culture

As we prepare for Thanksgiving, many people look forward to sharing a warm meal with their family and friends. Others dread the holiday, gearing up to argue with their relatives or answer nosey questions. TSP has written about the political minefield that holiday meals can be in the past. This year we want to point out that the roots of difficult dinners actually run deep in everyday family mealtime. Thanksgiving, like any family mealtime, has the potential for conflict. 

Scholars have documented how important meal time can be for families in terms of cultivating relationships and family intimacy. However, they also show that despite widespread belief that families should share “happy meals” together, meals can be emotionally painful and difficult for some families and family members.

• Ann Meier and Kelly Musick. 2014. “Variation in Associations Between Family Dinners and Adolescent Well‐Being.” Journal of Marriage and Family 76(1):13–23.
• Richard Wilk. 2010. “Power at the Table: Food Fights and Happy Meals.” Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies 10(6):428–36.

Disagreements between parents and children arise at mealtime, in part, because of the meal itself. Some caregivers go to battle with “picky eaters.” Migrant parents struggle to pass cultural food traditions to children born in the United States. Low income parents worry that their children will not like or eat the food they can afford.

• Jayne A. Fulkerson, Mary Story, Dianne Neumark-Sztainer, and Sarah Rydell. 2008. “Family Meals: Perceptions of Benefits and Challenges among Parents of 8- to 10-Year-Old Children.” Journal of the American Dietetic Association 108(4):706–9.
• Sarah Bowen, Joslyn Brenton, and Sinikka Elliott. 2019. Pressure Cooker: Why Home Cooking Won’t Solve Our Problems and What We Can Do about It. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Family meals also reproduce conflict between heterosexual partners. Buying, preparing, and serving food are important ways that women fulfill gendered expectations. At family meal-times men continue to do less work but hold more power about how and when dinner is served.

• Marjorie L. DeVault, 1991. Feeding the Family: The Social Organization of Caring as Gendered Work. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Kate Cairns and Josée Johnston. 2015. Food and Femininity. London; New York: Bloomsbury Publishing.

Thanksgiving, or any big holiday meal, can involve disagreements. However, that is not altogether surprising considering that everyday family meals are full of conflicts and tension.

The election of President Donald Trump in the United States in 2016 ushered in an era of attacks on the media and accusations that outlets such as The New York Times and The Washington Post are publishing “fake news.” But what exactly is “fake news”? And why are claims about information, misinformation, and disinformation in American journalism so troubling?

TSP has previously published articles summarizing scholarly concerns about fake news–in particular, its role in the political polarization phenomenon. Media scholars also now see these trends as part of a larger, longer-term crisis of democracy itself, beginning sometime in the final decades of the 20th century.

• Matt Carlson. 2018. “Fake News as an Informational Moral Panic: The Symbolic Deviancy of Social Media during the 2016 US Presidential Election. Information, Communication & Society: 1–15.
• Karin Wahl-Jorgensen. 2018. “Media Coverage of Shifting Emotional Regimes: Donald Trump’ Angry Populism.” Media, Culture & Society 40(5): 766–778.
• Edson C. Tandoc. 2019. “The Facts of Fake News: A Research Review. Sociology Compass: 1–9.
• Johan Farkas and Jannick Schou. 2019. Post-Truth, Fake News and Democracy: Mapping the Politics of Falsehood. New York: Routledge.

In spite of all of these questions and controversies, one thing is clear: there is no consensus on what exactly fake news is. The definition of fake news is unclear to many Americans. According to a 2018 study from The Media Insight Project, there are several understandings of what “fake news” really means to Americans nationwide:  

• 71% of Americans think fake news is “made-up stories from news outlets that don’t exist”
• 63% think fake news refers to “media outlets that pass on conspiracy theories and unsubstantiated rumors”
• 62% think it means “journalists from real news organizations making stuff up” 
• 43% think fake news refers to news organizations making sloppy mistakes
• 25% call satire or comedy about current events fake news

Audiences play a key role in interpreting the news and acting on it — or not. Pew Research Center data shows 68 percent of American adults say that they get their news on social media even though 57 percent of them expect the news they see on social media to be “largely inaccurate.” Academic studies also find that “fake news” is often used by social media users to insult information shared by members of opposing political parties.  

