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SocImages News:

We hit milestones on both our Facebook and Twitter pages this month, exceeding 18,000 at the former and 8,000 at the latter.  We also celebrated our 5th birthday and almost 4,500 posts.  Congratulations to us!

And congratulations also to Christina Barmon, Georgia State University.  Barmon has written guest posts for us — on health advice to men and women in the 1920s and, most famously, on sitting, standing, and peeing — but, more importantly, she was awarded the ASA/SAGE Teaching Innovations & Professional Development Award this year! Congratulations Christina!

Upcoming Lectures and Appearances:

Lisa has started booking talks and lectures for the fall.  Her first talk will be at Indiana State University (Sept. 17th-19th) where she’ll be giving a featured lecture at the International Crime, Media & Popular Culture Studies Conference.

Newest Pinterest Page:

We now have a Pinterest page featuring our collection of material glamorizing violence in fashion (trigger warning).  It’s a depressing ride, if you want to take it for a spin.  We have 17 other boards, too, if you’d like to check out the list.

Social Media ‘n’ Stuff:

In case you’re new, we’re on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and Pinterest.  Lisa is on Facebook and most of the team is on Twitter: @lisadwade, @gwensharpnv, @familyunequal, @carolineheldman, @jaylivingston, and @wendyphd.

In Other Very Important News…

We visited a little-known private, non-profit zoo in Moapa, NV called Roos n’ More.  They let us hold and pet monkeys, lemurs, bear cats, zebra, camels, toucans, wallabies, and, kangaroos!  The best part, though, was being swarmed by otters!  Here’s Gwen getting an otter kiss:

And here’s Lisa smiling as an otter goes down her shirt and comes out again.  Rawr!

This experience in no way undermined our belief that animals prefer us above all other humans.

Links and Quotes This Month:

• Gala Darling and Feministing both picked up our article arguing that one way to “have it all” is to not have kids.
• Jezebel linked to our posts about gender, groupies, and musical taste and an old post about the dropping age of first menstruation.
• We were quoted at Disinformation, the Huffington Post, and Boing Boing.
• AdiosBarbie in a post about the absence of the female gaze in fashion, linked to our posts on passive women on Chinese and Japanese book covers, romanticized violence against women, and twisted and warped women’s bodies in fashion editorials.
• Finally, Bitch and Feministing both linked to the first post in our series on sexual objectification; Bitch also linked to Caroline Heldman’s review of Magic Mike, as did The Portland Mercury.

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.

Course Guide for
SOCIOLOGY OF SPORTS
(last updated 4/2012)

Developed by J.A. Carter
University of Cincinnati

 History

• Social Hygiene and the Gender of Health in 1922
• Vintage Women’s Basketball Teams: So Funny!
• Chance, Innovation, and the Evolution of Skateboarding
• Woman Wears Men’s Clothes to a Prizefight World Gasps 1910
• 1927 Wimbledon Ad Using Women’s Progress to Sell

Culture

• Sociologist Doug Hartman on Why We Love Football
• Context: How do you Play Football?
• Brit Hume: Only Christianity Can Save Tiger Woods
• Arizona’s Prayer at the Super Bowl
• What Does it Mean to Believe that a Human Characteristic is Natural?

Fans

• Jay Smooth on the Irrationality of Sports Fandom

Stadiums/Economics

• New Sports Stadiums and Economic Development
• The Economic Sociology of Triathlons

Race/Ethnicity

• Distracted by “Linsanity”: Hidden Racism and the Model Minority Stereotype
• Jeremy Lin, ESPN says, has a “Chink in the Armor”
• Racial Stereotyping and Perceptions of Competence
• Tragedy at Red River: Race, Privilege and Learning to Swim
• Racism and Jingoism Among US Soccer Fans
• When Whiteness Matters in Sport
• Media, Race, & Web 2.0
• An Indigenous Olympics
• Russian Ice Skaters Impersonate Aboriginals, Win Gold
• Orientals v. Gauchos: Who are you Rooting for?
• Dutch Soccer Club Nicknamed the Jews
• Notre Dame’s Fighting Irish Mascot
• Some Native American Sports Mascots
• Don’t Olympic Athletes have Other Things They Need to be Doing
• Olympians Making “Chinese Eyes”
• Arab Women and 2008 Olympic Athletes
• “The Angry Black Athlete”
• Race and the King Kong Motif
• Southern Hospitality?
• Corporate Plantation

