marriage?
• Evidence: Fat People Can Be as Healthy as Thin People
• “Too Much Mother Love”: Proving the Necessity of Nurture

2012

• The Manly Origins of Cheerleading
• White Privilege and the Snow White Santa
• The (Terrifying) Transformative Potential of Technology
• Historical Trends in Gun Advertising
• The Truth about “Pink” and “Blue” Brains
• The Neural Basis for Dehumanizing the Homeless
• Liu Xianping, Fashionable Grandpa, Models for Teen Clothing Line

***TRIGGER WARNING for racism and enslavement***

During a dark period of world history, intellectuals pondered where to draw the line between human and animal.  They arrayed humans hierarchically, from the lightest to the darkest skin.  Believing that Africans were ape-like, they weren’t sure whether to include apes as human, or Africans as apes.

One artifact of this thinking was the “human zoo.”  Kidnapped from their homes at the end of the 19th century and into the next, hundreds of indigenous people were put on display for white Westerners to view.  “Often they were displayed in villages built in zoos specifically for the show,” according to a Spiegel Online sent in by Katrin, “but they were also made to perform on stage for the amusement of a paying public.”  Many died quickly, being exposed to diseases foreign to them.

This group of captives is from Sri Lanka (called  Ceylon at the time):

This photograph commemorates a show called “Les Indes,” featuring captives from India:

These captives are from Oromo in Ethiopia:

A German named Carl Hagenbeck was among the more famous men involved in human zoos.  He would go on expeditions in foreign countries and bring back both animals and people for European collections.  In his memoirs, he spoke of his involvement with pride, writing: “it was my privilege to be the first in the civilized world to present these shows of different races.”

The zoo in Hamburg still bears his name.

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.

Cross-posted at Racialicious.

Frances Stead Sellers at the Washington Post has a fascinating account of the differences in Black and White American sign language.  Sellers profiles a 15-year-old girl named Carolyn who in 1968 was transferred from the Alabama School for the Negro Deaf and Blind to an integrated school, only to learn that she couldn’t understand much of what was being signed in class.

White American sign language used more one-handed signs, a smaller signing space, stayed generally lower, and included less repetition.  Some of the signs were subtlety different, while others were significantly different.

“Well-dressed”:

“Pregnant”:

As is typical, the White students in the class did not adapt to Carolyn’s vernacular; she had to learn theirs. So she became bilingual.  Sellers explains:

She learned entirely new signs for such common nouns as “shoe” and “school.” She began to communicate words such as “why” and “don’t know” with one hand instead of two as she and her black friends had always done. She copied the white students who lowered their hands to make the signs for “what for” and “know” closer to their chins than to their foreheads. And she imitated the way white students mouthed words at the same time as they made manual signs for them.

Whenever she went home, [Carolyn] carefully switched back to her old way of communicating.

These distinctions are still present today, as are the White-centric rules that led Carolyn to adopt White sign language in school and the racism that privileges White spoken vernacular as “proper English.”  For example, referring to the way she uses more space when she signs, student Dominique Flagg explains:

People sometimes think I am mad or have an attitude when I am just chatting with my friends, professors and other people.

The little girl who transferred schools and discovered that White people signed differently than her is now Dr. McCaskill, a professor of deaf studies. You can learn more about the racial politics of American sign language from her book, The Hidden Treasure of Black ASL.

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.

Today is the first day of school at the college where I teach, so I thought it would be a nice time to re-post this oldie-but-goodie on the relationship between income and SAT scores.  I’m sure all of our students are brilliant, of course, but whether the SAT measures intelligence fairly is up for debate.

The College Board is an education association that, among other things, administers the SAT college entrance examination.  A report on the scores from 2009, reviewed by the New York Times, included a break down of scores by the household income of the student. Scores correlate strongly and positively with income:

I can think of two explanations for the correlation.

First, it is certainly true that children with more economic resources, on average, end up better prepared for standardized tests.  They tend to have better teachers, more resource-rich educational environments, more educated parents who can help them with school and, sometimes, expensive SAT tutoring.

Second, the test itself may be biased towards wealthier students.  These tests tend to be written and evaluated by privileged individuals who may inadvertently include class-based knowledge, not just knowledge, in the exam (asking questions, for example, that rely on background information about golf instead of basketball).

In any case, this correlation should give us pause; it calls into question, quite profoundly, the extent to which the SAT is functioning as a fair measure.  Perhaps it measures preparedness for college, but whether it measures potential is up for debate.

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.