art/literature

Cross-posted at Montclair SocioBlog.

I don’t know the sociological research on auctions — surely it must exist — but auctions seem like a wonderful illustration of how value is socially constructed. I didn’t really need to be convinced that people don’t always live up to economists’ ideals of rationality, but I was reminded of it on Saturday when I watched the auction of items from my mother’s “estate” (i.e., stuff in her apartment). I wasn’t in the actual auctiion room; nowadays you can watch — and bid — online.

As someone who is relatively ignorant about art, I of course was puzzled as to why one piece was worth several hundred dollars while another might fetch only a $50 or no bids at all. But I thought that potential buyers would have an idea of how much something is worth — the objects and information about them are all available beforehand — and they would bid and stop bidding according to these prior valuations. But look at this lithograph, which graced my parents’ wall for as long as I can remember.

The opening asking price was $20.* None of the people at the auction house or online would offer that much. For the potential bidders, the picture was not worth $20.

The auctioneer then lowered the opening bid to $10. Someone offered the ten bucks. A bargain. But then someone else bid $20. The picture which had not been worth $20 suddenly was. And then it was worth $30. You can see the bidding history to the right of the lithograph. The bidders were reluctant — twice someone came in just as the gavel was about to come down — but in the end, the picture that nobody thought was worth $20 eventually sold for twice that much. In the interval of a few minutes, this minimal interaction between bidders had quadrupled the value of the picture.

There’s also a cognitive-dissonance explanation. If I bid $10 for the item, I’m not just telling myself, “I think this picture is worth $10.” Instead, the message is more general: “I want this picture.” Once we decide to buy something, our subjective valuation of it goes up – we’re more comfortable thinking that we got a good deal than thinking that we wasted our money. Most transactions end there; we buy something at a price, and we are happy with it. But an auction encourages us to turn that subjective valuation into hiigher and higher cash bids.

——————————

* It can be a bit daunting, depressing even, to think that a picture so familiar that it feels like a part of your life turns out to be worth so little to other people.

This picture — a woman marked up for the plastic surgery she would require if she were to look like Barbie — captures in a moment what Dove’s Evolution video took over a minute to convey — the media images and fashion icons that we aspire to emulate are constructions.  Like billboard signs and magazine editorials, the pictures are manipulations that distort our sense of normal bodies.

We are trapped in a narcissistic world of images, where we must self-surveil our bodies with beauty as one of our primary goals.  We invest in and manipulate our bodies and engage in body regimes to cultivate our physiques, often towards unattainable goals of perfection.  We become subjects (in the Foucauldian sense) to our own projects of becoming, as we police ourselves and internalize a normalizing gaze.  The only way to achieve these kinds of bodies, like Barbie’s proportions in this image, is through dramatic, invasive cosmetic procedures.  Yet, we still labor over our bodies, continually trying to shape it in accords of dominant ideals.  We have forgotten (or simply ignored) that these kinds of bodies are fantastical images.

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 Cyborgology.

As part of my research into the popularization of tattooing, I have accumulated quite a few interesting links on tattoo toys for children. I don’t mean those temporary tattoos we all used to get from the vending machines at popular chain restaurants. This toys I am talking about have drawn flack from parents as being “inappropriate” for kids, creating an example of a burgeoning “moral panic”. Some examples include: tattoo inspired toddler wear, tattoo machines for kids, and of course, tattooed Barbie dolls.

Tokidoki Barbie:

Toys like these have been released every few years since the 1990s, when tattooing was ranked as the 6^th fastest growing industry in the country (Vail 1999). But we are now seeing more children’s tattoo toys spring up, dovetailing with the increasing popular interest in the craft. We may very well be observing a second Tattoo Renaissance (Rubin 1988), especially given the expansion of the industry and the artistic flowering that has occurred since the tattoo reality TV shows first emerged in summer 2005. 

I believe we are we observing a cultural paradigm shift (Kuhn 1962) regarding tattooing.  Cultural trends are slowly reshaping popular conceptions of tattooing, turning them from “marks of mischief” (Sanders 1988) into an “ironic fad” (Kosut 2006) of consumer capitalism. Whereas tattooing was once largely reserved for working-class men, sailors, carnival performers, and exotic dancers, we have since seen the practice become widely popular amongst all races, genders, and classes.

G8 Tat2 Maker by Spin Master Toys:

Beginning with the Tattoo Renaissance of the 1960s (Rubin 1988) and more recently with the expansion into reality television (Lodder 2010), we have seen the cultural cache of tattooing shift in favor of middle-class notions of identity work (Atkinson 2003); that is, towards seeing the body as a vehicle for expressing oneself, towards actively controlling and crafting the body as a form of empowerment, and towards the development of “distinctive individualism” through appearance (Muggleton 2002). The highly narrative focus of tattooing contained in popular reality TV shows like “LA Ink” or “NY Ink” only bolster these trends, as new tattoo enthusiasts invest deeply-held meanings into each tattoo.

