sociology

Raising Brooklyn: Nannies, Childcare, and Caribbeans Creating Community

mandy — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 20:00:00 +0000

When Tamara Mose Brown had her first child in 2004, she began going to different Brooklyn, New York parks on sunny afternoons. In each, she found dozens of West Indian nannies caring for the babies and toddlers of the largely White middle- and upper-income denizens who lived nearby. Questions about both the nannies' work and the race, class, and gender dynamics of their lives prompted Brown—the Canadian-born daughter of Trinidadian immigrants—to begin spending time with these women. Their conversations were eye-opening. For one, Brown came to realize the centrality of paid childcare to U.S. economic life. For another, she was shocked to find that employers who labor at home often require nannies to work outdoors, or in libraries or community centers, for upwards of ten hours a day.

What’s more, Brown quickly recognized that childcare workers, many of them undocumented immigrants, are routinely exploited—underpaid, and required to do household chores far outside their job description, from picking up dry cleaning, to cooking, to going to the pharmacy or market. Nonetheless, she also discovered that domestic workers have found ways to create social networks to make their work lives easier and more enjoyable. Often predicated on a common ethnic heritage, these networks enable childcare workers to share everything from food to gossip. By pre-arranging meetings in public spaces, they can watch the kids in their care while also socializing and breaking the monotony of their jobs.

But, Brown writes in Raising Brooklyn, as wonderful as these networks can be, there’s a down side. To wit, nannies in public spaces are easily observed. Take the website I Saw Your Nanny. In one incident, Brown reports that people with limited information logged onto the site and reported that a toddler had been lured away by a suspicious man while his caretaker—who was eventually identified as the child’s mother and not a nanny—was obliviously chatting. Turns out that the man was the child’s father, but, of course, the notice was posted before this fact was ascertained.

That said, Brown chronicles the ways nannies support one another, whether meeting on a particular park bench at a particular time each day or gathering for story hour at the local library. Cell phones have been a tremendous boon, she continues, giving otherwise isolated workers a way to connect with one another, an easy way to share news from home or strategize about ways to deal with a difficult child or a demanding employer. They’ve also enabled them to organize, and many of the workers Brown interviews are active participants in Domestic Workers United, an organization that successfully pushed the New York state legislature to pass a Domestic Workers Bill of Rights in 2010.

Brown has done a masterful job—as a participant observer—of reflecting the everyday world of female domestic laborers. While she, herself, straddles two worlds—belonging to an Afro Caribbean community that is victimized by racism while simultaneously having the financial resources to hire a part-time nanny to care for her two children—her ethnic identity allowed her access to an insular community. The result is both fascinating and compelling. Although Brown occasionally lapses into sociological jargon, Raising Brooklyn is generally accessible and insightful. Her own insider-outsider status is clearly presented; at the same time, her compassion for the twenty-five nannies she interviewed makes Raising Brooklyn a wonderful testament to the valuable contribution working class women of color make to life in the U.S. of A.

Written by: Eleanor J. Bader, March 7th 2011

Strip Club: Gender, Power and Sex Work

gwen — Mon, 20 Dec 2010 00:00:00 +0000

By Kim Price-Glynn

New York University Press

In Strip Club: Gender, Power and Sex Work, sociologist Kim Price-Glynn analyzes the organizational structure of a strip club to explore whose interests strip clubs serve and how. To gain an insider’s perspective, Price-Glynn spent fourteen months working as a cocktail waitress in a strip club. During this time, she observed, analyzed, and interviewed strippers, employees, and patrons.

Price-Glynn seeks to demonstrate that the strip club she researched, like the majority of others in the U.S., is organized in a way that benefits male employees and patrons while socially and economically marginalizing strippers. She weaves her research with sociological and organizational theory, along with other scholarship on sex work, such as Wendy Chapkis’ Live Sex Acts and Katherine Frank’s G-Strings and Sympathy. In an attempt to situate sex work as an occupation that entails intense emotional labor, Price-Glynn also draws heavily on the works of Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Hochschild.

Price-Glynn argues that the strip club perpetuates gender inequalities. She distinguishes, however, from a generalized argument that stripping and sex work inherently contribute to gender inequality and posits instead that strippers were marginalized by the organizational structure of the strip club. She notes that there were no women in positions of authority and that employees, who were explicitly told to always supervise the strippers, believed that strippers were never to be trusted, had low self-esteem, and used drugs excessively. In a fascinating portion of the book, Price-Glynn highlights the differences in how strippers and other club employees receive their wages. Employees have fixed wages while strippers receive money solely from tips; they also pay the strip club for their use of the club and are required to tip other employees, like the deejay. This system decreases their profits and creates a paradigm where the strippers appear to depend on the club (even if the club profits solely because they feature strippers).

