Search results for gendering

Why did people march on January 21, 2017? As a team of sociologists interested in social movements, we know there are many possible answers to this seemingly simple question.

As a team of sociologists we have developed a multi-method, multi-site research project, Mobilizing Millions: Engendering Protest Across the Globe.* We want to understand why people participate in a march of this scale, at a critical historical juncture in our political landscape. Within weeks of discussion of the first march, there were already “sister” march pages national and internationally. While it is beyond the scope of this post to discuss all of the project findings thus far, the predictability of the racial tensions visible in social media or the role of men, local opportunities and challenges we do offer some early findings.

In the project’s first phase, we had team members on the ground in Washington D.C.; Austin, TX; Boston, MA; Los Angeles, CA; New York, NY; Philadelphia, PA;  Portland, OR; Santa Barbara, CA and St. Louis, MO. We are currently conducting a survey about the motivations and experiences that brought millions of people to the marches worldwide. We recruited respondents from marches in the aforementioned cities, and online. This has resulted in responses from around the world. Our preliminary findings from the observations and survey highlight that 1) there were a range of reasons people attended marches and 2) across and within sites, there were varying experiences of “the” march in any location.

One striking similarity we observed across sites was the limited visible presence of social movement organizations (SMOs). For sure, SMOs became visible in social media leading up to the event (particularly for the DC march). Unlike at social movement gatherings such as the US Social Forum or conservative equivalents, the sheer number of unaffiliated people dwarfed any delegations or representatives from SMOs. Of our almost 60-member nation-wide team across sites only a handful had encountered anyone handing out organizational material, as we would see at other protest. This is perhaps what brought many people to the march—an opportunity to be an individual connecting with other individuals. However, this is an empirical question as is what this means for the future of social movement organizing. We hope others join us in answering.

Second, while the energy was palpable at all of the marches so was the confusion. As various media sources reported, attendance at all sites far exceeded projections, sometimes by 10 times. Consequently, the physical presence of the expanded beyond organizers’ expectations, which in many places required a schedule shifted. At all marches there were points where participants in central areas could not move and most people could not hear scheduled speakers even if they were physically close to a stage.  Across the sites, we also observed how this challenge stimulated different responses. In multiple locations, people gathering spontaneously created their own sub-marches out of excitement as happened in DC when a band started playing on Madison street and people followed. Or, while waiting, waiting participants chanted “march, march.” Still, in many locations, once the official march started, people created sub-marches out of necessity because the pre-planned march route was impassable. When faced with standing for an hour to wait their “turn” to walk or create an alternative, they chose the latter.

Creativity was visible in artistic forms as well. While there were professionally printed signs (and T-shirts), there was a wealth of handmade signs at the marches. As expected, a slew that referenced phrases the president-elect had said noting, for example, “this pussy grabs back.” Yet there was also a range of other signs ranging from simple text to complicated storyboards (see below).

Across sites, we also saw many differences: including which types of organizations sponsored (or “supported” or “ were affiliated with”) that march.

At the Austin, Texas march, marchers’ signs and chants reflected a wide variety of concerns, including women’s reproductive health care, Black Lives Matter, and environmental justice. The emotional tenor was frequently celebratory, though it varied from one point in the march to another across a crowd reported to be more than 40,000. Many speeches at the rally immediately following the march connected the actions of the Texas state legislature–on whose front steps the march began and ended–to the broader national context.

The Los Angeles March numbers suggest it exceeded DC participation. There was a noticeable presence of signs about immigration and in Spanish, which is not surprising considering the local and state demographics.

The Philadelphia, PA march was close to bigger cities of in New York and DC. Some participants noted that due to the location it was  “competing” for marchers.

The Portland, OR protest also exceeded attendance expectations as marchers withstood hours of pouring rain. Holding the “sister” marches on the same day worldwide emphasized the magnitude and assists in building collective identity. Yet it also meant organizers in different locations faced vastly different challenges. Factors such as weather that might not have existed if organizers had been scheduling based solely on local norms and contexts.

To help provide a preliminary sense of the motivations and continued engagement of marchers, we examined a sample of the ~40,000 tweets posted over two months. The analysis continues.