But these trends do not mean that tattoo toys aimed at children are any less offensive to some. Largely, it appears to be a generational divide: youth are much more supportive (in fact, largely celebratory) towards body art like tattoos and piercings, but the baby boomers continue to view tattoos through the lens of deviance.

For people of my parents generation, tattoos continue to be a symbol of deviant proclivities. Some have even called it a “disease” plaguing the youth of today. I have taken issue with such an interpretation of tattooing, especially by social scientists who continue to conceptualize the practice as an indicator of mental pathology or emotional instability, and have proposed a “pro-social” conception of contemporary body modifications like tattooing and piercing [you can read my work here]. In my opinion it is just a matter of time before prominent and visible tattoos become commonplace in professional and public settings, tattooed Barbie notwithstanding.

——————————

David Paul Strohecker (@dpsFTW) is a PhD student at the University of Maryland, College Park. He studies issues of intersectionality, consumption, and popular culture. In addition to his work on the popularization of tattooing, a project on the revolutionary pedagogy of public sociology, and more theoretical work on zombie films as a vehicle for expressing social and cultural anxieties. He previously wrote for the blog Racism Review and currently blogs at Cyborgology.

For more from Strohecker, see his posts on facial tattoos, the origins of zombies, QR codes and the digital divide, and laughing at disability.

If you would like to write a post for Sociological Images, please see our Guidelines for Guest Bloggers.

This seems like a good time to reiterate a simple truth: It can be art/fashion/satire/cutting edge etc. and… and and and it can be offensive, trivializing, and triggering.

Eight readers sent in links to an ad for a hair salon called Fluid. The salon, which has a history of using “shocking” ads (like this one after the Gulf oil spill), is attracting criticism for an ad featuring a woman being offered jewelry by a man; she appears to have a black eye.  Six more sent in a link to a Glee star, Heather Morris, in a photoshoot by Tyler Shields, also with a black eye.

Responding to the criticism, Fluid said it was being “cutting-edge,” “satirical,” “high fashion,” and “editorial,” and “artistic.”  It doesn’t matter what you call it, what tradition it references, or whether you’re trying to get a reaction; your product is still part of a wider cultural context.  Accordingly, you may get called out for being insensitive to other people’s pain. In which case, probably best not to call the critics hypocrites and suggest that there are bigger problems in the world than the trivialization of domestic violence.  Or go right ahead, I guess.

Thanks to Eric S., Kristina V., YetAnotherGirl, Dave S., Caitlin R., @CreativeTweets, Meghan H., Dave S., Judith B., Olivia G., Alexis W., Theresa W., and an anonymous reader for the tips!

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.

In a recent interview at The Consensual Project, I was asked if I’d ever seen any “…videos, images, or sound bites that have provided [me] with valuable sexual health information.” I recounted this experience:

There is one video I saw, when I was about 21, that stands out in my mind even today…  The filmmaker asked about 40 women to stand naked, side-by-side, on the edge of a stage.  The camera captured the appearance of their bodies from about the neck to the knees, no faces, just bodies. (I don’t know if it was ever publicly available, but if anyone can send it to me, I’d be thrilled.)

Think about how rarely you actually see a new (near-)naked body that is not a model or the equivalent (actress etc).  With new sexual partners, perhaps.  And if you’re straight, this is (probably mostly) going to be the body of the other sex.  At the gym perhaps?  But you’re not supposed to look, so you probably don’t look closely.  I realized when I saw this video (it probably lasted all of two minutes), that I had never really seen women’s bodies outside of the mass media. I didn’t know what women’s bodies looked like.  And I had been comparing my body to that of actresses and models.  I realized that day that things about my body that I thought were horrible deformities were completely normal.  Even though the bodies in that video were all different, they were also very similar, and my body looked just like theirs in some cumulative way.  From that point on, I knew I wasn’t gross.  A simple lesson.  And so important, but a really hard one to encounter in a powerful way.

I was reminded of this story when I saw a photograph by Spencer Tunick.  Tunick specializes is getting large numbers of naked people together, arranging them, and taking pictures.  Most of them seem more polished than raw, but this one, featured at BoingBoing, seems to reveal bodies in some of their variety and similarity simultaneously.  It’s worth a good long look at each body; each is a precious point of push back against mass media’s representation of the female form.

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 North Atlantic Books Communities.

Edward Said famously argued that the West uses the East as an inverted mirror, imagining them to be everything the West is not.  In a book titled Orientalism, he showed us how this perceived binary separating the Semitic East and the Christian West has traditionally manifested itself in art through romanticized scenes of Eastern cultures presented as alien, exotic, and often dangerous.