Price-Glynn highlights the ways in which strippers’ safety is compromised by an intense culture of masculinity, a lack of physical boundaries between strippers and patrons, and the fact that a club’s revenue is often boosted if patrons think they can have physical access to strippers. She recounts stories, told to her by strippers during interviews, of being digitally raped on stage, of being expected to perform oral sex, and of club employees looking the other way when patrons touched strippers. Building on past scholarship, she also focuses on the intense emotional labor, such as flirting, that strippers are expected to perform. Private dances, she argues, are not prized for their extended dance, but because of the (false) intimacy it creates.

Price-Glynn’s work is an important reminder of the dangers of sex work. At times, however, I questioned whether she excessively focused on the negative aspects of stripping. A section devoted to the women’s rituals when they returned home (one bathed in bleach) and the effects of stripping on outside relationships (such as an inability to enjoy sex) was profoundly sad. It also implies that none of the strippers were able to disengage themselves from their work and that they were all negatively affected, even “damaged,” by stripping. When strippers said they enjoyed stripping or found it empowering, Price-Glynn hints that this is simply a mask or coping mechanism. This is, of course, plausible, but diverges from other scholarship on sex work and comes close to supporting arguments that stripping categorically harms women.

Strip Club offers important insight for those strippers and advocates of sex worker rights who want to improve the environment of the strip club and increase opportunities for women to be empowered within sex work. Price-Glynn’s choice to use organizational theory allows the reader to find concrete examples, such as wage reform, that could have very immediate and positive results. This method also distinguishes her book from other recent scholarship on sex work and stripping. I recommend the book, therefore, for those interested in learning more about the culture of the strip club or to sociology students interested in a unique application of organizational theory.

Written by: Shannon Hill, December 19th 2010

Sport, Power and Society: Institutions and Practices

priyanka — Mon, 04 Oct 2010 16:00:00 +0000

Edited by Robert E. Washington, David Karen

Westview Press

Presenting the multifaceted world of sports, this book introduces a multitude of perspectives into the sports world. While encompassing many specifics about the whole idea of what makes up sport, this book offers views into aspects that create the sports world into a fully participatory and also a spectator-oriented institution. With many selections of essays that delve into specific topics like ownership, media, participation, violence and more, the institution of sport becomes a full-on demanding, powerful, industry like many other money-making organizations. In-depth and relatively stimulating, this compilation serves as terrific resource for readers interested in how sport has become, and continues to be, the "institution" it represents in many perspectives.

Not without rhetorical and sociological views, the book elaborates on many scholarly issues. The editors elaborate on each chapter heading to outline the premise for each collection of essays, culminating in the possible problems with sport in modern society. With this in mind, the reader may pick and choose essays that fit their own interests, from race issues to the politics of to fans of various sport to the money that supports specific sports. In sum, this book offers a huge amount of reading materials as well as resources for the readers.

Although published in 2010, some references for articles are gathered from 2000 and earlier. These research bases are older, and they serve a good base for starting research, but with technology and ten years, the articles in the book are outdated—a more recent selection of research may offer more current ideas and objective facts. As a compendium of resources, this reader or anthology serves as a good base for future research. For example, essays of sports ownership date to the late 1990s, and they are somewhat outdated for the reader of today.

However, in the end, the reader is left with a better understanding of the sports world and how it exists in our day-to-day living regardless of how much or how little we want it there. Its influence on society and children (as well as on adults) definitely makes the idea of sport a powerful tool in our lives. Modern society grabs onto the business of sport in many cases, and this leads to immense financial investments. Shocking at times, clearly disturbing at others, Sport, Power and Society: Institutions and Practices gives all of its readers a little more to chew on in its presenting of critical thinking about sport. Definitely one to keep on the shelf.

Written by: Carolyn Espe, October 4th 2010

Habits of the Heartland: Small-Town Life in Modern America

admin — Sat, 17 Jul 2010 16:01:00 +0000

By Lyn C. Macgregor

Cornell University Press

I am really worried about Viroqua, Wisconsin. Not because Lyn C. Macgregor made it the subject of a two-year community study, which she writes about in Habits of the Heartland, but because in a footnote on page forty-eight she mentions that the Utne Reader had an article about the town as a good place to live. In the age of the Internet, attractive places to live do not stay secret long. Combined with the commodification of lifestyle, the publicity can change the character of a locality. I date the demise of my own Williamsburg neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York, to gentrification from a recommendation of that same publication that it was a hip place to live. Good luck, Viroqua!

Like the majority of United States residents, I do not live in the country or a small rural town—and my experience with small towns was the romance of “going to town” while vacationing on my grandparents' farm in Jasper County, Illinois. The names of nearby towns—Oblong, Robinson, Paris—recall adventure and mysteries of the beyond—that famous cities do not conjure up.

In Habits of the Heartland, Macgregor jumps right in to address a common claim about small town life, that everyone knows your business. Well, she says, it's true. The clerk at the optician's knew that she had been pulled over for not having a current registration ticket on her plate. It turned out that the clerk was also a member of the ambulance squad and had heard about the incident on the police scanner.