In the coming month, we are launching a separate survey to better understand a group social movement scholars are sometimes less inclined to study: people who do not participate in marches on January 21 (there are exceptions to this of course). As social movement scholars know, mobilization is actually a rare occurrence when we consider the range of grievances present in any society at any given moment. For a second phase of the project, we will conduct interviews with select survey participants.

Understanding the range of responses to grievances is critical as we move into this new era. If the first month of Trump’s presidency is any indication of the years to come, scholars and activists across the political spectrum will have many opportunities to engage these questions.

____________________

*The team Faculty collaborators are Zakiya Luna, PhD (Principal Investigator, California, DC, LA,PH and TX coordinator); Kristen Barber, PhD (St. Louis Lead); Selina Gallo-Cruz, PhD (Boston Lead); Kelsy Kretschmer, PhD (Portland Lead). The site leadership was provided by Anna Chatillon (Austin, TX); Fátima Suarez (Los Angeles, CA); Alex Kulick (Philadelphia, PA & social media); Chandra Russo, PhD (DC co-lead). We are also grateful to many volunteer research assistants.

Dr. Zakiya Luna is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research focused on social movements, human rights and reproduction with an emphasis on the effects of intersecting inequalities within and across these sites. She has published multiple articles on activism, feminism and reproductive justice. For more information on her research and teaching, see http://www.zakiyaluna.com.

Alex Kulick, MA, is a doctoral student in sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara and trainee in the National Science Foundation network science IGERT program. Their research investigates social processes of inequality and resistance with an emphasis on sexuality, gender, and race.

Anna Chatillon-Reed is a doctoral student in sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is currently completing her MA, which investigates the relationship between the Black Lives Matter movement and feminist organizations.

It was “Latino night” at a gay club. When the story finally broke, that’s all I heard. Orlando’s tragedy at the Pulse puts Latina/o, Latin American, Afro-Latinos, and Puerto Ricans and other Caribbean LGBT people front and center. Otherness mounts Otherness, even in the Whitewashing of the ethno-racial background of those killed by the media, and the seemingly compassionate expressions of love by religious folk. The excess of difference—to be Black or Brown (or to be both) and to be gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender (or queer, as some of us see ourselves) serves to shock, through difference, how news are reported. Difference – the very basis of feminist and ethnic politics in the 20^th century – has been co-opted and ignored, sanitized even, to attempt to reach a level of a so-called “humanity” that is not accomplishable. We know this, but we don’t talk about it.

.

Don’t get me wrong: empathy is essential for most social codes of order to functionally sustain any given society. To pay one’s respects for others’ losses, however, does not mean that we think of those lost as equals. Liberal people demanding that sexuality be less important in the news (and thus removed from the coverage) is an inherent violence toward those who partied together because there was real love among them, in that club, for who they were – and are. Religious righters may spread hate while trying to give the illusion of compassion, but they do so in a clear hierarchical, paternalistic way – that is hypocrisy, and we must call it out every chance we get. But this goes beyond liberal notions and conservative hypocrisy – even while Anderson Cooper wept when reading the list of those killed, he knows the distance between himself and many of those at the club is enough to build a classed, raced, and social wall between them. Clearly, empathy is not enough.

To be Latina/o in the US – increasingly another Latin American country, again – is to breathe in hate, to face retaliation, to be questioned at every turn about our allegiances, tested on our sense of citizenship, pushed in our capacity to love the nation and thus hate “like the rest” (a testament to the masculinity of the nation). At a minimum, to be Latina/o guarantees one to be looked at oddly, as if one was out of place, misplaced, inappropriately placed. Simply by being, Latinas/os rupture the logics of normalcy in USAmerica. To be Latina/o and LGBT is to disrupt the logics of racial formation, of racial purity, of the Black and White binary still ruling this country – all while de-gendering and performing an excess (of not only gender, but sexuality) that overflows and overwhelms “America.” In being Latino and queer, some of us aim to be misfits that disrupt a normalcy of regulatory ways of being.

