Race, Class, Gender

It’s Tuesday afternoon, which means I’m watching my daughter on the bars and beams <and, yes, blogging from my phone>. Tuesdays are gymnastics days. My daughter- lover of pink and dresses and princesses and sugar and spice and everything nice. To put it one way, third wave feminism supposedly gives me permission to be ok with these affinities. For 3rd wavers, it’s fine to bake and sew and ballet and prim, to be nurturing, sensitive, emotional, attentive. The problem is in claiming that these likes and dispositions are inferior to those associated with masculinity. Here, here!

But while I can cheer all of this theoretically–philosophically, even– my actual response belies latent misogyny…well, kinda.

When my daughter was first born, her dad and I admonished our relatives and friends NOT to gift her pink apparel. It’s not that we wanted her to be androgynous necessarily, but we were attempting to squelch early on the associations between our female child and those things culturally dubbed feminine that are widely parodied and stereotyped negatively. But she was like a sponge for this stuff once she started school and all the ways that her little female friends had been socialized to behave and have preferences for as females were soaked up rapidly.

I remain ambivalent about all this at best. I find it frustrating when, like today, she gets into the car after school and when asked about her day tells me that she and her playmate don’t like boys, clearly indicating that there are fundamental differences between the genders that are cause for antagonism. Meanwhile, I seem to applaud the next part of the story in which she and playmate played superhero. She, she tells me, is supergirl. I’m able to selectively interpret this favorably, evidence that she values strength, bravery, and heroism for women rather than as evidence that she’s being socialized to value toughness and violence.

Knowing that we both share a tendency toward stubbornness, it’s evident that as she and I move through this socialization thing together, we will continue to challenge each other. I’ll search for female role models and activities we can both agree on and she will unknowingly chip away at her feminist mother’s latent misogyny.

I have consistent moments of inspiration, which I sometimes reflect on as moments of clarity.  One such set occurs while I’m in the course of running, typically a long run.  Ideas seem brilliant and novel.  They sparkle and beckon and seem “worth it,” actionable, like something ought to be done with them.  Another set happens upon me when I’m with my daughter, typically while she’s playing and I’m looking on as if looking through the distant stillness.  The latter occurred at the lake the other day.  She latched on to a horde of other young children building sand castles <clay castles, really> and splashing about as sharks, as signaled by the hands-together-as-fins positioned over the head.   I was left sitting on the beach, looking.

The thing about these mental incitements is that the ideas never flow as freely or resound as strongly outside of the initial lightbulb.  I think about them later and give myself the equivalent of a knowing nod, but more often than not I leave them in their former glow.  On this particular occasion, I gave myself a dry chuckle as it became imminently clear to me that rather than the warm and fuzzy, “All I really need to know about life I learned in Kindergarten,” Everything I need know about life, I learned in grad school. Truth be told, some recent episode of The Wire <I’m rounding off season 4 through my netflix right now> had leaked into my thought processes and I was ruminating over its bureaucratic realism.  The series showcases various facets of Baltimore urban life– drugs, politics, education, law enforcement–and regularly highlights the manipulability and superficiality of official protocols and their outcomes– entire constituencies are “swayed” through key campaign donations to individuals; crime statistics are “juked,” i.e. altered such that a more serious offense is downgraded through magical paperwork making various crime rates appear to have declined; students are promoted from one grade to the next because there’s no where else to put them.  And while some of this is accomplished with underhanded intent, the majority of such actions are depicted as rather ordinary, run of the mill.

Really the reason that I find this series and its themes compelling is that I had already learned them in grad school and am merely amused by their appearance in all other arenas I encounter.  I do not mean that I ever sat in a classroom where the official  higher ed knowledge that “people are calculating” was lavished upon me <unless you count learning the tenets of Rational Choice Theory>.  I’ve learned the kind of things about the system of higher ed (and life) that you cannot learn through the system expressly but only by being a part of it, complicit in it if you will.  Informal education.  Perhaps that’s because you wouldn’t feel it the same way if someone told you about it.  The experience is what makes it real and penetrating.