Macgregor reveals her sociological findings right away. She sees not just one but three social groups in Viroqua: the Alternatives, anchored by a Waldorf school; the Main Streeters, active in preservation of the buildings on Main Street and in mitigating the effects of a Wal-Mart on its businesses; and the Regulars, who just want to live there. She introduces these subgroups by recounting how each of them celebrate Halloween, a vibrant explication of their different folkways and values. She then devotes a chapter to each of these groups and concludes Part I with her view of their interactions. In Part II, she slices her research a different way, in terms of civic engagement, retailing, and consumption. Esoteric but still readable comments about her methodology and the place of her study in the sociology of small towns are relegated to an appendix at the end of the book.

Why does an ordinary reader crack open a sociology book? For me, sociology casts a cool eye on one's life lived with others. Macgregor's glance is kind and her accounts gleam with lived experience. She refers to Herbert Gans's Urban Villagers in her appendix. Reading Gans as a young woman, I discovered some of my Italian-American father's quirks were not unique to him but were common in the immigrant Italian communities who settled in the United States.

Macgregor's work, too, gave me an insight about my own counterculture politics. Her argument that people think very differently about community and whether and how it can be made. The vulnerability in this alternative, outside-the-system politics is the potential for isolation from the larger society. Active in a community-supported agriculture group—Viroqua, like Brooklyn, has a lot of them—I bristle when people call this foods movement elitist. Macgregor’s comment, “The Alternatives were proud of all they had accomplished in Viroqua, and this pride made them feel that their deliberately made community was distinctly superior to other organizations and people in town,” stopped me cold. Even alternative communities become just another “gated community” unless they are open to the outside world. Not bad for a book about one small town.

Written by: Frances Chapman, July 17th 2010

The Tyranny of Opinion: Honor in the Construction of the Mexican Public Sphere

admin — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 16:01:00 +0000

By Pablo Piccato

Duke University Press

A coworker who saw this book sitting on my desk commented, “The tyranny of opinion? Isn’t the whole point of an opinion that it’s free from tyranny?” Not quite. Even today, public opinion can make or break a celebrity’s or politician’s career. In The Tyranny of Opinion, Pablo Piccato weaves an intricate web connecting a variety of aspects of nineteenth century Mexican society, examining the notion of how honor was closely tied to one’s place in society and how public opinion affected people’s public and private lives.

Since honor was one of the most important—if not the most important—form of social capital one could have, people went to great lengths to maintain (or attain) it. Journalists at the time, for example, had a dualistic connection to public opinion. On one hand, they were responsible for publishing the material that helped create it. On the other, many journalists were underpaid and worked in poor conditions, and their upward mobility in society was closely tied to their success as writers. As such, establishing one’s reputation sometimes took precedence over objective reporting, which in turn had an impact on how public opinion was shaped.

Love affairs, student protests, public riots, and duels are also subjects of analysis in the book. Lest one think that he focused solely on the honor of the upper class, Piccato actually covers a broad spectrum of race and class. He is also careful to include a gender-based component in his analysis. Although the book focuses largely on the honor of men, Piccato examines the reasons why women—especially “respectable” women—were largely excluded from public life. In his conclusion, he notes how his analysis regarding women, domesticity, political narratives, and moral economy serve to contribute to a larger academic conversation about these subjects.

Piccato grounds his work in close readings of primary sources, interpreting everything from published newspaper stories to court documents. His knowledge of the historiography on the subject is evident, as is his knowledge of Mexican culture during the late eighteenth to early twentieth centuries. The strength of the book lies in Piccato’s ability to convey the context of his analysis. The Tyranny of Opinion will surely serve as an excellence resource for Mexican history scholars.

Written by: Melissa Arjona, July 12th 2010

The Uterine Health Companion: A Holistic Guide to Lifelong Wellness

admin — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 07:44:00 +0000

By Eve Agee

Celestial Arts

In The Uterine Health Companion, Eve Agee brings her training as a medical anthropologist and as a holistic healer to bear on the subject of life-long uterine health. She begins the book by explaining both holistic health and the structure and function of the uterus to her readers. Then she outlines a plan for optimal uterine health, with chapters on emotional/spiritual and mental health, the power of nutrition and the importance of a strong body.

In part three, Agee discusses what she calls “Uterine Health Conditions” and these span from menarche to menopause and beyond. This is a book for women at every stage of reproductive life. This is also a book for Western women specifically.

Agee’s training in Africa has led her to question the disproportionate distribution of uterine maladies from a global perspective. Without ever insinuating that western women have their menstrual woes all in our heads (so common to masculinist approaches to women’s reproductive health, as I’m sure most of you are aware), Agee asks why it is that PMS, endometriosis and hot flashes (to name some examples) are so prevalent in the west but comparatively minimal in the non-western world. Agee indicates that dominant western attitudes about women’s bodies and women’s reproductive systems and abilities have actually contributed to menstrual, reproductive and menopausal illness in the western world. I found that to be the most interesting thing about her book.

