*updates

NEWS:

We would like to express our gratitude to Michael Kimmel and Abby Kinchy for nominating us for the American Sociological Association’s Distinguished Contributions to Teaching Award.  We’re grateful, also, to Chris Uggen, Doug Hartmann, Philip Cohen, Myra Marx Ferree, who wrote supporting letters, and to all of our Readers who submitted supporting anecdotes and words of praise.    We are committed to continuing the work we’ve been doing thus far and hope to make the website increasingly easy to use and helpful to instructors.

An original essay by Gwen, Family Movies: Where Are All the Girls (based on a post here at SocImages), was featured at BlogHer.  There she talks about the data on who produces these films alongside analyses of Bee Movie and the new Disney adaptation of Rapunzel, Tangled.

Always a fun treat, two of our posts — the baby worshipper and Target trampling — were featured on BoingBoing this month (here and here).

Finally, this is your monthly reminder that we’re on Twitter and Facebook.

In other news…

FEATURED READER:

This month we received an email from Robin who inquired:

I was just reading your blog, and for the 100th time probably, asked myself “Who is Dmitriy T.M.? What do they do for a living/for pleasure that they come across so many interesting and varied images??”

I would love to see an interview with Dmitriy on your blog. For real, I want to know who this mysterious person is!

Well Robin, the mysterious Dmitriy submitted to an interview and sent along a revealing self-portrait!  Enjoy!  :)

AWARD NOMINATION CALL FOR ANECDOTES:

We mentioned earlier this month that sociologists Michael Kimmel and Abby Kinchy are nominating us for the American Sociological Association’s Distinguished Contributions to Teaching Award.  The award is given to sociologists who have made “a significant impact on the manner in which sociology is taught at a regional, state, national, or international level.”   Kimmel and Kinchy are seeking short anecdotes or testimonials from sociologists who have found Sociological Images to be useful in the classroom.  We are so pleased at the response so far, and want to make one final, humble solicitation for such anecdotes.  They can be emailed to Abby Kinchy (kincha@rpi.edu) or added right here in the comments.

Thank you all again for making our blog so very rewarding for us both.

LOTS OF FUN NEWS:

The next essay in our ongoing feature in Contexts magazine, Skull Face and the Self-Fulfilling Stereotype, has been published (based on a previous post). If you’d like a copy of the essay, feel free to email us (socimages@contexts.org) and we’ll send it along.  See the list of all of our Contexts essays here.

We are indebted to David Mayeda for writing a review of Sociological Images for Teaching Sociology.  Thank you, Dr. Mayeda, for all your kind words!

We are super excited to report that the Ms. magazine blog has begun partially syndicating our work.  If you’re a reader of their blog, you may have seen us pop up there already.

And we were tickled to hear our post on the worldwide penetration of Facebook used as a source in a Scientific American podcast (we’re in the Totally Bogus quiz at about 21:45).

Finally, this is your monthly reminder that we’re on Twitter and Facebook.  Let us invade your everyday life and be your friend!

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.

NEWS:

This month our post on historical changes in soda portions was featured on Boing Boing. 

Also, this is your monthly reminder that we’re on Twitter and Facebook (where we link to our posts everyday).

NEWS:

Gwen and I were honored to appear alongside no other than media-critic-icon Jean Kilbourne in a podcast for Bitch magazine.

Gwen was also featured in a Sociology Improv podcast (about vajazzling, the Republican party, and how it’s never been good to be a cowboy) and was interviewed about sociology and her super curly hair for The New Naturalista.

Marissa’s guest post about gender and toilet signs was translated into French and posted at Rue89.

Also, SocImages had its highest traffic month ever in September with over 575,000 visits!  After a typical summer dip (oh how we hate the months of June, July, and August around here!), we made a strong recovery with a record month!  Here’s to an excellent year for us all!

Finally, this is your monthly reminder that we’re on Twitter and Facebook (where we update with featured posts everyday).

NEWLY ENRICHED POSTS (Look for what’s NEW! Sept. ’10):

We only have one newly updated post for you this month.  Have you seen the recent back-to-school Life cereal commercials?  We added them as another example of how people of color are used to represent flavor.

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.

NEWS:

Happy fall semester everyone!

For me, classes begin today and just yesterday the doc gave me the a-okay to walk without the “boot.”  So “hello” to students and “goodbye” to the summer-of-a-broken-leg!