• Silvio Waisbord. 2018. “Truth is What Happens to News: On Journalism, Fake News, and Post-Truth. Journalism Studies 19(13): 1866–1878.
• John Brummette, Marcia DiStaso, Michail Vafeiadis, and Marcus Messner. 2018. “Read All About It: The Politicization of ‘Fake News’ on Twitter.” Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 95(2): 497–517.

There is no shortage of writing on the history of college sports, especially its history of scandal. There is also plenty of writing on how big-time college sports harm both the colleges and their athletes. Books as varied as Pay for Play: A History of Big-Time College Athletic Reform, College Sports Inc.: The Athletic Department vs. The University and College Athletes for Hire: The Evolution and Legacy of the NCAA’s Amateur Myth highlight the rise of the NCAA through and because of scandal, the enormous amounts of money flowing through college athletic departments (but not to players), and the contortions of universities to fit big-time athletics.

But athletics matter even in schools defined by their academics rather than their sports. Documents from the recent Harvard affirmative action legal case confirm prior research: even at the Ivies and at coed liberal arts colleges, athletes receive a substantial admissions bump. Articles from The Atlantic and Slate detail this bump and how it especially benefits upper-class white students. At Ivies and elite liberal arts colleges, the potential financial gain from athletics (as suspect as that might be at other schools) doesn’t make sense as the primary reason to keep sports in these schools. So what are some other reasons that American higher education institutions prioritize athletics? Here are three that sociological thinking and research can help us understand.

1.Status Networks and Peer Institutions

First, athletics helps schools signal who their peers are, both academically and athletically. Higher education in the United States didn’t develop from a master plan. It is, instead, a network and market of schools that jockey for position, carving out niches and constantly battling for status. Athletic conferences are one way that institutions establish networks, and research has found that schools within conferences come to share similar status, both athletically and academically. The Ivy League is the prime example of this phenomenon. Although “the Ivies” have come to mean a set of elite schools, the league began as simply a commitment to compete against each other on the athletic playing field. 

• Arik Lifschitz, Michael Sauder, and Mitchell L. Stevens. 2014. “Football as a Status System in U.S. Higher Education.” Sociology of Education 87(3): 204–19.
• David F. Labaree. 2017. A Perfect Mess: The Unlikely Ascendancy of American Higher Education. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

2. Competing for Students

Another way that colleges signal prestige is through established ranking systems, and a key part of those rankings come from measures of selectivity and the quality undergraduate students. So all colleges are competing for students — either to solidify rankings or to simply matriculate enough students for small, tuition-dependent institutions to be able to pay the bills. In Creating a Class, Mitchell Stevens points out how important athletics are to recruiting students within the competitive, small liberal arts space. He writes,

“Students choose schools for multiple reasons, and the ability to participate in a particular sport at a competitive level of play is often an important one. Because so many talented students also are serious athletes, colleges eager to admit students with top academic credentials are obliged to maintain at least passable teams and to support them with competitive facilities.”

• Mitchell L.Stevens. 2007. Creating a Class: College Admissions and the Education of Elites. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

3. Non-academic Signals in Admissions

Histories of Ivy League admissions have revealed how including athletic markers was part of establishing who belonged at the school. On the most obvious level, prominent alumni who were athletes or the parents of prospective students publicly pushed for admissions policies that would be beneficial to others like them. But more subtly, and more insidiously, having an affinity for athletics was viewed as a mark of the “Yale man,” the upper-class, Christian, future leader of the world who had the presence of mind and body to pick up new ideas and manage others. 

• Jerome Karabel. 2006. The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. Boston, MA: Mariner Books.
• Joseph A. Soares. 2007. The Power of Privilege: Yale and America’s Elite Colleges. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Athletics in colleges isn’t just a money-maker or something to keep students happy. It’s a way for colleges to recruit students, fight for status, and signal what types of students they value.

Let’s face it: lots of fans despised the final season of Game of Thrones. Earlier this year, Scientific American suggested that’s because the storytelling style changed from sociological to psychological. When the storytelling was sociological, the characters evolved often in dramatic, unpredictable ways in response to the broader institutional settings, and the countervailing incentives and norms that surrounded them. When the style switched to psychological, viewers had to identify with the characters on a personal level and become invested in them for the story to work. Within this individualistic framing, characters’ unexpectedly evil actions and untimely deaths stopped making sense. As it happens, not only is sociological storytelling an important driver in keeping audiences devoted, it can also be a powerful tool in crafting a persuasive research article.