I can’t say I learned much about the nature of uterine health conditions or about things to do for optimal uterine health, but I’m a reproductive health geek, so I came to the book with a fair amount of knowledge. Still, the reminder to eat my orange and red veggies was a good one and encouragement to keep up on exercise is always appreciated. The part I just couldn’t do was the holistic bit: I just couldn’t bring myself to do the guided visualizations. Certainly, that had more to do with my own comfort zones. Still, I just wasn’t prepared to enter my uterus and talk to the people/things I met there (though it was fun to tell my mother do to so).

Agee’s style is engaging and easy without being overly simple. A quick read, enjoyable and timely.

Written by: kristina grob, July 1st 2010

Feminism Seduced: How Global Elites Use Women's Labor and Ideas to Exploit the World

admin — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 16:01:00 +0000

By Hester Eisenstein

Paradigm Publishers

I have been waiting for a book to tell me how things went wrong, how we ended up with lady cops and mothers in combat zones, how “feminist” became an insult. Did we women do it to ourselves, or were we pushed? Hester Eisenstein, professor of sociology at Queens College and the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City, has offered Feminism Seduced, which, as promised and despite its flaws, does map elements of the neoliberal project to some “feminist” initiatives, but it is not the book I have been wanting, the one that explains, not so much the academically popular theory of “recuperation,” but how the radical women might have kept the momentum of the women’s movement going and in the right direction.

Let’s get the most obvious major flaw of the book out of the way: the near total omission of lesbian-feminism, a powerful influence in the radical wing of the women’s movement in the 1970s. Though it is like blaming a reporter for the headline on her story to blame Eisenstein for the judgments of her indexer, the lack of an index entry for lesbianism reflects the extreme once-over-lightly she gives to the historical role of this feminist tendency, which cannot be subsumed under “queer theory” or dismissed with “conflicts over suppression of lesbian influence... eventually faded.”

Eisenstein’s nuanced concern about the limitations of the “women of color” construct apparently does not extend to the inability of the category “GLBT” to comfortably incorporate Rita Mae Brown’s “woman-identified woman.” This is a glaring oversight from an author who rightfully chastises a movement which often alienated women of color and working-class women.

Eisenstein’s argument or rather arguments are directed, she insists, mostly at hegemonic, state feminism (an approved version of reform feminism). She views feminism as driving out what she calls “labor feminism,” the initiatives for women within the labor movement that resulted in laws protecting women. Essentially she argues that women’s demands for wage equality, while benefiting professional women, put working- and lower-middle class women into poorly paid service jobs and undermined the expectation of a “family wage.” These feminist demands served to facilitate more direct anti-union activities begun by big business at the same time. (She seems less interested in the exclusion of women from trade unions in the higher paying blue-collar occupations like plumbing and carpentry.)

Moreover, feminist emphasis on paid labor undermined women’s work in the home and thus “welfare” programs. On a global level, feminism linked with modernity destroyed traditional societies and allowed access to markets to the forces of globalization, by focusing on such issues as “genital cutting,” which Eisenstein comes close to defending. She charges that the empowerment of individual Third World women through measures such as microfinance has taken the place of state-led development. She then recounts the use of feminist ideology in the promotion of imperialist initiatives, such as President George W. Bush crowing about liberating the women of Afghanistan from Taliban oppression, and in encouragement of Islamophobia.

The author presents a not entirely trustworthy account of feminist history and its continuance in women’s studies and a fairly standard leftist rendition of the neoliberal project—a lot of ground to cover. The reader is left to piece together her thesis from topic-based chapters that operate as silos, disrupting both the narrative history and the argument—without the aid of a Venn diagram.

In the end, she presents a post hoc analysis that stops short of proving her case against even mainstream feminism. Her solutions—maternalism, a socialist state, ACORN, and the California Nurses Association—seem neither particularly feminist nor radical. Perhaps that feminism is best that doesn’t take a gendered view of all the evils of the world but rather gives women the power of agency to uproot them.

Written by: Frances Chapman, April 9th 2010

Justice for Girls?: Stability and Change in the Youth Justice Systems of the United States and Canada

admin — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 00:01:00 +0000

By Jane B. Sprott, Anthony N. Doob

University of Chicago Press

In Justice for Girls?, Canadian researchers Jane B. Sprott and Anthony N. Doob provide a comprehensive and concise overview on girls and juvenile delinquency in these two North American countries. Sprott and Doob address the misconception, fueled by media reports and newspaper articles circulating in the U.S. and Canada, that girls are committing more crimes, and more violent crimes. The book asserts that contrary to popular belief, “the violent girl crime wave that people have been waiting for since the early 1900s...has simply not happened.”

