{"id":256,"date":"2013-03-12T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2013-03-12T17:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2007\/10\/24\/race-class-and-gender\/"},"modified":"2015-09-01T21:22:32","modified_gmt":"2015-09-02T02:22:32","slug":"race-class-and-gender","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2013\/03\/12\/race-class-and-gender\/","title":{"rendered":"Managing Stigma: Doing Race, Class, And Gender"},"content":{"rendered":"

Cross-posted at Racialicious<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

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…). \u00a0It’s still one of my very favorite images.<\/p>\n

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).<\/p>\n

The ad for PhatFarm deftly balances Blackness (the body), upper-class Whiteness (the sailboat), and femininity (the pink sweater). \u00a0In strategically using culturally-resonant signifiers, he challenges popular representations of the Black body.<\/p>\n

\"1\"<\/a><\/p>\n

This happens in real life too. \u00a0Journalist Brent Staples powerfully\u00a0discusses<\/a>\u00a0how 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.<\/p>\n

…I employ what has proved to be an\u00a0excellent tension-reducing measure: I whistle melodies from Beethoven and Vivaldi and the more popular classical\u00a0composers. Even steely New Yorkers hunching toward nighttime destinations seem to relax and occasionally they\u00a0even join in the tune. Virtually everybody seems to sense that a mugger wouldn\u2019t be warbling bright, sunny\u00a0selections from Vivaldi\u2019s Four Seasons.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

“It is my equivalent to the cowbell that hikers wear when they know they are\u00a0in bear country,” Staples adds, referring to the fact that being perceived as dangerous can itself be dangerous, as we know from the example of\u00a0Trayvon Martin<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Rodrigo Diaz<\/a>, who was shot in the head in January when he accidentally pulled into the wrong driveway thinking it belonged to a friend.<\/p>\n

Thinking of class, race, and gender as performances gives us credit for being agents. \u00a0We don’t have control over what the signifiers are, nor how people read our bodies, but we can actively try to manage<\/em> those meanings. \u00a0Of course, some people have to do more “damage control” than others.<\/p>\nLisa Wade, PhD<\/a> is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of <\/em>American Hookup<\/a>, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender<\/a>; and a forthcoming introductory text: <\/em>Terrible Magnificent Sociology<\/a>.\u00a0You can follow her on Twitter<\/a> and Instagram<\/a>.<\/em><\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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…). \u00a0It’s still one of my very favorite images. I use it in Sociology 101 when I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[29,373,55,778,23694,23695,285,1760,23622],"class_list":["post-256","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-class","tag-color","tag-gender","tag-intersectionality","tag-intersectionality-gender-x-class","tag-intersectionality-gender-x-race","tag-raceethnicity","tag-raceethnicity-blacksafricans","tag-social-construction-symbols"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/256","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=256"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/256\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":58040,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/256\/revisions\/58040"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=256"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=256"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=256"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}