Tags: discourse/language, gender, inequality, media, prejudice/discrimination, decentering, eve teasing, india, sexual harassment, sexism, street harassment, 00 to 05 mins Year: 2012 Length: 3:32 Access: YouTube Summary: It is often the case that when incisive critiques are leveled against an oppressive system, such as patriarchy, there will be efforts to derail or decenter that conversation. For example, one might critique patriarchy in India by pointing out that there is a marked tendency to blame the victim in cases of harassment. Defying all probability, time and again the original critique of power slips from the conversation, and those who were instrumental in exposing the problem suddenly find themselves defending whether their critique is in fact proof of their own prejudice against men. Or, even more befuddling, the focus of the conversation shifts from the problem of sexual harassment to the hurt feelings of a few men who claim they have never harassed women. As explored elsewhere on The Sociological Cinema, YouTube videos can be understood as social activism, and in that context, any single clip can be seen as a discrete contribution to an unfolding public conversation about a particular social issue. In the above video, one finds a young man catching a ride on a not-so-crowded Delhi bus. In the course of the ride the driver abruptly presses on the brake, and the young man accidentally falls on the woman standing next to him. On the mistaken assumption that the man was attempting to physically harass her, the woman slaps him across the face (a perfect Indian response!), and the woman's friend chides the man for “not having any manners.” Later in the ride, the driver again abruptly presses the brake, but in this instance, it is the woman who falls on the man, and it is now his turn to slap her. The video encourages the viewer to see the man's response as entirely valid and even legally justified (The video's caption references Article 15 of the Indian constitution, which prohibits gender based discrimination). It is a cautionary tale, which promotes the absurd idea that men must frequently bear the burden of being unjustly accused of street harassment, or what is euphemistically referred to as eve teasing in India. The conversation no longer contemplates the tendency to blame the victim, and it no longer dwells on why violence against women is now the fastest-growing crime in India. Instead, this video and others like it attempt to reorient the discussion so that people must now contemplate the indignity suffered by a minority of men who have been unjustly accused. Submitted By: Manjistha Banerji Image by Blank Noise
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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: children/youth, crime/law/deviance, discourse/language, emotion/desire, lgbtq, sex/sexuality, bi-curiousity, conversion therapy, 21 to 60 mins Year: 2007 Length: 21:26 Access: southparkstudios.com Summary: [Trigger warning: Not all instructors will feel comfortable screening an episode of South Park in the classroom, a show that is notorious for its "crude language and dark, surreal humor" on a wide range of often taboo topics. This episode is no exception. Specifically, instructors might be uncomfortable with this episode's treatment of youth suicide, violence, sex, sexual consent, and cultural/ethnic insensitivity.] In this South Park episode (season 11, episode two), South Park Elementary School student Cartman takes a photo of his own penis in his friend Butters's mouth while Butters is sleeping. Afterwards, Cartman tells his friends about what he did in order to ridicule Butters. However, Cartman didn't count one thing: this behavior is interpreted as a homosexual act and his friends start calling him "gay." Hoping to prove that he's not gay, Cartman believes he must convince Butters to reciprocate the act. Just as Cartman is about to carry out his plan in front of a blindfolded and unknowing Butters, Butters's father walks into the bedroom. Concerned that his little boy is bisexual, his father takes Butters to the priest, who diagnoses Butters as "confused" and suggests Butters attend a bi-curious boy's camp to heal Butters from this "disease." This video can be used as an example of how bisexual people are perceived as being confused about their sexual identity. As Ryle (2012) writes in Questioning Gender: A Sociological Exploration: "Bisexuals can receive negative reactions from both homosexuals and heterosexuals." She cites Ault's (1996) work that showed how some lesbian feminists "insist that there is no such thing as bisexuality. Bisexuals are either confused lesbians or heterosexuals who are experimenting" (201). The clip can also be used to initiate a discussion about cultural definitions of sexual orientation: Is it about behavior? Desire? Identity? Finally, the episode offers a framework for talking about sexuality as a choice or innate, and illustrates the ways in which heterosexuality gets defined as "normal" through a discourse of shame, guilt, and "fixing" or "curing" anything that deviates from a cultural heterosexual norm. Submitted By: Nihal Celik Tags: abortion/reproduction, discourse/language, gender, government/the state, inequality, contraception, feminism, fertility, slut-shaming, 00 to 05 mins Year: 2012 Length: 2:44 Access: Hulu Summary: In this clip of Seth Meyers and Amy Poehler's classic sketch called "Really!?! with Seth & Amy," the comedic duo rails against the rash of recent politicos, who seek to restrict the ability of women to control their own fertility. Seth and Amy refer to the hearings held by a House Oversight Committee on religious liberty and insurance coverage for contraception on February 16th. In the hearings, representatives Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.) and Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.) accused Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) of manipulating committee rules to block women from testifying as witnesses. Seth and Amy also mention Foster Friess (a major donor to the super PAC backing Rick Santorum's presidential campaign), who recently joked in an interview on MSNBC about contraception. "Back in my days," Friess remarked, "The gals put [Bayer aspirin] between their knees, and it