Sociological Images

The Social and Geographic Distancing of Grocery Store Produce

Kristina Vidug on February 26, 2011

Harkening back to a day when grocery and ‘convenience’ stores did not exist, one was intimately aware of where one’s food was coming from. This is because leading a life of subsistence meant growing one’s own food. It meant raising animals and growing crops and then processing them into food.

As foodstuffs began to be commodified, that is, rendered a marketable good to be exchanged for capital — and largely controlled by transnational corporations — we began to lose understanding to where our food comes from. Arguably, the dearth of this understanding is illustrated by the fact that increasingly children believe that fruit and vegetables are something that comes from the grocery store rather than from the farm or the earth.

The effects of this phenomenon, known as distancing, have social, political and economic ramifications. Typically grocery store produce is devoid of any clues as to the conditions under which it was produced, save for the country of origin. This serves to make invisible the labour taken to cultivate the produce and instead presents the consumer with the end product. The conditions under which bananas are produced, for example, are particularly problematic given their use of toxic pesticides and lack of environmental and worker protection measures.

Accordingly, I was particularly struck when I noticed this produce sign at a local grocery store.

Here the source of the bananas is specified in a way that might help combat distancing. But, in fact, knowing that these bananas are from the “tropics” does more to obfuscate than illuminate. The tropics refers to no place in particular – technically referring to parts of South America, Africa, Asia, and the South Pacific. Instead of a concrete agricultural source, then, pointing to the tropics simply creates a false sense of understanding, one that plays on consumers’ desires for (and stereotypes about) all things lush and tropical, leaving the consumers’ ignorance intact.

Kristina Vidug is pursuing a masters of arts degree in sociology at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada. Her research is on post-industrial risk management with a focus on women’s avoidance of synthetic chemicals in the domestic sphere. You can follow her “adventures in thesising” on her blog, jeez (kristina) louise.

Reactions to the Case of Lara Logan

Guest Blogger Matt Cornell on February 23, 2011

The sexual assault of CBS reporter Lara Logan in Tahrir Square last week has resulted in two predictable, but utterly depressing types of commentary.

Muslims are backwards

On the one hand are the anti-Islam culture warriors, eager to find in this incident proof of how degenerate Muslims (and Arabs) are. This, despite the fact that there’s no proof the assailants were Muslims, nor that they had any connection to the overwhelmingly peaceful and harassment-free demonstrations. In fact, there’s reason to believe that Logan’s attackers may have been pro-Mubarak thugs or apolitical opportunists. The right wing response to this story was inevitable, but liberal response was also problematic. Film critic and outspoken liberal Roger Ebert tweeted this today:

“The attack on Lara Logan brings Middle East attitudes toward women into sad focus.”

Oy.

I’d like to call Roger Ebert’s attention to the case of Roman Polanski, who has enjoyed a long and celebrated movie career, in spite of his status as a fugitive child rapist. When Polanski was arrested in September of 2009, while attempting to accept an award at a film festival in Switzerland, supporters circulated a petition on his behalf. Over a hundred people in the film industry signed that petition which gratuitously called Polanski’s crime “a case of morals.” Some weeks later, Gore Vidal went so far as to smear Polanski’s 13 year old victim as “a young hooker.”

Has Ebert ever decried the Polanski case for the way it “brings Hollywood’s attitudes towards women into sad focus?” Has he ever criticized Polanski, Vidal, David Lynch, Wong Kar Wai, Harvey Weinstein or any of the dozens of cinematic luminaries who signed off on this petition? Nope. On the contrary, he gave a big thumbs up to a documentary which argued Polanski should be given a pass for his crime.

I hardly expected Russ Meyers’ former writing pal to be an exemplar of feminist discourse, but his tweet yesterday was especially myopic. Does he really believe that the West is so much more enlightened about rape and sexual violence than those primitive, backwards Middle Easterners?

The opportunistic use of feminism is a common feature of the “liberal” discourse in the culture war against Islam. Just look at how Ayaan Hirsi Ali is trotted out by the media (especially Bill Maher and Steven Colbert) to justify imperialist wars and burqa bans, all in the name of protecting Arab and Muslim women from their own cultures. Meanwhile, many of these same commentators ignore the fact that rape and misogyny are also endemic to our own culture. (And that includes our movies, Roger.)

Rape is sexy

The other type of response to Logan’s assault was the usual victim blaming, made extra creepy by the focus on Logan’s good looks and alleged sexual history. The worst offender was LA Weekly blogger Simone Wilson, who, in an extraordinarily trashy piece of writing had this to say:

Logan was in Tahrir Square with her “60 Minutes” news team when Mubarak’s announcement broke. Then, in a rush of frenzied excitement, some Egyptian protesters apparently consummated their newfound independence by sexually assaulting the blonde reporter.

