A Peer Reviewed Blog
As I write this, “Large Item Pick-Up Day” has just passed in my neighborhood. Like in many other locales across the U.S., this is the annual event when our city’s trash provider names a particular weekend when large or bulky refuse will be picked up free of charge, including things like refrigerators, furniture, computers, old TVs, etc. Continue reading “One Man’s Trash is Another Man’s Status: the Voyeur’s Gaze and Large Trash Pick-Up Day”
At the small liberal arts university where I work, we offer a travel course entitled “The Rhetoric of War.” The course examines the way that rhetorics (both verbal and graphic) depict war, patriotism, and the nation-state in the American context. Midway through the semester, the class takes a whirlwind trip to Washington D.C. in order to directly engage the ways in which war is memorialized.
My friend and colleague, Dr. Amy Milakovic, is one of the faculty who teaches that course; she has a forthcoming paper about the experience, with particular focus paid to the Women In Military Service For America (WIMSFA) Memorial. As Dr. Milakovic argues, the attempt to honor military women at WIMSFA happens through a narrative that works only to the degree that it actually diminishes women. WIMFSA achieves this by reinforcing traditional gendered stereotypes at the same time that its physical appearance emphasizes invisibility and insignificance, two terrible ironies achieved in a place that claims to highlight and celebrate women in the military. Continue reading “The Memory That Forgets: The Women in Military Service for America Memorial”
Almost exactly two years ago, I had the wonderful opportunity to accompany a group of my students to India for a course designed to specifically examine how notions of “justice” operate in an Indian context. As you might imagine, we saw literally hundreds of noteworthy things. With time, though, I have mentally sifted through some of these memories of what went on during our travels and realized that the most poignant moments of analysis came from events that no one had planned. Continue reading “It’s Not the Taj, It’s the Tour Guide: Some Musings on a Trip to India”
“If you’re not sexy, you might want to be easy.” So wrote David Epstein in an Inside Higher Ed article written about the website ratemyprofessors.com, which allows students to provide public feedback about their professors. In addition to reporting some basic information like the student’s interest in the course material and their perception of the necessity of the textbook, class attendance, etc., each student grades their professors by providing feedback on three major scales: “Helpfulness,” “Clarity,” and “Easiness.” A fourth measure, “Hotness” (symbolized by a chili pepper), is awarded when students deem a professor suitably attractive. Continue reading ““If you’re not sexy, you might want to be easy”: Some Thoughts On Ratemyprofessors.com”
If you watch the polygamy-themed TLC show Sister Wives (starring Kody Brown and his four wives, pictured above, along with their collective 17 children), you may have heard the news that Brown and the wife to whom he was legally married (second from the left) have divorced, with Brown since legally marrying another one of the four (center). Brown refers to his non-legal wives as his “spiritual wives.”
The news of the divorce may seem a somewhat cryptic move, seeing how there’s been no actual rift in their family, according to Brown, although rumors abound that the situation is far from marital bliss. Nevertheless, Brown insists that the only thing that has changed is the manner in which the state regards their relationships: since one of his wives is now legally his ex-wife, she and her children remain eligible for certain rights and protections (such as insurance) at the same time that his current legal wife and her children are due the same. Rather than call this a divorce, in fact, Brown has referred to it as a “legal restructuring” of their family. Continue reading “Holy Matrimony! Polygamy in the Wild”
True confession: As I am prone to do every semester, I have once again tarnished the innocence of young adults by forcing a group of students to look at this particular photo. It is, I am told, “the most disgusting picture ever.” If you can stand it, here it is:
It turns out that my students’ near ubiquitous sense of disgust with this image is not unique, for scholar Breanne Fahs has recently shown that despite many women’s nonchalant attitudes towards underarm and other body hair as mere “personal choice” when discussed hypothetically, a diverse group of her female students who opted to forego hair removal as part of an in-class experiment reported almost universal feelings of social pressure, helplessness, disgust, and anger, not only in the way that they felt about themselves, but also in the way that their families and peers treated them. Continue reading “The Most Disgusting Picture Ever”
Recently, I had a student come by during my office hours. Upon entering, one of the first things he said was something like “Whoa, Dr. Smith – I wouldn’t have thought that you’d have a knife!”
To be honest, I wasn’t exactly sure what he was talking about. Then I remembered that I have an old knife hanging in a shadowbox frame on my office wall that I use as an art piece (it’s got some very interesting markings). Frankly, I’d never made much of it, except that it didn’t make the aesthetic cut at my house. In the hierarchy of interior design to which I ascribe, that means that my office became its new home. Continue reading “About That Knife”
Perhaps you’ve heard the news that the Supreme Court has refused to hear a case regarding a lactating woman’s firing, at least tacitly upholding the lower court’s ruling that described her treatment as something “not sexist.” As you can read here, former Nationwide Insurance employee Angela Ames returned to her first day of work after maternity leave and found numerous practical and bureaucratic roadblocks that made it exceedingly difficult for her to express breast milk while at work. When she noted the obstacles and asked for other accommodations, a supervisor told to “just go home to her babies.” Ames reports that she was subsequently coerced the same day to pen her resignation letter. Continue reading “Context-Free Lactation”
As Americans today celebrate Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, many of us continue to grapple with how to contextualize and understand the recent deaths of several young black American men at the hands of the police. This need to explain is thrown into even starker relief with the very recent story that black men’s photos are being used for target practice by the North Miami Beach police department. The chief of police insists that this is a case of “poor judgment,” not racism, because those officers taking aim at the targets are themselves multi-racial, and because other races are portrayed in other targets. As one might expect, however, at least one of the black men whose face became a target is not personally reassured, saying, “Now I’m being used as a target? … I’m a father. I’m a husband. I’m a career man. I work 9-to-5.”
It may seem quite paradoxical to discuss a “well-intentioned racist,” but arguably, there is usually no other kind. I am often amazed by how we expect that racism (or discrimination, more generally) is something committed by self-described bigots. Like many others who study and teach about social dynamics, I frequently tell my students that prejudicial behaviors and attitudes are not only ubiquitous, but also quite mundane — they are simply the old recipe of one part distinction and another part essentialization — and they are used to stir the stew of social power. Continue reading “The Well-Intentioned Racist”
In yet another example of how categorization matters, consider the latest controversy in children’s playthings: Hasbro Corp., maker of the famous Play-Doh brand modeling clay, recently released a Play-Doh set featuring a clay extruder that looks astonishingly like a penis. Hasbro has apologized to consumers offended by the shape of the extruder and has promised a replacement that’s, shall we say, less anatomically correct. Continue reading “The Problem with Phallic Play-Doh”