Research suggests that storytelling is powerful precisely because it gives human faces to abstract social forces, emplotting them as combatants over the very problems which social theory endeavors to understand — conflict, inequality, and modernization, to name but a few. Andrew Abbott thus argues for a lyrical sociology that recreates the experience of social discovery in the reader. Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot and Jessica Hoffmann Davis similarly suggest that to capture the complexity, dynamics, and subtlety of human experience and organizational life, one must document the voices and visions of the people they are studying.

• Andrew Abbott. 2007. “Against Narrative: A Preface to Lyrical Sociology.” Sociological Theory 25(1): 67-99.
• Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot and Jessica Hoffmann Davis. 1997. The Art and Science of Portraiture. Jossey-Bass Incorporated Pub.

Is it enough to fashion stories that enthrall readers with captivating narrative arcs, or must scholarship also advance theoretical arguments? In a recent Twitter thread, Jeff Guhin invites discussion of the tension in qualitative work between telling stories about social problems and making arguments. Some sociologists argue that description alone makes a valuable contribution. Scholars doing qualitative work should strive to publish descriptively rich, findings-driven papers that are so grounded and concrete that the reader intuitively grasps the “so what.” Though ethnography may share some characteristics with imaginative writing, Hammersley points out that it is more than that. Ethnographers must grapple with a number of issues as they analyze data and write up their work, just as they do when they choose where and how to collect it.

• Max Besbris and Shamus Khan. 2017. “Less Theory. More Description.” Sociological Theory 35(2): 147-153.
• Ashley Mears. 2017.  “Puzzling in Sociology: On Doing and Undoing Theoretical Puzzles.” Sociological Theory 35(2): 138-146.
• Martyn Hammersley. 2006. “Ethnography: Problems and Prospects.” Ethnography and Education 1(1): 3-14.

Using our sociological imagination in storytelling doesn’t mean discounting characters’ personal or psychological motivations. Instead, it means showing characters in ongoing and complex interaction with the economic and political forces of broader society and illustrating the consequences that emerge. This can be a powerful tool for learning social theory.

• Dennis S. Erasga. 2010. “When Story Becomes Theory: Storytelling as Sociological Theorizing.” Asia-Pacific Social Science Review 10(1): 21-38.

Originally posted November 28, 2017.

American attitudes towards transgender and gender nonconforming persons might be changing. Earlier this month, voters elected six transgender officials to public office in the United States, and poll data from earlier this year suggests the majority of Americans oppose transgender bathroom restrictions and support LGBT nondiscrimination laws. Yet, data on attitudes toward transgender folks is extremely limited, and with the Trump administration’s assault on transgender protections in the military and workplace, the future for the trans community is unclear. Despite this uncertainty, a close examination of the social science research on past shifts in attitudes towards same-sex relationships can provide us insight for what the future may hold for the LGBTQ community in the coming decades.

Attitudes about homosexuality vary globally. While gay marriage is currently legal in more than twenty countries, many nations still criminalize same-sex relationships. Differences in attitudes about homosexuality between countries can be explained by a variety of factors, including religious context, the strength of democratic institutions, and the country’s level of economic development.

• Amy Adamczyk. 2017.  Cross-National Public Opinion about Homoseuxality: Examining Attitudes Across the Globe. Oakland, CA: University of California Press.

In the United States, the late 1980s witnessed little acceptance of same-sex marriage, except for small groups of people who tended to be highly educated, from urban backgrounds, or non-religious. By 2010, support for same-sex marriage increased dramatically, though older Americans, Republicans, and evangelicals were significantly more likely to remain opposed to same-sex marriage. Such a dramatic shift in a relatively short period of time indicates changing attitudes rather than generational differences.

• Dawn Michelle Baunach. 2012. “Changing Same-Sex Marriage Attitudes in America from 1988 Through 2010.” Public Opinion Quarterly 76(2): 364-378.
• Kathy Hull. 2014. “Same-Sex, Different Attitudes.” The Society Pages, White Paper.

