Category: Sociology of Culture

Gender & Sexuality / Race & Ethnicity Studies / Sociology of Culture / Sociology of Law, Crime and Deviance

Heavy Metal Music and Sociological Imagination

As a kid I loved heavy metal.  The overly bright, distorted anthem-like electric guitar solo.  The accompanying rhythmic pulse was reminiscent of a battle snare drum, a hallucination of a military march.  The drum roll and the introduction of the power chord, a series of musical intervals of a perfect fourth repeated over and over again.  When the vocalist entered the picture, singing at the lower end of his range and producing clear tones that were such a deep contrast...

Political & Economic Sociology / Sociology of Culture

The (Broken) Economics of Professional Sports Stadiums

The wide world of sports has had a bad week for public relations. First, the Miami Dolphins hazing fiasco occurred, which was analyzed by my colleague Cliff Leak in “Man up: NFL Hazing and Jonathan Martin’s ‘Man Card’.” Next, the Atlanta Braves announced they would be vacating Turner Field, their stadium of 17 years, to move into a new stadium in 2017. The Braves are leaving downtown Atlanta to move North to the suburbs in Cobb County. The Atlanta Braves...

Gender & Sexuality / Sociology of Culture

Man Up: NFL Hazing and Jonathan Martin’s “Man Card”

On October 28th, Miami Dolphins offensive lineman Jonathan Martin left the National Football League citing emotional distress as a result of abuse at the hands of his teammate Richie Incognito.  Incognito admits to having sent Martin racist, homophobic, and threatening text messages and voicemails but argues that rather than hazing or bullying, this was merely an instance of miscommunication between the two men.  While a great deal of media attention has questioned the behavior of Richie Incognito, a disproportionate amount...

Sociology of Culture

Fear: What is it good for?

November is here, which means the season of ghosts and goblins has come to pass. As an enthusiast of all-things-haunted, I filled the month of October with scary movie nights, Halloween costume parties, visits to a haunted house and Phantom Fright Nights at my local amusement park, and even an outing that involved shooting paintballs at zombies. As any good graduate student in the social sciences might do, I pondered the sociological aspects of these activities throughout the month. What...

Gender & Sexuality / Social Movements / Social Change / Sociology of Culture

Art, Identification, and Labels: Understandings of “Feminist Art” Among Female Artists

  Full Disclosure:  I am a feminist.  It never crossed my mind that there might be anything problematic about labeling myself this way since I have openly articulated my interests in gender issues and social, political, and economic equality since my early undergraduate days.  Of course, I knew that researchers had shown women today often reject the term “feminist” (McRobbie 2004; Rowe-Finkbeiner 2004; Levy 2006). However, I somehow had convinced myself that these individuals were just not informed.  I truly...

Gender & Sexuality / Sociology of Culture / Sociology of Media & Communication

Autocompletes of Sexism and Inequality

Yesterday, I read a disturbing article in Adweek. “Powerful Ads Use Real Google Searches to Show the Scope of Sexism Worldwide Simple: Visual For Inequality” by David Griner explores a new campaign idea from UN Women, which used real suggested search terms from Google’s autocomplete feature. The ads, which were designed by art director and graphic designer Christopher Hunt, were designed to illustrate how gender inequality continues to be so problematic that even Google has come to expect it. Being...

Gender & Sexuality / Sociology of Culture / Sociology of Media & Communication

Masculinity and Disney’s Gender Problem

Disney has a gender problem. A long line of feminist scholars and activists has used Disney princesses as examples of exactly what is wrong with the representation of women in mainstream media.  The classical Disney princesses (Cinderella, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Ariel, Jasmine, etc.) have been lambasted for having story lines in which they are helpless damsels in distress whose lives revolve around male characters.  Even the more modern princesses such as Tiana from Princess and the Frog and Rapunzel...

Political & Economic Sociology / Sociology of Culture / Sociology of Media & Communication

The Commodification of the American Farmer

The American farmer is becoming a central figure in the advertisement world and two recent commercials standout for using the image and ethos of the small, hardworking farmer to sell their products.  During Super Bowl XLVII, Dodge Truck made a commercial called “god made a farmer.” The commercial shows a series of still shots of American farmers working hard and the narrative describes the hardships associated with an honest day work on the farm. The commercial focuses on the small...