A break between queer and América erupted this past weekend – in Orlando, a city filled with many Latin Americans; a city that, like many others, depends on the backs of Brown folk to get the work done. Put another way, Orlando’s tragedy created a bridge between different countries and newer readings of queerness – Orlando as in an extension of Latin América here. Queer-Orlando-América is an extension of so many Latin American cities as sites of contention, where to be LGBT is both celebrated and chastised – no more, or less, than homophobia in the US.

Enough has been said about how the Pulse is a place where people of color who desired others like themselves, or are trans, go to dance their fears away, and dream on hope for a better day. Too little has been said about the structural conditions faced by these Puerto Ricans, these immigrants, these mixed raced queer folks – some of whom were vacationing, many of whom lived in Florida. Many were struggling for a better (financial, social, political – all of the above) life. Assumptions have also been made about their good fortune as well. Do not assume that they left their countries seeking freedom – for many who might have experienced homophobia back home, still do here; though they have added racism to their everyday lived experience. Of course, there are contradictions on that side of queer-Orlando-América, too; yet same sex marriage was achieved in half a dozen countries before the US granted it a year ago. This is the world upside down, you say, since these advances – this progress – should have happened in the US first.Wake up. América is in you and you are no longer “America” but América.

You see, this is how we become queer-Orlando-América: we make it a verb, an action. It emerges where the tongues twist, where code switching (in Spanish/English/Spanglish) is like a saché-ing on the dance floor, where gender and race are blurry and yet so clear, where Whiteness isn’t front and center – in fact it becomes awkward in this sea of racial, gendered, and sexual differences. This queer-Orlando-América (a place neither “here,” nor “there,” where belonging is something you carry with you, in you, and may activate on some dance floor given the right people, even strangers, and real love – especially from strangers) was triggered – was released – by violence. But not a new violence, certainly not a Muslim-led violence. Violence accumulated over violence – historically, ethnically, specific to transgender people, to Brown people, to effeminate male-bodied people, to the power of femininity in male and female bodies, to immigrants, to the colonized who speak up, to the Spanglish that ruptures “appropriateness,” to the language of the border. And in spite of this, queer-Orlando-América has erupted. It is not going down to the bottom of the earth. You see us. It was, after all, “Latino night” at a gay club. You can no longer ignore us.

As the week advanced, and fathers’ day passed us by, I have already noticed the reordering of the news, a staged dismissal so common in media outlets. Those queer and Brown must continue to raise this as an issue, to not let the comfort of your organized, White hetero-lives go back to normal. You never left that comfort, you just thought about “those” killed.  But it was “Latino night” at a gay club. I do not have that luxury. I carry its weight with me. Now the lives of those who are queer and Latina/o have changed – fueled with surveillance and concerns, never taking a temporary safe space for granted. Queer-Orlando-América is thus a “here and now” that has changed the contours of what “queer” and “America” were and are. Queer has now become less White – in your imaginary (we were always here). América now has an accent (it always had it – you just failed to notice).  Violence in Orlando did this. It broke your understanding of a norm and showed you there is much more than the straight and narrow, or the Black and White “America” that is segmented into neatly organized compartments. In that, Orlando queers much more than those LGBT Latinas/os at the club. Orlando is the rupture that bridges a queer Brown United States with a Latin America that was always already “inside” the US – one that never left, one which was invaded and conquered. Think Aztlán. Think Borinquen. Think The Mission in San Francisco. Or Jackson Heights, in NYC. Or the DC metro area’s Latino neighborhoods. That is not going away. It is multiplying.

I may be a queer Latino man at home, at the University, at the store, and at the club. That does not mean that the layered account of my life gets acknowledged (nor celebrated) in many of those sites – in fact, it gets fractured in the service of others’ understandings of difference (be it “diversity,” “multiculturalism” or “inclusion”). But it sure comes together on the dance floor at a club with a boom-boom that caters to every fiber of my being. It is encompassing. It covers us. It is relational. It moves us – together. So, even if I only go out once a year, I refuse to be afraid to go out and celebrate life. Too many before me have danced and danced and danced (including those who danced to the afterlife because of AIDS, hatred, and homophobia), and I will celebrate them dancing – one night at a time.

