culture

Television distorts, mocks and marginalizes fat people. Fat characters are reduced to caricatures whose stories and identities aren’t developed and don’t matter. In one study by Tzoutzou et al., all 36 compliments about appearance given to women were for thin women. Not one positive message was included for a woman of an average or overweight body type. For men, the same pattern was found: only one overweight character received a positive message. 

These TV shows tell the audience that external beauty only resides in thinness and excludes anyone who deviates from this definition of beauty. Viewers can internalize this thin ideal, which in turn can make it difficult for the audience to feel good about themselves, especially if their body doesn’t fit this body standard. Seeing the treatment of fat people on TV can affect how viewers think about their own bodies, especially if their body type doesn’t fit the thin ideal.

Bigger Bodies, Smaller Roles

Not only is the representation of fat people overwhelmingly negative, but fat bodies are underrepresented on TV shows.

This pattern of dehumanizing fat people continues when they don’t get the chance to develop their characters. They are often represented as a comedy sidekick or as villains.

In comedy, we often don’t laugh with fat women, but at them. Overweight women are about twice as likely to be the reason for a joke than thinner women. They also have smaller roles, less romantic relationships, and are in “fewer positive interactions than thin characters”.

Media often represents fat characters as villains as well. One study by Himes and Thompson “found that obesity was equated with negative traits (evil, unattractive, unfriendly, cruel) in 64% of the most popular children’s videos”. Examples of this can be seen in famous children’s movies with characters such as Ursula from The Little Mermaid or The Queen of Heartsfrom Alice In Wonderland. These villains help to draw the connecting line between fat and negative qualities Fat characters become less human than other characters who have full stories built around them. Makers of TV don’t just ignore fatness, they demonize it.

Effects on the Audience

The negative portrayal of fat people in TV shows can lead audiences to internalize negative portrayals of being overweight. This internalization can happen quickly: a study by Fouts and Burggraf found that only 30 minutes of watching TV can affect how a young woman views her body which can result in various external struggles. 

In the study by Tzoutzou et al., girls agreed that the media influenced their desire to be thin and fit the beauty standard. This can cause frequent dieting because many eating problems are due to unrealistic body standards, an image that mass media often transmits.

Not only can these misrepresentations of fat people lead to low self-esteem, but it can lead viewers to believe that they will be treated in the sexist ways that they see on TV if they don’t fit the body norm to avoid this.

All of these aspects have the potential to make a female viewer feel worse about themselves through their appearance and perceived reactions from other people rooted in fictional and distorted depictions on TV.

TV Should be Fun for Everyone

TV is a space that is meant to be enjoyed. But viewers can’t sit back and relax with TV if they feel like their body is being judged by the shows that they put on. All bodies should feel like they have a space within TV shows. All bodies deserve to be seen by a wide audience.

Tori Lieberman is a rising Sophomore at Hamilton college planning on studying Creative Writing and Sociology. You can find examples of her journalism here.

It is good to be a Korean today because the world is fascinated with Koreanness, from K-pop to K-dramas, K-movies, K-food, K-fashion, and K-beauty. It is no exaggeration to say that Korean culture has become synonymous with being cool and being hip. Things were quite different, however, not too long ago.

It was around 2018 at a local supermarket in Kansas when I realized that K-culture was becoming the mainstream in the U.S. I uncovered a stack of gochujang, Korean red chili pepper paste, on the shelf. This was way before the success of the movie Parasite, which won the Best Picture Oscar in 2020, or 2021 Netflix’s Squid Game, which became Netflix’s biggest debut hit by reaching 111 million viewers. Of course, some Korean cuisine like kimchi, bibimbap, bulgogi, and kalbi were already in American’s food lexicon. However, I did not expect to see a pile of gochujang boxes at a local grocery store.

As I stood in front of this stack of red containers, I felt happy and crying at the same time. I was elated that I found my food at an American supermarket, and I was sad that it took more than two decades for me to find my food at an American supermarket. It was an indicator of acceptance and normality. It seemed to be telling me that the flavor of gochujang is not either exotic or foreign any more.