In uncovering the hype behind sensationalized reports on girls and violence, the authors view juvenile delinquency as a social construction. In researching the number of violent girl crimes throughout the twentieth century, they assert that girls are less likely to commit violent crimes than boys. However, they note that girls make up a large percentage of juvenile delinquents and custody cases due to status offenses, so-called crimes in which girls can be arrested and tried for non-criminal behavior, such as sexual immorality.

Connecting the courts' motivations behind status offenses to women’s political movements, the authors make a convincing argument that girls have often born the brunt of a sociopolitical backlash as a parallel when women's movements are afoot.At these pivotal moments in history, juvenile court systems have tightened their surveillance of girls’ behaviors and criminalized girls’ sexual expression. As a result, Sprott and Doob argue, girls have historically been punished, and continue to be punished, for behavior and actions considered normal and acceptable for boys.

The authors discuss the limitations of their research, acknowledging the absences in their data with regards to race and class. Another absence in the book is a discussion of queer girls as well as trans girls and boys. Since sexual immortality—one of the most common status offenses girls are cited for—is not discussed at length, it is unclear if any of the girls convicted of this offense were/are queer or trans, and how their sexuality and/or gender identity influenced a court’s decision. Moreover, besides examining one case study, the authors do not offer girls’ own voices or their stories. Instead, they allow statistical evidence to speak for the injustices girls face in juvenile justice systems.

As a feminist scholar interested in the intersection of girls’ studies and media studies, I would argue that Sprott's and Doob’s work could benefit any researcher addressing the current hype surrounding girls and violence in contemporary Western societies.

Written by: Kristen Lambert, March 20th 2010

Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace With Marriage

admin — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 00:58:00 +0000

By Elizabeth Gilbert

Viking

Since I am apparently one of the only women between the ages of twenty-five and seventy-five who hasn’t read Eat, Pray, Love, I was delightfully surprised by Elizabeth Gilbert's latest work, Committed.

Gilbert's engaging prose and witty, self-deprecating style are intriguing, thought provoking, moving, and hilarious. Committed picks up where the first book leaves off. Gilbert and Felipe have been living together happily on several continents, but their domestic bliss is brought to an end when U.S. Immigration detain Felipe at the airport in Dallas and then deport him. The couple is advised that the only way Felipe will be able to enter and live in the U.S. again is if they get married.

Gilbert describes their situation in confessional detail: they want to be together and Felipe needs to travel to America for his business to survive. On the other hand, both have gone through gut wrenching divorces and have sworn never to remarry. Gilbert leaves the country to be by Felipe’s side during the immigration process. As they travel together, she decides to do her own investigation of marriage to try to embrace it fully. Committed is the chronicle of that time.

The pleasure of Committed, for me, was Gilbert’s interweaving of her own story with research on the history of marriage, and the informal interviews she conducted with women from all over the world. In her writing, Gilbert shows the various, often contradictory effects of marriage on women, and she does it in a complex fashion. The chapter “Marriage and Women” begins with anecdotes about Gilbert’s time in Laos, but it could have been subtitled “Mixed Emotions” or “A Cost-Benefit Analysis.”

For example, Gilbert tells us about Joy and Ting. Ting is from a tiny Laotian village and is extremely proud of her daughter Joy, who has received an education and is a skilled weaver. However, Joy’s ability to support her family is a source of both happiness and frustration. The young men in the village are neither as educated as Joy nor are they able to provide an equally large income. Joy’s material betterment effectively ended her marriage prospects within the village.

Gilbert goes on to relate the story of her grandmother, who gave up a fashionable life and successful career to raise seven children in one room of a drafty old farmhouse during the Great Depression. Gilbert’s grandmother claims this was the happiest time of her life, but also hopes Gilbert will not give up writing books to raise a family. The contradictions inherent in how Gilbert’s grandmother feels about her life and her granddaughter’s life embody the experience of many modern women.

Gilbert captures the complicated emotions surrounding marriage perfectly, and her intelligent analysis, combined with her obvious heart and likability, make Committed a thoughtful and gratifying read. I’ve already ordered Eat, Pray, Love.

Written by: Jennifer Wedemeier, February 23rd 2010

Social Theory: The Multicultural and Classic Readings

admin — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 01:03:00 +0000

Edited by Charles Lemert

Westview Press

The fourth edition of Social Theory: The Multicultural and Classic Readings offers a lesson in sociological practice that moves beyond the atmosphere of a university auditorium. This collection is arranged in chronological order and organizes the Modern Era into distinct historical categories. However, the overarching themes of decentering, discourse, and difference are incorporated into the discussion of each era in a way that is seamless yet meaningful.

Lemert’s expressed goal in creating a comprehensive collection that combines sociological masterpieces with yet unexplored pieces is to simply provide people with the knowledge to live better lives. Social theory, argues Lemert, can bring people power, pleasure, understanding about their social worlds, and most importantly, the ability to put their experiences and observations into words. Social theory thus allows people to explore and express inequalities and social disruption, investigate class warfare and communication breakdowns, and discern how differences between people can be magnified, nullified, or respectfully approached.