We are not going away – in fact, a type of queer-Orlando-América is coming near you, if it hasn’t arrived already, if it wasn’t there already—before you claimed that space. No words of empathy will be enough to negotiate your hypocrisy, to whitewash our heritage, or make me, and us, go away. If anything, this sort of tragedy ignites community, it forces us to have conversations long overdue, it serves as a mirror showing how little we really have in common with each other in “America” – and the only way to make that OK is to be OK with the discomfort difference makes you experience, instead of erasing it.

We must never forget that it was “Latino night” at a gay club. That is how I will remember it.

Salvador Vidal-Ortiz, PhD, is associate professor of sociology at American University; he also teaches for their Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies program. He coedited The Sexuality of Migration: Border Crossings and Mexican Immigrant Men and Queer Brown Voices: Personal Narratives of Latina/o LGBT Activism. He wrote this post, originally, for Feminist Reflections.

Today is Labor Day in the U.S. Though many think of it mostly as a last long weekend for recreation and shopping before the symbolic end of summer, the federal holiday, officially established in 1894, celebrates the contributions of labor.

Here are some SocImages posts on a range of issues related to workers, from the history of the labor movement, to current workplace conditions, to the impacts of the changing economy on workers’ pay:

The Social Construction of Work

• The surprisingly racist reason we don’t tip flight attendants
• Luxury and the consumption of labor
• The unsung heroes of the crash landing in San Francisco
• Why do firefighters take such risky jobs?
• McDonald’s delusional blame-the-victim budget
• Devaluing hospitality workers
• Domestic  behavior as both gendered and raced: Who does what for airlines?
• Child labor and the social construction of childhood
• Child labor, 1908-1912
• Women are 49% of the workforce, but we still think work is for men

Work in Popular Culture

• Children’s books and segregation in the workplace
• Alienation and orange juice: The invisibility of labor
• Hurricane Sandy and high fashion: Portraying a class hierarchy
• Whimsical branding obscures Apple’s troubled supply chain
• The “working family” discourse and the invisibility of individuals
• The DJ in American culture: Resonant but misunderstood
• Whiteness and tokenism on the runway
• The solution to patriarchy? Pantene says shine!
• Forbes’ photostock faux paus (what do women workers look like?)

Unemployment, Underemployment, and the “Class War”

• The “Precariat”: The new working class
• When classes collide: Workers and guests at high end hotels
• Who benefits from government programs?
• $22.62/hr: The minimum wage if it had risen like the incomes of the 1%
• Why can’t conservatives see the benefits of affordable child care?
• Food stamps, public policy, and the working poor
• The striking rise in “missing workers”
• Can the minimum wage cover average housing costs?
• Discrimination against the long-term unemployed
• Jon Stewart on class warfare
• Mike Rowe defends blue-collar manual labor

Unions and Unionization

• What have unions ever done for us?
• Footage of strikes and protests
• “Is your washroom breeding Bolsheviks?”
• A way for feminism to overcome its “class problem”
• Target’s anti-union video for new employees
• Unemployment and support for unions
• César Chávez and the fight for farmworkers’ rights
• Hiring non-union workers to staff picket lines
• “A woman’s place is in her union!”

Economic Change, Globalization, and the Great Recession

• U.S jobs are back, but they’re no match for population growth
• The U.S. is replacing good jobs with bad ones
• Whose economic recovery is it?
• Prison labor and taxpayer dollars
• The austerity agenda and public employment
• Comparing black and white job loss in the recession
• The exploitation of worker productivity
• What kinds of jobs are we gaining in the slow recovery?
• Historical look at changes in types of work
• Two American families trapped in a changing economy
• Race and the economic downturn

Work and race, ethnicity, religion, and immigration

• Distrust for Black entrepreneurs
• Race in the NFL draft
• Are Mexicans the most successful immigrant group?
• Race, criminal background, and employment
• The curious evolution of the sign spinnner
• Linguistic occupational segregation
• International politics and the first African American flight attendants
• Luxury and the consumption of labor
• Children’s books and segregation in the workplace
• Whiteness and tokenism on the runway
• Whimsical branding obscures Apple’s troubled supply chain
• When classes collide: Workers and guests at high end hotels
• The surprisingly racist reason we don’t tip flight attendants
• Questioning the benefits of “rescue” from prostitution
• Porn producers with a heart of gold?
• Anti-Muslim bias on the French job market
• Race/ethnicity and the pay gap
• Race, ethnicity, and McDonald’s marketing strategy