Wilson conflates the historic Egyptian revolution with gang rape. Classy stuff. But she’s not through. In addition to “blonde reporter” we’re also treated to these descriptors of Logan:

“it girl”
“firecracker”
“shocking good looks”
“Hollywood good looks”
“gutsy stunner”
“homewrecker” (this courtesy of a NY Post article from 2008)

As has already been noted, focusing on a sexual assault victim’s good looks and allegedly dubious sexual character amounts to victim blaming. But it also does something even more insidious. It makes rape sexy.

This is par for the course at the LA Weekly, where almost anything can be sexed up. LA Weekly‘s cover art department in the last couple of years has managed to make nearly every topic sexy, from murder to toxic mold and overpopulation.

Murder is sexy:

Toxic mold is sexy:

Overpopulation is sexy:

Rarely do the sexy women adorning the covers of the LA Weekly figure as the subjects of these stories. They’re splayed on the cover to boost circulation, because sex sells and, after all, “what’s wrong with being sexy?” (This isn’t even to mention the content of the Weekly– its abundance of ads for plastic surgery, or its routine back page ads from American Apparel– subjects for a longer post.)

Given this particular aesthetic, it is not at all surprising that an LA Weekly blogger would choose to play up the sexy side of the Logan assault story, taking extra pains to emphasize her “Hollywood good looks.” Even an “alternative” newspaper upholds the local value system. Arab Muslim rapists are bad. Sexy women make great victims. And cinematic geniuses should get a pass.

UPDATE, after the jump:

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Grammar-Phobia, Or Judging a Book by its Cover

Guest Blogger Josef Fruehwald on February 11, 2011

I was walking through the University bookstore today to pick up beginning of the semester office supplies, when this book, Grammar Sucks: What to Do to Make Your Writing Much More Better, caught my eye:

Back cover text:

Do you suffer from grammar phobia because…

You’re so used to IMing, you’ve forgotten how to write a normal sentence. :- )

You’ve started thinking in rap lyrics.

Last time you gave a report, your handout got you laughed out of the room.

What made this book seem blog-worthy to me is the not-so-subtle coded language used to refer to those speakers who the book cover authors (maybe not the book authors) feel are culpable for the degradation of language. I want to consider the second point specifically: “…thinking in rap lyrics.”

Ok, of course not all rappers are black, but it is an art form that is so solidly identified with the African American community.. And, of course, they’re not really talking about “rap lyrics,” they’re talking about AAVE (African American Vernacular English). This is an offensive and transparently coded throwback to the linguistic inferiority of African Americans.

AAVE is a dialect of English just like all dialects, and has a fully articulated syntax, morphology and phonology. It is NOT a broken or mislearned form of the dominant dialect. And people certainly don’t speak AAVE because they failed to learn arbitrary writing conventions in school (e.g. “Don’t start a sentence with a conjunction”) , which appear to be the topic of this book.

But, let’s take them at their word. Maybe you have grammar phobia because you’re thinking in rap lyrics. Do you mean, like, you’re freestyling in your head all the time? Do you mean you’re kind of like this guy?

You mean, all your thoughts have flow, and rhyme, are creative, and drop properly formed Spanish imperative verbs? To the book cover authors: you fucking wish. I mean, I wish I could do that.

In the context of the book, it makes a clear point: If you are young, and black (and your hat’s real low), you’re not worthy of social respect, or economic achievement.

Needless to say, I went on to go buy my office supplies, and didn’t read the body of the book. I can’t really tell you if it gave any good advice that made any sense. This book is just another case where supposed discussion of language isn’t really about language. It actually ties in nicely with my previous post on how people discuss language in terms of morality. Here, the book cover authors are laying blame on the same groups of people that are accused of leading moral decay: youth, and racial and ethnic minorities.

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Josef Fruehwald is a graduate student in Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania. His research focuses on theoretical models of language variation and change. He frequently blogs about the relevance of linguistic research to language attitudes (among other things) at Val Systems.