You may have noticed that our parent site has changed to The Society Pages.  This is a name change only and we’re still thrilled to be under the stewardship of Doug, Chris, Jon, Letta and the wonderful folks at the University of Minnesota.  Word on the street is that SocImages crashed their servers so many times that they had to reconfigure them!  We’re so grateful to have their support and patience!

Gwen and I are proud to announce a new SocImages essay, What is Indian Art?, published in Contexts magazine (based on our original post).  If you’d like a pdf of the essay, send a note to socimages@thesocietypages.org and we’ll send it along.  You can see a list of our teaching essays here.  They’re all super short and great for in class exercises.

Finally, this is your monthly reminder that we’re on Twitter and Facebook (where we update with featured posts everyday).

NEWLY ENRICHED POSTS (Look for what’s NEW! Aug ’10):

Women clean because they love it, don’tcha know!

Facebook has added a generic female avatar.

Another example of boys are kids and girls are girls.

More pinkification of manly items for the ladies.

We added a 38th example of food items conflated with sexy women.

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.

NEWS:

This month Gwen and I wanted to take a moment to thank all of you who have submitted ideas for posts.  Our inbox is alive with ideas and it makes our job exceedingly fun!  We absolutely could not do it without all of your eyes.  So thank you for your submissions!  Also, if you’ve submitted an idea and it was never posted, please don’t be discouraged.  We get far more ideas than we could possibly use.  And, even if yours was a submission that we decided against using, be assured that we read it, thought about it, and sometimes talked about it together before setting it aside.  We appreciate all of your help, even if it doesn’t make the front page.

In other news, we’ve entered a new partial syndication agreement with BlogHer and we’re super excited to add that partnership to our one with Jezebel.  Our first syndicated post was our recent discussion of the Vaseline skin-lightening Facebook application.

Finally, please do remember that you can follow us on Twitter or friend us on Facebook.  Soon we’ll be launching a MySpace page as well.

NEW PUBLICATIONS:

(If you don’t have the subscriptions required to access either paper, we’re happy to send you a copy,  Just send us a note at socimages@thesocietypages.org.)

Gwen and my most recent essay in the print-magazine Contexts, Flesh-Toned, is now online.  It draws on the long conversation we’ve been having here about the way that the use of the terms “flesh,” “nude,” and “skin” to refer to light beige colors makes darker-skinned people invisible.

Also, a paper I wrote with Caroline Heldman is now available at Sexuality Research and Social Policy.  How and why hook-up culture came to characterize U.S. colleges remains a mystery.  In our paper, Hook-Up Culture: Setting a New Research Agenda, we argue that the emergence of hook-up culture on college campuses is an excellent opportunity to learn more about how sexual cultures change.  We review the literature, offer some hypotheses to explore, and discuss methodological requirements.

NEWLY ENRICHED POSTS (Look for what’s NEW! July ’10):

This month we added new material to some older gender- and race-related posts.  Thanks almost exclusively to Gwen for doing the hard work of updating!  And thanks to those of who sent the images along!

Race

When a racially diverse group of people is included in ads or other materials, darker-skinned people are typically behind or below the lighter-skinned.  We updated our post on how people of color are subordinated in advertising with a new example of a church welcome banner.

Another ’70s book on useful Spanish phrases for talking to your maid.

Givenchy has some rather light “nude”-colored dresses, but Esquire responded to complaints about ignoring Black men by following up a story with a segment that acknowledged that African Americans might require or prefer different hair maintenance techniques and styles than other groups.

Black dolls sell for less than White dolls at Target.

A second example of vintage soap advertising suggesting that African Americans are dirty.

Gender/Sex

Haven’t found quite the right string bikini for your infant girl? We added another example to our post about bikinis for babies to help you out.

Two more examples in which men are people and women are women.

Another example of large clothes on small models.

More parking spaces just for women.

Using the PETA demonstration model in Jordan.

More gendering of language.

Rosie the Riveter was “maid to clean.”

More gendering of boys’ and girls’ (coloring) books.

eBay continues to gender gift suggestions…while simultaneously degendering them.

Only dudes use technology. Didn’t you know?

Don’t smoke. It makes you ugly.

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.

NEWS:

Happy July everyone!