Gender and Work

• Majority of “stay-at-home dads” aren’t there to care for family
• Most women would rather divorce than be a housewife
• Before the stewardess, the “steward”: When flight attendants were men
• Star Trek is scaring the ladies: Why women don’t major in computer science
• What do little girls really learn from “Career Barbies”?
• “Dude, you need to get into nursing”: How organizations recruit men into nursing
• Stay-at-home mothers on the rise among low-income families
• Gender at The New York Times
• Mother, sex object, worker: The transformation of the female flight attendant
• Female movie stars peak at 34, but men see success till the end (pictured)
• What kind of work does Women’s History month value?
• Men’s and women’s work: It’s the 1950s at Brinks Home Security
• Women’s refusal to be deferent and the words that describe them
• Why “breadwinner moms” don’t portend a coming matriarchy
• Single mother, meet jobless man
• Gender, work, and family time
• First-time mothers and access to paid work leave
• The role of employer selection in gendered job segregation

The U.S. in International Perspective

• Overwork and its costs
• The U.S. is las in paid vacation and holidays
• International comparison of workplace leave policies
• Vacation in international perspective

Academia

• What do professors do all day?
• Gender and the dual career academic couple
• How many PhDs are professors?
• Professors join the “precariat”
• How professors spend their time
• Precious academic moments

Just for Fun

• Who is the highest paid employee of your state?
• Secrets of the Internet Adult Film Database
• Two-thirds of college students think they’re going to change the world

Bonus!

• Advice for new college grads from two sociologists

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.

Our Pointlessly Gendered Products Pinterest board is funny, no doubt. When people make male and female versions of things like eggs, dog shampoo, and pickles, you can’t help but laugh. But, of course, not it’s not just funny. Here are five reasons why.

1. Pointlessly gendered products affirm the gender binary.

Generally speaking, men and women today live extraordinarily similar lives. We grow up together, go to the same schools, and have the same jobs. Outside of dating — for some of us — and making babies, gender really isn’t that important in our real, actual, daily lives.

These products are a backlash against this idea, reminding us constantly that gender is important, that it really, really matters if you’re male and female when, in fact, that’s rarely the case.

But if there were no gender difference, there couldn’t be gender inequality; one group can’t be widely believed to be superior to the other unless there’s an Other. Hence, #1 is important for #3.

Affirming the gender binary also makes everyone who doesn’t fit into it invisible or problematic. This is, essentially, all of us. Obviously it’s a big problem for people who don’t identify as male or female or for those whose bodies don’t conform to their identity, but it’s a problem for the rest of us, too. Almost every single one of us takes significant steps every day to try to fit into this binary: what we eat, whether and how we exercise, what we wear, what we put on our faces, how we move and talk. All these things are gendered and when we do them in gendered ways we are forcing ourselves to conform to the binary.

2. Pointlessly gendered products reinforce stereotypes.

Pointlessly gendering products isn’t just about splitting us into two groups, it’s also about telling us what it means to be in one of those boxes. Each of these products is an opportunity to remind us.

3. Pointlessly gendered products tell us explicitly that women should be subordinate to or dependent on men.

All too often, gender stereotypes are not just about difference, they’re about inequality. The products below don’t just affirm a gender binary and fill it with nonsense, they tell us in no uncertain terms that women and men are expected to play unequal roles in our society.

Girls are nurses, men are doctors:

Girls are princesses, men are kings:

4. Pointlessly gendered products cost women money.

Sometimes the masculine and feminine version of a product are not priced the same. When that happens, the one for women is usually the more expensive one. If women aren’t paying attention — or if it matters to them to have the “right” product — they end up shelling out more money.  Studies by the state of California, the University of Central Florida, and Consumer Reports all find that women pay more. In California, women spent the equivalent of $2,044 more a year (the study was done in 1996, so I used an inflation calculator).