Gender

• The Manly Origins of Cheerleading
• Women and Exclusion from Long Distance Running
• Policing Gender in Figure Skating
• I Wonder How Much Laundry the Average Team USA Dad will Do
• Happy Super Bowl Day!
• Barbie and GI Joe: Inscribing Gender Norms on Toys
• Which Women Play on the Center Court at Wimbledon?
• Skate Canada gets “Tough”
• Participation in High School Sports by Gender and Sport
• The Sexualization of Female Olympiads
• Breakfast and Lunch and Dinner of Olympic Champions
• “Come to the Ball”: Swiss Soccer Ad
• Valuing Dads in the WNBA
• Blaming Jessica Simpson: Women Sap Men’s Strength
• Pink Sports Team Clothing: Making a Masculine Arenas Safe for Women

Sex Differences in Sports

• Opportunity and Athletic Performance
• Male as the Neutral Default
• The Question of Caster Semenya’s Sex

Equipment differences in sports

• Female Boxers may be Required to Wear Skirts
• Ideology, Safety, and the Lingerie Football League
• The Amazing Disappearing Cheerleading Outfit
• Femininity and the Proposed Badminton Dress Code
• Two Fun Facts About Figure Skating Fashion

Masculinity

• Hegemonic Masculinity in Super Bowl Commercials
• No Man’s Land and the Alice Band
• Mocking Men with Femininity
• The Daintification of Masculinity
• Men without Sports Knowledge/Skills are Inadequate Human Beings
• Energy Drinks and Violent Masculinity
• Crossing Gender Lines: Boys Doing Double Dutch
• A Set of Ads Suggesting that Men must Eschew Femininity or Else
• Social Construction and Hegemonic Masculinity

Sexuality/Homophobia

• Pushing Back Against Homophobia in Sports
• “Powder Blue Faggots”: More Sporting Homophobic Taunts
• Yankee Fans Verbally Assault Teenage Red Sox Fans with Homophobic Taunts
• What Does a “Prehomosexual” Look Like?
• Johnny Weir: That’s Gay
• Pulled Homophobic Nike Ads
• “Homosexual” vs. “Gay”: Discourse in the Culture Wars
• You’re a Quarterback for SC?  That’s So Gay!

Bodies

• Tim Tebow and the Religious Body (Politic)
• Disabled Bodies and Ableist Acceptance
• World Champion Olympic Medalist Reduced to Woman on a Diet
• Objectification of Women = Go Team!
• Idealizing Shawn Johnson
• Re-Framing Menstruation
• Ski Jumping’s Weight Problem
• An Entitlement to the Right to Define and Consume Female Beauty
• Nude Calendar Images of German Paralympic Athletes
• Release the Thin Athletic Body Trapped Inside your Big Fat One
• The Male Gaze Does Not Allow for Boy Nipples
• Men’s Bodies are Allowed to Grow Up

Media

• What’s Important About Female Athletes?
• “Come for the Ladies, Stay for the Legends”
• Serena Williams’ Patriarchal Bargain
• Female Athletes Support the Guys
• His and Hers Sports Illustrated Covers
• SportsCenter, the Predictable Gender Trend
• Cheerleader Dreams at Mattress World
• ESPN Introduces Website for Women
• Women Talk, Eat at Baseball Game; Earth Stands Still
• Welcome, Women to your Special Section
• It’s the Ironman, Not the Ironwoman, so Shut your Cereal Hole
• A Breakdown of Televised Football Broadcasts
• Feminizing Women’s Sports Teams
• It’s so Boring to Wait While your Wife shops for you
• Serena Williams on the Cover of ESPN
• Another Collection of Gender-and-Tech-Related Images
• Female Athletes: Be Pretty, but Not Sexy or Pregnant
• Bringing People Together with Coke
• Marketing Sports Supplement to Men and Women
• Media Portrayals of Female Athletes
• Connecting Golf and Sex
• Score Big at Sports Bar