Gender & Sexuality / Sociology of Culture

Masculinity Breaking Bad: Walter White and the Fallouts from Complicit Masculinity

  [Warning: Spoilers for the series finale of Breaking Bad ahead] AMC’s award-winning and groundbreaking drama Breaking Bad is, although complemented by a number of highly intriguing and well-played characters, primarily the story of its lead protagonist Walter White, a disillusioned high school chemistry teacher diagnosed with terminal cancer, who turns to cooking crystal meth in order to provide for his family’s financial security after he will have passed away. Thus, Breaking Bad is a reflection on the destructive potential...

Sociology of Culture

Undertones of Recursivity: My Quest for Empirical Studies That Move Beyond Hybridity

For a long time I have been interested in how cultural products, ideologies, commodities, norms, values, and beliefs travel within an interconnected global society.  I struggled with questions such as, “What happens when cultural product move from one global locality to another?” and “What happens to the cultural ideologies embedded within these products as they travel?” I found that previous scholarship often presented the movement of cultural products and ideologies as a linear process.  Hybridity and ‘glocalization’ models, such as...

Race & Ethnicity Studies / Sociology of Culture / Sociology of Media & Communication

Connecting the Dots: The Politics of Race in Big Time Football's 2013 Offseason

Football season is upon us, and there are plenty of reasons why this moment in big time football is very intriguing from a sociological perspective. More specifically, most of the major offseason storylines of both professional and collegiate football tell us much about the racial politics in big time football and the negotiations of race and sports in the media. Update: Johnny Manziel makes the cover of Time Magazine.

Gender & Sexuality / Sociology of Culture / Sociology of Media & Communication

For the Love of the Game: Collective Memory and the Fight for Gender Equality in Sports

On September 20th, 1973 recent Wimbledon winner, 29-year-old Billie Jean King took on a 55-year-old former tennis champ, Bobby Riggs, in an exposition match dubbed “The Battle of the Sexes.” King dominated the court, winning straight sets (6-4, 6-3, 6-3) and marking a historically significant moment for female athletes, second wave feminists, and women’s history in general. ESPN’s recent exposé, suggesting the match was rigged has resulted in passionate responses from journalists, sports commentators, feminist scholars, and tennis fans across...

Race & Ethnicity Studies / Sociology of Culture / Sociology of Media & Communication

"Where's my place in a music that's been taken by my race?": Macklemore and Authentic White Hip-Hop

In his 2005 song “White Privilege,” white hip-hop artist Macklemore asked, “Where’s my place in a music that’s been taken by my race?”.  In the same song he acknowledges that “white rappers’ albums really get the most spins” and that “hip-hop started off on a block [he’s] never been to, to counteract a struggle that [he’s] never been through.”  This seemingly self-aware critique of his own whiteness in the context of hip-hop dropped 7 years before Macklemore’s meteoric rise to...

Gender & Sexuality / Sociology of Culture

Does your life pass the Bechdel Test?

The Bechdel test is a simple but effective way of assessing the feminist qualities of a film, and how women are represented. The test was introduced by Alison Bechdel in 1985, in a comic strip called ‘The Rule’. The test asks three simple questions of a film: 1) Are there more than two (named) female characters in the film? 2) Do they interact with each other? 3) If they do, do they talk about something other than a man? If...

Sociology of Culture / Sociology of Media & Communication

American Public Libraries: A Forgotten Social Institution?

Last week, NPR ran a series on American public libraries.  The series immediately filled me with a sentimental wave of nostalgia.  One of my earliest memories is packing up my teddy bear and a sack lunch and driving to the Lincoln Township Public Library for their annual Teddy Bear Picnic.  I also remember taking a writing workshop at the library in second or third grade, which lead to my first publication, “Friends of the Sea.”  As an undergraduate, I spent...

Social Movements / Social Change / Sociology of Culture

Does the Web call time on our traditional ethical arrangements?

  Ethnography is a “particular method or sets of methods” which in its “characteristic form it involves the ethnographer participating, overtly or covertly, in people’s lives for an extended period of time; watching what happens, listening to what is said, asking questions — in fact, collecting whatever data are available to throw light on the issues that are the focus of the research” (Hammersley and Atkinson, 1983: 1). Ethnography therefore allows insight into the knowledge and meanings behind the composition...