Americans have also become more inclusive in their definition of family. In 2003, nearly half of Americans emphasized heterosexual marriage in their definition of family, while only about a quarter adopted a definition that included same-sex couples. By 2010, nearly one third of Americans ascribed to a more inclusive understanding of family structures. Evidence suggests that these shifts in attitudes were partially the result of broader societal shifts in the United States, including increased educational attainment and changing cultural norms.

• Brian Powell, Catherine Bolzendahl, Claudia Geist, and Lala Carr Steelman. 2010. Counted Out: Same-Sex Relations and America’s Definition of Family. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.
• Jeni Loftus. 2001. “America’s Liberalization in Attitudes Toward Homosexuality, 1973 to 1998.” American Sociological Review, 762-782.

Despite this progress for same-sex couples, many challenges remain. Members of the LGBTQ community still experience prejudice, discrimination, and hate crimes — especially for trans women of color. Even with support for formal rights for same-sex couples from the majority of Americans, the same people are often uncomfortable with informal privileges, like showing physical affection in public. Past debates within LGBTQ communities about the importance of fighting for marriage rights indicates that the future for the LGBTQ folks in the United States is uncertain. While the future can seem harrowing, the recent victories in the United States and Australia for same-sex couples and transgender individuals would have been unheard of only a few decades ago, which offers a beacon of hope to LGBTQ communities.

• Long Doan, Annalise Loehr, and Lisa R. Miller. 2014. “Formal Rights and Informal Privileges for Same-Sex Couples: Evidence from a National Survey Experiment.” American Sociological Review 79(6): 1172-1195.
• Mary Bernstein and Verta Taylor, eds. 2013. The Marrying Kind? Debating Same-Sex Marriage within the Lesbian and Gay Movement. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

—

Want to read more?

Check out these posts on TSP:

• Violence and Discrimination against Transgender People
• Attitudes toward Gay and Lesbian People Have Grown More Accepting around the World. Why? And What Obstacles Remain?

Review historical trends in public opinion on gay and lesbian rights (Gallup)

Check out research showing that bisexual adults are less likely to be “out” (Pew Research Center)

Since the passage of the Education for All Handicapped Children Act (EHA) in 1975 and the more comprehensive Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) in 1990, the number of children receiving special education services has increased dramatically. Today, seven million children in the United States receive special education to meet their individual needs, with more than ever attending their neighborhood schools as opposed to separate schools or institutions.

Because special education has become so institutionalized in schools over the past three decades, we often take for granted that the categories we use to classify people with special needs are socially constructed. For instance, Minnesota has thirteen categorical disability areas, ranging from autism spectrum disorders to blind-visual impairment to traumatic brain injury. But these categories differ from state to state, as do states’ definitions for each category and their protocols for determining when a child meets the diagnostic criteria in a given area. A more sociological take suggests that the “special ed” label does more than just entitle children to receipt of services. For better or worse, it also helps to establish their position within the structure of the mass education system, and to define their relationships with other students, administrators, and professionals.

• Sally Tomlinson. 2012. A Sociology of Special Education. Routledge.

• Curt Dudley-Marling. 2004. “The Social Construction of Learning Disabilities.” Journal of Learning Disabilities 37(6): 482-489.

• Ray McDermott, Shelley Goldman, and Hervé Varenne. 2006. “The Cultural Work of Learning Disabilities.” Educational Researcher 35(6): 12-17.

Research suggests that children of color are overdiagnosed and underserved. They are more likely to be referred for special education testing and to receive special education services than others. This disproportionality occurs more often in categories for which diagnosis relies on the “art” of professional judgment, like emotionally disturbed (ED) or learning disabled (LD). It occurs less often in categories that require little diagnostic inference like deafness or blindness. The attribution of labels can be particularly concerning for children of color, as these labels can be associated with lower teacher and peer expectations and reduced curricular coverage. Even when appropriately placed in special education classes, children of color often receive poorer services than disabled white children. Some research suggests that this happens because the culture and organization of schools encourages teachers to view students of color as academically and behaviorally deficient.

• Carla O’Connor and Sonia DeLuca Fernandez. 2006. “Race, Class, and Disproportionality: Reevaluating the Relationship between Poverty and Special Education Placement.” Educational Researcher 35(6): 6-11.

