discourse/language

Christine sent us a link to some fabulous photos coming out of Toronto. In January a member of the Toronto Police force, Const. Michael Sanguinetti, suggested to students at York University that “women should avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimized” (source).  In response, SlutWalk was born.  The SlutWalk, which strode just yesterday, was a march designed to draw attention to the way in which the term “slut” is used to stigmatize and invalidate women.

As Leora Tanenbaum argues in Slut! Growing Up Female with a Bad Reputation, the term is used to control all women, not just women who want to have sex, because it can be applied to girls and women regardless of their sexual activity (as any virgin with a slut reputation can tell you).  Young girls grow up using, and fearing, the slut label.  And that label continues to be used against them as adults, even when it comes to sexual assault, as the police officer’s comment makes clear.

In an effort to bring attention to word and  its use as a mechanism of control girls, women and men of all sexual activity levels came together on Sunday, re-claiming and diffusing the “slut” label.

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.

Men and women are told, in a myriad of daily ways, that being masculine is good and feminine bad. It sneaks into our daily language in ways that are so common that we fail to even see it anymore. For example, a recent New York Times article about Google’s effort to determine what makes managers successful featured a list, written by Google, of what makes a good boss.

I noticed that they added The New York Times added the phrase “Don’t be a sissy” to “Good Behavior” #4.  It reads “Don’t be a sissy: Be productive and results-oriented.”   It’s the only Good Behavior that includes a derisive slur. And while I’m accustomed to seeing terms like “sissy” thrown around as insults, it occurred to me that the very next rule #5, “Be a good communicator and listen to your team,” could easily have been prefaced with “Don’t be a man.”

But being a “sissy” (that is, feminine) is something that we can all agree is bad, while being a man is good.  So, even when the rules suggest that men take on feminized traits, they’re unlikely to adorn the suggestion with a denigration of masculinity.

Via Teppo at OrgTheory.

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.

Students of mine who are unversed in race politics frequently use the phrase “colored people.” They hear me use the phrase “people of color” and assume that the phrases are equivalent. This is a truly reasonable assumption, even as people familiar with race-based struggle know for sure that “colored” is an offensive term and “people of color” is typically not considered so.

Occasionally a student asks me what the difference is and, to be frank, I’m not quite sure. I’ve simply absorbed the rules of talking-about-race and have a good idea of how to do so in ways that reflect grass roots language claims.

Accordingly, I was really excited to see a clip of famed activist Loretta Ross at Racialicious explaining the history of the phrase “women of color,” and later “people of color.” She explains that, while “colored people” was a phrase used to delegitimate black- and brown-skinned people, “people of color” was coined by activists hoping to bring all non-white people together into a coalition against racism.

(Thanks to decius for placing a transcript in the comments. I’ve pasted it in after the jump.)

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Via Bruce Jacobs, Lesley Hazleton describes her experience of reading the Koran, for real, for the first time:

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 early 20th century America, eugenics was promoted as a new way to scientifically shape the human race. The idea was to change the human population for the better through selective breeding and sterilization. As you can imagine, this led to serious abuses. People of color, the poor, and those deemed otherwise unfit for reproduction were disproportionately targeted, and usually the sterilization was accomplished by targeting women’s bodies in particular.

One interesting facet of the effort to promote eugenics is the language used, or the framing of the issue. Indeed, just last week I introduced my students to the notion of “Birthright.”  The term birthright suggested that all children have the right to be born into a sound mind and body.  Why was it important to sterilize individuals deemed morally, culturally, or biologically inferior?  Why, we must do it for the children, of course!

I was reminded of the idea of children having such a birthright by a vintage ad (posted at, predictably, Vintage Ads).  The ad is for a school designed to improve the future of the human race by improving parenting.  The school would, therefore, teach parents how to engage in civilized “intelligent” “parenthood.”  The idea that such parenting can be taught points to the way that eugenics evolved from a biological to a cultural basis.  And in several places you see the term “birthright” (excerpted below).

Excerpts:

For a time, pro-sterilization laws were very popular.  The U.S. map below, for example, shows which states had pro-sterilization laws in 1935 (striped) and states with laws pending (black). As you can see, most of the United States was on board at this time.  Later, condemnation of the practices in Nazi Germany would take the blush off of the eugenics rose.

(source)

For a wonderful book on the history of eugenics, read Wendy Kline’s Building a Better Race: Gender, Sexuality, and Eugenics from the Turn of the Century to the Baby Boom.

For more on eugenics and sterilization, see our post with additional pro-eugenics propaganda and two contemporary examples of coercive sterilization campaigns by your health insurance carrier and politician who’ll pay the “unfit” to get tied.

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.

(source)

Many of you have probably seen the recent anti-Asian rant released by UCLA student Alexandra Wallace. In it, she says that “hordes” of Asians who are admitted to UCLA inappropriately bring their parents along and obnoxiously speak foreign languages in the library (“Oooooooh! Ching chong, ling long, ting tong!? Ooooooh!”). And she compares them to herself, the “polite, nice, American girl that my momma raised me to be.”

Okay so yes, this is what racism looks like. It’s also what sexism looks like. People who objected to Wallace’s video (as they should), often did so with sexist language, including these examples collected by Caroline Heldman for Ms. magazine:

• “I bet her grades match her cup size.”
• “i have big tits and gave the dean a blowjob to get into UCLA is all I hear.”
• “EXCUSE ME WHILE I WHIP MY DICK OUT AND JERK IT TO THOSE TITS.”