Violence

• Reception of Rape Victims: Silsbee, TX Edition
• Glorifying Violence in American Football

College Athletics

• In Defiance of Title IX Colleges Report Male Athletes as Women
• College Athletics and Graduate Rates
• College Athletes and their Majors
• Where Sports Scholarships Go

For the past few years I’ve been following a wonderful little blog, Hanzi Smatter. The author invites people to submit images of tattoos written in (what they think is) Japanese or Chinese, to find out what they actually mean. As it turns out, tattoos often do not mean what their bearers think they mean. The results can be hilarious, like Thought to mean: Loyalty. Actual meaning: Noodles.

It is quite trendy in the U.S. to get a word that means something to you in English (“love,” “strength” etc.) tattooed in Japanese or Chinese characters. Visit any tattoo parlor or online tattoo image gallery and you’ll see many Chinese and Japanese character options. So why is this so popular? Some argue that the beauty and simplicity of the symbols make Asian characters desirable for tattoos: “But what, besides the beauty of the art, would make these tattoos so popular? The main reason is that Chinese symbolism can be used to express so much, while still remaining simple and clean.” But couldn’t any written language be considered beautiful (cursive English, for instance)? And isn’t any language capable of expressing a lot in just a few simple characters (words have multiple meanings even in English)?

I don’t think this is just about beauty and simplicity. Using Japanese or Chinese characters makes a tattoo more exotic than getting the same word tattooed in English. And there is an added element of mystery—having a tattoo that not everyone in an English-speaking country can read is cool (even if the person with the tattoo can’t read it, either).

Cultural appropriation describes the adoption of specific aspects of a culture that is not your own. A Kanji tattoo when the wearer is not Japanese and has no specific connection to Japanese culture is an example of cultural appropriation. While we could debate whether or not cultural appropriation is ever positive (e.g. the popularity of yoga, or the interest in Italian food and culture when HBO’s The Sopranos was running), there are negative consequences to cultural appropriation. When language and symbolism are taken out of their original context, the meaning is over simplified or completely lost. Tattoos that attempt to translate English into Japanese or Chinese characters are a perfect example of lost meaning:

Intended meaning: None. Characters chosen for their appeal. Actual meaning: “Buy/trade”, “road, path”, and “card” which is like a type of prepaid card that allows its owner to access public transportation.

Thought to mean: Warrior. Actual meaning: Waterfall or rapids.

 Many tattoos are victims of what Hanzi Smatter calls “gibberish font.” There is no correlation between English letters and Japanese or Chinese characters, but some tattoo shops use this gibberish font for tattoos—using the font to spell out words letter by letter, when Chinese and Japanese don’t work that way.

Thought to mean: Initials of loved ones. Actual meaning: Nothing

Thought to mean: Beautiful. Actual meaning: “Calamity, disaster, catastrophe.”

 Thought to mean: As long as I breathe, I hope. Actual meaning: The five characters mean “living”, “air”, & “love” separately, but just the characters together do not create the intended sentence.

 Thought to mean: Outlaw. Actual meaning: “[In] hiding” and “criminal”, or the equivalent of “snitch” or “rat”.

 Thought to mean: Live for today. Actual meaning: None.

Hanzi Smatter discusses that last one:

As is, this gibberish means nothing in Japanese or at least nothing like “live for today” and I don’t think it means anything in Chinese either. The only meaning I can guess is that if it were written 生きて現れる, this would mean “to show up alive” or “turn up alive” as if someone thought dead had appeared alive. Anyway, it sounds pretty spooky, like seeing a zombie!