• Daniel J. Losen and Gary Orfield. 2002. Racial Inequity in Special Education. Harvard Education Publishing Group.

• Beth Harry and Janette Klingner. 2014. Why Are So Many Minority Students in Special Education? Teachers College Press.

• Ellen Brantlinger, Robert Jimenez, Janette Klingner, Marleen Pugach, and Virginia Richardson. 2005. “Qualitative Studies in Special Education.” Exceptional Children 71(2): 195-207.

Given the disproportionate representation of students of color in special education, sociologists have investigated whether a child’s race or ethnicity elevates their likelihood of special education placement. By controlling for individual-, school-, and district-level factors, researchers have found that race and social class are not significant predictors of placement. However, school characteristics — like the overall level of student ability — play a role in determining who gets diagnosed. And, because children of color tend to be concentrated in majority-minority schools, they are less likely to be diagnosed than their white peers.

• Jacob Hibel, George Farkas, and Paul L. Morgan. 2010. “Who is Placed into Special Education?” Sociology of Education 83(4): 312-332.

You may also be interested in a previous article: “Autism Across Cultures.”

For more information on children and youth with disabilities, check out the National Center for Education Statistics.

This post was created in collaboration with the Minnesota Journalism Center.

Technology has its share of perks and benefits. Past articles on The Society Pages demonstrate how artificial intelligence and technology can help enhance journalism and curb trafficking and trolling online — but scholars have also found technology has a dark side. Meredith Broussard calls it, “technochauvinism,” a belief that tech is always the solution to the world’s problems. It is a red flag, she says, because “there has never been, nor will there ever be, a technological innovation that moves us away from the essential problems of human nature.”

• Meredith Broussard. 2018. Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World. The MIT Press.
• Cathy O’Neil. 2016. Weapons of Math Destruction. Crown.

One of these problems is unequal access to the internet. On The Society Pages, we highlighted how access to the internet influences activism. Other research shows how access to the internet influences various societal practices including predictive policing, real estate markets, affordable housing, social services and medical care. For example, predictive policing is a developing area of inquiry. This practice has come under scrutiny for its lack of transparency and potential to assign inaccurate risk scores to individuals that may become a victim or offender in a violent crime, which can lead to the overpolicing of already marginalized areas.

• Eszter Hargittai and Yuli Patrick Hsieh. 2013. “Digital Inequality.” The Oxford Handbook of Internet Studies. Oxford University Press.
• Albert Meijer and Martijn Wessels. 2019. “Predictive Policing: Review of Benefits and Drawbacks.” International Journal of Public Administration.
• Nicholas Diakopoulos. 2019. Automating the News: How Algorithms are Rewriting the Media. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.

Scholars have also discovered that blue-chip companies, including Google, produce search results that marginalize underrepresented populations. Further, there is fear that algorithms are writing people out of jobs. While algorithms do have the potential to write people out of jobs, different fields may experience this to various degrees. This may be true for professions including paralegals: Up to 69 percent of paralegals’ time could be automated. In the journalistic profession, reporters and editors are in better shape due to their ability to animate algorithms to their advantage: As a human-centered process, algorithms have the potential to increase reporting outputs with less human effort. But algorithms aren’t neutral — they are produced by people, and they have the potential to reproduce marginalization.

• Virginia Eubanks. 2018. Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
• Safiya Umoja Noble. 2018. Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. New York: NYU Press.

Originally published on June 29, 2018.

In the United States, tension between religious institutions and the LGBT community persists, even after the legalization of same-sex marriage. While some faith groups are becoming open and affirming, the recent Supreme Court decision in Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission and stories of LGBTQIA+ exclusion at religiously-affiliated institutions like Hope College and Wheaton College show continued conflict between religion and sexuality, even in an era when Americans have become more accepting of same-sex relationships. Social science research shows that these challenges continue, but it also demonstrates how people don’t always have to choose between faith and being faithful to who they are.

Religious institutions are clearly changing. Even churches without formal welcoming statements often accept LGBT members, sometimes in contrast to the policies of their national organizations. At the same time, queer students are both learning to navigate their identities on religious campuses, and engaging in direct activism to create more welcoming and inclusive organizations.

