Tags: historical sociology, inequality, race/ethnicity, apartheid, racism, robert f. kennedy, south africa, subtitles/CC, 00 to 05 mins Year: 1966 Length: 1:22 Access: audio and transcript Summary: This is an audio excerpt from Robert F. Kennedy's famous "Day of Affirmation" speech given at the University of Capetown, South Africa on June 6, 1966. I use the first 1 minute and 20 seconds from Kennedy's speech to introduce the racism section of my Social Problems course. The speech begins with Kennedy describing a country beguiled with a history of slavery and racism. During this time, the audience (including the contemporary listener) seemingly assumes Kennedy is describing South Africa. Near the end of this introduction, however, he reveals that he has been describing the United States. Once revealed, the crowd dramatically bursts into applause. I play this audio in class, repeating it once, with the text of the speech displayed on PowerPoint so that students can read along; I find that the piece sets an effective tone for the enormity of the racism discussion to follow. The clip is also useful for stimulating students' sociological imaginations, as Kennedy succinctly lays out the Unites States' racial/racist history. With sociological imaginations engaged, I go into a brief history lesson of racial construction in the U.S. before going into contemporary facts/figures. The PBS documentary RFK in the Land of Apartheid: A Ripple of Hope (2009) chronicles Kennedy's South African trip at the height of South African and American apartheid; check out the film's website to view the trailer and other useful teaching materials. Submitted By: Beverly M. Pratt
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Riley and Huey of the Boondocks discuss "no homo"
Tags: discourse/language, lgbtq, sex/sexuality, black satire, fag discourse, homophobia, masculinity, satire, 00 to 05 mins Year: 2010 Length: 0:42; 1:46 Access: YouTube (clip 1; clip 2) Summary: These short clips from the animated series The Boondocks stand as examples of Black satire exploring the topic of homophobia in American society. In the first clip Riley explains to his granddad the importance of not sounding gay and how to successfully guard against being misidentified as such. He warns his granddad, "Pause...You said something gay, so you got to say 'no homo' or else you a homo." The second clip features a conversation between Riley and Huey about whether Riley's friend, Gangstalicious, is gay, which is clearly a prospect that Riley has trouble even considering. For Riley anyway, the message is clear that being gay, being mistaken as gay, or associating with someone who is gay is something to be avoided at all costs. Make no mistake, The Boondocks deploys a complex brand of satire, and unlike other pronouncements of "no homo" in popular culture (for example, in hip hop music videos), the show invites the audience to criticize Riley's extreme aversion to all things gay. The clips would work well with a short monologue from Jay Smooth of the Ill Doctrine (here), in which he recounts the historical emergence and popularity of the phrase "no homo." Finally, I think it is also important to identify the emergence of "no homo" as a part of what C.J. Pascoe calls a "fag discourse," which calls attention to the way the term is deployed as a means of ostentatiously asserting one's masculinity as much as it is about denying a sexual preference. I would like to thank Aleia Clark for suggesting this clip. Submitted By: Lester Andrist _Tags: gender, marketing/brands, commercial, gender socialization, heteronormativity, media literacy, representation, subtitles/CC, 00 to 05 mins Year: 2010 Length: 0:30 Access: YouTube Summary: This 30-second commercial is an excellent illustration of West and Zimmerman's (1987) "doing gender" and how media reproduces traditional gender roles in contemporary society. The advertisement features a montage of different women cleaning up various messes around the house, helping their children in the kitchen, and doing the grocery shopping. The very masculine man on the paper towel package sings "lean on me," showing that society ascribes these qualities to a man, while the woman is supposed to depend on men and “lean” on them for support (this also reflects a heteronormative relationship, in which a couple is depicted as a heterosexual male and female). The commercial concludes with the woman buying the paper towel with the “strong” man on the package. Viewers can reflect on how such commercials promote traditional gender socialization within pop culture, how it promotes gender inequality, and how this particular depiction of masculinity and femininity might reflect unequal power within a relationship. Using commercials in this manner offers several benefits, including a quick assessment of student understanding of key concepts (see here and here for other examples of gender in commercials). Submitted By: Deborah Kim and Michon Tart 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