It’s especially interesting to read this collection at this point in time. Honestly, it will probably always be considered a reflexive, thoughtful text, but some of the pieces that I read were almost predictive of the current global state of affairs. For instance, in 1919, John Maynard Keynes offered an economic philosophy that recommended state policies which would control and direct the economy. In recent history, conservative talking heads could be heard lambasting “Keynesian Economics,” as the government takeover of the free market. Today, we know that the market doesn’t always stabilize as effectively as Capitalists say it does, and it could be argued that Keynesian Economics seems to be more sensible than Socialism.

The role of women in this collection of essays is hardly marginalized, however, since the writings move from older to more recent, a greater selection of feminist writers emerges towards the book’s end. The feminist selections in this anthology are theoretical yet practical, and seem to focus mainly on the topic of difference. Both social theorists and non-theorists can garner inspiration and motivation from the lessons provided in these pieces. In "The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House," Audre Lorde states that meaningful discourse can help women and other historically oppressed groups to “take our differences and make them strengths.” Likewise, Nancy Hartsock advises that “we can construct an understanding of the world that is sensitive to difference.” Within the context of globalization, Saskia Sassen moves beyond the realm of language and argues that issues of participation and representation should take center stage in current feminist analysis.

Could this mean that globalization is helping the world to become more sensitive to difference? I’m not sure, and they authors don’t say either. But that’s one of the goals of this collection: to make you ask questions and decide on the answers yourself.

Social Theory: The Multicultural and Classic Readings certainly provides readers with an array of arguments that don’t always coincide with one another. However, Lemert’s personal argument to readers can be witnessed in nearly every essay. That is, to think about the social world around all of us. Because by thinking, observing, and expressing our sentiments about this fascinating world, we are using a critical eye, and ultimately, improving our own lives and hopefully, others’ too.

Written by: Rachel Muzika Scheib, November 19th 2009

Women Who Kill

admin — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 01:06:00 +0000

By Ann Jones

The Feminist Press

Let me first just throw the creepiness right out there and admit I am a big fan of all media coverage related to serial killers. I love the horrible shows like Cold Case Files, and I love the even crappier rushed books written about every case. So when I saw Women Who Kill, I immediately zoomed in and claimed it.

I originally expected it to rely heavily on Aileen Wuornos, maybe some of the Manson girls, or even the women involved in couple-assisted murders, like Karla Homolka. I was expecting a similar sensationalized retelling of widely known to fairly well known cases, but what I got instead was an amazing surprise. Author Ann Jones doesn’t bore you with any of these tired old cases; in fact she rarely goes too deep into any individual case at all.

Women Who Kill marries the relationship between why and how women have killed during America’s history with the social problems of each time period behind them. This is a fascinating book for history buffs, sociologists, feminists, crime buffs—essentially, everyone. It’s so easy to write off a murderer as just being “crazy,” so I loved how this book went further to show that many of the female murderers throughout history actually had very rational reasoning behind their crimes brought on by their social position.

The book does not focus on any one criminal, but is divided rather loosely into crimes and time periods. The first type of murder brought up is that of women murdering their own children. Murdering your child is never a justifiable offense, but when Jones examines the American culture of the late 1600s and early 1700s to views on women, sexuality, and rape, the crimes become easier to understand.

The last type of murder covered is that of battered women retaliating against their batterers, from the late 1970s to the present. This was one of the more infuriating chapters, as it was closer to my lifetime. Jones never excuses any woman’s crime, but simply lays out each case on a carefully planned timeline of women’s social progress throughout the ages. All of the accounts are still extremely sad. And while this was a fascinating read that I could not put down, Women Who Kill left me feeling incredibly depressed and frustrated with how little progress it seems society really has made.

Between the language, euphemisms, and attitudes still in use—such as using seduction for the term rape in the 1600s, to the present favorite usage of had sex with, to the overall concept of how women still receive harsher sentencing for similar crimes committed by men—I didn’t feel our culture is much closer to equality, as I did before reading. Jones does a truly terrific job in presenting a morbid subject in an extremely interesting way, but I was left wishing for was some sort of guidance in what I could do personally to change things.

I don’t fault Jones for this though, as I doubt she has any idea herself. While it’s a wonderful book, the subject matter can be a little heavy to take in all at once. Surprisingly, Women Who Kill is not so much light beach fare (no ready-made for E! TV or movie sensationalism here) as it is a fresh insight to a little realized and ongoing problem.

Written by: Jen Klee, November 7th 2009

Missing Bodies: The Politics of Visibility

admin — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 23:59:00 +0000

By Monica J. Casper, Lisa Jean Moore

New York University Press

It is hard to deny the creeping, theatrical aspect that seems to permeate every mode of information and method of exposure we are subjected to daily. While once relegated to advertisements, television, and movies, the careful craft of showcasing and presenting certain bodies is now seen in governments, military, and the health industry. Why some bodies are overexposed while others are seemingly non-existent is useful in determining the underpinnings of American society and agenda. Monica Casper and Lisa Jena Moore explore these politics behind the visibility of certain bodies in Missing Bodies: The Politics of Visibility.