• Andrew L. Whitehead. 2018. “Institutionalized Norms, Practical Organizational Activity, and Loose Coupling: Inclusive Congregations’ Responses to Homosexuality.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 56(4): 820–35.
• Jonathan S. Coley. 2018. Gay on God’s Campus: Mobilizing for LGBT Equality at Christian Colleges and Universities. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
• Robbee Wedow, Landon Schnabel, Lindsey K. D. Wedow, and Mary Ellen Konieczny. 2017. “‘I’m Gay and I’m Catholic’: Negotiating Two Complex Identities at a Catholic University.” Sociology of Religion 78(3): 289–317.

Some people who are queer and religious experience tension between their identities, especially when they feel family members, faith leaders, or friends want them to choose one or the other. But other people work out all kinds of ways to be both religious and queer at the same time, from different doctrinal interpretations to forging their own communities.

• Tanya Erzen. 2006. Straight to Jesus : Sexual and Christian Conversions in the Ex-Gay Movement. Berkeley: University of California Press.
• Melissa M. Wilcox. 2009. Queer Women and Religious Individualism. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
• Dervla Sara Shannahan. 2009. “Sexual Ethics, Marriage, and Sexual Autonomy: The Landscapes for Muslimat and Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgendered Muslims.” Contemporary Islam 3(1): 59–78.

“Howzat?”
“Kaaaaach it!”
“Bowled ‘im!”
“Wadda wrong’un!”

Americans may scratch their heads at these expressions, but a large body of international sports fans relishes those words. England and Wales are currently hosting the Cricket World Cup, the 12th edition of the tournament that began in 1975; ten national teams who have made it past qualifiers are slogging it out to lift the trophy. Social scientists around the world have studied cricket — as with many sports, a social science perspective on cricket shows that the pitch and stumps reside at a complex intersection of globalization, postcolonialism, boundaries, and identity.

Cricket is a global sport based on institutional and organizational processes as well as broader patterns of cultural and national identity. The centuries-old sport started in the United Kingdom and has since spread into a worldwide, modernized phenomenon, complete with fireworks, cheerleaders, and sophisticated analytics. An international network of cricketing organizations, athletes, broadcasting companies, sponsors, and state actors bring the game to its large, global audience.

• Jason Kaufman and Orlando Patterson. 2005. “Cross-National Cultural Diffusion: The Global Spread of Cricket.” American Sociological Review 70(1): 82-110

• Jon Gemmell and Boria Majumdar. 2007. Cricket, Race and the 2007 World Cup. CRC Press.
• Devra Waldman and Brian Wilson. 2017. “Behind the Scenes of Sport for Development: Perspectives of Executives of Multinational Sport Organizations.” International Review for the Sociology of Sport 52(6): 651-674.

In several countries, cricket’s growth has been shaped by the dilemmas, challenges, and sticky wickets of decolonization. In these countries, cricket has played an important role in building new cultural and national identities; social scientists explain that the popularization of cricket is both a cause and consequence of broader change. South Asian nations today are key players and decision-makers in the international cricketing world, which reverse-sweeps conventional logic that white countries hold greater global power.

• Boria Majumdar. 2007. “Nationalist Romance to Postcolonial Sport: Cricket in 2006 India.” Sport in Society 10(1): 88-100.
• Colin Agur. 2013. “A Foreign Field No Longer: India, the IPL, and the Global Business of Cricket.” Journal of Asian and African Studies 48(5): 541-556.
• Kaushik Bandyopadhyay. 2013. “Cricket as Nationalist Obsession: ICC World Cup 2011 and Bangladesh as a Host Nation.” Sport in Society 16(1): 19-32.

The cricket field can also tell us a lot about race, belonging, and hierarchy. A classic in the social science of sport, C.L.R. James’ Beyond the Boundary uses his tales playing cricket to highlight status, exclusion, prejudice, and inequality within a social world shaped by racism, colonialism, and resistance. For example, he describes how team selection in cricket was shaped by skin-color rather than skill. Today, James’ ideas still influence scholars who study cricket as relevant to race, group boundaries, and social movements. Some researchers have studied anti-racist activism and the pursuit of equitable cricket representation in countries grappling with racial inequality. Others have shown that cricket offers an avenue of legitimization for marginalized and underrepresented groups in such nations.