wasn't that costly." Not mentioned by Seth and Amy is Georgetown law student, Sandra Fluke's recent testimony before Congress in favor of contraceptive coverage. Political commentator, Rush Limbaugh, responded by calling Fluke a "slut" and a "prostitute," and he made her the following proposition: "So Miss Fluke, and the rest of you Feminazis, here’s the deal. If we are going to pay for your contraceptives, and thus pay for you to have sex, we want something for it. We want you to post the videos online so we can all watch." These recent news stories, many of which are touched on in Seth and Amy's comedy, illustrate the ambitions of men to continue to exercise power over the reproductive lives of women. In the first congressional hearing, the experiences of women were formally excluded from the congressional record. The remarks from Friess and Limbaugh, in contrast, amount to slut-shaming, which is a discourse that similarly attempts to control women's sexual lives. While the above comedy sketch may not be intellectually rich on its own, it works well as a means of broaching a discussion about why contraception is a feminist issue, and how formally controlling women's sexual behavior through law works in concert with informal controls, such as slut-shaming. Submitted By: Lester Andrist Tags: discourse/language, emotion/desire, politics/election/voting, social mvmts/social change/resistance, framing, political sociology, 00 to 05 mins Year: 2012 Length: 1:26 Access: colbertnation.com Summary: Frank Luntz is a Republican Party strategist, pollster, and frequent commentator on the Fox News Channel. According to Luntz, his specialty is “testing language and finding words that will help his clients sell their product or turn public opinion on an issue or a candidate.” Comedian Stephen Colbert, recently hired Luntz to help him frame the language of his Super PAC, which he formed as a way to satirize the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision. Through humorous exchanges with Luntz, Colbert reveals some of the linguistic and political aspects of framing and attempts to create or engage with memes. The clip provides a light way to introduce work on the importance of framing in social movements, but it could also be useful for political sociology classes. I successfully paired the clip with an overview of Snow and Benford's work on framing, mobilization, and collective identity. The clip is also useful as a precursor to discussing Francessca Polletta's brilliant book, It Was Like A Fever. Note that another clip on The Sociological Cinema that explores framing as it pertains to social movements can be found here. Submitted By: Kim Simmons Rape humor on prime time television _Tags: discourse/language, gender, media, violence, comedy, media literacy, rape culture, symbolic violence, 00 to 05 mins Year: 2012 Length: 1:14 Access: nymag.com Summary: Before watching this remix of the 2012 television season's many rape jokes, take a minute to view an excerpt from the documentary Vietnam: American Holocaust, where American soldiers testify that they raped civilian women during the Vietnam War. "We found one hiding in a bomb shelter," one soldier explains, "She was taken out [and] raped by 6 or 7 people." You might also watch this recent speech from Tony Porter, where he recounts a moment from early adolescence when he came upon a group of older boys raping a mentally disabled girl from his neighborhood. Rape most easily stirs anger and depression, so a joke about it would seem to be a risky proposition for any comedian; yet that is exactly what happens with relative frequency in a number of new sitcoms this television season. The remix above features scenes from 2 Broke Girls, Wilfred, Up All Night, Workaholics, Whitney, Two and a Half Men, Modern Family, Glee, Work It, and a few others. More than just insensitive content in an era when 1 in 5 American women experience rape or attempted rape at some point in their lives, the use of rape as humor can potentially minimize the brutality of this crime. While humor can sometimes be an effective means of leveling social criticism (as argued elsewhere on The Sociological Cinema), that does not appear to be what is happening in the scenes that compose this remix. This short clip provides an excellent foray into discussions about how rape humor is part and parcel of rape culture (defined here). The humor stands to reinforce deeply problematic values, norms, and ideas of that culture, especially when they are blended with other more innocuous punchlines and canned laughter from a studio audience. Submitted By: Lester Andrist 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: community, discourse/language, theory, ferdinand de saussure, langue, parole, post-structuralism, speech act, structuralism, 00 to 05 mins Year: 2011 Length: 1:27 Access: YouTube Summary: This home video of 2-year-old Khaliyl Iloyi rapping with his father can be used to illustrate Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure's (1857-1913) concepts of langue and parole which, for Saussure, comprise a larger system of signs he calls language. Langue entails the total system of possibilities; it is the abstract set of structured rules that a given speech community internalizes. Parole, on the other hand, consists of individual speech acts and the message contained within them. Saussure argues that individuals don't pick and choose what belongs to langue or parole; rather, langue is social (in that it operates according to a set of rules that are in place before and after our existence) and parole is individual. Another way Saussure understood this distinction was that langue is a static, synchronic system while parole is diachronic and contingent. This video clip illustrates how, even at age two, Khaliyl understands the basic underlying structure of language (langue), even if he has yet to master the meaning of individual speech acts (parole). He is engaging in the social enterprise of langue in that he has internalized the abstract rules of language for his speech community, even though a meaningful message has yet to be put into practice (parole). Instructors should point out that Khaliyl's rap does not map perfectly onto Saussure's notion of langue, in that Saussure would consider grammar an example