gender

Thanks Kristyn G!

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.

Marie-Claire has been seeing these movie posters for Valentine’s Day all over Toronto and decided to send them in. She writes:

…Hollywood manages to keep a firm grip on the roles men and women play in society (working vs being worshiped), how they spend their time (being social, doing active/productive thing vs passive consumption and adorning themselves), and how they feel about Valentine’s Day (what day is it? The best day of the year!)

“Cards.  Candy.  Flowers.  Jewelry.  Dinner.  …What a day.”

“Work.  Business lunch.  Trainer.  Happy Hour.  Ballgame.  …What day is it again?”

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.

Victoria A. sent along this ad for Cafe Press:

Okay, okay, I know it’s just Cafe Press and anyone can make anything on Cafe Press and, heck, these undies probably come in both variations… but even so!

I mean really! Can we just think a second before we make an ad that includes a pair of men’s underwear that say “Loved by…” and a pair of women’s that say “Property of…”? I mean, can we just NOT do that when women actually are the legal property of men in some places and were at one point in history in many?

It’s not a joke. Women who, by virtue of being owned by someone, could not own property themselves; could not vote or enter into contracts; women whose children were taken away if they separated; who, when raped, deserved no compensation because she belonged to a man who, not incidentally, DID deserve compensation because his property had been tarnished. Can we, like, just not make this ad quite this way? Please?

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 this past Christmas my niece received The Three Musketeers “Barbie” and “Ken.” The series really pushes the idea that girls and women can be physical dynamos… and yet.  I photo’d their boxes because of the thought bubble in the corner of each.

The boxes:

Barbie’s thought: “This riding outfit is the cutest!”

Ken’s thought: “I want to be an inventor!”

I’m just sayin’, is all.  We’re not making this stuff up.

Thanks to my sister, Holly, for noticing and pushing the boxes into my hands, saying “you will love this!”  Indeed.

NEW (Mar. ’10)! Katie P. found these boy and girl onesies for sale.  The boy version reads “I’m Super” and the girl version… “Super Cute”:

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.

A few weeks ago I snapped this photo of a set of Surprise Newborn Twins Cabbage Patch Kids. The “surprise” is that you don’t know if the dolls are girls or boys; they come with yellow and purple accessories instead of blue or pink and aren’t noticeably marked as male or female:

You find out the sex when you open the birth certificates and see their diapers–blue for a boy, pink for a girl, of course. I looked at a lot of websites selling them, and they all say something along the lines of “You won’t know if it’s a boy or a girl until you see the diaper.” (Also, apparently this is the “Hispanic” version.) I couldn’t find any photos of the babies in their diapers or “surprise outfits.”

I think this is a pretty great example of how we socially construct gender to emphasize differences between men and women. Like most babies, these dolls aren’t identifiably male or female…until we provide signals to differentiate them by buying the appropriately-colored clothing, putting bows in little girls’ hair, decorating their rooms with butterflies or race cars, and on and on and on. People treat kids differently depending on these gender signs, and they expect (and justify) different behaviors based on them.

And we do this to, essentially, make ourselves feel more comfortable; since we believe a person’s sex is so important to know, even little babies need to be clearly identifiable. And as this toy helps illustrate, this is a social process that accentuates (or even creates) differences in a way that makes the similarities between boys and girls, men and women, largely invisible.

See also: a wig to make your infant look more feminine.

These days, if you live in the West, thinking about Asia–whether it be Chinese labor, Japanese inventions, Indian demographics, or Korean politics–is taken-for-granted as part of knowing about the world.  During the colonial era, however, when “mass media” was largely limited to print, Americans and Europeans experienced being more-or-less newly introduced to different cultures.  This spurred an entire industry in which “Africa,” “the Orient,” and the “Middle East” were presented to curious Westerners.  These presentations, more often than not, were objectifying.  Westerners were able to enjoy reveling in the seemingly bizarre and unfamiliar people and customs of these Other places (with a capital “O”), as if Other kinds of people were new species of animals over which to fawn.  This accumulation of documents with which the average Westerner could try to understand their “foreign” counterparts were produced not only by travel writers, but anthropologists, artists, imperial employees, novelists, and others.

Edward Said, in his powerfully influential book, Orientalism, first articulated the way that efforts of these actors coalesced into a mythology about “the Orient.”  A mythology in which the East and the West were set in opposition and the East was used by the West to define its own, superior identity.