European painters of the 19^th century turned to backdrops of harems and baths to invoke an atmosphere of non-European hedonism and tantalizing intrigue. Ingre’s 1814 Grande Odalisque , for example, depicts a concubine languidly lounging about, lightly dusting herself with feathers as she peers over her shoulder at the viewer with absent eyes. The notions of hedonistic and indulgent sex are bolstered by hints to opium-induced pleasure offered by the pipe in the bottom right corner. Images like this prompted viewers to imagine the Middle East as a distant region of sex, inebriants, and exciting exotic experiences.

Orientalism continues to inflect popular culture, but because we see ourselves differently now, we see them differently as well.  The rise of Islamic fundamentalism in the East, and the corollary Islamophobia of the West has shifted the focus to violence coupled with religious fervor. Take for example an image from a February New York Times article entitled “Afghan Official Says Women’s Shelters are Corrupt.”

The story is about the Afghan government’s desire to take over all Western-established shelters which they claim are “more concerned with the budget than the women.” It’s an article about bettering women’s support, community and safe havens, an act many Westerners would deem progressive in a way they wouldn’t usually view the region. However, the photo that was chosen for this article offers all the classic stereotypes held about the Middle East by depicting entirely veiled women who are shut indoors surrounded only by symbols of religion. The viewer sees two women, in both a hijab and niqab, separated onto two beds with looks of utter despondency; one looks down at her hands while the other stares off into the space ahead of her. In the center of the room is a young girl, blurred by the long exposure of the camera which attempted to capture her in the act of seemingly fervent prayer. Behind the praying young woman is an even younger girl sitting on a bed with a baby on her lap. Rather than depicting the officials who are rallying for female empowerment and institutional improvement, the photo that was chosen paints an image of silenced religious females.

Often imagery is more powerful and memorable than words and in some cases the photographs chosen to accompany the news are less than representational of the story at hand. This instance is typical of the Western media’s predilection for reinforcing Western notions about the East through imagery, instead of finding common ground between two regions that many believe are naturally separated by ideology. Thus orientalism lives on, transformed from its roots but maintaining its destructive stereotypes.

Adam Schwartz is an undergraduate at University of California, Berkeley entering his final year in the Media Studies program. He is currently preparing to write his thesis analyzing the gender and racial implications of the American Apparel advertising campaigns. When he isn’t in school he can be found biking along the beautiful California coast or working for the Berkeley Student Cooperative.

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.

This weekend I went to the Annenberg Space for Photography in Los Angeles to see the Beauty CULTure exhibit. The description of the show suggested a critical perspective on beauty:

Through different lenses focused on the body beautiful, the exhibition examines both traditional and unconventional definitions of beauty, challenging stereotypes of gender, race and age. It explores the links between beauty and violence, glamour and sexuality and the cost (in its multiple meanings) of beauty.

The exhibit, to be fair, included a 30-minute documentary that touched on several critiques: the socialization of children, the pressure felt by adult women, the role of capitalism, and sizism and racism in the industry (featuring Lauren Greenfield’s work on girl culture and weight loss camps and Susan Anderson on child pageants).

But the actual photographs in the exhibit overwhelmingly affirmed instead of challenged our beauty culture.  While the four images above, highlighted at the website, include an Asian woman, an older woman, and a picture of a child beauty pageant contestant designed to make us question how we raise children, the actual photographs were mostly conventionally-attractive, white, thin professional models glamorously outfitted, posed, and lit.  These photographs outnumbered those that included women of color, older women, “plus-size” women, and critical images (e.g., photos of cosmetic surgeries) by something like 10 to 1.  I didn’t leave feeling like I’d gained some perspective on the crushing pressure to be “perfect”; I left feeling like I’d flipped through a Cosmopolitan, awash in idealized images of female beauty, and more consciously aware of my deficiencies than when I arrived.

I say, skip it.

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.

In the contemporary Western world, naked and near-naked bodies are revealed everywhere.  But most of the bodies we see are those of models and actors, carefully cultivated, chosen, and digitally altered to look a particular way.  Except, artist Clarity Haynes notes, the “before” pictures in advertisements for diet plans and cosmetic surgeries.  She writes:

“Before” pictures pop up constantly on our computers and in magazines, as part of the daily landscape of imagery. These “before” pictures, meant to shock and scare, show bodies that are presented as needing urgent correction and control, through weight loss or plastic surgery.

In an effort to reclaim these “before” bodies, Haynes has lovingly painted a range of female bodies.  The Breast Portrait Project, she continues:

…is about finding dignity and beauty in the physical characteristics of the body that our popular culture often ridicules and heaps with shame, and in the process allowing the models who participate to feel pride in their particular selves — and by extension, the viewers of the work as well, regardless of their gender.

Visit Hayne’s gallery.  And, for more normalizing of normal bodies, see these selections of breasts,  bellies, and vulvas.

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.