This isn’t just something to get mad about. This is real money. It’s feeding your kids, tuition at a community college, or a really nice vacation. When women are charged more it harms our ability to support ourselves or lowers our quality of life.

5. Pointlessly gendered products are stupid. There are better ways to deliver what people really need.

One of the most common excuses for such products is that men and women are different, but most of the time they’re using gender as a measure of some other variable. In practice, it would be smarter and more efficient to just use the variable itself.

For example, many pointlessly gendered products advertise that the one for women is smaller and, thus, a better fit for women. The packaging on these ear buds, sent in by LaRonda M., makes this argument.

Maybe some women would appreciate smaller earbuds, but it would still be much more straightforward to make ear buds in different sizes and let the user decide which one they wanted to use.

Products like these make smaller men and larger women invisible. They also potentially make them feel bad or constrain their choices. When the imperative for women is to be small and dainty, how do women who don’t use smaller earbuds feel?  Or, maybe the small guy who wants to learn how to play guitar never will because men’s guitars don’t fit him and he won’t be caught dead playing this:

In sum, pointlessly gendered products aren’t just a gag. They’re a ubiquitous and aggressive ideological force, shaping how we think, what we do, and how much money we have. Let’s keep laughing, but let’s not forget that it’s serious business, too.

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 Labor Day in the U.S. Though many think of it mostly as a last long weekend for recreation and shopping before the symbolic end of summer, the federal holiday, officially established in 1894, celebrates the contributions of labor.
Here are some SocImages posts on a range of issues related to workers, from the history of the labor movement, to current workplace conditions, to the impacts of the changing economy on workers’ pay:

The Social Construction of Work

• The surprisingly racist reason we don’t tip flight attendants
• Luxury and the consumption of labor
• The unsung heroes of the crash landing in San Francisco
• Why do firefighters take such risky jobs?
• McDonald’s delusional blame-the-victim budget
• Devaluing hospitality workers
• Domestic  behavior as both gendered and raced: Who does what for airlines?
• Child labor and the social construction of childhood
• Child labor, 1908-1912
• Women are 49% of the workforce, but we still think work is for men

Work in Popular Culture

• Children’s books and segregation in the workplace
• Alienation and orange juice: The invisibility of labor
• Hurricane Sandy and high fashion: Portraying a class hierarchy
• Whimsical branding obscures Apple’s troubled supply chain
• The “working family” discourse and the invisibility of individuals
• The DJ in American culture: Resonant but misunderstood
• Whiteness and tokenism on the runway
• The solution to patriarchy? Pantene says shine!
• Forbes’ photostock faux paus (what do women workers look like?)

Unemployment, Underemployment, and the “Class War”

• The “Precariat”: The new working class
• When classes collide: Workers and guests at high end hotels
• Who benefits from government programs?
• $22.62/hr: The minimum wage if it had risen like the incomes of the 1%
• Why can’t conservatives see the benefits of affordable child care?
• Food stamps, public policy, and the working poor
• The striking rise in “missing workers”
• Can the minimum wage cover average housing costs?
• Discrimination against the long-term unemployed
• Jon Stewart on class warfare
• Mike Rowe defends blue-collar manual labor

Unions and Unionization

• What have unions ever done for us?
• Footage of strikes and protests
• “Is your washroom breeding Bolsheviks?”
• A way for feminism to overcome its “class problem”
• Target’s anti-union video for new employees
• Unemployment and support for unions
• César Chávez and the fight for farmworkers’ rights
• Hiring non-union workers to staff picket lines
• “A woman’s place is in her union!”

