Iconic Photos documents at least two instances in which the U.S. postal service rewrote history, so to speak, taking smoking out of the stamp:
Pollack and Johnson are important figures in American history, who smoked before it carried the stigma it carries today, and whose smoking represents the time and culture that inspired their genius. How do you balance the desire to be historically accurate and true to the individual, with the desire to avoid endorsing a habit newly framed as a social problem?
We’ve posted before on the tendency for female, but not male, athletes to be featured in glamorous or sexualized ways that highlight their femininity instead of their athleticism. See, for example, our posts on WNBA player Candace Parker and the Florida State University’s women’s basketball team. Kirsten W. sent in another nice example. In this case, it’s two tennis players at the height of their careers: Roger Federer and Anna Kournikova.
Federer is pictured as we might expect, doing what he is famous for doing, playing tennis:
[Kournikova]… is presented in a very typical “female” way, with her long hair down (it would generally be pulled during a game), flowing over a pink frilly nightgown that suggests she’s in bed, and potentially waiting for company.
In 2000 when this issue of Sports Illustrated was released, Kournikova was on fire. She was ranked 8th in singles and 4th in doubles… in the world. Yet, Sports Illustrated decided to portray her not as an amazing athlete, but softly: as a beautiful, perhaps receptive woman.
Later Kournikova would abandon tennis for modeling. Many argue that she did so because she failed as a tennis player, I wonder if she went into modeling, in part, because her appearance made people take her less seriously as an athlete.
Laura Heron sent in a article from the Economist about changes in union membership. The article, which takes a fairly negative view of the effects of unionization, includes a graph, titled “Where trouble lies,” that illustrates how much union membership has shifted from the private to the public sector in the U.S. Today, 36% of public employees (7.6 million) are members of a union, while only about 7% of employees of private companies (7.1 million) are:
Such a change, from primarily private-sector and often blue-collar workers to government employees, many of whom will be white-collar, middle-class, and relatively highly educated, has significant consequences for employers, governments, employees, and the issues likely to be of primary concern to the labor movement more broadly.
I used the data given in the article to create a chart comparing the percent of private- and public-sector employees in unions in Canada, the U.S., and Britain “today” (by which I assume they mean 2010, though they don’t specify, so be cautious there; also, they didn’t provide the private-sector rate for Canada, so I just used the data I had):
Aside from that, Laura’s attention was drawn to the post partially by the way labor was represented. To make sure we don’t miss the fact that unions are “trouble,” they illustrate the story with this image depicting labor as a fat, ravenous, naked figure devouring resources from the trim man in business attire:
A subsection of the article is also titled “Fattening the Leviathan,” and as the image at the end of the article makes clear, we need to cut this monster down to size:
It’s sort of the mirror image of the “fat cat” rhetoric often used to depict the wealthy as greedy individuals who gorge themselves on profits at the expense of workers. In either case, the central element that makes such rhetoric work is the perception of fat people as lazy, ravenous, greedy individuals who take more than their fair share of available resources.
This is SportsCenter is the name of a series of comical television commercials run by ESPN to promote their SportsCenter sports news show. The ads are presented in a deadpan mockumentary style, lampooning various aspects of sports, and sports broadcasting. The commercials debuted in 1994.
As of tonight (December 24, 2010), ESPN’s YouTube channel profiles 77 of these short videos. Not every “This is SportsCenter” commercial is profiled, but I’m just going with what is up on this page now as the sample data set. I generally enjoy these commercials. Many of them are witty, and they are all short (around 30 seconds). Here are a few examples:
As can be seen, the commercials typically profile a famous athlete and/or a SportsCenter anchor, and on occasion a non-sports-related celebrity (e.g., Richard Simmons). In examining what athletes the commercials profile on ESPN’s YouTube page, a highly predictable trend emerges. Here are the individual athletes the commercials profile (note: when no athletes are profiled and only anchors, gender of anchors profiled noted instead):
Dwight Freeney (football; male)
Derek Jeeter (baseball; male)
Floyd Mayweather (boxing; male)
Tim Lincecum (baseball; male)
Wayne Gretzky (hockey; male)
Dwight Howard (basketball; male)
David St. Hubbins (musician; male)
Arnold Palmer (golf; male)
Oregon Duck (football; gender neutral)
Usain Bolt (track & field; male)
Larry Fitzgerald (football; male)
Matt Ryan (football; male)
Brett Favre (football; male)
Adrian Peterson (football; male)
Joe Mauer (baseball; male)
Adrian Peterson (football; male)
Manny Ramierz (baseball; male)
Josh Hamilton (baseball; male)
SportsCenter Anchors (all male)
Jimmie Johnson (car racing; male)
SportsCenter Anchors (all male)
Manny Ramirez (baseball; male)
David Ortiz & Jorge Posada (baseball; male)
David Wright (baseball; male)
Chad Ochocinco (football; male)
Chad Ochocinco (football; male)
Ladanian Tomlinson (football; male)
Chad Ochocinco (football; male)
Tony Romo (football; male)
Paul Pierce, Kevin Garnett, & Ray Allen (basketball; male)
Michael Phelps (swimming; male)
Ladanian Tomlinson (football; male)
Jim Kelly (football; male)
Dale Earnhardt Jr. (car racing; male)
Chad Ochocinco (football; male)
Stephen King (writer; male)
Michael Phelps (swimming; male)
Jimmy Rollins (baseball; male)
Richard Simmons (fitness pro; male)
Maria Sharapova (tennis; female)
Steve Smith (football; male)
Jose Reyes (baseball; male)
Pat Summit (basketball; female)
Dale Earnhardt Jr. (car racing; male)
Carmelo Anthony (basketball; male)
Chris Paul (basketball; male)
Keyshawn Johnson (football; male) & Kobe Bryant (basketball; male)
“Moving the Franchise” (all male anchors)
“Yahtzee” (male anchors)
Kerri Strug (gymnastics; female)
“Talent Search” (male anchors)
Globetrotters (basketball; male)
Dan O’Brien (track & field; male)
“Journalistic Integrity” (male anchors)