Upon first thought, this book might appear to be a critique of the media, a poignant peek into the ways in which the use of stereotype highlights certain bodies at the expense of others—but that topic is one that is otherwise understood, and largely written about. Casper and Moore delve deeper than that. They are concerned with the bodies that appear and disappear in much less talked about fields, such as female soldiers, people living and dying with HIV/AIDS, and infant mortality. With almost the same tools the media use to derive entertainment from everyday life, political institutions are doing the same to real lives and human suffering—and with graver consequences. The bodies of dead infants, those stricken with AIDS, and female soldiers are masked by numbers, lies, and underreporting. So how do real care, understanding, healing, and prevention begin when those bodies are erased in the first place?

At the root of the analysis is the preservation of Western ideals and agendas. By switching the concern of HIV/AIDS from a public health crisis to statistical, epidemiological data that helps manage government and secure the status of the state, there is a displacement of pain, suffering and death. The public has a harder time envisioning real people living with this disease amidst the quantitative numbers than they do erroneously understanding that HIV/AIDS is more of a disease that plagues other nations. Similarly, framing the release story of Jessica Lynch, a female prisoner of war in Iraq, as one of feminine passivity and rescue bolsters America’s dependency on gender dichotomies which fuels wars. While Lynch’s story is ultimately lost and retold as untrue, Lynch herself, and other female soldiers that suffer sexual discrimination are rendered invisible.

Lyrical, engaging, and encompassing, this book raises important and timely questions about the construction of identity and visibility in a post-9/11 landscape. In this fast-paced, technological world, others will readily construct our stories before us for benefits that are not our own. This book urges readers to question the sources, framing, methods, and presentation of information and tragedy so that we may recover the truth behind missing bodies.

Written by: Krista Ciminera, October 30th 2009

Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers

admin — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 16:39:00 +0000

By Tom Wolfe

Picador

Radical Chic, noun: a small clique of the New York upper elite who, in order to appear groundbreakingly fashionable, support social movements and causes which ironically are at odds with the morays inherent to their identity

Mau-mau, verb: to stubbornly and meticulously badger someone into supporting a cause; to petition while using one’s minority identity in such a way that a member of a majority is left without rebuttal

Flak Catcher, noun: poorly paid and hardly respected public officials who are often used as human shields to protect their bosses from mau-mauing (see definition)

Beginning Tom Wolfe’s collection of two essays Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, I admit I knew very little. Who or what was the radical chic? What was mau-mauing? Why were flak catchers on catching end? A child born long after the '60s, I had little beyond a layperson’s knowledge of Wolfe’s other eccentrically long titles—something involving Kool-Aid, acid, and some sort of test.

Upon concluding the book, I’m happy to admit that I now know infinitely more, not only about the kooky title, but also about race relations in the 1960s, the Black Panther movement, and the infamous evening that brought the hypocrisy of the highest New York socialites to the nation’s attention. With a constantly tongue-in-cheek tone, Wolfe walks the reader through the dinner party hosted by Leonard and Felicia Bernstein in 1970 in his essay “Radical Chic” and through the methods employed by minority groups to petition the local government of San Francisco in “Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers.” On both coasts and with two different populations, Wolfe holds up a mirror to the duplicity, irony, and hilarity of race relations.

I couldn’t help laughing as Wolfe aptly described the wonderfully humorous scenarios: Roquefort cheese balls served to dinner guests in black leather, rich Jewish party-goers writing checks for an anti-Semitic organization, minority leaders protesting against a white government for their failure to follow through, then failing to follow through with their own protests. Wolfe’s style is disarming and feels truthful, as if he’s the only person who sees each situation for what it actually is, and the actions, desires, and blind spots he reveals in people of every ethnicity serve to both humble and unite them.

Both essays were highly enjoyable, and as someone far removed from the 1960s, New York, and San Francisco, I can only imagine they would be even more interesting to someone with firsthand knowledge of those locales during this time period. Although the book was essentially about how people tried to deal with difference, I turned the last page feeling more akin to each person’s fumbling portrayal regardless of race. The best part of Wolfe’s writing is the recognition that he himself is part radical chic, part mau-mauer, and part flak-catcher. We all are, to varying degrees, and as long as there is a satirist to expose our foibles and peccadilloes, we should keep hosting parties to provide hilarity for the audiences of the following decades.

