social construction: symbols

Cross-posted at The Huffington Post.

One of our Pinterest boards collects images that reveal that men are the “neutral” sex in contemporary Western cultures. This means that (1)  the image that pops up in our minds when we say “person” or “human” or “worker” is usually implicitly male, (2) non-sexed representations of people are usually assumed to be male (e.g., cartoon animals appear female to us unless we slap on eyelashes and lipstick), (3) items for sale often get marketed as either “item” or “women’s item” (e.g., “deodorant” and “women’s deodorant”), and (4) men and male bodies get to stand in for humanity (e.g., in scientific research).

Instances of this phenomenon have been a fun series on the blog; we featured another one just this past weekend, on how (not) to write obituaries.  Then today SocImages Contributor Philip Cohen sent along another great example that we couldn’t resist sharing. The graphic below, released by Bloomberg Business Week, is meant to help us understand who is in and out of the labor force.  While 3% of Americans want to work but can’t find a job, large proportions are also permanently or temporarily out of work on purpose: they’re retired, in college, in the military, disabled, or a stay-at-home parent.

For our purposes in this post, what’s interesting is the way they illustrate the categories.  See what you see:

In all cases but one, the stick figured is either non-sexed and therefore implicitly male (e.g., the newspaper reader and the disabled) or explicitly male (the business-suited full-time employees, the mustachioed retiree).  The one exception, of course, is for the stay-at-home parent.  Suddenly the stick figure is a female.  We see this all over.  As soon as parenting or housework is involved, all those neutral/male stick figures sprout skirts.

Now, to be fair, 97% of stay-at-home parents are female, but so is 50% of the American workforce. You wouldn’t guess so, however, by this graphic.  Also, for what it’s worth, it doesn’t have to be like this.

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 Racialicious.

I featured the two-page ad below in one of the first posts I ever wrote for SocImages (it was October of 2007 and we’d written less than 100 posts; today we’re approaching 5,000, but I digress…).  It’s still one of my very favorite images.

I use it in Sociology 101 when I argue that race, class, and gender are, among other things, performances. Activities, items, and behaviors carry class, race, and gender meanings. In order to tell stories about ourselves, we strategically combine these things with the meanings we carry on our bodies (a gendered shape, skin color and hair texture etc., and signs of economic wealth or deprivation).

The ad for PhatFarm deftly balances Blackness (the body), upper-class Whiteness (the sailboat), and femininity (the pink sweater).  In strategically using culturally-resonant signifiers, he challenges popular representations of the Black body.

This happens in real life too.  Journalist Brent Staples powerfully discusses how he adds a signifier of upper-class Whiteness to his large Black body in order to avoid the discomfort of frightening people on the streets of New York.

…I employ what has proved to be an excellent tension-reducing measure: I whistle melodies from Beethoven and Vivaldi and the more popular classical composers. Even steely New Yorkers hunching toward nighttime destinations seem to relax and occasionally they even join in the tune. Virtually everybody seems to sense that a mugger wouldn’t be warbling bright, sunny selections from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons.

“It is my equivalent to the cowbell that hikers wear when they know they are in bear country,” Staples adds, referring to the fact that being perceived as dangerous can itself be dangerous, as we know from the example of Trayvon Martin and Rodrigo Diaz, who was shot in the head in January when he accidentally pulled into the wrong driveway thinking it belonged to a friend.

Thinking of class, race, and gender as performances gives us credit for being agents.  We don’t have control over what the signifiers are, nor how people read our bodies, but we can actively try to manage those meanings.  Of course, some people have to do more “damage control” than others.

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.

Following up on our recent posts on representations of “person”, I discovered a set of stick figures from around the world, collected by Steve Portigal.  He has some observations on variations.  From a gender perspective, however, they all look more or less like this one from Bali, Indonesia:

What is interesting for our purposes, though, is this Chinese language example from Bangkok, Thailand:

Do you see it?  In case you doubted it, the fact that the fourth panel includes a stick figure in a skirt (1) proves that the non-skirted stick figures are implicitly men and, on an entirely different note, (2) reminds us that men do not take care of children.

Similarly, these two pictures of warning signs for moving sidewalks (snapped in the Dublin airport) feature “neutral” stick figures, unless a child is involved:

We see the same phenomenon in commercial airplanes, where “flight attendants” still tend to be pictured in skirts.

Prof. Shaun Huston sent in these photos from United Airlines. Everyone’s in pants… except the person changing a diaper:

Amanda C. sent in another example from a hotel in Sydney. When the stick figures are housekeepers, suddenly they sprout skirts!

Sophie pointed out that in Holland, bike traffic lights only include images of what most people would recognize as a “men’s” bike, with the bar across the top, thereby managing to gender the traffic signals without including any figures of people at all (images found here and here):

For what it’s worth, here’s a counter-example from Malmö, Sweden:

Emanuelle, who took the photo and submitted it, says it’s the only time she can remember that she’s seen a silhouette figure like this with a kid where the figure isn’t clearly marked as female.  We’ve a fun collection of traffic lights featuring female stick figures.

We’d love to collect more examples!

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 reader named Caroline sent in a really nice email.  “I just wanted to tell you – again,” she wrote, “how much of an impression you’ve made on my 17yo daughter Eliza.”  She explains that they’d been reading SocImages together for “years (yes, years!).”  We can’t express how much that means to us!

Caroline was inspired to write because Eliza had brought to her attention this image accompanying a story about a high school’s trackable ID badges:

Eliza had noted that, while the male figure was walking more-or-less directly towards the viewer, the female figure was standing with her torso contorted and her hip cocked.

