Tags: art/music, bodies, gender, intersectionality, race/ethnicity, sex/sexuality, feminism, rap music, 00 to 05 mins
Year: 2007
Length: 4:25
Access: YouTube

Summary: In this music video, rap artist Missy Elliott fills the void in the discussion of pro-sex black feminism. Historically, black voices have been excluded from the sex-positive feminist revolution. In part, the marginalization of black voices is a product of a colonial past that has stereotyped the black body as always already hypersexual (see Saarjite Baartman). As a result, black academics have taken up a “politics of silence” to resist these stereotypes. A potential site to begin the discussion of a pro-sex black feminist discourse is rap music (Skeggs 1993). The female rappers “talk back, talk black” (hooks 1989) to the colonialist system that attempts to contain the expression of women’s sexuality. In Missy Elliott’s hit song “Work It” (lyrics here), she expresses her own kind of sexuality, effectively creating a dialogue for us to rethink our analyses of black women’s sexuality. How does Missy (re)claim her body as a site of desire and empowerment? How does Missy establish herself as an active sexual subject in the song? Does this challenge patriarchal notions of female sexuality? How does she subvert traditional understandings of the black body? Does Missy challenge conventional (white) beauty standards (i.e. celebration of hips, large butt etc)? How, if at all, does Missy’s music differ from other female artists and, specifically, other popular women rappers? Does Missy create a language for other black women to start understanding and theorizing about their sexual experiences? Can we understand the black female body as separate from representations of Saartje Baartman? How does this enhance our understanding of active black female desire? Do you think that rap music is a legitimate medium to begin theorizing about black sexual scripts?

Submitted By: Pat Louie

Tags: bodies, culture, discourse/language, cultural relativity, gestures, non-material culture, 06 to 10 mins
Year: 1994
Length: 9:06
Access: YouTube

Summary: Culture is a fundamental concept within sociology and anthropology. Culture includes the ideas, values, practices, and material objects that enable human cooperation within groups and societies. Symbolic culture includes non-material forms of culture such as language, which consists of meaningful symbols that enable communication. Beyond written and spoken language, we also communicate via gestures, or body language. This excerpt from the BBC's Human Animal series discusses gestures and their meanings in different cultures around the world. The video illustrates many common gestures (e.g. the use of the middle finger, head nod, thumbs up, and handshake) and documents the diverse messages these gestures send in different countries. It also draws upon certain ideas, such as the notion that someone is "crazy", and illustrates the various gestures used to communicate this same message. Viewers may find this video useful in introductory classes to illustrate one dimension of culture, and how it varies throughout the world.

Submitted By: omowbray

Tags: bodies, culture, emotion/desire, gender, multiculturalism, sex/sexuality, social construction, cultural relativity, ideal beauty, 06 to 10 mins
Year: 1997
Length: 9:56
Access: YouTube

Summary: What is beauty? Is beauty an objective feature or is it in the "eye of the beholder"? According to a 2012 competition hosted by Lorraine Cosmetics, the most "natural" and "objectively" beautiful woman was determined "scientifically" through such measures as facial symmetry. While the incident ignited a public debate about the ability to "scientifically" measure beauty, a review of the research shows that people's sense of beauty varies across time and culture. In this video, famous anthropologist Desmond Morris notes that while there is a "biological language of sex" in which people are attracted to others through physical characteristics, this process is mediated through a "complex cultural adventure." Throughout cultures across the world, people exaggerate the features of beauty that their culture deems attractive. A study looking at beauty across 200 different cultures found hardly any qualities that existed across all cultures. The video documents several of these physical features on women, including neck length, foot size, and lip size. It illustrates the cultural evaluation of beauty and the (often painful) techniques used to achieve the unnaturally extreme forms of beauty. What notions of female beauty in your culture might be similar to or different from conceptions of beauty found in the video? Viewers may also note the heteronormativity of the video, in which beauty is explicitly stated to attract members of the opposite sex.

Submitted By: omowbray

Tags: bodies, consumption/consumerism, gender, marketing/brands, media, sex/sexuality, representation, sexual
objectification, 00 to 05 mins
Year:
2011
Length: 0:59
Access: YouTube 

Summary: In this television advertisement for the Fiat 500 Abarth, a man has a passionate encounter with a seductive Italian woman, who  turns out to be a car. Literally. I use this clip to teach the concept of  sexual objectification. First, I have my students read Caroline  Heldman's essay on how to identify sexual objectification in media images. In this essay, Heldman defines the term as follows: "If objectification is the process of representing or treating a person like an object, then sexual objectification is the process of representing or treating a person like a sex object, one that serves another’s sexual pleasure." I then screen this Fiat commercial in class and have students construct it, using Heldman's 7-item Sex Object Test (SOT) as a resource to guide our analysis. This approach gives us a lot to talk about, including the way the woman in the advertisement stands in for an object, the interchangeability of sex objects (she only speaks Italian and appears to be incomprehensible to the fantasizer), the way in which her body is literally branded with the Abarth logo, and the ejaculatory imagery. Instructors can go on to discuss the harm associated with sexual objectification, which Heldman addresses in Part 2 of her series on sexual objectification, and which is also discussed in the films Killing Us Softly and Miss Representation.