I thought, this must be the same feeling for those who came to the U.S. before me when they found sesame oil at local American supermarkets around the 2000s. When sesame oil was foreign and exotic, these immigrants had to travel to Asian markets in big cities for five to seven hours. I used to travel an hour and a half just to buy gochujang in Kansas City.

Gochujang is a key ingredient in cooking Korean food, and it can be very versatile. It is used to make various stew and soup, or can be mixed with rice. In the 1990s, gochujang was a must-item for young Korean backpackers for traveling Europe. Many young students carried gochujang to Europe so they could eat it with breads. I am sure that this was a way to prevent craving for a taste of home while traveling. As a matter of fact, that was how I survived my two-month backpacking back in 1995. It is also a cultural touchstone. In the 2021 movie Minari, grandmother Soon-ja (played by Youn Yuh-Jung) travels to the U.S. to see her daughter. She brings many Korean food items including chili powder, which can be used to make gochujang. In the 1980s, finding gochujang in a small town was virtually impossible in the U.S.

Like sesame oil, the flavor of gochujang has not changed over the years. It is the people who have changed. Americans do not see gochujang foreign or exotic taste anymore. This is consistent with other immigrant food trends like pizza, kimchi, and hummus. The other day I had a brief talk with a young lady, who was holding a container of gochujang at a local store. She said, “I love gochujang. I use gochujang a lot. And I even add gochujang to my Shin-Ramen.” It was a refreshing moment to realize how far gochujang has come.

At the same time, the wide popularity of K-culture has not translated into reduced racism toward Asian Americans. A recent report found that there is a sharp rise in racism and harassment toward Asian Americans, especially Asian women. For example, there were over 9,000 incident reports between March 2020 and June 2021. This bleak reality led a movement like #stopAAPIhate and #stopAsianhate during the Covid-19 pandemic and eventually pushed President Biden sign a bipartisan legislation to stop the hatred and the bias against Asian Americans in 2021. I completed this post during the one-year anniversary of the Atlanta Spa Shooting.

In 2018, whenever I visited the supermarket, I bought a couple of gochujang even though I did not need them. I was so desperate to keep them on the shelf, thinking that if they were not popular they might not return to the store again. Today, I see even more Korean foods like mandu (Korean dumpling), Korean fried chicken, and a wide range of Korean ramen at American supermarkets. Now I notice that gochujang is a staple – there are even different varieties on the shelf. I hope that the U.S. is more willing to embrace people like me in the way they have welcomed my food. I am still crying today because we still encounter racism and bias.

Dr. Sangyoub Park is an associate professor of sociology at Washburn University, teaching Food & Culture, K-Pop & Beyond, Japan & East Asia, Social Class in the U.S., and The Family.

One of the goals of this blog is to help get sociology to the public by offering short, interesting comments on what our discipline looks like out in the world.

We live sociology every day, because it is the science of relationships among people and groups. But because the name of our discipline is kind of a buzzword itself, I often find excellent examples of books in the nonfiction world that are deeply sociological, even if that isn’t how their authors or publishers would describe them.

Last year, I had the good fortune to help a friend as he was working on one of these books. Now that the release date is coming up, I want to tell our readers about the project because I think it is an excellent example of what happens when ideas from our discipline make it out into the “real” world beyond academia. In fact, the book is about breaking down that idea of the “real world” itself. It is called IRL: Finding realness, meaning, and belonging in our digital lives, by Chris Stedman.

In IRL, Chris tackles big questions about what it means to be authentic in a world where so much of our social interaction is now taking place online. The book goes to deep places, but it doesn’t burden the reader with an overly-serious tone. Instead, Chris brings a lightness by blending memoir, interviews, and social science, all arranged in vignettes so that reading feels like scrolling through a carefully curated Instagram feed.

What makes this book stand out to me is that Chris really brings the sociology here. In the pages of IRL I spotted Zeynep Tufekci’s Twitter and Tear Gas, Mario Small’s Someone to Talk To, Nathan Jurgenson’s work on digital dualism, Jacqui Frost’s work on navigating uncertainty, Paul McClure on technology and religion, and a nod to some work with yours truly about nonreligious folks. To see Chris citing so many sociologists, among the other essayists and philosophers that inform his work, really gives you a sense of the intellectual grounding here and what it looks like to put our field’s ideas into practice.