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Trivializing Homelessness: iCarly and “Hobo Parties”

Gwen Sharp, PhD on February 8, 2011

Josh Leo brought our attention to something he started thinking about recently: the use of the word “hobo” among kids. This started when he saw a video of kids reacting to the Ted Williams, the man who became famous after a video of him panhandling at an intersection and displaying his “golden voice” went viral. Josh was struck with the way the kids talk about individuals who become homeless and, in particular, the repeated use of “hobo” to describe him (they discuss Williams in the first 2 minutes):

Since one girl attributed her use of “hobo” to the TV show iCarly, Josh did a little searching and discovered that the show’s official website contains a set of photos of the cast dressed up for a Hobo Party, complete with captions that make fun of or trivialize poverty and homelessness, including this first one that refers to the store “C.J. Penniless”:

A quick google search turns up lots of images of and suggestions for throwing hobo parties (including a video of a “Hobo House Party,” in which four people in costume dance in a cardboard box). Now, my guess is a lot of people would argue that references to hobos today aren’t really about homelessness now, since it’s a term often associated with the Great Depression. Indeed, a lot of the hobo party sites I found referred to the Depression or suggested 1930s-type clothing. But the video of the kids’ reactions certainly shows that they don’t just see it as a term for people in the past; they clearly connect it to homeless people today.

This trivialization of homelessness and poverty isn’t just on kids’ shows, though. It reminded me of a segment The Daily Show did recently about a news affiliate in Indianapolis that decided to see if any local homeless individuals could be the city’s own “golden-voice” (the segment starts at about 1:30 in):

Such a news story could humanize homeless individuals, of course. Instead, the news segment treats the two women as sources of entertainment whose value comes only from the possibility that they might surprise us by having a “hidden talent.” The idea that it would be shocking to find a homeless person with an amazing gift presumes that people who have skills or talents don’t become homeless, while also presenting the solution as very individualistic: if you’re the next Ted Williams, you can have a house and a job too!

Gwen Sharp is an associate professor of sociology at Nevada State College. You can follow her on Twitter at @gwensharpnv.

“It’s All in the Genes”: The Invisibility of Labor in Modeling

Guest Blogger Ashley Mears on February 7, 2011

“You can’t be taught the skills to model, because first and foremost, skill doesn’t matter. It’s all in the jeans genes.”

So notes a shirtless man, a self-described “male mannequin” in commercials for Next Top Model in Vietnam:

My sociological knee-jerk reaction is to point to the ways in which models’ labor is deliberately rendered invisible, masking performance as mere appearance, in much the same way social categories are naturalized to appear like states of being instead of products of social organization — think gender, ethnicity, class, and yes, beauty.

As concerns the category of beauty, there is considerable work involved in pulling it off. Like retail service workers, models do “aesthetic labor,” as documented by sociologists Elizabeth Wissinger and Joanne Entwistle and more recently by Christine Williams and Catherine Connell. Aesthetic labor is the work of manipulating one’s physique and personality to embody a company brand. In the modeling market, some people easily have that physique, as the shirtless guy claims to have, but most models have to fight for it, and they’re fighting against the clock of aging. If they don’t have to work for cut abs and narrow hips, they most likely still feel compelled to work at it, given the rampant uncertainties facing them in their daily grinds of auditions and rejections. All of this work gets carefully tucked behind the scenes of fashion and beauty images — a clandestine world NTM purports to expose for voyeuristic consumers around the world.

But instead of exposing it, the NTM franchise caricatures it. In the American version, Tyra Banks insists that effort is everything, and she axes candidates left and right because they didn’t “want it badly enough.” She just didn’t work hard at it, goes the usual dismissal, or she lacked the determination to keep smiling when Jay Manuel told her that her face is weird. It’s not that you’ve got the wrong look, the show tells contestants, but that you didn’t put in the work to get the right one. NTM sticks close to an individualistic ethos: if you fail, it’s because you lacked the individual effort needed to succeed.

Success in any culture industry is a mix of both hard work and the luck of being the “right” contender at the right moment, which is somewhat arbitrarily decided in any given fashion season. Saying that success is “all in the genes” renders the “look” into a natural state of being, when like all culture industries, modeling is a complex social production.

Saying it’s all in the jeans is also pretty funny. Let’s not overlook this guy’s self-deprecating humor: here’s a man surrendering himself (and his manhood) to the whims and preferences of fashion, an industry widely believed to be controlled by women and gay men. In other ads he mocks his talent and wryly notes the biggest hazard in his line of work: wearing leopard print g-strings (to say nothing of occupational challenges like the precarious nature of freelance labor, the lack of health and retirement benefits, or the unpaid labor of castings and magazine shoots). What’s most striking about this guy and his seductive black-and-white commercial is not the sociological back story, it’s his own silliness. He’s playing on the ironic gap between social expectations of masculinity and the realities of being featured as a passive visual object. We probably wouldn’t be so charmed if the commercial featured a young woman laughing about her job title: “I’m a professional model!” We’d probably roll our eyes. The source of that silliness—unequal cultural expectations about the display value of men and women—is as problematic as it is good fodder for comedy.