The equivalent of a fragment sentence remains– why, if I usually abandon these little thoughtcapades, have I held onto this one to the point that I’ve bothered to write about it here <especially when I feel like I’m saying nothing at all>?  My post hoc rationalization is that my grad school life lessons become increasingly lucid and pervasive.  And shouldn’t one share lucid and pervasive things?  Well, I am anyway.  So here are some things I now know about life that I learned in grad school that I’ve been thinking on today.

1.  TNSTAAFL, there’s no such thing as a free graduate education–er, um, I mean lunch.  Despite what the purveyors may tell you, the food is not free.  And it is not free because the costs–such as where you have to eat that lunch, how you have to eat it, and who feeds it to you–are hidden.  So, TNSTAAFL.  White bread and hot dogs give me heartburn.  I wish they weren’t served to me on styrofoam plates by puppets.

2. Institutions Are Not Your Friends. By their very nature, institutional structures are concerned with self-preservation and their social import reaches far beyond the reason that the institution exists.  Think about the fact that changes to our energy policies are more concerned with job creation/loss and national security than they are with optimal and efficient delivery of energy.  Likewise, only in a narrow sense are educational institutions concerned with the “noble” task of enlightening the masses.  Education is what they say they do.  What educational systems actually do is perpetuate an elite power structure rooted in esoterically communicated “knowledge” (translation: one way of knowing the world) and socially privilege that way of knowing the world.

3. With rare exception, Professional Prestige is Field-Specific. Do you know who Randall Collins is?  Preeminent social theorist?  Interaction Ritual Chains?  Wrote a few detective, mystery type novels along the way?  Not ringing any bells?  Exactly.  If you’re a sociologist, you knew this dude right away.  And if you’re my kind of sociologist, then he’s probably your favorite living theorist.   If you’re not a sociologist, odds are you’ve never heard of this guy, this amazing sociological thinker.  And it cuts both ways– I don’t know the big wigs in political science, physics, neuroscience, etc.  Now, the hard sciences have more social cred, of course,  so cross-disciplinary or popular prestige is somewhat more likely (baring in mind the unlikeliness of such in-field prestige for any one scholar).  But the point is, if you are out to be a superstar, your fan club is likely to be small and niche.  And this is not unique to academia as a profession.  So if citations and name recognition are among your professional goals, you’ve got to ask yourself how many [your discipline here]‘s racing toward carpel tunnel it would take for you to feel like you’ve made it in [your discipline here].

What new things will grad school teach me this week?

I think I’ve become addicted to shock value as a means of introducing myself and course material to students.  Today was the second meeting of my fall course on marriage and family.  We’re still in that awkward getting-to-know-you place.  I’d intended to advance this sequence a bit more by today, but alas, I always run into technological snags on the first day and was unable to get my ish together to pull off my grand introduction on meeting one, which means that I dismissed the initial class while still wearing my wig.

So the course is Marriage and Family taught <duh> from a sociological perspective.  How, you might ask, does one use a wig to illustrate anything introductory in M&F?  I start with basic questions like:  How do we study M&F sociologically and what does the sociological perspective reveal about these social institutions?  From here I explain that sociology involves debunking or unmasking false ideas or opinions– great cue for the pilar defrocking.  But <flashbacks to high school tennis lessons> the follow-through wasn’t there– I was over time on class day one <sorry, students>, feeling rushed, feeling like the whole bit would be forced.  So I bid the newbies adieu and returned to my office with a sweaty, wigged head, and a new problem:  what rationale do I now have for wearing and removing some head of hair in the second class?