I think the person who made this up just looked in a dictionary for the word for “to live” 生 and a word that means something like “now” 現and thought you could stick them together to make “live for today.”

The fact that these tattoos, and countless more like them, don’t mean what people think they mean, illustrates the consequences of fetishizing aspects of a culture. Symbols and language don’t translate easily from one culture to another. Adopting aspects of a culture that might seem “exotic” without understanding what they mean in their specific contexts ends up creating cultural gibberish; tattoos that make no sense to anyone at all.

Amid accusations of racism, the European Union (EU) has withdrawn a two-minute video designed to raise awareness about “Neighbourhood Policy,” an approach to establishing “deeper relations” with neighboring state the need for unity among EU nations and acceptance of candidate states hoping to enter.  In the video, sent to us by Claire P., the EU is personified by a white woman, who is facing attacks from all sides.

Bruno Waterfield, writing for the Telegraph, describes the scene:

First the EU heroine… is menaced by a Chinese Kung Fu master. Then a second threat appears as a urbaned practitioner of Kalaripayattu, a southern Indian martial art, levitates towards her brandishing a scimitar.

UPDATE: Reader Katrin says the video was about increasing integration and cooperation of states and the European Commission’s enlargement policy, not about the “neighborhood” policy as reported by the Telegraph:,

It was for greater unity of existing EU member states (which is why the video is entitled “Growing Together”) and candidates for membership (which is why it says “the more we are the stronger we are”) in order to show a united front to the rising powers China, India and Brazil. It was intended to portray that if the EU acts united, then China, India and Brazil will be willing to engage with the EU constructively…Current candidates of accession are e.g. Iceland, Macedonia, Montenegro, Turkey and Serbia. Enlargement and unity as a tool for greater power when facing rising economies was the intended message of the clip, not the ENP.

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.

At The Color Line, sociologist C.N. Le highlighted an instance in which racist language was used in reference to pro-basketball player Jeremy Lin.  A headline at ESPN read, “Chink in the Armor.”  “Chink” is a term used to denigrate the Chinese and Asians more generally.

Le observes astutely that the word likely wasn’t meant as a slur, but instead a pun.  And, in fact, ESPN “quickly and decisively” took action, changing the headline, firing the person who wrote the headline, and suspending a sportscaster who repeated the phrase.

Instead of outright racism, Le suggests that the appearance of the word is symptomatic of a (false) belief that we’re in a colorblind post-power society.  In this society, every group is on equal footing, so making fun is just equal opportunity offensiveness; it may be off-color, but it’s all in good fun (think of South Park as an example).  The approach assumes that slurs like “chink” are no more harmful than slurs like “cracker.”

Le was disappointed to see that this kind of ongoing insensitivity to real power differences remains, but pleased to see ESPN react so swiftly and strongly to it.

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

Cross-posted at The Russell Sage Foundation.

Claude Steele and his colleagues have found ample evidence of “stereotype threat” in test-taking situations.  Stereotype threat occurs when people worry that poor performance on a task will inadvertently confirm a negative stereotype applied to the group to which they belong.  Their worry depresses performance, thus creating outcomes consistent with the stereotype. Stereotype threat depresses the performance of high-achieving African American students on difficult verbal tests as well as accomplished female math students on difficult math tests.

Not all stereotypes are negative, however, suggesting that certain stereotypes might also enhance performance.  With Min Zhou, I looked into how the stereotype that Asian Americans students are particularly smart and high achieving — as illustrated in this TIME magazine cover from 1987 — might shape their performances.