Submitted  By: Michelle Sandhoff

Tags: bodies, health/medicine, media, prejudice/discrimination, fat shaming, obesity, 00 to 05 mins
Year: 2012
Length: 2:04
Access: msnbc

Summary: This video is from the Today Show and can be used to highlight the very real health concerns associated with obesity, a problem which stems in part from living in a society that encourages people to move less and eat more. According to the news report, Alabama, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, and West Virginia are the "fattest" states, while Colorado, Massachusetts, and Vermont are the leanest. While there is a tendency for people to conclude the issue boils down to personal choices, this report draws attention to a more systemic reason for obesity. The lowest rates of obesity tend to occur in the wealthiest states, suggesting that leaner states are able to encourage exercise by building more pedestrian friendly infrastructure. Class discussion can also be pushed beyond the explicit message of the report, and students can be encouraged to critically examine the discourse on obesity in the United States. Much like this news report, people often connect weight and health, but it is simply not the case that being overweight is the same as being unhealthy. Similarly, students can also be encouraged to examine the phenomenon of fat shaming and how the widespread practice of photographing overweight bodies without heads (a.k.a., "headless fatties") reinforces the message that having an overweight body is so shameful, identities need to be disguised.

Submitted By: Vicky Herbel, Associate Professor of Sociology

Tags: art/music, bodies, gender, sex/sexuality, social construction, dance, masculinity, performance, subtitles/CC, 06 to 10 mins
Year: 2009
Length: 9:11
Access: YouTube 

Summary: This video features a dance piece entitled "The One & The Other," and is part of the graduate thesis of choreographer Juan Carlos Claudio (performing here with Graham Brown). In the piece, Claudio explores issues of masculinity and male-male friendships. He writes in his thesis: "The One & The Other came from a desire to portray the process of developing a healthy male relationship in which traits of masculinity and femininity are fully realized and expressed without fear or judgment. In presenting an example of this relationship I hoped to: 1) Challenge the old-fashioned rules of masculinity and the assumptions of male superiority, so that men could live happier and more fulfilled lives; 2) Expand men’s personal and emotional selves by helping them expose and realize their fears of close affection toward other men; and 3) Understand how men can create more genuine friendships by overcoming competitiveness, inexpressiveness, and other aspects of traditional masculine roles." This piece is not set to music. If you turn the volume up high you can hear the sounds of breathing and bodies in motion. After showing this performance in class, I ask students to discuss their emotional or visceral responses; they often say that it made them feel uncomfortable. This sets up a discussion of our social expectations of performances of masculinity, and can segue into a discussion of how we connect gender performance to ideas about sexuality. I ask the students to honestly assess whether they made assumptions about the sexuality of the performers based on their movements and interactions, and what led them to these assumptions. The video can also be used as an introduction to why bodies matter—I often ask students if they would feel more comfortable if it were two women dancers, or a male-female couple, and how their interpretations of certain movement sequences might be altered.

Submitted By: Michelle Sandhoff

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: art/music, bodies, discourse/language, gender, inequality, lgbtq, sex/sexuality, social mvmts/social change/resistance, gender expression, gender identity, identity politics, riki wilchins, queer, queer theory, transgender, subtitles/CC, 06 to 10 mins
Year: 2012
Length: 6:35
Access: YouTube

Summary: What better way to learn about the multiplicity of genders than to talk openly about gender identities and expressions, especially those which appear to challenge the prevailing myth of a tidy binary? The director of this short film asks eighteen trans activists, "How do you describe your gender identity?" and one by one, they respond. "Being a woman has got nothing to do with having a vagina," one activist remarks, then adds, "being a man has got nothing to do with having a penis." The clip is useful for underscoring the analytical distinction between gender identity, which refers to one's inner sense of being a man or a woman, and gender expression, which refers to one's fundamental sense of being masculine or feminine through performance (see Riki Wilchins, Queer Theory, Gender Theory). The impulse to police the gender binary, to ostracize and assault those whose gender identity and expression appear incongruent or fall outside the gender binary is an oppressive project, and as the activists featured in this clip suggest, there is both conformity and resistance to this project. To some extent, the activists who identify as transsexual women, work within the schema that posits "woman" as an identity which is meaningfully distinct from "man." In contrast, one activist appears to reject the binary altogether (1:04 to 2:38) and identifies only as a "trans person." To my mind, the collection of interviews begs a central and important question: Is it possible to move beyond gender as a fundamental basis of one's identity?

Submitted By: Lester Andrist

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: bodies, children/youth, inequality, prejudice/discrimination, race/ethnicity, implicit bias, interracial friendship, 06 to 10 mins
Year: 2012
Length: 9:28
Access: CNN

Summary: This Anderson Cooper clip examines children's views on race and interracial friendships. It shows how researchers viewed children (6-year olds and 13-year olds) ambiguous pictures of children with different colored skin, and asked them about what was happening in the pictures, if the children were friends, and if their parents would want them to be friends. It showed that both sets of children had clear understandings about race and that, at least the 13-year olds, had clearly experienced racist views from their families and their friends' families. Among the 6-year olds, young white children were more negative about interactions between children of different races and were far more likely to think black and white children would not be friends. The researcher discusses these experiences as part of an implicit bias, in which people are placed into stereotypes categories based on previous interactions and messages. See also this video of an experimental study showing children's racial bias, this video showing why racial diversity matters in forming view on race, and this video on the children's views on interracial friendships (all from Anderson Cooper).

Submitted By: Paul Dean