Ultimately, I pulled it together<although, I decided that if it didn’t work out a second time, I would just rotate through my wigs for the next three weeks until I’d exhausted my selection, go in without one for week 4, and then start the cycle over, just to keep them guessing>.  The reading assignment for today was Stephanie Coontz’s article, “The American Family,” which calls into question whether the family is in decline– a question to which students routinely respond, “yes, indeed,” citing the divorce rate and a deteriorating moral climate.  Coontz points out that the reference point for most people in making this assessment seems to be the 1950s Leave it to Beaver ideal, which does not (and perhaps never did) resemble most families.  She argues that we ought not view change in family form as decline and suggests that

The biggest problem facing most families as this century draws to a close is not that our families have changed too much but that our institutions have changed too little. America’s work policies are 50 years out of date, designed for a time when most moms weren’t in the workforce and most dads didn’t understand the joys of being involved in childcare. Our school schedules are 150 years out of date, designed for a time when kids needed to be home to help with the milking and haying. And many political leaders feel they have to decide whether to help parents stay home longer with their kids or invest in better childcare, preschool and afterschool programs, when most industrialized nations have long since learned it’s possible to do both.

All in all, this seemingly simple question–is the family in decline?–turns out to offer extensive conversational ground for approaching M&F sociologically.  What do we mean by family?  What do we mean by decline?  What are the indicators of decline?  What is the reference point for claiming that the family has declined?  Has the family declined relative to 50 years ago?  What about 100?  1,000?  Is one contemporary family (i.e. a divorced one) in a state of decline relative to another (i.e. one in which the parents are married)?  Is a divorced family still a family?  Ultimately, the conversation became a call to consider the historical trajectory and contemporary context in which we make our assessments and a precautionary note on conflating difference and decline.  On that note, I let the sociological good times roll, reiterating that

“Sociology teaches us to…

question our assumptions; debunk or unmask false ideas or opinions; and to look under the surface [cue wig removal] because things aren’t always what they seem.”

There were some blank stares, dropped jaws, and silence.  Too dramatic on my part?  Perhaps an overkill.  But in the end, if I’m not enjoying myself on the stage of that classroom <and, yes, that’s how the room is structured>, they won’t be either.

A:  Hey O, have I ever told you about Charlotte Perkins Gilman?

O:  [Shakes head]

A:  Well, she was a sociologist in the late 19th/early 20th c. and she wrote this story called The Yellow Wallpaper.

O:  [Nods]

A:  And she had a baby and after that she got sick.  And when she was sick, she had to stay in this room to rest for a long time and she wasn’t allowed to do anything.  And because she was in that room she wrote a story about feeling trapped, about the yellow wallpaper.  She said she could see things in the wallpaper.

O:  She’s dead?

A: Actually, she is dead.

O:  Today, just now?

A:  No, not just now.  A long time ago.  She died 75 years ago on this date, August 17th.

O:  Oh. Like the dinosaurs?

A:  Well the dinosaurs died a long time, too, but like millions of years ago.  Charlotte Perkins Gilman died 75 years ago.

—

Whether the commemoration of the life of a deceased author/intellectual/stellar human occurs on the date of her birth or death is more or less arbitrary.  In these summer months, I’ve found myself paying homage on dates of death– Thoreau on May 6; Foucault back on June 25; and today, CPG.  Perhaps it’s a tendency inherited from a Christian culture in which death–especially of the premature variety– is a marker of the significance of the person’s life.  For me, Gilman is something of a precursor to Betty Friedan, giving voice to varieties of female suffering (e.g. postpartum depression) theretofore dismissed or ignored– putting words, ethos, and action to those experiences.  Today is a good day to read about Charlotte, the anniversary of a day in which enacting her own philosophy freed her to take her own life.

Day 2 of reading Tom Wolfe’s I am Charlotte Simmons.  It’s been on the to-read list for years now (probably equivalent to the number of years since its publication), but it takes an episode of fatigue for me to settle into fiction.  Having found myself in a renewed bout over the weekend, I indulged in the instant gratification afforded by the 5 minute drive to Barnes & Noble and am now ankle-deep into the novel.

I don’t know to what end exactly–a non-fiction reading habit, I suppose–but I find myself keeping a pen on hand in case I want to markup some text in some fashion.  So far I’ve made a few dots near the stereotyped masculinities populating the pages.  Today I was more amused by a passage in the chapter introducing the egoistic character Jojo Johanssen, star-basketball player on the campus of the university that is, so far, the main setting.  In this scene, Jojo is walking the campus when he crosses paths with a familiar-looking man that he cannot immediately place:

Just before they passed each other, the guy looked him right in the face and said, “Hello, Mr. Johanssen.”  Jojo gave him an embarrassingly unconvincing, “Hey–how are you?”  Each walked on.  Mr. Johanssen? That wasn’t a fan talking.  Now, too late, it dawned on him: that was his sociology professor from first semester last year.  Like a lot of athletes, Jojo was majoring in sociology, which was known as an athlete-friendly department.