Economic Change, Globalization, and the Great Recession

• U.S jobs are back, but they’re no match for population growth
• The U.S. is replacing good jobs with bad ones
• Whose economic recovery is it?
• Prison labor and taxpayer dollars
• The austerity agenda and public employment
• Comparing black and white job loss in the recession
• The exploitation of worker productivity
• What kinds of jobs are we gaining in the slow recovery?
• Historical look at changes in types of work
• Two American families trapped in a changing economy
• Race and the economic downturn

Work and race, ethnicity, religion, and immigration

• Distrust for Black entrepreneurs
• Race in the NFL draft
• Are Mexicans the most successful immigrant group?
• Race, criminal background, and employment
• The curious evolution of the sign spinnner
• Linguistic occupational segregation
• International politics and the first African American flight attendants
• Luxury and the consumption of labor
• Children’s books and segregation in the workplace
• Whiteness and tokenism on the runway
• Whimsical branding obscures Apple’s troubled supply chain
• When classes collide: Workers and guests at high end hotels
• The surprisingly racist reason we don’t tip flight attendants
• Questioning the benefits of “rescue” from prostitution
• Porn producers with a heart of gold?
• Anti-Muslim bias on the French job market
• Race/ethnicity and the pay gap
• Race, ethnicity, and McDonald’s marketing strategy

Gender and Work

• Majority of “stay-at-home dads” aren’t there to care for family
• Most women would rather divorce than be a housewife
• Before the stewardess, the “steward”: When flight attendants were men
• Star Trek is scaring the ladies: Why women don’t major in computer science
• What do little girls really learn from “Career Barbies”?
• “Dude, you need to get into nursing”: How organizations recruit men into nursing
• Stay-at-home mothers on the rise among low-income families
• Gender at The New York Times
• Mother, sex object, worker: The transformation of the female flight attendant
• Female movie stars peak at 34, but men see success till the end (pictured)
• What kind of work does Women’s History month value?
• Men’s and women’s work: It’s the 1950s at Brinks Home Security
• Women’s refusal to be deferent and the words that describe them
• Why “breadwinner moms” don’t portend a coming matriarchy
• Single mother, meet jobless man
• Gender, work, and family time
• First-time mothers and access to paid work leave
• The role of employer selection in gendered job segregation

The U.S. in International Perspective

• Overwork and its costs
• The U.S. is las in paid vacation and holidays
• International comparison of workplace leave policies
• Vacation in international perspective

Academia

• What do professors do all day?
• Gender and the dual career academic couple
• How many PhDs are professors?
• Professors join the “precariat”
• How professors spend their time
• Precious academic moments

Just for Fun

• Who is the highest paid employee of your state?
• Secrets of the Internet Adult Film Database
• Two-thirds of college students think they’re going to change the world

Bonus!

• Advice for new college grads from two sociologists

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.

Flashback Friday.

A reader named Judith B. wrote in confounded by the copy describing the watch pictured above. It began:

Don’t be fooled by the girly blue and white face on this multifunction Pro Spirit® digital sports watch. It’s more than a match for any tough guy’s watch…

“Girly blue and white?” she asked. “Huh?”

I think I’ve got an answer for you, Judith. And it has to do with fractals. Trees are good examples of fractals: branches can split into two branches, and each of those branches can split into two branches, etc.

The gender binary — that is, the rule that everything (oh animals, jobs, food, kleenex, housework, sound, games, deordorant, love and sex, candy, vitamins, etc) gets split into male and female — is fractal. That means that, for every male or female version of something (say sports versus dance), there is a further gendered split that can be made. If we take sports, we might divide it into the masculine football and the feminine swimming. If we take swimming, we could probably divide it down further. Take education (which is, arguably, feminized): we can split it into physical sciences (masculine) and social sciences (feminine). And we can split the physical sciences into biology (dominated these days by women) and physics (dominated by men). So the gender binary has a fractal character.

What does that mean for blue? Well, it means that, even though “blue” is socially constructed to be masculine, blue can be broken down into more and less masculine types of blue. Turquoise and light blue, for example, are often seen as more feminine that the primary color blue or royal/dark blue. The text, then, is referring to, literally, “girly blue.” Lots of ads aimed at women employ the feminine blues. These ads sent in by some of my former students are good examples:

Usually the use of a “girly blue” serves to balance masculinity and femininity.  It’s no accident that these ads are sports-related, or use copy such as “strong & beautiful” and “I totally have a soft side. You comfortable with that?”

So, that’s my explanation for “girly blue”: fractal gender binaries.

Originally posted in 2010.

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.