Zach Wahls testifies before the Iowa House Judiciary Committee
_Tags: inequality, lgbtq, marriage/family, prejudice/discrimination, sex/sexuality, social construction, law, parenting, 00 to 05 mins Year: 2011 Length: 3:01 Access: YouTube Summary: What is a family? This is the fundamental question posed by Zach Wahls' testimony given here. This testimony was given to the Iowa House Judiciary Committee about House Joint Resolution 6, which proposed amending the Iowa Constitution to define marriage as between one man and one woman. In his testimony, Wahls argues "the sense of family comes from the commitment we make to each other, to work through the hard times so we can enjoy the good ones; it comes from the love that binds us." He notes that in discussions about gay marriage, the question often comes up about whether or not gay parents can successfully raise a child. Citing several of his own impressive accomplishments, he argues that clearly is not an issue. Instead, the issue around gay marriage is discrimination. Wahls states you are "voting for the first time in the history of our state to codify discrimination into our constitution"; "you are telling Iowans that some among you are second class citizens who do not have the right to marry the person you love." Viewers themselves can be encouraged to consider what defines family? How does the state define family, and how do these definitions have consequences for existing families? What does it mean to view family as an institution within a sociological perspective? Viewers may also consider the broader history of discrimination encoded in laws, from race and ethnicity, to gender and sexuality. This can also be put in the broader national context of the fight for marriage equality, as demonstrated in this clip, which shows a conservative defending marriage equality from common conservative critiques. Submitted By: Paul Dean _Tags: commodification, emotion/desire, goffman, theory, arlie hochschild, back stage, dramaturgy, emotional labor, front stage, impression management, presentation of self, 00 to 05 mins Year: 2005 Length: 2:03 Access: YouTube Summary: [Trigger warning: this clip includes explicit language] Waiting is a movie about a day in the life of workers at a casual dining restaurant. This clip can be used to highlight a number of concepts related to Erving Goffman's dramaturgical perspective. For example, in order to avoid disruption and with hopes of getting a bigger tip, the wait staff go to great lengths to manage the impressions that customers have of them. These "front stage" performances are, however, quite different from the "back stage" interactions between the wait staff and cooks. In a separate vein, the clip also highlights Arlie Hochschild's concept of "emotional labor," a concept which she develops in her book The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Feeling. One can see in the clip how the wait staff must go to great lengths to maintain pleasant appearances in the face of rude and unruly customers. Submitted By: Derek Evans (@Dee_Wreck) _Tags: emotion/desire, gender, lgbtq, sex/sexuality, audre lorde, homoeroticism, manhood, masculinity, othering, performativity, subtitles/CC, 00 to 05 mins Year: 2007 Length: 2:29 Access: YouTube Summary: In her article “Performing Gender Identity” (in Language and Gender: A Reader), Cameron argues that men are under constant pressure to constitute themselves as masculine. This pressure, at times, quickly turns into outright anxiety and terror, especially when it becomes more and more difficult to stabilize heterosexual masculinity in the absence of an object that can safely be identified as the target of desire proper. I use this nonthreatening clip from “Scrubs” to introduce students to the idea that the line between homosociality and homoerotics is very thin, blurred, and quite arbitrary. The ever-presence of the possibility of a homoerotic relationality between men, who, in this instance, cannot find an other through whom they can safely express their desire for each other, exposes the absurdity of manhood as not only a performance that is always already lost, but also as a performance of loss and as a mode of subjecthood which actively forbids itself an unpredictable and undefined range of intersubjective experiences. When hegemonic heterosexual masculinity attempts to “face the facts about me and you, a love unspecified,” as J.D. says, the homoerotic components of the intersubjective experience (where Audre Lorde finds the “chaos of our strongest feelings” —“The Uses of the Erotic”) are instantly alienated