A Peer Reviewed Blog
Have you seen this video, about giving a genetic test for ancestry/origins to a group of people who each seem to think they’re pure blood?
Sure, it’s basically an ad for a Copenhagen-based travel website, but it’s interesting nonetheless.
See what you think. Continue reading “Clash of Classifications”
On the heels of North Carolina’s recent decision to require transgender people to use public restrooms that correspond to their identified sex at birth, Target has just released a new policy indicating that transgender people may use restrooms in its stores that correspond to their present gender identity. While this initiative has received strong support from many corners, it is also not without controversy; most notably, the American Family Assocation (AFA) has called for a boycott of Target on the grounds that this policy “endangers women and children by allowing men to frequent women’s facilities.”
With these claims in mind, there is some importance to my inquiry in doing a bit of fact-checking. As the evidence suggests, transgender people are no more likely to be sexual predators than anyone else, and yet as a group they experience disproportionately higher levels of discrimination and harassment in public venues (and in bathrooms, in particular). Moreover, in response to those who claim that Target’s policy will invite sexual predators of all gender identities into bathrooms, the data indicates that people are no more likely to be attacked in a bathroom than anywhere else, rendering most of the safety arguments relatively void. Continue reading “Do Bathrooms Matter? Revisiting “The Bathroom Problem””
According to this news story from a few years ago, a “living” man from Ohio was legally ruled “dead”:
A US man declared dead after he disappeared nearly three decades ago cannot now be declared officially alive, though he has returned home and is in good health, a judge has ruled.
Donald Miller of Ohio left behind a wife, two children and significant debt when he fled his home in 1986.
He was declared legally dead in 1994, then re-emerged in 2005 and attempted to apply for a driving license.
A judge this week found death rulings cannot be overturned after three years.
Judge Allan Davis handed down the ruling in Hancock County, Ohio, probate court on Monday, calling it a “strange, strange situation”, according to media reports.
“We’ve got the obvious here. A man sitting in the courtroom, he appears to be in good health,” he said, finding that he was prevented by state law from declaring Mr Miller legally alive.
“I don’t know where that leaves you, but you’re still deceased as far as the law is concerned.”
What we have seems to be a case of competing discourses. If this man went to the hospital, it seems unlikely that the doctors would direct him to the morgue. On the other hand, from the court’s perspective he is dead and thus not eligible to get a driver’s license. Continue reading “Competing Discourses on Life and Death”
Did you catch this spoken word piece, by rapper Prince Ea, that was making the rounds online a couple moths ago? (It’s apparent support for the notion of being post-racial received its share of criticism, by the way.) Continue reading “Who We Truly Are?”
This post originally appeared on the Practicum blog.
In Religion & Society—my introductory religious studies course — I regularly use the 1998 comedy Pleasantville to engage in a discussion about how we’re socialized to actively seek conformity to the existing social order. The film is about two teens — David, played by Tobey Maguire, and Jennifer, played by Reese Witherspoon—who are magically transported from the 1990s into a 1950s sitcom; they immediately begin to chafe under the social expectations of small town life. As they start deviating from the social norms of the fictional sitcom world (and encourage others to do so as well), they disrupt the life of the entire town. (If you haven’t seen it, the trailer is below. Note: there are spoilers further down.) Continue reading “Pleasantville and Social Reproduction”
Did you catch the recent interview with Tom Jones, on National Public Radio? He’s 75 now and still going strong. He has an autobiography out and a new album and was reflecting, in the interview, on how, with age, he’s now able to sing certain songs with more credibility than when he was younger. Continue reading “Reason to Believe”
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That’s Roch Carrier, the Quebec author, when he was 10 years old, in 1947.
If you know anything about the history of Canada, or hockey, you’ll know that there’s something wrong with that picture once you hear it was taken in Sainte-Justine-de-Dorchester, Quebec — near Quebec City but also near the Maine border.
Or, to put it another way, it wasn’t taken in Toronto. Continue reading ““I asked God to send me, right away, a hundred million moths that would eat up my Toronto Maple Leafs Sweater””
At least here in North American, it’s likely you’ve had General Tso’s Chicken if you’ve got to a Chinese restaurant. (And fortune cookies, of course.)
But who was General Tso? Did he really like chicken? And where’d the dish come from?
This new documentary would be really useful in classes interested in tackling just what it means to assume something is authentic or, better yet, to exemplify how identity is, in fact, a public and always ongoing collaborative exercise — in this case, between cooks, armed with certain sorts of recipes, and eaters, who arrive at their restaurants with very different tastes.
Prompted by the discussion surrounding Rachel Dolezal’s NAACP resignation, this series of posts is about how and when we take performativity seriously…, and when it bows to interests in historical or experiential specificity.
Race, as many have pointed out for years, is not biological. This point raises questions about the basis on which it is determined. Is it ancestry, appearance, cultural practice, or something else? That complicated question has come to greater prominence in light of the media circus around Rachel Dolezal and her assertion of an African-American identification. While discussions of Dolezal often focus on the process of self-identification and strategic choices made in relation to that self-identification, I want to focus, instead, on the strategic nature of the act of ascribing identification to someone else. Continue reading “Strategic Ideologies”