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

Tags: bodies, children/youth, crime/law/deviance, gender, sex/sexuality, violence, human trafficking, prostitution, rape, sex trafficking, sexual violence, violence against women, 00 to 05 mins
Year: 2012
Length: 4:30
Access: New York Times

Summary: In this Op-Ed Video, Pulitzer-prize winning columnist Nicholas Kristof interviews a survivor of childhood sex trafficking in Manhattan (see accompanying article). The woman was forced into prostitution at age 16, and at age 19, she was able to escape her pimp and gain her freedom. In the video, the woman describes how, as an emotionally and economically vulnerable teenager, she was tricked by an older man into a relationship and then forced into prostitution. Her pimp threatened her with violence, and she was sold from one pimp to another, and forced to have sex for money in New York and other cities along the East Coast. The video discusses how pimps recruit their girls and the role of websites like backpage.com in facilitating sex trafficking. Backpage (owned by Village Voice Media) features girls as young as 14 (although they are advertised as being at least 18) years old, makes $22 million/yr from its adult ads, and is now the "premier website for human trafficking in the United States." Many viewers may assume that victims sex trafficked in the US come from other countries, but in fact, the majority of sex trafficking victims in the US are domestic victims. Viewers may reflect on the role of the pimp in this process, and why pimps are often glorified in American popular culture.

Submitted By: Paul Dean

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: bodies, consumption/consumerism, gender, health/medicine, knowledge, political economy, biopolitics, feminism, medicalization, menarche, menstruation, menses, patriarchy, stigma, taboo, 00 to 05 mins
Year: 2007
Length: 3:57
Access: YouTube

Summary: In this scene from the movie Superbad, Seth finds himself dancing close to a woman at a party and winds up with her menstrual blood on his pant leg. A group of boys at the party spot the blood and deduce the source, and thus begins one of the film's signature gags: an awkward adolescent deals with what is supposed to be an awkward adolescent moment. In addition to Seth's panicked yet futile attempts to stave off humiliation are his efforts to work through the disgust of this unambiguous contamination. "Someone period-ed on my fucking leg!" he cries while gagging. Feminists have long been critical of this all-too-common fear of menstrual contamination and point to its roots in patriarchy. It is an instance of re-imagining the natural human experience of menstruation as a pathology, which can only be experienced with a measure of shame and dread. But more than men simply pathologizing a distinctly feminine experience, the pervasive fear of menstruation also fuels a multibillion dollar industry, which produces and markets hundreds of products designed to manage and even suppress menstruation (e.g., Lybrel and Seasonique). In an interview (here) about her recent book, New Blood: Third Wave Feminism and the Politics of Menstruation, sociologist Chris Bobel nicely articulates the connection between menstrual anxiety and corporate profit: "The prohibition against talking about menstruation—shh…that’s dirty; that’s gross; pretend it’s not going on; just clean it up—breeds a climate where corporations, like femcare companies and pharmaceutical companies, like the makers of Lybrel and Seasonique, can develop and market products of questionable safety. They can conveniently exploit women’s body shame and self-hatred. And we see this, by the way, when it comes to birthing, breastfeeding, birth control and health care in general. The medical industrial complex depends on our ignorance and discomfort with our bodies." The clip would work nicely with Bobel's book and as a means of opening a discussion about biopolitics, and specifically, the intensity with which women's bodies are scrutinized and managed by both the state and economy.

I would like to thank Aimee Koon for suggesting this clip.

Submitted By: Lester Andrist

_Tags: bodies, crime/law/deviance, gender, sex/sexuality, violence, rape, sexual violence, violence against women, 00 to 05 mins
Year: 2011
Length: 2:04
Access: wusa9.com news

Summary: This local DC newscast notes that a government study just found that sexual violence is more pervasive than previously thought: 1 in 5 women experience rape or attempted rape at some point in the lives; 1 in 4 women are beaten by their partners. The newscasters critically respond by asking how seriously does society respond to that? They note that a fraternity at the University of Vermont recently circulated a questionnaire that asked respondents "who would you like to rape?" It briefly gives the perspective of a recovering rape victim who was sexually molested by her step-father since she was 3 years old. A local community activist describes how the experience of sexual violence is very traumatic, and how it affects how they experience daily life and relationships. This raises the question of how we, as a society, respond to sexual violence and crime? Is rape somehow glorified by certain groups, and if so, why and how? This video is a good complement to another video on Rape and Blaming the Victim, and reflection on our rape culture, which is articulated well in the book Transforming a Rape Culture. See also this video about how sexual violence against women is perpetuated through popular culture, specifically music video. On a more uplifting note, see activist Tony Porter's efforts (as depicted in this video) to end violence against women.