of the structured rules of language---clearly, Khaliyl is not adhering to any grammatical set of rules. Similarly, Saussure would include performance as part of the meaningful speech act that makes up parole; here, Khaliyl obviously demonstrates an understanding of the appropriate performance of the speech act he is attempting to convey. Nonetheless, viewers can still be encouraged to use the clip in order to think about the ways in which Khaliyl's rap does and does not illustrate classical understandings of langue and parole. This discussion of Saussure would be useful in a social theory course that examines structuralism (including the theories of Claude Lévi-Strauss), as well as post-structuralism, as it can be used to illustrate the ideas against which the post-structuralists were reacting. Submitted By: Valerie Chepp _Tags: consumption/consumerism, discourse/language, gender, inequality, knowledge, marketing/brands, media, social construction, feminism, glass ceiling, glass escalator, media literacy, representation, role specialization, sexism, stereotypes, 00 to 05 mins Year: 2012 Length: 0:31 Access: YouTube Summary: We all work in an economy marked by occupational sex segregation. That is, men and women typically work in different occupations. American Men, for instance, are overrepresented as auto mechanics and airline pilots, while American women are overrepresented as preschool teachers and nurses. But why is occupational sex segregation a problem? When I bring this issue up in class, my students often counter rather quickly that segregation is merely the result of a gendered role specialization and doesn't inherently denote inequality. However, the fact is that men segregate into higher paid professions than women. Also, while women often report experiencing a glass ceiling, which refers to an invisible barrier to promotion, men who take positions in fields dominated by women report just the opposite. They face a glass escalator, or pressure to move up in their chosen professions (Williams 1992). In short, occupational sex segregation is a bad deal for women. It is less about role specialization and more about men retaining power and resources for the benefit of men. But why is occupational sex segregation so recalcitrant? Check out the commercial above from Best Buy, which aired during Super Bowl 46, and note the natural affinity it depicts between men (read, male logic) and technological innovation. In rapid succession, the viewer encounters distinguished, white men holding their high tech inventions. "I created text messaging," says SMS innovator, Neil Papworth. Only at the end of the thirty-second spot do women appear, and they are Best Buy's relatively low status sales representatives. Elsewhere on this site (here), I have argued that the symbolic domain of high tech is almost the exclusive provenance of men, and while men are overrepresented in ads that pitch items like smart phones and iPads, women are overrepresented in ads that pitch “domestic” technologies, or those that pertain to, say, cooking and other household chores (see here, here, and here). Insofar as the Best Buy ad succeeds, the approximately 100 million people who tune into the Super Bowl, will be persuaded that Best Buy is good place to buy a smart phone, but they are also left with an impression of the world they inhabit. "Why does occupational sex segregation persist?" my students ask. An important part of the answer is that advertisements reinforce the fiction of immutable differences between men and women, and by extension, they suggest that men and women naturally gravitate toward different occupations. The Best Buy commercial can be a useful reminder that advertising is a medium that excels at constructing the reality it claims to merely reflect. What is "natural" is itself a social construction. Submitted By: Lester Andrist _Tags: class, discourse/language, inequality, intersectionality, prejudice/discrimination, race/ethnicity, code speak, 00 to 05 mins Year: 2011 Length: 4:20 Access: The Daily Show Summary: Since outright hatred and discrimination of people because of their race is no longer socially acceptable in our post Civil-Rights era, many argue racism no longer exists. But sociologists suggest that racism simply changed, becoming more implicit and indirect. Eduardo Bonilla-Silva argues that the new racism entails individuals saying and doing things that perpetuate racial stereotypes and inequalities, but they do so in such a way that the offender is able to deny being explicitly racist. One of the many types of new racist strategies Bonilla-Silva highlights is the use of racially charged code speak, or using indirect racial rhetoric and semantic moves to express an ideology that serves to reinforce white dominance over minorities. In this clip, The Daily Show’s Larry Wilmore illustrates the code speak implicit in presidential candidate Newt Gingrich’s suggestion that we combat poverty by hiring poor children to clean the restrooms at their schools. Wilmore notes that “it’s 2011, and you can’t just call Black people lazy,” and then points out Gingrich’s racial code speak. He notes Gingrich’s statement about “neighborhoods where they may not have that experience [of working]” is “code for inner-city, which is code for urban, which is code for Black.” Gingrich’s statement about poor children having “no habit of showing up [to work] on Monday” is “code for shiftless, which is code for lazy, which is code for black.” Wilmore then plays more of Gingrich’s speech where the presidential candidate cites statistics about Black unemployment, thereby making his implicit racial assumptions explicit. When John Stewart asks why this is important, Wilmore points out how the causes of poverty “matter to the solutions.” Viewers can be encouraged to consider how framing these issues as individual problems (e.g. a person being lazy) differs from framing them as social issues (e.g. lack of available jobs), and how that might "matter to the solutions" that society seeks as a result? How is this related to race and do we see code speak in reference to other groups as well? Note: This summary is an edited excerpt from Jason's original post at Sociological Images. Submitted By: Jason Eastman |
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