Katrin sent in one example of this traffic in Orientalism.  It’s a postcard from the early 1900s that depicts a “Burmese Beauty.”  It was painted by Robert Talbot Kelly and originally published in his book, Burma (1905).  The caption reads:

A Burmese Beauty. The Burmese women are generally attractive, much more so than the men, and present a pretty picture as they walk about attired in their gaily coloured skirts and shaded by their quaint umbrellas. All the ladies smoke in Burma, large cigars being the favourite ‘weed.’

Here, the people themselves are seen as objects for a (distant) touristic gaze, kind of like the generic mostly-naked-woman-in-tropical-paradise postcard that we still see today.  More examples of colonial era Orientalist postcards depicting Burma (from Images of Asia):

1908:

1910:

1905:
1910:

1905:

1912:

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.

Katrin sent along one ad from a campaign by Louis Vuitton.  The campaign centers around the fantasy that young, beautiful women with porcelain (white) skin are hand-crafting their products.  A two-page spread:Text:

The Young Woman and the Tiny Folds.

In everything from Louis Vuitton, there are elements that cannot be fully explained.  What secret little gestures do our craftsmen discreetly pass on?  How do we blend innate skill and inherent prowess?  Or how can five tiny folds lengthen the life of a wallet?  Let’s allow these mysteries to hang in the air.  Time will provide the answers.

Another example is titled “The Seamstress With Linen Thread and Beeswax.”

But, of course, “Hardly any Vuitton bags or wallets are handmade.”  Or so says Carol Matlack at Business Week.  She continues:

While reporting an article on Vuitton in 2004, I visited one of its factories in the village of Ducey near Mont St. Michel. There I saw rows of workers seated at sewing machines, stitching together machine-cut pieces of canvas and leather. The partially finished bags were rolled from one workstation to the next on metal carts.

It was no sweatshop. The building was modern and airy, with windows overlooking the Normandy countryside. But the work being done there didn’t resemble in any way the painstaking handiwork shown in Vuitton’s ads. Indeed, the factory managers – who had been recruited from companies making such things as mobile phones and yogurt containers — talked proudly about the strides they had made in automating every step of the process. Just about the only Vuitton products still made by hand, they told me, were custom-made items produced at its historic atelier in the Paris suburb of Asnières.

UPDATE (May ’10)! Katrin and Anjan G. messaged us to let us know that the U.K. Advertising Standards Agency has decided that these ads violate truth in advertising.  They’ve been disallowed.

For other examples of marketing that mythologizes its manufacturing processes, see these posts on Goldfish crackers (mommies and daddies make them!) and Ecko Jeans (sweatshops are full of hot women in bikinis!).

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.

Lynn S. sent us a link to a Carnegie Mellon story about a new robotic “nurse” for the elderly.  Her name is “Pearl.”

It should go without saying that robots do not need to be gendered male or female and that, in this case, gendering the robot female reproduces a wasp’s nest of stereotypes about who is responsible for caring for others.

I say it should go without saying but, in fact, it mostly does, in the most bizarre way.  The article is about trying to maximize Pearl’s effectiveness as a helper by testing various configurations of appearance, mannerisms, expressions, etc.  But they never address why she is female.  From the article:

To that end, a multidisciplinary team of roboticists, social scientists and interaction designers has drawn on theories of emotion from cognitive science and the principles of aesthetics to explore what happens when human characteristics are added—or taken away—from Pearl’s “persona.”
…
Appearance has a strong impact on a person’s expectations. Researchers want to learn whether facial characteristics will factor into the emotional reaction of people who interact with her. Pearl’s configurable head, the size and spacing of her eyes and the shape of her lips are all important elements in projecting a “persona.”

In the caption to this image, they mention the importance of her “configurable head” for her “persona,” but her gender remains conspicuously unexamined.

Only once in the entire article do they mention gender.  They say that they are “…studying people’s responses to a robot’s perceived gender by changing Pearl’s lips and voice.”  But they named her Pearl, so they seem to have rushed to a conclusion there.  It’s as if, despite the incredible range of concerns and experimentation, scientists are not seriously questioning her sex.

And I think they should!  Not only because it’s good science, and not only to avoid sexist assumptions, but because the robot is being designed for senior citizens, who are disproportionately women, most of whom have spent a lifetime caring for children and husbands; I’d bet they’d find a nursebot named Peter to be quite a treat!

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.