Above all, I think the book is worth your time because it is a glowing example of what it means to think relationally about our own lives and the lives of others. That makes Chris’ writing a model for the kind of reflections many of us have in mind when we assign personal essays to our students in Sociology 101—not because it is basic, but because it is willing to deeply consider how we navigate our relationships today and how those relationships shape us, in turn.

Evan Stewart is an assistant professor of sociology at University of Massachusetts Boston. You can follow his work at his website, on Twitter, or on BlueSky.

It is a strange sight to watch politicians working to go viral. Check out this video from the political nonprofit ACRONYM, where Alexis Magnan-Callaway — the Digital Mobilization Director of Kirsten Gillibrand’s presidential campaign — talks us through some key moments on social media. 

Social media content has changed the rules of the game for getting attention in the political world. An entire industry has sprung up around going viral professionally, and politicians are putting these new rules to use for everything from promoting the Affordable Care Act to breaking Twitter’s use policy. 

In a new paper out at Sociological Theory with Doug Hartmann, I (Evan) argue that part of the reason this is happening is due to new structural transformations in the public sphere. Recent changes in communication technology have created a situation where the social fields for media, politics, academia, and the economy are now much closer together. It is much easier for people who are skilled in any one of these fields to get more public attention by mixing up norms and behaviors from the other three. Thomas Medvetz called people who do this in the policy world “jugglers,” and we argue that many more people have started juggling as well. 

Arm-wrestling a constituent is a long way from the Nixon-Kennedy debates, but there are institutional reasons why this shouldn’t surprise us. Juggling social capital from many fields means that social changes start to accelerate, as people can suddenly be much more successful by breaking the norms in their home fields. Politicians can get electoral gains by going viral, podcasts take off by talking to academics, and ex-policy wonks suddenly land coveted academic positions.

Another good example of this new structural transformation in action is Ziad Ahmed, a Yale undergraduate, business leader, and activist. At the core of his public persona is an interesting mix of both norm-breaking behavior and carefully curated status markers for many different social fields. 

In 2017, Ahmed was accepted to Yale after writing “#BlackLivesMatter” 100 times; this was contemporaneously reported by outlets such as NBC News, CNN, Time, The Washington Post, Business Insider, HuffPost, and Mashable. 

Since then, Ahmed has cultivated a long biography featuring many different meaningful status markers: his educational institution; work as the CEO of a consulting firm; founding of a diversity and inclusion organization; a Forbes “30 Under 30” recognition; Ted Talks; and more. The combination of these symbols paints a complex picture of an elite student, activist, business leader, and everyday person on social media. 

Critics have called this mixture “a super-engineered avatar of corporate progressivism that would make even Mayor Pete blush.” We would say that, for better or worse, this is a new way of doing activism and advocacy that comes out of different institutional conditions in the public sphere. As different media, political, and academic fields move closer together, activists like Ahmed and viral moments like those in the Gillibrand campaign show how a much more complicated set of social institutions and practices are shaping the way we wield public influence today.

Bob Rice is a PhD student in sociology at UMass Boston. They’re interested in perceptions of authority, social movements, culture, stratification, mental health, and digital methods. 

Evan Stewart is an assistant professor of sociology at University of Massachusetts Boston. You can follow his work at his website, on Twitter, or on BlueSky.

For a long time, political talk at the “moderate middle” has focused on a common theme that goes something like this: 

There is too much political polarization and conflict. It’s tearing us apart. People aren’t treating each other with compassion. We need to come together, set aside our differences, and really listen to each other.

I have heard countless versions of this argument in my personal life and in public forums. It is hard to disagree with them at first. Who can be against seeking common ground?

But as a political sociologist, I am also skeptical of this argument because we have good research showing how it keeps people and organizations from working through important disagreements. When we try to avoid conflict above all, we often end up avoiding politics altogether. It is easy to confuse common ground with occupied territory — social spaces where legitimate problems and grievances are ignored in the name of some kind of pleasant consensus. 