SocImages in the News:

• I’m now officially a “professorette” (thanks Rush Limbaugh!), so I’d appreciate it if we did high kicks together whenever we cross paths.
• There’s Research on That! does an anatomy of Limbaugh’s comment, discussing research showing that women are more likely than men to face challenges to their legitimacy.
• New York Magazine covered Gwen Sharp’s discussion of the origins of the shopping cart.
• And Autostraddle picked up on our coverage of Amin Ghaziani’s research on residential segregation and sexual orientation.

You like!  Here are our most appreciated posts this month:

• More time with mom has little to no effect on children’s well-being (3,400+ likes)
• How manufacturers make you think you’re saving money when you’re spending it (1,700+ likes)
• Culture and privacy: A sociology of the shotgun house (750+ likes)
• Wall Street bonuses add up to twice the income of all minimum wage workers combined (700+ likes)
• The quinoa economy (500+ likes)

Thanks everybody!

Editor’s picks:

• Why rich people think they’re middle class
• Only 6% of college presidents think that sexual crime is prevalent on their campus

Top post on Tumblr this month:

• What a bold lingerie ad looks like (almost 100,000 notes!)

Follow us!

• SocImages is on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and Pinterest.
• I’m on Facebook and and Twitter.
• More of the team! @gwensharpnv, @familyunequal, and @jaylivingston

Finally…

To all the students, faculty, and staff out there, I found this mossy, wooden-eyed, 100-year-old teddy bear inside the walls of my (shotgun) house. It wishes you good luck for the end of the semester. Tell it “thank you”… OR ELSE.

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.

Carol Adams has written extensively on the sexual politics of meat, arguing that women and other animals are both sexualized and commodified to facilitate their consumption (both figuratively and literally) by those in power. One result has been the feminization of veganism and vegetarianism. This has the effect of delegitimizing, devaluing, and defanging veganism as a social movement.

This process works within the vegan movement as well, with an open embracing of veganism as inherently feminized and sexualized. This works to undermine a movement (that is comprised mostly of women) and repackage it for a patriarchal society. Instead of strong, political collective of women, we have yet another demographic of sexually available individual women who exist for male consumption.

Take a browse through vegan cookbooks on Amazon, for instance, and the theme of “sexy veganism” that emerges is unmistakable:

Oftentimes, veganism is presented as a means of achieving idealized body types.  These books are mostly geared to a female audience, as society values women primarily as sexual resources for men and women have internalized these gender norms.  Many of these books bank on the power of thin privilege, sizism, and stereotypes about female competition for male attention to shame women into purchasing.

To reach a male audience, authors have to draw on a notion of “authentic masculinity” to make a highly feminized concept palatable to a patriarchal society where all that is feminine is scorned.  Some have referred to this trend as “heganism.”  The idea is to protect male superiority by unnecessarily gendering veganism into veganism for girls and veganism for boys.  For the boys, we have to appeal to “real” manhood.

Meat Is For Pussies (A How-to Guide for Dudes Who Want to Get Fit, Kick Ass and Take Names) appears to be out of print, but there are others:

Then there is the popular tactic of turning women into consumable objects in the exact same way that meat industries do.  Animal rights groups recruit “lettuce ladies” or “cabbage chicks” dressed as vegetables to interact with the public.  PETA routinely has nude women pose in and among vegetables to convey the idea that women are sexy food.  Vegan pinup sites and strip joints also feed into this notion.  Essentially, it is the co-optation and erosion of a women’s movement.  Instead of empowering women on behalf of animals, these approaches disempower women on behalf of men.

In sum, vegan feminism argues that women and non-human animals are commodified and sexualized objects offered up for the pleasurable consumption of those in power. In this way, both women and other animals are oppressed under capitalist patriarchy. When the vegan movement sexualizes and feminizes vegan food, or replicates the woman-as-food trope, it fails to acknowledge this important connection and ultimately serves to repackage potentially threatening feminist collective action in a way that is palatable to patriarchy.

Corey Lee Wrenn is a Council Member for the American Sociological Association’s Animals & Society section.  This section facilitates improved sociological inquiry into issues concerning nonhuman animals and is currently seeking members. Membership is $5-$10; you must be a member of the ASA to join.

Cross-posted at the Vegan Feminist Network and Pacific Standard.