“Sportscaster Celebrities” (male anchors)
“Live on the Set” (predominantly male anchors; female anchor at end)
Michael Andretti (car racing; male)
Gordie Howe (hockey; male)
“Reading Lips” (all male anchors)
“Makeup Buddies” (all male anchors)
“Athletes Bribing” (multiple male athletes from different sports)
George Mikan (basketball; male)
Mary Lou Retton (gymnastics; female)
“Tour” (all male anchors)
“One Track Mind” (predominanty male anchors; female anchor at start)
“Shoot” (female anchor)
“Paws” (all male anchors)
“Serious Journalism” (all male anchors)
“Write Your Own Stuff” (all male anchors)
“Sweet Science” (predominantly male anchor; short appearances by a female anchor)
“Potty Talk” (male anchor)
“Memories” (all male anchors)
Keshawn Johnson (football; male) & Kobe Bryant (basketball; male)
Glenn Robinson (basketball; male)
Barry Melrose (hockey; male)
Landon Donovan (soccer; male)
Jimmie Johnson (car racing; male)
When going through the data set, we find that out of the 77 commercials, women only appear 8 times (10.4%), in some cases in relatively peripheral roles. When looking specifically at athletes, only 3 female athletes are profiled, all 3 of whom represent historically “acceptibly feminine” sports: Mary Lou Retton and Kerri Strug (both gymnasts) and Maria Sharapova (tennis). One commercial profiles Pat Summit, the famous women’s basketball coach from the University of Tennessee. All other commercials featuring athletes have males.
Examining the content of the commercials is also important. For instance, the commercial with Sharapova clearly relies on Sharapova’s status as a femininized beauty figure in athletics. And while all the commercials are “presented in deadpan mockumentary style,” the humor clearly calls upon dominant notions of heterosexual masculinity — take for example the commercials that mock femininity among males, such as those in which the male anchors share makeup and mock Richard Simmons as a conditioning coach.
The trends shown here are highly predictable. It is hardly surprising that males are over-represented numerically in the commercials, both as athletes and anchors. Likewise, it is unsurprising that the humor utilized in these commercials so often mocks femininity among males in the sporting world or uses female athletes as sexualized figures.
What we see here in ESPN’s “This is SportsCenter” commercials is the typical way that gender is constructed in sport — patriarchy is reified within an institution historically reserved for heterosexual males.
In the 22-minute short film below, titled MouseTrapped 2010, employees of Florida’s Walt Disney World plead with Disney to negotiate a fair contract with their Union. The film is interesting on two accounts. First, is a good example of the low wages in many service industries. Sociologists refer to the “working poor” to describe people who work full-time and yet still cannot make ends meet. Some of the employees in this video take second jobs, live with their parents or siblings, routinely take food from church food banks, or receive food stamps.
Second, it is an example of a new bargaining tactic: widespread public pressure. This tactic is possible only because of developments in the last decade: the affordability and accessibility of the technology required to put together a short video like this and the medium of youtube that allows the employees to reach potentially millions of viewers for free. It’s working too; Jordan G. spotted this video at Boing Boing, one of the most widely read sites on the web.
FiveThirtyEight has up a post about attitudes toward gun ownership in the U.S. Drawing on General Social Survey data, they show actual ownership of guns has gone down over time; less than 40% of American households now report having one:
You might expect that, as fewer Americans own guns themselves, support for the right to own personal firearms might decrease, as fewer people might feel a strong personal interest in the issue and restricting or banning access to guns wouldn’t, presumably, affect them directly or bring up an emotional image of agents storming into their homes. Yet we don’t see this at all. In fact, Gallup poll data indicate that support for banning handguns has decreased over time as well, with fewer than one third of Americans supporting such a policy:
Silver suggests that changes in political rhetoric, particularly more vocal and unequivocal support for gun rights by the Republicans and less emphasis on banning guns by Democrats, may explain some of this change. I’m sure that’s part of it; but that leaves unanswered why the political rhetoric changed, particularly after 1992 (when, as Silver demonstrates, the Republican Party platform became more pro-gun/anti-restriction, while the Democrats made sure to start stressing their overall support for some basic right to gun ownership by individuals, though still pushing for some regulations). And aside from that, the biggest drop in support for banning handguns came during the ’60s and ’70s, before the change in party rhetoric, so what do we make of that?
All social movements try to frame issues in ways that benefit their cause. Controlling the discourse is an important step towards getting the outcome they want. Previously, we’ve posted about the way that activists against the genetic modification of food have nicknamed these foods, “frankenfoods.” Recently, Steven Foster, a student at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, sent us a pair of images questioning this rhetoric by comparing the imagery with the animals in question.
Frankenfish cartoon:
Images of genetically- and non-genetically-modified salmon:
While we don’t know whether anti-“frankenfood” activists are right about their concerns and it’s certainly true that these animals are genetically modified; it’s also clear that the visuals distort the facts (that is, the modified animals are not nearly as distorted as the cartoon implies). Thinking through how the tactics by which social movement actors try to influence discourse is a fun and useful application of the sociological imagination.
In a previous post I embedded a video of a small child worshipping, arguing that it illustrated how children learn “the culturally-specific rules guiding the performance of devotion.” The video below is a similar case, showing how a young child of about the same age, who has yet to learn to speak, has nonetheless absorbed the rhythms, emotional expression, and gestures customary among preachers in the particular faith in which he is being raised:
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…