We argue that Asian American students benefit from a “stereotype promise”—the promise of being viewed through the lens of a positive stereotype that leads one to perform in such a way that confirms the positive stereotype, thereby enhancing performance.  The Chinese- and Vietnamese-Americans students we studied described how their teachers assumed that they were smart, hard-working, and high-achieving, which affected the way that their teachers treated them, the grades they received, and their likelihood of being placed into the most competitive academic tracks, like Advanced Placement (AP) and Honors. For many students, stereotype promise exerted an independent effect, and boosted performance.

For example, Ophelia is a 23 year-old second-generation Vietnamese woman who described herself as “not very intelligent” and recalls nearly being held back in the second grade. By her account, “I wasn’t an exceptional student; I was a straight C student, whereas my other siblings, they were quicker than I was, and they were straight A students.”

Despite Ophelia’s C average, she took the AP exam at the end of junior high school, and not surprisingly, failed. Nevertheless, she was placed into the AP track in high school, but once there, something “just clicked,” and Ophelia began to excel in her classes. When we asked her to explain what she meant by this, she elaborated, “I wanted to work hard and prove I was a good student,” and also added, “I think the competition kind of increases your want to do better.” She graduated from high school with a GPA of 4.2, and was admitted into a highly competitive pharmacy program.

Once she was placed in a more challenging setting, then, where teachers’ expectations and peer performance were elevated, she benefited from stereotype promise. Ophelia did not believe at the outset that she was academically exceptional or deserving of being in the AP track (especially because she earned straight C’s in junior high school and failed the AP exam), but once anointed as academically exceptional and deserving, the stereotype promise exerted an independent effect that encouraged her to try harder and prove that she was a good student, and ultimately enhanced her performance.  While it is impossible to know how Ophelia’s academic performance would have differed had she stayed on the school’s “regular track,” that she was given the opportunity to meet her potential attests to the advantage that Asian American students are accorded in the context of U.S. schools.

In future research, I plan to study in what institutional contexts “stereotype promise” may emerge, for which groups, and in what domains. For example, males may benefit from stereotype promise in certain occupational niches where stereotypes about gender and performance prevail.

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Jennifer Lee is a sociologist at the University of California, Irvine, specializing in intersection of immigration and race and ethnicity. She wrote, with Frank Bean, a book called The Diversity Paradox, that examines patterns of intermarriage and multiracial identification among Asians, Latinos, and African Americans.

Read a Q&A on with Jennifer Lee about “stereotype promise” at the Russell Sage Foundation.

For the last week of December, we’re re-posting some of our favorite posts from 2011.

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Enjoying a show last year at The Magic Castle, I was struck by the magician/assistant distinction.  The magician would make a dove disappear, and his assistant would suddenly reveal it in her possession.  “Who was doing magic,” I wondered? It looked like a team effort to me.

I was reminded of this distinction while watching an NPR short on artist Liu Bolin.  Bolin, we are told, “has a habit of painting himself” so as to disappear into his surroundings.  The idea is to illustrate the way in which humans are increasingly “merged” with their environment.

So how does he do it?  Well, it turns out that he doesn’t.  Instead, “assistants” spend hours painting him.  And someone else photographs him.  He just stands there.  Watch how the process is described in this one minute clip:

So what makes an artist?

One might argue that it was Bolin who had the idea to illustrate the contemporary human condition in this way. That the “art” in this work is really in his inspiration, while the “work” in this art is what is being done by the assistants. Yet clearly there is “art” in their work, too, given that they are to be credited for creating the eerie illusions with paint. Yet it is Bolin who is named as the artist; his assistants aren’t named at all.  What is it about the art world — or our world more generally — that makes this asymmetrical attribution go unnoticed so much of the time?

See also Hennessey Youngman on “How to make An Art.”

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 2011.

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The US economy faces a number of challenges—among them a lack of job creation and an ever-growing trade deficit. Many policy-makers believe that encouraging business innovation is the best response to these particular challenges. Sounds plausible but experience suggests otherwise.

The best example of why simply encouraging business innovation is not the answer for our employment and trade problems is Apple and its iPhone.