A really powerful sociological image popped up in my Twitter feed that makes the point beautifully. We actually did find some common ground this week through a trend that united the country across red states and blue states:

It is tempting to focus on protests as a story about conflict alone, and conflict certainly is there. But it is also important to realize that this week’s protests represent a historic level of social consensus. The science of cooperation and social movements reminds us that getting collective action started is hard. And yet, across the country, we see people not only stepping up, but self-organizing groups to handle everything from communication to community safety and cleanup. In this way, the protests also represent a remarkable amount of agreement that the current state of policing in this country is simply neither just nor tenable. 

I was struck by this image because I don’t think nationwide protests are the kind of thing people have in mind when they call for everyone to come together, but right now protesting itself seems like one of the most unifying trends we’ve got. That’s the funny thing about social cohesion and cultural consensus. It is very easy to call for setting aside our differences and working together when you assume everyone will be rallying around your particular way of life. But social cohesion is a group process, one that emerges out of many different interactions, and so none of us ever have that much control over when and where it actually happens.

Evan Stewart is an assistant professor of sociology at University of Massachusetts Boston. You can follow his work at his website, on Twitter, or on BlueSky.

Because everything is currently terrible, I binge-watched Love is Blind. In case you are planning to do the same, this is a spoiler-free post.

You probably know the premise: contestants in this romantic reality romp go on speed dates in little pods. They can’t see their conversation partners, and at the end of the dates they decide whether to get engaged before seeing each other. The question is whether love can flourish when we cast aside our assumptions about appearances, including race, wealth, and sexuality.¹ It is a mess. I couldn’t look away.

What struck me most about the show isn’t actually what unfolded, but instead how it is based on an interesting assumption about the way biases work: if you can’t see anything to make a snap judgment, you have to be genuine and objective, right? This reminded me of how people use the term “colorblind” to signal that they don’t feel racial bias. Scholars are critical of this colorblindness because it suggests that ignoring social differences is the same as reducing biases against those differences.

Does limited information actually make us less likely to make snap judgements? Social science findings are a pretty mixed bag. 

On the one hand, taking information away in some cases has been shown to give people a fair shot. One big example is the “ban the box” movement. This policy reform effort works to remove the initial reporting of felony convictions on applications, based on the fact that people with criminal records often face high rates of discrimination when they try to get jobs or go to school. 

On the other hand, “blindness” doesn’t necessarily reduce bias. Our brains are pattern-making machines ready to fill in any gaps with our own best guesses. One of the most interesting findings on this is that people who are blind still understand race in visual terms. Experimental studies show that people can “smell” social class, matching perfume scents alone to our assumptions about taste and wealth. Jumping to conclusions is exactly what the mind does when you give it an incomplete picture, and you can see this lead to some particularly cringe-worthy moments early in the show.

Implicit biases are implicit for a reason: they happen whether or not you are trying to stop them. The important part is to recognize them and consciously work to set them aside, rather than thinking they can be cast out by cutting off your information or attention. Again, avoiding spoilers, I think the most successful couples on the show were self-aware enough to know how much work they would have to put in after leaving the pods. For the couples who thought the experiment made this “meant to be”—that their relationship was somehow special, pre-ordained, or protected by the process—well, we got our fair share of drama.

¹ They kept calling the show an “experiment.” The scientist talked about “testing hypotheses.” This irked me, because you know IRB would absolutely freak out if one of us tried to propose this as a study.

Evan Stewart is an assistant professor of sociology at University of Massachusetts Boston. You can follow his work at his website, on Twitter, or on BlueSky.

Who’s afraid of a global pandemic? We all are, at the
moment. But like so many other forms of fear, concern about medical issues is
much more acute for people in precarious and vulnerable social positions. The
privileged—particularly those who are white and upper class—can more afford not
to be preoccupied with health and medical concerns, including pandemics.

In our new book Fear Itself, we found consistent support for updating our classic theories about vulnerability. Classic theories often understand vulnerability in physical terms. But risk and vulnerability are also social, rather than primarily physical, and we found consistent evidence that members of disadvantaged status groups—particularly women, racial and ethnic minorities, and those with lower levels of social class—had higher levels of fear across many domains.