Gwen and I were traveling in June so there are only a few enriched posts to peruse (below) and little SocImages news to impart.  There is exciting me news, however.

I took a tumble and broke my leg this week.  This has the excellent upside of earning me a two week visit from Gwen!  So if any of you Los Angelenos would like to meet for cocktails, we’ve got lots of time and good reason to drink!  Send us an email at socimages@thesocietypages.org.

And take pity on me and sign up to follow us on Twitter or friend us on Facebook (where we update with a featured post everyday).

NEWLY ENRICHED POSTS (Look for what’s NEW! June ’10):

Two more boobs for our two boobs posts!  Dmitriy T.M. sent along a boob scarf; yeah so we added that to our booooooooooooooobs post.  And Jay Livingston found another ad in which a product that is not a boob is made to look like a boob.  Maybe NSFW.

We added seaweed-flavored Pringles to our post on culturally-specific flavors.

Lauren McGuire spotted another vintage ad for weight gain, we added it to our collection.

Thanks to Stephanie DeH. and Lindsey Dale, we have a handful of new ads to add to our post on truly unlikely things sold with sex… including archery.  We also included an ad from Lindsey’s site that we added to our post on ads selling homes with women’s bodies.

We added a snapshot of pink handguns for sale in Oklahoma to our ad featuring, well, pink guns marketed to women.

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.

NEWS:

I’ll be in New Orleans until June 23 and the big Island of Hawaii from the 23rd to the 1st.  It’s always fun to meet readers, so if you’re nearby please send us an email (socimages@thesocietypages.org) and we’ll have coffee or drinks!

A Louis Vuitton advertising campaign that we critiqued has been determined by the U.K. Advertising Standards Agency to be a violation of truth in advertising.  Check it out.  Thanks to Anjan G. and Katrin for pointing it out.

This is your monthly reminder!  You can follow us on Twitter or friend us on Facebook where we update with a featured post everyday.

NEWLY ENRICHED POSTS (Look for what’s NEW! May ’10):

Cara McC. sent along another example of a commercial separating normal from abnormal… this time it’s “normal” skin.  We added it to our post on hair.  On the same theme, Renée Y. took a photo of bike helmets in women’s and… um… helmet.  We also added more examples to our post on gendering default icons, this time bike traffic lights in Amsterdam.

We added breast cancer-themed grape tomatoes — yes, you read right — to our post on surprising things themed as such.  Sent in by Renée Y.

M.I.A.’s  “Born Free” video shows red-headed, freckled male adolescents being rounded up as part of an ethnic cleansing campaign. We added it to our post on gingerism.

Orangina has a drink with grenadine in it called “Indien” that features an orange wearing a feathered headdress. We added it to our earlier post on the use of feathered headdresses and other elements of some American Indian cultures.

We updated our post on the CNN experiment on children’s attitudes toward skin color with a segment of a parent reacting to her child’s preferences. Thanks to Abeer K., Dimitriy T.M., and Alex P. for sending in the one we missed!

Ang B. snapped a photo of an advertisement for men’s and women’s haircuts with the phrase “Fuck your Gender Binary” written across it.  We added it to our post featuring small acts of resistance against gendered and objectifying advertising.

Andi S. sent a photo of Spanx for men, designed to shape his upper body.  We added it to our post on the push-up panty for the penis.  Relatedly, Michelle R. sent us another example of how the diet/nutrition industry markets products differently to men and women.

We added two videos of the “men are like this, but women are like that, hahaha!” variety to one of our posts on gender stereotypes.  Also, in case you haven’t had enough of pointlessly gendered products, we added an example of a gendered “find” game and another example of gendered earplugs to our post on the topic.  On the other hand, doggie poop bags are unisex. Good to know.

In case you’re looking for some polite, submissive women, we added an online ad for “beautiful Russian ladies” to our post about a website that sells the submissive Asian stereotype to (mostly) non-Asian men.

We updated our post on a child’s zebra-striped string bikini with a bikini pulled from shelves in the U.K. The bikini, meant for young girls, included a padded bra.

We updated our post on envisioning how highways would affect the city of the future with an exhibit from the 1939 World’s Fair that pointed out that benefits of being able to avoid slums.  Also on the topic of highways, we added an image sent in by Jayna T. to our post on teens, the elderly, and driver safety.