But the most interesting thing I’ve heard about Wallace’s video and the response came from What Tami Said.  Tami suggested that all the shock and outrage regarding Wallace’s racism was naive, at best, and delusional, at worst.  Expressing shock, she said, may be a way to spice up a headline.  Or, it might be reflective of a belief among some that this sort of racism doesn’t exist anymore.  Or, she speculates, expressing shock may be a way for people to distance themselves from people like Wallace, a way for them to advertise the notion that they aren’t racist.

Tami’s insight is that the language of shock deserves analysis in itself.  What does it mean that we’re expressing shock when events like this on college campuses are rather routine (e.g., see “Conquistabros and Navajos,” “Compton Cookouts,” and other race-mocking parties).

In any case, she doesn’t think it’s helpful:

I get that few understand “isms” like marginalized people… But, for God’s sake pay attention! You needn’t be victim to oppression to know it exists. I submit that if you are truly shocked in the face of racism and sexism and homophobia and transphobia and other injustices, then you are as big a problem as the perpetrators of same. Because people who persist in being unaware of “isms” create an environment where ridiculous people like Amanda Wallace and, more importantly, people with far greater power and influence can conduct their bigotry unchallenged.

 

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.

On the February 21, 2011 edition of The Colbert Report, there was a humorous but still telling segment (watch) about former Congressional Senator and Representative Rick Santorum (R-PA). The segment detailed the effects of Dan Savage’s appeal to readers and followers to “Google bomb” then U.S. Senator Santorum in 2003 as a response to some of Santorum’s comments about homosexuality. In April of 2003, the Senator made several controversial statements that essentially compared homosexual acts to bestiality and incest, and stated he believed such acts to be a threat to society and the institution of the family (read excerpts from the interview). Savage, author of the sex advice column “Savage Love,” appealed to his readers to come up with a definition of “Santorum” to memorialize the Senator’s comments as an act of protest.

After settling on a definition, Savage created the website Santorum to promote the newly coined sexual neologism that meant a “frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the byproduct of anal sex.” Over time, and many searches later, Savage’s website is to this day at the top of the results list when you Google “Santorum.” [In a nutshell, in order to Google bomb, or to inflate the ranking of a site under a particular query, you rely on people clicking on a specific link in the search results list and you rely upon other websites linking to a particular page using a specific anchor text. In this case, other websites linked to Savage’s site using the anchor text “Santorum” and many people clicked on his site when Googling the term.]

As funny as the story is, it raises important questions about the power over discourse given the new possibilities presented by the web. Much is to be said for a crowd-sourced means of discourse. In a very general way, it can be likened to subvertising (see AdBusters) where popular advertisements are parodied or spoofed to illustratively and critically question the meaning of the original advertisements and the discourses they are selling to the consumer. In a more specific way to Santorum’s case, using a Google bomb can be likened to muckraking. Not only did Savage make a successful attempt at a large-scale practical joke, he successfully drew attention to Santorum’s comments about homosexuality. Further, the result of the Google bomb would make it difficult for Santorum to promote his own website and the discourse he would wish to produce about himself on the web, especially should he consider running for the U.S. Presidency in 2012.

Yet, each of these strategies that combat dominant narratives are traditionally produced by the few and the privileged, and the same was true of the dominant narratives. Ultimately, what I wish to highlight with this post is that the web is fostering challenges to existing power relations over the production of discourse. The Google bomb presents an interesting case for the democratization of discourse production, and it provides evidence for possible strategies of altering what discourses become visible in the mainstream.

William Yagatich is a sociology graduate student at the University of Maryland.  His post originally appeared at Cyborgology.

Last year I wrote about a series of billboards in Atlanta that re-framed the abortion debate as a race issue. The billboards featured a child’s face and read “Black Children are an Endangered Species.” A new billboard, in the same theme, has appeared in New York City and was sent in by Kristy H. and Kelly.  Featuring a young girl, it reads: “The most dangerous place for an African American is in the womb”:

Three points:

(1) People without economic resources —  including, disproportionately, black women — are more likely to end pregnancies in abortion. This is not a trivial matter; many women in the U.S. have abortions because they can’t afford (more) children.  It’s terribly saddening to think that some women abort children they want.  And some members of the Black community do argue that this is a form of genocide.

(2) This ad, however, doesn’t come across to me as sympathetic to Black women.  The language in the ad leaves the aborting woman unstated, but still culpable.  She is simultaneously reduced to a womb and accused of placing her child in danger (of being a murderer?).  As Michael Shaw at BagNewsNotes suggests, this ad appears to happily trigger our thoughts of Black people and Black spaces as violent.  Is this ad appealing to the Black community?  Or is it appealing to stereotypes about Black people as a strategic move in the anti-abortion debate?

(3) Finally, as I wrote in my previous post, and on a different note, the message illustrates something very interesting about social movements and framing.

The fact that abortion is highly politicized in the United States, deeply connected to feminism (but not race or class movements), and framed as a specifically-gendered contest between “life” and “choice” seems natural to most Americans. Indeed, it’s hard for many Americans to imagine a world in which the procedure is less politicized or debated differently.  But the politics of abortion in the U.S. is not the only kind of abortion politics that could exist… [see, for example, Shaping Abortion Discourse].  So, whether you agree or disagree with the claims in these billboards, they nicely jolt us out of our acceptance of abortion politics as is.  How might thinking about abortion as a race issue or a class issue change the debate?

Source: Gawker.

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.