• Goolam Vahed. 2001.”‘What Do They Know of Cricket Who Only Cricket Know?’: Transformation in South African Cricket, 1990-2000.” International Review for the Sociology of Sport (36)3: 319-336.
• Karen Farquharson and Timothy Marjoribanks. 2006. “Representing Australia: Race, the Media and Cricket.” Journal of Sociology 42(1): 25-41.
• Stephen Wagg. 2007. “‘To Be an Englishman’: Nation, Ethnicity and English Cricket in the Global Age.” Sport in Society 10(1): 11-32.
• Thomas Fletcher and Thomas Walle. 2014. “Negotiating Their Right to Play: Asian-specific Cricket Teams and Leagues in the UK and Norway.” Identities 22(2): 230-246.

Unfortunately, many issues of exclusion and marginalization still exist in the cricketing world today, both within and across different nations. As cricket continues to grow, globalize, and gather, such issues will hopefully be firmly driven outta here from the middle of the bat.

For an explanation of cricket terms, visit this ESPN glossary.

Originally published June 22, 2018.

The 2017 critically-acclaimed documentary Check It depicts the lives of a group gay and transgender youth from Washington D.C., who create a gang to help protect themselves from bullying and violence in their community. Although the film claims that the Check It group is “the only gay gang documented in America, maybe even the world,” evidence suggests that gay gang members may be more common. While research on crime typically portrays gang members as predominantly heterosexual men of color, such visions of gang life have overlooked the experiences of gay gang members. Recent scholarship attempts to incorporate LGBT voices into our understandings of gangs and violence, and move past the often one-sided depictions of LGBT people as victims of hate crimes.

Although researchers have been studying the hate crime victimization of gay men, and to a lesser extent other LGBT identities, they often limit queer experiences as passive or lacking agency. Evidence suggests that various intersections of a LGBT person’s identity including race, class, and gender identity, influence both their likelihood of being victims of hate crimes and their perceptions of the harmful impacts of the victimization experience itself. Scholars also critique hate crime politics and legislation for treating queer violence as individualized and abnormal, rather than highlighting the systematic ways that LGBT people are oppressed and excluded in mainstream society that facilitates this violence.

• Gregory M. Herek. 2009. “Hate Crimes and Stigma-Related Experiences among Sexual Minority Adults in the United States: Prevalence Estimates from a National Probability Sample.” Journal of Interpersonal Violence 24: 54–74.
• Doug Meyer. 2012. “An Intersectional Analysis of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) People’s Evaluations of Anti-Queer Violence.” Gender & Society 26(6): 849-873.
• Doug Meyer. 2014. “Resisting Hate Crime Discourse: Queer and Intersectional Challenges to Neoliberal Hate Crime Laws.” Critical Criminology 22(1): 113-125.
• Joey L. Mogul, Andrea J. Ritchie, and Kay Whitlock. 2011. Queer Injustice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States. Beacon Press.

We know far less about how LGBTQ individuals participate in gang activity and violence. New investigations into gay gang members challenges heteronormative assumptions about participation in violent crime. This work, spearheaded by sociologist Vanessa R. Panfil, demonstrates how these gay men must reconcile their sexuality in an overtly masculine and homophobic gang culture. Panfil shows that while some of her participants participated in predominantly straight or mixed-sexuality gangs, others were part of queer friendship networks that created their own — and self-defined as — “gangs” in order to protect themselves from discrimination, bullying, and violence in their neighborhoods, much like the friends in Check It.

• Vanessa R. Panfil. 2014. “I Will Fight You Like I’m Straight”: Gay Gang-and Crime-Involved Men’s Participation in Violence.” Pp. 121-145 in Handbook of LGBT Communities, Crime, and Justice. New York: Springer.
• Vanessa R. Panfil. 2018. The Gang’s All Queer: The Lives of Gay Gang Members. New York: New York University Press.

“Queering” criminal behavior breaks down inaccurate understandings of how violence operates. Among gay gang members, it isn’t just about untethered masculinity. LGBT perspectives highlight how binaries such as “victim” and “perpetrator,” and even the very idea of what constitutes a “gang,”  are often superfluous, inaccurate, and stigmatizing. Incorporating queer voices into studies of criminal behavior and punishment helps to disentangle how the various intersections of identities shape criminal behavior and criminalization.