and turned into fear, uncertainty, and doubt. Their song is performative: it is a painful and quasi-conscious play that creates and sustains the kind of masculinity they assume and expect to already have, by constructing, bit by bit, the contours of intolerable desire, gaze, and touch... In Cameron's article, this gesture (of separating and dichotomizing homosociality and homoerotics) turns out to be potentially violent. There, in order to desperately preclude the possibility of homoerotic desire exposing itself, men produce an absent other, where they displace their own desires, project their own fears and terror, regulate their own anxieties, and externalize the unpredictable and subversive elements of intersubjectivity. This mythical monstrous absent other, constructed through a cooperative effort of sustained conversation about it, and alienated and terrorized as “the anti-thesis of man,” then serves as the basis of a kind of masculinity that was expected to already be safely present. Submitted By: Mehmet Atif Ergun Tags: goffman, theory, dramaturgy, facework, impression management, performance, self-presentation, social interaction, 00 to 05 mins Year: 2006 Length: 1:42 Access: YouTube Summary: The intended content from this BBC video is not nearly as interesting as the social interaction that takes place during the segment. The anchor and the audience believed the interviewee was Guy Kewney, the editor of a technology website News Wireless; however, due to a mix up back stage, a man named Guy Goma was rushed onto the set for the interview (Goma was in fact in the BBC studios awaiting an interview with the accounting department). The video shows Goma's look of surprise when he realizes he is not the person that is supposed to be interviewed. The clip addresses several features of Goffman’s (1973) The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life with a focus on impression management. During this formal television interview, Goffman’s notion of the ‘front’ is seen here as ‘institutionalised’ and with ‘stereotyped expectations’ (Goffman 1973). In this 'scene,' the anchor and interviewee face each other to ensure they are seen as engaging with each other, but also in order to present themselves to the television audience. The backdrop features several computers and people working to put forward an image of the busy newsroom. Goffman would refer to Goma's shocked facial expression as an example of being ‘out of face.’ Goma does not know how to act, given that he does not have the appropriate knowledge and is not the person he is taken to be; however, to prevent disruption during this live broadcast, the respondent and anchor ‘maintain face,’ by attempting to carry on with their respective roles as interviewer and interviewee, as if nothing disruptive has happened (Goffman 1967). The rest of the interview illustrates what Goffman refers to as ‘the arts of impression management,’ (Goffman 1973) where both the anchor and interviewee take on ‘dramaturgical loyalty.’ They take it as their ‘moral obligation’ to continue in a formal manner. They can both be described as deploying ‘dramaturgical discipline’ by ‘maintaining face’ and managing their ‘fronts,’ so that they are both seen to be as professional characters their audience expects them to be. Submitted By: Jessica Lee and Michelle MacDonagh Tags: art/music, capitalism, commodification, consumption/consumerism, media, social mvmts/social change/resistance, theory, creativity, culture industry, frankfurt school, mass production, max horkheimer, theodor adorno, subtitles/CC, 00 to 05 mins Year: 2009 Length: 2:12 Access: YouTube Summary: In their chapter entitled "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception" from their book Dialectic of Enlightenment, critical theorists Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer conceptualize power as an absolute, all-encompassing force, driven at unrelenting speed by the engine of capitalism. They argue that culture is an important site where power in contemporary society is demonstrated; here, cultural productions have transformed from pure art forms to gimmicky imitations in which the aesthetic appeal is now simply a response to consumers' "tastes" and the goal is no longer to evoke truth but rather to merely “entertain.” Horkheimer and Adorno refer to this routinized and commodified feature of contemporary culture as the culture industry. This short montage of various scenes from different Disney movies is one illustration of how cultural products can be seen as an imitation of one another, recycled formulas sold to cultural consumers as entertainment. As an assignment or topic for class discussion, students can be encouraged to cite other examples of interchangeable formulas sold in popular culture through the mass