I laughed.  It wasn’t a hearty, out-loud kind of laugh.  It was the muted, knowing kind.  I was not amused by this for the seemingly obvious reason that there are, perhaps, many athletes in our own sociology department with the same rationale that Jojo presents.  I do see many in the intro classes, but considering that the course fulfills some general requirement or other, the number of athletes there is relatively meaningless.  No, I laughed because it echoed to me the widely held assumption that sociology is easy, so effortless that anyone can do it.  Read a Malcolm Gladwell book and poof:  insta-sociologist.

Actually, I do applaud Gladwell’s ability to illustrate the socio-scape in panorama to a broad audience.  The tendency to psychologize on the merits of individual volition makes the sociological perspective quite difficult to adopt in this culture.  So on one level, the internal chuckle is at the implication of effortlessness with respect to doing sociology.

But on another level, my amusement is located in the manipulation hierarchy <I intend no negative-connotation in use of the word “manipulation.”  It’s just the most descriptive word that comes to mind.>.  It would seems that Jojo and his athlete brethren are one variety of system workers.  Their goal in university matriculation has little do with intellectual enrichment <actually, this is probably true for most college students>.  The degrees that they will receive are something of a latent function of the path to athletic stardom.  At the same time, you have to earn a degree to have access to this path.  So by choosing any easy or “athlete-friendly” department in which to do this, these students work the system by pursuing their own ends meanwhile abiding by the rules of the game.

Going meta, Sociologists are but another variety of system workers.  At a very basic level, sociologists are just academics that see systems– patterns of interaction that are the invisible rules of operation and engagement in any given setting.  Once the rules are identified, the conditions of play established, the sociologist need only abide by them in spirit or appearance.  One version of this is in the churning out of one article after the next on the same topic merely replacing or adding a variable.  This appears to follow the rules of “scientific” advancement <and is also a method of appearing to be more “science”-y, i.e. legitimate and respected>.  But the article volume would, doubtless, wane were it not also tied to tenure.

Sociologists know systems.  They identify them, analyze them, study them.  Sociology, as an academic discipline, is just another a system, subject to the same protocol.  Once you understand the operation of a system, your ability to manipulate its parts and your behavior in them is multiplied.  Perhaps it’s like understanding how to study for a multiple choice test: it’s not about comprehension and application of knowledge from the course; it’s about term recognition.  But when the student recognizes the terms and scores well accordingly, both instructor and student pat themselves on the back, participating in the mutual delusion that education has occurred.  Likewise and in practice <rather than the ideal or rare case> it’s not about intellectual collaboration, theoretical discovery or progress; it’s about securing livelihoods for the bookish.  But when the sociologist publishes an article or gets a grant, she and her institution (university, research org, think tank, whatever) pat themselves on the back participating in the mutual delusion that the discipline has gained ground or otherwise progressed.

Sociology of sociology.

Dear Female Reader,
The television is a constant source if enlightenment.   Actually, credit where credit is due, it’s marketing conveyed through the medium of television.  Did you know that there is something wrong with the shape if your breasts? In fact, the form that you were born with is unnatural!  Try the Playtex side-smoothing bra to elimate that awkward– nay, unnatural– pointy-ness (“that torpedo thing”). What you need to look “natural” is underwire, domed padding, and some cotton. 

One minor point of confusion: if something is natural when it is “marked by easy simplicity and freedom from artificiality, affectation, or constraint; having a form or appearance found in nature,” then why does a woman have to alter her physicality, applying constraints to her breasts to affect the appearance of “natural.”  I’m still stuck on that one…

Although I left the classroom today feeling much better about the reception of the topic (we finished up with the theoretical perspectives on gender), I did recall between yesterday and today that I did in fact have a 5th to add to the list of classroom grievances.