The iPhone was introduced in 2007 and has been incredible successful.  U.S. sales soared from 3 million units in 2007 to over 11 million in 2009.  Global sales topped 25 million in 2009.

While the iPhone is designed and marketed by Apple, almost all the phone’s components are produced by foreign companies operating outside the United States.  These components are then shipped to China where Foxconn, a Taiwanese company, oversees their assembly and their export to the United States and other countries.  As a result, the iPhone generates few jobs in the United States.

Two economists, in an Asian Development Bank working paper, examined the iPhone 3G production process in some detail.  The table below, taken from their study, highlights the main suppliers and the costs of the components they produce for a single phone.  Most of the components are supplied by Japanese, South Korean and German firms, although there are also some U.S. suppliers (although who knows where they actually produce their compnents).

The total component cost of an iPhone in 2009 was $172.46.    Workers in China assemble the iPhone, but because their wages are low the assembly cost per phone (labeled manufacturing costs in the table below) is quite small, only $6.50 a phone.  The total production cost per phone is $178.96.

Because the iPhone is assembled in China all sales in the U.S. mean an increase in Chinese exports (even though the phone is largely composed of inputs produced outside of China) and an increase in U.S. imports.  In 2009, China exported more than $2 billion worth of iPhones to the United States.  Thus, the iPhone, because of the Apple’s production strategy, also adds to the U.S. trade deficit.

Apple is not alone in embracing China as its production base.  China is now the world’s largest exporter of manufactured goods. And, as the chart below shows, the share of Chinese exports that are labled high technology is growing.  This trend has encouraged many analysts to claim that the U.S. is now locked in fierce economic competition with China.

However, as we see next, more than 80% of China’s high technology exports are actually produced by foreign companies operating in China.  Moreover, these foreign companies have significantly increased their control over this production.  In 2002 foreign owned firms that were 100% foreign owned (which means that they had no Chinese partner) accounted for only 55% of Chinese high technology exports.  In 2009 they accounted for 68%.

Why do so many transnational corporations choose to locate production in China?  The answer is obvious: profits. Apple again serves as a good example.  The table below, taken from the Asian Development Bank working paper cited above, shows Apple’s profit-margin on the iPhone.  In 2009 it was a whopping big 64%.

Struck by the size of Apple’s profit-margin, the authors of the Asian Development working paper considered whether the iPhone could reasonably be made in the United States.  As they note:

The role of the PRC in the production chain of iPhones is primarily the assembly of all parts and components into the final product for re-shipment abroad. The skills and equipment required for the assembly are very basic and there is no doubt that American workers and firms are capable of assembling iPhones in the US. If all iPhones were assembled in the US, the US$1.9 billion trade deficit in iPhone trade with PRC would not exist. Moreover, 11.4 million units of iPhone sold in the non-US market in 2009 would add US$5.7 billion to US exports.

For the sake of discussion, they assumed that assembly line wages in the U.S. are ten times higher than in China.   Given that Chinese production workers earn roughly $1 an hour, that is not an unreasonable assumption.  The higher wages would mean that the total assembly cost per phone would rsie to $65 and the total manufacturing cost would approach $238.  If Apple continued to sell the iPhone for $500, the company would still earn a very respectable 50% profit margin.

Moreover, as the authors point out:

In this hypothetical scenario, iPhones, the high-tech product invented by the U.S. company, would contribute to U.S. exports and the reduction of the U.S. trade deficit, not only with the PRC, but also with the rest of world. More importantly, Apple created jobs for U.S. low skilled workers; those who could not be the software engineers needed by Apple. Giving up a small portion of profits and sharing them with low skilled U.S. workers by Apple would be a more effective way [than depreciation of the exchange rate] to reduce the U.S. trade deficit and create jobs in the United States.

Of course, shifting production to the United States would mean that Apple would earn less money and there is little reason to believe that the company is prepared to sacrifice its profits for the good of the country.  If we want to tackle our employment and trade problems were are going to have to do more than promote more attractive conditions for business.