Likewise, @low_hana sent us this screenshot of DC Comics Underoos available for sale. Men are posed like, well, superheroes, but the women twist, fiddle, and turn their backs:

Now, this might seem like a small thing, and unimpressive in the singular.  But, in fact, we see this kind of thing all the time, even in ostensibly objective medical textbooks and anatomy illustrations.  We even see it when only faces are involved, as in this series of movie posters featuring men looking straight at the camera and women looking askance.  Here’s one example:

As these types of images add up in our subconscious, they tell us a story about masculinity and femininity.  It’s a complicated one, but might include lessons like this: men face things head on, while women are uncertain; women pose and men take action;  men are straightforward, women sly.

Thanks Caroline, for sending in another example of such an insidious and largely invisible cultural pattern.  And great job, Eliza, for spotting 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.

Cross-posted at The Huffington Post.

Justin J.W. Powell and Liat Ben-Moshe have written a great short history of the icon signifying accessibility for people who use wheelchairs for the magazine Stimulus Respond.  The story, they argue, is one of “exclusion to inclusion.”

For most of American history, they begin, there was no icon at all.  This is because people in wheelchairs were largely excluded from public life.  There were no efforts to ensure accessibility, so no signs of accessibility were needed.

In the late ’60s, however, Rehabilitation International partnered with the United Nations and the International Standards Organisation to sponsor an international competition for an icon.  The winner, a Danish design student named Susanne Koefoed, had submitted the icon on the left.  In committee, they noted that Koefoed’s design erased the person in the wheelchair.  They added a head, creating what people around the world recognize as a symbol of accessibility.

The symbol is still evolving. Powell and Ben-Moshe note that recent revisions have been aimed at emphasizing that people in wheelchairs are active users, not passive ones.  Accordingly, some organizations have shifted to using a symbol that captures the fact that people in wheelchairs get themselves around.  I’ve snapped pictures of the icons used by the Huntington Gardens and a T.J. Maxx (both in CA): the former has the users’ arms bent behind them to signify pushing their chair forward, while the latter leans the figure forward and adds motion lines.

Another trend involves trying to break down the categorical binary between abled and disabled people, instead recognizing that there is a spectrum of ability. For example, this icon (source):

Ultimately, Powell and Ben-Moshe hope that access will be so universally designed into public buildings that it will eliminate the need for an icon at all: architecture would no longer be designed around a specific type of person considered “normal,” but instead would be designed for the range of people who will use the spaces.  This full integration would mean that differently-abled people would be considered just “people” and we wouldn’t need an icon at all.

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.

As a sociologist who happens to DJ — or is that the other way around? — I’m always curious to see how DJing is depicted in popular culture and advertising. Ever since the 1970s, when the disco craze helped push the prominence of DJs into the public realm, disc jockeys have become iconic symbols of nightlife culture. Within the milieu of the dance floor, DJs serve as what Sarah Thornton once described as “orchestrators of a ‘living’ communal experience.”

As such, the image of the DJ standing behind a pair of turntables has become ripe for appropriation by liquor and cigarette companies in particular. For them, especially in print ads, the DJ serves as a visual shorthand for any number of values they want their product associated with: culturally hip/cool, entertainment/musical mavens, the source of good times, etc. However, when it comes to that shorthand, this Smirnoff ad from last summer may have come up just a little too short.

At first glance, this image of a DJ working the turntables, with a cleavage-baring admirer looking on, seems uncomplicated: Smirnoff promises a fun, sexy time. However, a closer examination of the mise en scéne yields some instant problems.

It’s a little known fact that the swastika, famously appropriated and perverted by the Nazis, is (or was) a symbol of good luck.  Dating back to the Neolithic period, the symbol was frequently included in greetings and used as decoration.  A 1917 ad for swastika jewelry, for example, called the symbol the “oldest cross” and explained it like this: “To the wearer of swastika will come from the four winds of heaven good luck, long life and prosperity.”

Here are some additional examples of the swastika being used to send hopeful messages to loved ones, found by Tom Megginson at The Ethical Adman along with the one above:

Happy New Year, everyone.

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.

Emile Durkheim, founding father of sociology and author of The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, would love  the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Consider this excerpt from a British observer, Jonathan Raban, who watched the parade twenty years ago from a window on Central Park West. The parade, he said, was…

…the secular, American descendant of the European Catholic Easter procession in which all the icons and saints’ bones are removed from the churches and carried ceremonially around the town. The baseball hero, the gaseous, rubbery Mickey Mouse, the Mayflower pilgrims were the totems and treasure relics of a culture, as the New Orleans jazz and Sousa marches were its solemn music.

Had a serious-minded Martian been standing at the window, he would have learned a good deal by studying the parade’s idyllic version of American history. [guns, refugees, rebels]… The imaginative life of children was honored to a degree unknown on Mars — which was, perhaps, why matters of fact and matters of fiction were so confusingly jumbled up here, with Santa Claus and George Washington and Superman and Abraham Lincoln all stirred into the same pot.

He would be struck by the extraordinarily mythopoeic character of life in this strange country. People made myths and lived by them with an ease and fertility that would have been the envy of any tribe of Pacific islanders. Sometimes there were big myths that took possession of the whole society, sometimes little ones, casually manufactured, then trusted absolutely.

Jay Livingston is the chair of the Sociology Department at Montclair State University. You can follow him at Montclair SocioBlog or on Twitter.