Drum roll?

5. When a question to the tune of, “How does sociologicaltruism influence your behavior?” is offered up for class discussion, an obstinate student responds, “I think it’s up to each individual how they will respond.  It’s how you approach the situation and your own personality.  It’s different for every person.”  This, perhaps more than anything else, makes me feel like I have failed to educate someone sociologically.    One of my chief goals in teaching this discipline is to help students see that their actions and ideas are shaped by the cultural context in which they were formed and exist, that their actions and decisions are not made in a vacuum, but are influenced by social structures (patterned social arrangements like family) and the continuous process of socialization.  Ironically, given the value placed on individualism in this culture into which students are well-socialized, it is an inconsistent concession to view one’s actions as linked to larger social forces.

Today, after two days stuck on my couch with my daughter’s stomach flu from last week, I returned to the classroom.  My energies are still at half-mast, but how many days of a summer class can you really miss when you’re the instructor?  Le sigh.  I returned just in time to take up the gender chapter.  It remains one of my favorites despite having never (that I remember) walked out of the classroom feeling like I did a satisfying job with it.  I debriefed with my cubemate about it after the class.   I appreciate him as a sounding board:  What went wrong? What did you talk about? How did they respond?  What was it about X that made you think/feel Y?  It’s like instructional therapy.

I explained that I had covered all of the usual suspects for the gender section, focusing on gender roles and stereotypes, edging toward structural sexism (e.g. the gender wage gap), and that I could feel the room tightening up when I briefly broached same-sex marriage, attitudes toward women as homemakers/men as achievers, and the fact that the values we tend to endorse culturally are more strongly identifiable with masculinity than femininity.

I’m not sure about the constructive value of this, but continuing with the instructional therapy motif where it would fly, my reflections on the class are perhaps best encapsulated in a top 4 list <I tried for 5, but today I’m feeling the weight of 4>.

Classroom Grievances, unranked:

1. There are <10 minutes left in the class period.  Noting this, a precocious student returns his/her notebook and various materials to backpack commencing domino effect whereby the rest of the students follow suit and collectively disengage from discussion and learning.

I’m delinquent on my social dues.  A week+ after the shaving without posting the video or really talking about it much (in the talk=blog kind of way).  In part, it’s the fear that the clip–as a mere segment of a class period–doesn’t communicate the full effect of the event.  But also, it’s because I botched my script. Ok, so botched is a strong word.  Ad-libbed, maybe.  It’s not that I was nervous about shaving my head– this, I have done for 3 consecutive summers now <it’s sort of a rush, really>.  However, I’ve never shaved my head as part of a demonstration to prove a point before.  Highly structured/scripted things make me anxious.

The class was on the components of culture, with emphasis on social norms:

I went in “guns-a-blazin’” that day, donning my student (as opposed to instructor) uniform (for females on this campus, that = running shorts + topsiders + tee shirt + makeup + jewelry; it’s like you started getting ready to go out, but then decided you wanted to go by them gym first while wearing boat shoes), answering my cell phone after the beginning of the class period to discuss my pretend hangover with the friend I’d asked to call.  This was the introduction to a class long demonstration of how our expectations and evaluations of people vary according to their adherence to social norms.  Given that it was the 3rd or 4th class meeting, I’d established enough of a rapport with the students that they deemed my choice of apparel an indication of being laid back or cool and my phone conversation an indication of the fact that I like to have a good time.   Though the first-year students were amused by the novelty, as a senior in the class commented, I would not have been taken seriously had I worn such clothing or answered my phone on day 1.  ”That’s not how Baylor professors dress or behave.”  Although my knowledge base and qualifications to teach the course would have been the same regardless of what I was wearing and what I did the night before, students’ expectations of me would have been tainted by the fact that I had broken a variety of social norms dictating the propriety of dress and demeanor and that particular setting.  In short, my behavior was inconsistent with the setting and my status.*