Written by: Melissa Ablett, October 12th 2009

Enterprising Women in Urban Zimbabwe: Gender, Microbusiness, and Globalization

admin — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 08:52:00 +0000

By Mary Johnson Osirim

Indiana University Press

In the early 1990s, Mary Osirim took a team of interviewers to several urban areas in Zimbabwe to learn about the lives and financial status of women working in the “microenterprise sector.” She found that while women were largely excluded from education and much of the Zimbabwean economy, some had found a niche as crocheters, seamstresses, hairdressers, and “market traders” in fruits and vegetables and other goods.

There is plenty of sociological theory—the author is, after all, an eminent sociologist—much of it concerning the damage wrought by globalization generally and more specifically by the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the Economic Structural Adjustment Program of 1991, which seem here to overshadow colonialism and even patriarchy as root causes of poverty and oppression. And there are a lot of statistics: “Seventy-nine percent of the traders reported that they made all decisions about the use of profits from their enterprises”—which are suggestive, if taken from small sample sizes.

The essence of Enterprising Women in Urban Zimbabwe is in the voices of the women themselves. These women are trying to survive in jobs that have them vending in outdoors stalls in all weather and economic vagaries—many of them providing for families and extended families. The interviewers ask questions like “Why did you start this business?” and “Who makes the decisions in your family?” and “Does your husband assist with domestic duties?” The answers, although too often painfully synoptic, provide a mixed picture of these women’s experiences. Many of them are living on dreams deferred, still hoping that a career as nurse or air hostess is not entirely out of reach.

One crocheter reports, “I’m happy because [my husband] does not hit me. I live nicely. He gives me money.” One of the recurrent themes embedded here is the struggle for autonomy as made manifest in the women’s earnings: “Husband makes decisions about money and bills.” In some of the accounts, one can hear echoes of the novels of Buchi Emecheta, although her work captures a different time and place.

Time and place present a problem in this study. First, the interviews are fifteen years old, and so are most of the bibliographic references. In the Zimbabwe of the early 1990s, many apparently held out hope that Robert Mugabe would acknowledge the role women played in gaining Zimbabwean independence by creating meaningful reforms allowing women greater access to education and the workplace. Locating the study specifically in Zimbabwe is also somewhat problematic in that the workers are “cross-border traders" coming from, traveling to, and trading with nations throughout the region. In the strictest sense, their lives and experiences are not exclusively Zimbabwean.

Still, Enterprising Women in Urban Zimbabwe is a valuable report on the status of a worldwide phenomenon; the term “enterprising women” is more a generic label than a specific title: the transformative possibility of women’s entrepreneurial work throughout the world. At least in terms of this report, the experience of women in “microbusiness” has mitigated poverty for some, brought some measure of financial independence for some, and has changed the lives of a few. Overall, though, it does not, at least in Zimbabwe, seem to have had large-scale transforming effects in either the status of women or in the patriarchal traditions or the laws that still oppress them.

Written by: Rick Taylor, October 2nd 2009

The Cult of Celebrity: What Our Fascination with the Stars Reveals About Us

admin — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 23:56:00 +0000

By Cooper Lawrence

skirt!

I must admit that I have a minor addiction to so-called celebrity news. I’ll read People magazine at the gym and admit to having a fascination with hearing more about my favorite stars. This addiction is explained in The Cult of Celebrity.

The book breaks down our addiction by first equating it to worship. Celebrities are, to some extent, deified. They are put on a pedestal, separate and special from the rest of us. They can get away with all sorts of things that us ordinary mortals cannot. Part of the draw, as Lawrence explains, is the charisma that most celebrities have in spades.

We are inundated with celebrity culture in today’s world, and as Lawrence says, “The number of people we know in the ‘artificial world’—actors, singers, sportspeople, TV hosts—is much larger than the number of people we know in the real world.” We’re drawn to know more about celebrities because of a kind of personal connection we may feel with them; the relationship we have with a celebrity (all one-sided) is easier than many of our real life relationships. Yet, our connection to a celebrity can bring us closer to those around us. When in doubt, you can often gossip about the latest celebrity info with an acquaintance and find common ground.

Not only do we love celebrities, but many of the teens and twenty-year-olds today want to be celebrities. Our culture has emphasized the importance of fame, and many people are desperate for it. We think it is a quick fix to our lives, and that when we’re discovered, all our dreams will come true. Why else would shows like American Idol and America’s Got Talent be so popular?

Thankfully, Lawrence addresses the issue of young girls and celebrity. Films, TV shows, music, magazines, advertisements, and books are everywhere that cater to the young consumers desire to be famous and beautiful. Much of this emphasizes the purely superficial as the most important. The book has tips and hints for parents to provide positive parenting for children, including how to become the role model for your children.

The complicated cult of celebrity examined by Lawrence also encompasses celebrity endorsements and celebrities doing good. More people know about the crisis in Darfur thanks to celebrities like George Clooney; whether this is a good or bad thing is another issue. Not simply revealing her opinions on celebrity, Lawrence uses psychologists, philosophers, academics and researchers to support the points she makes.

Written by: Kristin Conard, August 30th 2009