Ashley Mears is a former model and current Assistant Professor of sociology at Boston University who is doing fantastic work on the modeling industry. In her book, Pricing Beauty: Value in the Fashion Modeling World (UC Berkeley Press), she examines the production of value in fashion modeling markets.

Gwen Sharp is an associate professor of sociology at Nevada State College. You can follow her on Twitter at @gwensharpnv.

Maps of Surnames

Gwen Sharp, PhD on February 5, 2011

Sara P. let us know about a map at National Geographic that shows the distribution of surnames in the U.S.

The names are color coded by region of origin of the name:

A note on methodology: geographers looked at the most common by counting the most common last names in phone books and selecting the most common names in each state. This hides significant diversity in names in large cities that may have had a greater mix of immigrant groups that the state overall; for instance, a map of the most common names just in New York City might look quite a bit different than the most common names in New York state.

Nonetheless, the concentration of last names serves as an echo of immigration and settlement patterns. British-origin names tend to dominate across the U.S., unsurprisingly, particularly Smith, Johnson, and Williams. Because slaves were often given the last names of their owners, a significant proportion of individuals with British last names are African American — for instance, African Americans are about 20% of people named Smith.

Several Irish-origin names stand out in Massachusetts, as well as some French surnames in Maine:

The map of Hawaii reflects the significance of the Asian population there:

Spanish-origin names in the Southwest:

The names common in the Great Lakes/upper plains region reflects the fact that the area was a common destination for immigrations from Germany and Scandinavia:

I looked up the geographers who created the maps (James Cheshire, Paul Longley, and Pablo Mateos at University College London) and that led me to an interesting website sponsored by UCL, the World Names Project. If you type in a surname, it will show where on the globe it is most common. You can also zoom in on individual nations and see the distribution within them. Here’s the global distribution of my last name, Sharp:

You also get some data about the name: its origin, the top 10 regions and individual cities for that name, and the most common first names that go with it (which, in all the names I tried, were overwhelmingly male, so I don’t know what to make of that).

As Sara said of the National Geographic map, many of the results are predictable, but that doesn’t mean it’s not fun to look at them.

UPDATE: Reader Kristina provides an explanation for why male names dominate the most common first names lists:

My explanation for Gwen’s finding that the most common first names are overly represented by male names is that names for boys are less variable than names for girls.

Interesting post on that here, which notes, “it [natural language geocoder] needs 4200 first names for girls to cover 90% of the population, but it only needs 1200 boy’s names to reach a 90% coverage. The reason for this huge difference is mainly found in the top positions. The ten most popular male names reach 23% whereas the ten most popular female names reach a comparatively meager 10%.”

“Standard English” and Social Power

Lisa Wade, PhD on February 2, 2011

Malia Green, taking a writing diagnostic test while enrolled in Junior College, came across the following question:

The question was part of Pearson’s MyWritingLab, self-described as “a complete online learning program [that] provides better practice exercises to developing writers.”

I have heard rumor that young people have been adopting shorthand tweet-type language as “standard English,” using it in communications with professors and in their academic papers. The inclusion of this question in Pearson’s test suggests that this may, indeed, be a widespread phenomenon and that young adults may not necessarily know the difference between the English most of their parents grew up with and the English they have encountered in this brave new world.

Despite the fact that each of the answers will make sense to anyone familiar with text-ese, the correct answer on the Pearon’s test is clearly d). So, are the answers a) through c) actually wrong? Who gets to decide what “standard English” is anyway?

The whole thing reminds me of the controversies over African American Vernacular English, better known as “ebonics,” in the 1990s. The idea that some people “talk right” and some people do not is an excellent way to justify prejudice. Perhaps an employer largely chooses not to hire black people, not because they’re black, of course, but because they don’t “talk right.” Is the outcome significantly different? And who decides what “talking right” sounds like anyway? Well, the people who have the power to do so… and they typically side with themselves.

So, is text-ese wrong? Only according to those who are making the rules (and Pearson’s tests). And what do you want to bet that those young people who are taught to differentiate between the kind of English they are allowed to use in texts and the kind they are allowed to use in “proper” communication are class privileged, on average? And disproportionately white, accordingly?

So, who decides the future of English? And will “2” and “u” be words in it, or not?

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.

Toyota Highlander Ads Disguise Classism with Cool

Lisa Wade, PhD on January 15, 2011

Sam J. and Elizabeth H. sent in these commercials for the Toyota Highlander. In both an (ungrateful brat of a) son explains that parents who don’t drive the Highlander — all of which, inexplicably, drive wooden-sided station wagons or minivans — are “lame” “geek[s]” who ooze “dorkiness” and are “utterly humiliat[ed].” Somehow the words seem to distract from the real message: if you’re too poor to buy a brand new mid-range SUV, you suck.

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.