Submitted By: Paul Dean

_Tags: bodies, gender, lgbtq, sex/sexuality, identity, lesbian, masculinity, transgender, 11 to 20 mins, 61+ mins
Year: 2005
Length: 13:58 (entire documentary is 75:00)
Access: YouTube

Summary: The Aggressives is a documentary "look at the lesbian women who prefer to dress and act as men and who participate in NYC's predominantly African-American lesbian drag balls." Viewers may explore issues of identity, gender, and sexuality with this group of lesbians that identify as butch/stud "aggressives," and adopt a very masculine gender. Part of this excerpt shows the daily practices to portray a masculine physique, including constantly working out to build muscle tone, grinding their teeth in order to have a strong masculine jaw line, taking hormone pills to grow facial hair and other mail traits to reduce feminine features and using duct tape, ace bandage and girdles to tape/hold down their breasts so they are less visible. As the respondents discuss their identity, this excerpt also explores what it means to be a man or woman, illustrating West and Zimmerman's concept of "doing gender." The women in the documentary are constantly fighting against societal constraints of a gendered female norm. This highly provocative excerpt can be a great discussion starter on issues of gender and sexuality, but the film more generally also examines issues of race.

Submitted By: Jasmine Jowers and Rachele Macarthy

_Tags: bodies, disability, health/medicine, inequality, prejudice/discrimination, stereotypes, subtitles/CC, 06 to 10 mins
Year: 2007
Length: 10:47
Access: YouTube (part 1; part 2)

Summary: What if ablebodied people were a minority? What would navigating that world be like? This film put out by the Disability Rights Commission (UK) turns the tables on a world that favors the ablebodied, and invites viewers to imagine what it would feel like if they found themselves subjected to the difficulties, discomforts, humiliations, and discrimination that disabled people face on a regular basis. This is a useful way to open a class discussion of the production of disability as a social category—how do we organize society in a way that privileges certain kinds of bodies and marginalizes others? How do we frame the people who are marginalized? How do we understand our own relationship to them when we come into contact with them? How do we understand institutional and cultural efforts to mitigate that process of marginalization—and how successful are we, really?

Submitted By: Sarah Wanenchak

Tags: bodies, children/youth, consumption/consumerism, discourse/language, gender, inequality, marketing/brands, media, political economy, sex/sexuality, social construction, violence, feminism, media literacy, representation, self-objectification, sexism, sexual objectification, stereotypes, symbolic annihilation, 06 to 10 mins, 61+ mins
Year: 2011
Length: 90:00, 8:52
Access: no online access, Vimeo preview

Summary: Jennifer Siebel Newsom directs this documentary, and following in the steps of the Killing Us Softly films, it draws attention to the very problematic ways women and girls are represented in contemporary media. To tell the story, Newsom weaves together a number of interviews from an array of experts and activists, including Erika Falk, Jennifer Pozner, Jean Kilbourne, Condoleezza Rice, Nancy Pelosi, Cory Booker, Katie Couric, Rachel Maddow, Margaret Cho, Rosario Dawson and Gloria Steinem. The dominant themes of Miss Representation can be described as the consequences of living in a world where one is virtually swimming in representations which consistently emphasize an unattainable beauty standard for women, and in a separate vein, encourage routine violence against women. In this environment, women increasingly self-objectify, they suffer from increased levels of anxiety and depression, a lack of political efficacy, and men increasingly perpetrate violence against women. Despite similarities, Newsom takes her film further than Jean Kilbourne's documentary, Killing Us Softly 4, by exploring more of the political economy behind these harmful representations. Specifically, she explores the large scale entrance of American women into the paid labor force during World War II as a watershed event (see also The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter). In Newsom's retelling of this story, once men returned to from fighting abroad, the media played a central role in encouraging women to surrender their high-paying jobs back to men in order to become domestic consumers in the brave new post-war economy. Today the marketing of corporations are regulated even less by Congress, and their ads continue to target women; they objectify them as part of a strategy aimed at creating ever more insatiable consumers.

Submitted By: Lester Andrist