Tags: abortion/reproduction, aging/life course, biology, bodies, gender, health/medicine, lgbtq, marriage/family, science/technology, sex/sexuality, social construction, fatherhood, motherhood, parenting, pregnancy, stigma, transgender, subtitles/CC, 06 to 10 mins
Year: 2012
Length: 10:33
Access: Vimeo

Summary: This video portrays the experiences and voices of various transgender parents and their families, which includes their decisions to become parents, reflections on what it means to be a parent, experiences of being a child of a transgender parent, the social stigma attached to being a transgender parent (and transgenderism in general), and experiences with various reproductive technology options. The video is excellent for illustrating the diversity of family structures and alternative gender arrangements, and would be useful in a class on sociology of the family, reproduction, gender, or sex and sexuality. People in the video highlight the hyper-gendered experience of pregnancy and parenting, thereby illustrating the social construction of these core features of the life course; this social constructivist perspective stands in contrast to common biological understandings of pregnancy and parenting. This video would pair well with Laura Mamo's Queering Reproduction: Achieving Pregnancy in the Age of Technoscience, as well as with GLAD's recently released book, Transgender Family Law: A Guide to Effective Advocacy, which can offer a nice framework for discussing some of the legal issues and advocacy strategies that transgender people encounter in a family law context. The video is also available with Spanish subtitles.

Submitted By: Valerie Chepp

Image by Kristian Dowling/Getty Images for Beatie

Tags: aging/life course, bodies, ageism, comedy, stereotypes, 21 to 60 mins
Year: 2012
Length: 21:46
Access: NBC (available free online until 7/20/12)

Summary: According to the show's creators, "'Betty White's Off Their Rockers'" takes senior stereotypes and blows them out of the water with a cast of sassy septuagenarians who are hip, sexy and ready to party!" The show features seniors who routinely prank young adults in hilarious situations. Season 1, episode 1 of the show offers a great platform for a discussion about ageism and stereotypes about the elderly (although all episodes to date also seem to be great for this). When using the episode in class, I had my students take notes on underlying stereotypes that make the show shocking and funny. We discussed that societal norms can sometimes most clearly be seen in showing their opposite. My students quickly picked up that the show would not be shocking if other age groups were doing these things. They also noticed that the show assumes elderly people are not sexual, do not have fun, and are not energetic or lively. It was a fun way to start a conversation about our section on aging.

Submitted By: @iamtjones

Tags: aging/life course, art/music, emotion/desire, marriage/family, methodology/statistics, biography, data visualization, divorce, memory, narrative, storytelling, 00 to 05 mins
Year: 2001
Length: 2:34
Access: Vimeo

Summary: In this clip "Polly", a 65 year old woman from the Midlands in the UK, recalls the time as a child when her parents sat her down and asked her which of them she wanted to be with. Her story, re-narrated by three players, represents how this traumatic event became an enduring memory throughout the various stages of her life. This video exhibits how sociologists can draw upon biography and narrative to explore any number of sociological concepts; in this particular clip, Polly's narration of her own biography can be used to explore sociological understandings of memory, emotion, family, and the life course. For example, the clip could be useful in a class on cognitive sociology, highlighting how cognitive processes, such as memory, are shaped by socio-cultural events, such as divorce. In addition to using the clip as a way to interrogate biography and narrative as sociological methods of research, the clip could also be a nice launching pad from which to introduce an assignment where students create their own videos, using their own biographical narratives as a window through which to explore larger sociological phenomena, much in the way C.W. Mills suggested. The clip's Vimeo webpage provides production details about the video, as well as a link to a paper by Kip Jones, the video's writer and producer, "The Art of Collaborative Storytelling: Arts-Based Representations of Narrative Contexts," which tells more about Polly's story and Jones' method. Kip Jones describes the clip as an "experiment in visualisation of research data."

Submitted By: Kip Jones

Tags: aging/life course, bodies, consumption/consumerism, discourse/language, gender, marketing/brands, media, race/ethnicity, social construction, comedy, feminism, reflexivity, representation, self-objectification, sexism, sexual objectification, 00 to 05 mins
Year: 2011
Length: 2:14
Access: Vimeo

Summary: It is not uncommon to read about Photoshop mishaps these days, and there is even a website devoted to posting pictures of bodies that have been butchered by the software, where the overzealous rearrangement of pixels has inadvertently created an oversized hand or a clavicle that appears to fold up like an accordion. Ralph Lauren's infamous picture of model Filippa Hamilton-Palmstierna was heavily retouched, leaving her torso smaller than her head, and as Rachel Maddow points out (here), in all probability, this is not a combination that exists in nature--_at least outside the insect world" (Jean Kilbourne is also critical of the Hamilton-Palmstierna photo in her documentary, Killing Us Softly 4). The often humorous attention paid to Photoshop mishaps threatens to overshadow the very troubling practice of distorting photographed bodies in popular media, and then peddling those distorted images to the public as real. In this post's featured clip, filmmaker Jesse Rosten creates what appears to be just another commercial for a product that promises youth and beauty in a bottle, but after seeing that the product is named Fotoshop, it's easy to deduce that Rosten's pitch is pure satire aimed at lambasting the similarly named software. Witty zingers abound in the clip (e.g., "Just one application of Fotoshop can give you results so dramatic they're almost unrealistic" and "Brighten eyes, whiten teeth, even adjust your race!"), and it offers a nice foundation for beginning a conversation about Photoshop's impact on the standards men and women are coming to have for their bodies and how Photoshop's ubiquity might be tied up with reflexivity, which denotes the growing awareness people have of their bodies. I find it useful to ask students to articulate what all the fuss is about? What's the harm?

The Sociological Cinema has explored the widespread use of Photoshop as a social problem in other videos, but perhaps none is more effective than the Dove Evolution commercial from 2006. Note too that this clip joins a number of other clips on The Sociological Cinema, which deploys satire as a means of critiquing the values promoted in commercials (here and here).

Submitted By: Lester Andrist

Tags: aging/life course, children/youth, consumption/consumerism, social construction, social mvmts/social change/resistance, critical youth studies, youth movements, 00 to 05 mins
Year: 2011
Length: 4:25
Access: New York Times

Summary: This Op-Doc from the New York Times is a video excerpt from Matt Wolf's and Jon Savage's film Teenage. The clip chronicles the development of "teenager" as a new social category, invented in America following World War II, and conceived of as a previously untapped market of new consumers. Yet the current global economic crisis has tested the limits of adolescent consumer power, as youth unemployment is high and many teenagers are no longer able to shop as they did in past decades. The clip is especially relevant in that it provides a brief overview of the history and power of youth social movements, and it connects this to contemporary youth movements happening around the globe. This video would be good to use in a sociology class on the life course or social movements. Click here to watch a "teaser" of the film and read some background on the project, and click here to read a short New York Times article that accompanies the Op-Doc video.

Submitted By: Valerie Chepp