media, which might include formulaic narratives, images, and characters sold through hip hop, action movies, soap operas, romance novels, among many others. Yet, students can also be encouraged to critique Horkheimer and Adorno's totalizing take on the culture industry, as they essentially argue that there is no escape; even when we believe we are freely making choices in the cultural marketplace or, worse yet, even if we recognize the culture industry’s suffocating strength and intentionally try to resist it, our actions and cultural creations have already “been noted by the industry” and become part of the system. Since present-day art is only a vehicle for entertainment and amusement, it is stripped of emotion, tragedy, and truth, and merely exists to appease and distract us. In this state, we are defenseless and unable to resist. As such, the cultural actor “creating” under capitalism’s oppressive rules is (often unknowingly) fated for unoriginal imitation. According to this theory, none of us are actually behaving as individuals and our creations, which are in essence predictable simulations of other commodities circulating in the culture industry, ultimately fuel the engine of capitalism’s absolute power and the monopoly of mass culture. Do students agree that they are cultural dupes and incapable of original artistic creation and innovation? And what does cultural creation and consumption have to do with "resistance" and "distraction"? Distraction from what? Finally, can students think of examples of popular cultural creations that serve to challenge capitalistic power and the status quo? How would Horkheimer and Adorno respond to these examples? Submitted By: Valerie Chepp Emile Durkheim's famous sociological study of suicide Tags: durkheim, theory, integration, regulation, suicide, 00 to 05 mins Year: 1992 - 2011 Length: 1:44 - 5:33 Access: YouTube (PJ Jeremy Music Video, 1992, 5:33) YouTube (Heaven's Gate Cult, 2008, 3:01) YouTube (Jobless Veterans, 2011, 1:44) YouTube (College Student, 2010, 2:16) Summary: In his classic book, Suicide, Durkheim argued that suicide can be explained by social, rather than psychological or biological phenomena. Drawing upon a variety of statistics (i.e. "social facts"), he explained suicide as resulting from 4 different social causes (e.g. too much or too little integration in society, and too much or too little regulation by society). Integration is the degree to which collective sentiments are shared and have social relations which bind individuals to a group. Regulation is the degree of external constraint on people, including normative or moral demands on an individual in the group. First, egoistic suicide results from too little integration in society. Individuals lack integration within a collective conscience, are missing social relationships which bind them to the group, and thus have unmet needs and personal dissatisfaction. Pearl Jam's video, Jeremy, depicts the egoistic suicide when, at the end of the video, an isolated and tormented child commits suicide in front of his class. Second, altruistic suicide results when integration is too high and a person is almost forced into committing suicide. This includes members of religious cults or the infamous Heaven's Gate cult (see video) that give their lives willingly to the group. Third, anomic suicide occurs when regulation is too low and individuals experience a state of normlessness or rulelessness. This usually happens when the regulative powers of society are disrupted, and the collectivity temporarily loses its authority over individuals, such as after someone suddenly experiences a divorce or unemployment (see Jobless Veterans video). Durkheim had almost nothing to say about the fourth type of suicide, fatalistic suicide, which results from excessive regulation (no video available). This occurs when "persons with futures pitilessly blocked and passions violently choked by oppressive discipline" (Durkheim 1897: 276), such as when a slave may commit suicide. My best class discussions centered around this tragic video of a gay college student who committed suicide after his sexual activity was broadcast on the internet. His suicide may be understood as an experience of an isolated gay male in a hetero-normative culture. While the news video depicts his suicide resulting from his loss of privacy, Durkheim may suggest he lacked integration within society's collective conscience and accepting social relationships, which might have bound him to the collectivity. Note that this integration is promoted later in the video through the work of Dan Savage's "It Gets Better" campaign (the video also notes that gay kids are 4 times more likely to commit suicide, a "social fact"). Submitted By: Paul Dean |
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