Sean Payton and the Masculinization of Football

In case you’ve been on the moon recently and missed it, football is a gendered space.  While girls and boys, women and men continue to play sports on different teams, at different times, on different courts and fields, and often with subtly different equipment or rules, it’s also true that by and large, they’re playing many of the same sports.  There are only a few sports that have remained the province of men.  Olympic ski jumping is probably my favorite example.  In a classically awful way, it turns out that a woman (Lindsey Van) holds the world record in ski jumping but cannot compete in the Olympic event because it is sex segregated and there is no women’s event.  Football is one such space as well.  Women don’t play.  They don’t play as girls and they can’t play professionally as women.

[SIDE NOTE: It is true that there is a Lingerie Football League that started in 2009 (and yes… it’s exactly as awful as it sounds).  Women play full contact indoor football in the same arenas where men’s professional sports are played.  The game is unsafe and there are a great deal of injuries as a result.  The women wear less padding, but are extreme athletes and go “all out” in front of screaming audiences of men.]

The most recent issue in the NFL is the suspension of the New Orleans Saints’ coach, Sean Payton for what’s being considered unsportsmanlike conduct off the field. 

On Goffman the Gender Scholar

When sociologists discuss performance theories of gender, we usually go back to Candace West and Don Zimmerman’s (1987) famous article “Doing Gender.”  Some of us date this trend to Judith Butler, but few people bother to discuss some of the scholarship that predates this.  West and Zimmerman relied almost exclusively on Harold Garfinkel’s* analysis of Agnes (a transgendered women who he met with as a part of a UCLA study dealing with “deviant” gender identities) to support their conceptualization.

Beyond the use of data, West and Zimmerman’s article was written in conversation with Erving Goffman’s theory of gender, or of “gender display” as Goffman wrote about it.  Goffman wrote two pieces exclusively about gender.  The first was originally published in Studies in the Anthropology of Visual Communication (1976) and later published as a book–Gender Advertisements (1979)–which included the essay along with a host of advertisements that Goffman codes for different elements of gender display (for a great exploration of this, see Greg Smith’s work here).  The second is his better known and cited article in Theory and Society: “The Arrangement between the Sexes” (1977).  He wrote elsewhere about gender as well, but these were his two pieces of writing that were really dedicated to theorizing about gender.  For instance, the Goffman quote that Michael Kimmel (1994) used to discuss Connell’s conceptualization of “hegemonic masculinity” actually comes from Stigma (1963).**

While we have come to celebrate “Doing Gender” as one of the first pieces to actually break with the biological determinism of sex role theory, along with some notable others (see here and here for two of my favorites), Goffman’s lack of status as a “feminist” makes him an unlikely person to be remembered among this list.  

Glitter-Bombing: Tactical Frivolity or a Frivolous Tactic?

— Cross-posted at Social (In)Queery

The first time I remember glitter being used as an educational tool, I was in elementary school.  All of the first through third graders were gathered in the auditorium.  At the front of the room, an adult shouted for everyone to be quiet.  She reached into a paper bag and pulled out a handful of gold glitter and asked for a volunteer.  My hand shot up immediately.  But she chose someone else.  Asked if we liked glitter, we all screamed “YES!” in unison, and then she said, “Well not today!”  I like to think that there was a dramatic pause here as we all gasped, but that may be how I like to remember the story.  She let the glitter sprinkle back into the bag, but her hand was still covered.  She asked the boy who volunteered to shake her hand and so he did.  Then she got all of us up and asked us to walk around the room shaking hands with people.  As you might expect, this got rowdy (as random handshaking parties are wont to do) and she stopped us all after five minutes or so.  “Raise your hand if it has glitter on it,” she said.  Almost all of us raised our hands.  Then we all sat down and she talked at length about germs and diseases and the importance of basic hygiene.  I think it was a lesson about health and hygiene generally, but I now like to think that it was sex education in disguise, and that the “handshake” was a metaphor.  Either way, I will say this: I sometimes think about the exercise when I wash my hands (and when I don’t).  If you’ve never had glitter all over you, take it from me, it doesn’t come off after the first wash.

The educational properties of glitter have been put to other uses more recently as well.  Glitter-bombing has become a phenomenon across the nation as a way of peacefully and playfully protesting political pundits and candidates that support a particular constellation of anti-gay agendas.  Glitter-bombing is  a new form of protest that’s been directed at virtually all of the GOP candidates for this presidential race.  The sentiment dates back to when the former-Miss-Oklahoma-turned-anti-gay-rights-activist, Anita Bryant, had a pie thrown in her face at a press conference.

Gender Segregation By Victorian Design

Homes have always illustrated a great deal about those who inhabit them.  And changes in architectural design reflect much more than simply new techniques and styles.  They also reflect changing relationships between groups of people.  Victorian architecture is famous for a number of things, but one of my favorites is the notion that rooms really ought to only have one purpose.*  One of my favorite ways that this is illustrated is by highlighting the lack of a bedside table in most bedrooms in the 1800s in England.  Reading (or anything else for that matter) was an activity that was best undertaken in a separate (and more appropriate) room of its own.

To accomplish this, larger houses had an extraordinary number of rooms.  Smaller houses were forced to shift furniture around depending on what was going on that particular day.  While one of the premises of modern architectural design involves breaking down walls and opening up space, the Victorians were much more concerned with erecting walls and closing spaces off.  There are all sorts of remnants of this time still present in homes today – though they are often put to separate use.  For instance, parlors are still present in many homes.  They’re typically small rooms near the front of the house where household guests would have congregated, and within which Victorian forms of courtship took place (see Bailey on courtship here).  But few of us use these spaces as they were originally intended.  They feel impractical by today’s standards.

Gendering Sex and Sexual Violence

I never teach my courses on gender and sexuality without this table:

The table comes from Ed Laumann and colleague’s book, The Social Organization of Sexuality (1994).  There’s a variety of fascinating information throughout the text which aims to explore one of the first nationally representative surveys dealing with sexual identities, behaviors, and more.  This table in particular comes from the portion of the text where they describe their findings relative to coercive sex.

When I show this table in classes, I ask the students to tell me what they see.  The first thing students typically mention is the relatively high proportion of men who state that they have never been forced to do something sexual (96.1%).  Others point out the lower proportion of women (77.4%) who say that they have never been sexually forced.  Someone usually says something about this coming close to the “1-in-4” estimate that has become so popular.