Using pooled data from six waves (2014–2019) of Chapman Survey of American Fears (CSAF), we examined the sociological patterns of fears about disease and health. We looked at fear about four specific issues: global pandemics, fears of becoming seriously ill, and fears about people you love becoming seriously ill or dying.     

The racial and ethnic disparities across these four outcomes
are striking, with white Americans being significantly less likely to report
being “very afraid” of pandemics and medical issues involving themselves or
their families. Hispanic Americans reported the greatest concern about all four
issues, likely a reflection of lower rates of health care insurance and access
among Latino/a communities and individuals.

Likewise, we find clear disparities in fears about health and pandemics across different levels of education and family income. Again, the mechanisms are clear, with vast disparities in health care access in the United States, as well as the well-known social determinants of disease both playing a role.

While these patterns are not necessarily surprising, they are nonetheless disconcerting, for a number of reasons. First, in terms of the epidemiology of the Coronavirus pandemic, it is the disempowered who will disproportionately bear the brunt of the negative health effects, and who will be least equipped with the resources to adequately respond if and when they get sick. Second, when preventative public health measures such as quarantines are put in place, it is people in the working and lower classes who can least afford to take time off of work or keep their children home from school in order to comply with public health procedures.

Not only does fear disproportionately prey upon people in less powerful social positions, it also exacerbates and deepens inequality. Higher levels of fear and anxiety are strongly and significantly related to harmful health outcomes, even after accounting for the social inequalities that structure who is afraid in the first place. In Fear Itself we created an omnibus fear metric we called the “Sum of All Fears” that combined levels of fear across a wide range of domains, including but not limited to health, crime, environmental degradation, and natural disasters. Scores on this global, summary fear metric once again produced strong support for social vulnerability theory; but levels of fear were also strongly connected to steep declines in quality of life across a range of domains, including social, personal, and financial well-being.

Taken together, fear is both a reflection of and a source of social inequality. This is true for the current global Coronavirus pandemic and the accompanying concerns, but it will also be the case long after the pandemic has passed. Our hope is that sociologists, social psychologists, and public health officials begin to consider how fear factors into and deepens social inequality.

Joseph O. Baker is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at East Tennessee State University and a senior research associate for the Association of Religion Data Archives.

Ann Gordon is Associate Professor of Political Science and Director of the Ludie and David C. Henley Social Science Research Laboratory, Chapman University.

L. Edward Day is Associate Professor and Chair of the Sociology Department at Chapman University.

Christopher D. Bader is Professor of Sociology at Chapman University and affiliated with the Institute for Religion, Economics and Culture (IRES). He is Associate Director of the Association of Religion Data Archives (www.theARDA.com) and principal investigator on the Chapman University Survey of American Fears.

I just wrapped up my political sociology class for the semester. We spent a lot of time talking about conflict and polarization, reading research on why people avoid politics, the spread of political outrage, and why exactly liberals drink lattes. When we become polarized, small choices in culture and consumption—even just a cup of coffee—can become signals for political identities. 

After the liberals and lattes piece, one of my students wrote a reflection memo and mentioned a previous instructor telling them which brand of coffee to drink if they wanted to support a certain political party. This caught my attention, because (at least in the student’s recollection) the instructor was completely wrong. This led to a great discussion about corporate political donations, especially how frequent contributions often go bipartisan.

But where does your money go when you buy your morning coffee? Thanks to open-access data on political contributions, we can look at the partisan lean of the top four largest coffee chains in the United States.

Starbucks’ swing to the left is notable here, as is the rightward spike in Dunkin’s donations in the 2014 midterms. While these patterns tend to follow the standard corporate image for each, it is important to remember that even chains that lean one way still mix their donations. In midterm years like 2012 and 2014, about 20% of Starbucks’ donations went to Republicans.

One side effect of political polarization is that corporate politics don’t always follow cultural codes. For another good recent example of this, see Chick-fil-A reconsidering its donation policies.

Evan Stewart is an assistant professor of sociology at University of Massachusetts Boston. You can follow his work at his website, on Twitter, or on BlueSky.