Ok, so social norms dictate that I ought to dress and act professionally while I’m in a professional setting <earthshattering stuff here “) >.  If I don’t follow these rules, I’m likely to be denied the attention an instructor would expect to receive and may be subject to disapproving comments shared among classmates.  Revelation: when someone doesn’t follow socially agreed upon, but often unspoken rules we sanction them.   This sanctioning often happens with regard to why or how it’s done.  When someone violates a social norm, depending upon the kind of norm and the extent of the violation, people often feel an emotional reaction that you have not abided by the rules of the social game.  When you have to wait in line in the express line behind someone clearly exceeding the 10-items limit, you feel peeved and may started sighing or making disapproving sounds in the background.  They have violated a rule (norm), which offends your sense of fairness (value).

Because norms are established rules of behavior or conduct that we assume everyone knows, when a person breaks a norm, the automatic reaction is, “what’s wrong with her?”  And, depending on how far afield the violation, the breach can be viewed as pathological.  The media coverage of Britney Spears’ buzz cut is a great example of this.  So ultimately, the in-class sensationalism of shaving my own head was meant to demonstrate a) the powerful reactions we have when norms are broken, b) the effect of norm breaking on our judgment/evaluation of the breaker, c) the constraints on the part of the audience that keep them from engaging in similar behavior (great example of this is some background convo toward the end of the clip), d) the fact that the values that norms instantiate are typically unexamined (i.e. why does it matter if I shave my head?), and e) the tendency to pathologize norm-breakers (note media coverage of Britney in the background for this one).

Due to my inability to embed the video here, check out the Clip of the Clipping on youtube.

*Status in sociospeak = a socially defined position in society that is characterized by certain expectations, rights, and duties.

Saith the contemporary bard:  Storytelling is an art.  Fashioning tales out of your own life experience, a craft.  But seeing your life in narrative is postmodern paradigm.

There was a time during my high school social career that I spent participating in party culture.  In broad strokes, this culture consisted largely of adolescents converging on various unguarded locales for consciousness alteration and pursuant indulgence in less-inhibited behaviors.  Worry not: I’m not alluding to dropping acid in back alleys and forming teen sex cults.  I reference only the ever-so-common (and yes, adolescent delinquency in some form or other is statistically normal) practice of drinking the cheap beer afforded by someone’s fake ID or older sibling and the sophomoric shenanigans that would ensue.

Anyway, at some point it occurred to me that the staple of this entire enterprise was the stories that came out of the evenings spent.   As if in a video game, every night out represented an opportunity to build up your power supply with stories of the wild things you had done, with less points earned for the ones you witnessed but did not participate in.  On the other hand, if you were forced to stay in for the night– or God forbid multiple nights (let’s say you were grounded)– you would lose power.  You weren’t there for it.  You didn’t see it.  And so it separates your storyline from the other storytellers.

After I realized this, or at least corresponding to my realization of this, my enchantment with that region of the high school social spectrum lost its luster.  And as you might imagine, there were some spillover effects for my college experience, too– especially given my participation in the Greek life on campus <that’s a secret, though; don’t out me!>: talk about high school party culture part ii.  But recently, I’ve been reconsidering the value of stories.  How, for example, does knowing that you are participating in the creation of a story affect your behavior in a situation?  Likewise, how does knowing that you are participating in or creating what will become a story for someone else affect the way you approach a situation and your behavior in it?

I’ve spent the past few days immersed in this question, whether consciously or otherwise.  On Saturday, I was a rather unwitting figure in someone’s wedding, a character in their story because they had asked my daughter to be the flower girl.  Ultimately, I was the one thrust down the aisle with the petals.  Today, I breached a social norm by having a hair cut in class <well, quite a bit more than a haircut…> simply to evoke an emotional reaction so that the power of norm breaking would stay with the students watching.  Those are stories that I’ll let eek out over the next couple of days. Meanwhile, I’m noticed that being a conscious actor in your own story makes you want to enhance the experience that much more– whether in the act of participating in the experience or in the embellished retelling of it.  Knowing that what you are doing will be rehashed seems to make it  more meaningful and, in parallel fashion, to heighten sensitivity to the meanings being made.