Binders Full of Women?–Amazon Product Reviews as Political Protest

The Presidential debates this election year were—to put it mildly—theatrical.  This was the first year I followed the debates on social media platforms (Twitter, Tumblr, and Facebook), and much of what people seem to be searching for is something funny to latch onto to create the next great internet meme.  Early in the third debate, it was clear that Barack Obama’s comments about “horses and bayonets” was going to be an early winner (see here, here, here and here).  And in the first debate, Romney’s comments regarding equal pay for women included the poorly worded phrase, “I went to a number of women’s groups and said, ‘Can you help us find folks?’ and they brought us whole binders full of women.”  While his story about the event he was mentioning has been challenged, others rightly asked what saying “binders full of women” might have done to Romney’s chances of winning the election.  On social media, people were almost instantaneously outraged, and responses to Romney’s comment illustrate some of the new ways and spaces in which political protest takes place.

“Binders Full of Women” became an instant internet sensation, spawning its own Facebook community (now, with over 350,000 “likes”) in minutes.  Research is only beginning to discuss what this might mean and whether things like this actually matter.  For instance, a small but fast growing area of consumer research tracks Facebook fan counts against daily share stock prices.  There’s an enormous correlation, even on a day-by-day basis (see here for the research, and here for some commentary).  If Facebook can help us track changes in stock prices, what else can it tell us?

Political protest and civic engagement have always taken on new forms to respond to inequalities and injustice in new ways.  A recent form of protest utilizes the “customer review” function at Amazon.com.  If you look up the Avery Durable View Binder with 2 Inch EZ-Turn Ring on Amazon, you might notice something a bit odd.  The binder has been reviewed by over 1,000 Amazon shoppers.  This is a high number when you consider that the same binder with the 1.5-inch spine only has 17 reviews.

Material Feminists – Challenging the Shape of and Relations between Domestic Spaces

  Cross-posted at Femme-O-Nomics

Vernacular house forms are economic diagrams of the reproduction of the human race; they are also aesthetic essays on the meaning of life within a particular culture, its joys and rituals, its superstitions and stigmas.  House forms cannot be separated from their physical and social contexts. (Hayden 1984:  98)

The history of American home architectural design and the design of suburban space were never foregone conclusions.  From about 1870 through 1930, American home architecture was the topic of heated debate.  The homes that we live in today, their spatial arrangements, barriers, rituals, and traditions, and the shapes, uses, and meanings of our neighborhoods were fiercely debated topics.  And the debates that emerged out of the late 19^th century still structure our lives today.

What kind (of kinds) of home(s) Americans needed has always been a question without a simple answer—with many competing perspectives.  The designs of our home not only allocates our belongings throughout the house, it structures the ways in which we interact with one another and the communities in which we live.

Dolores Hayden suggests that building programs competed to define American homes.  Overly simplified, a “building program” is a statement concerning the spatial and architectural requirements of some built space, typically defining the type of building along with a list of the sorts of activities that the building is intended to shelter (sleeping, eating, cooking, playing, lounging, entertaining, etc.).  At a general level, building programs communicate the requirements (economic, technical, social) of a building, including an explanation of how the built space accommodates the activities it is intended to house.  But buildings do more than accommodate social interactions.  They also structure our interactions, preclude or present the possibility of interactional flexibility, and make symbolic boundaries physical.

Gendering Your Household by Smell

There’s a small body of work on the sociology of smell that deals with gender.  Scents, their cultural meaning, and our experiences of them are culturally mediated processes (here, here, and here).  What women and men ought to smell like is, in some ways, just another of the various ways in which we are all held accountable to recognizable performances of gender.  Controlling one’s own scent is a small part of this process.  And controlling the scent of your home–perhaps in different ways for different spaces within the home–is a piece of gendering our social environments as well.

Yankee Candle stores are always fun.  I generally find myself in one some time in winter or fall when I want my house to smell like I just baked something with apples in it or like a fir tree had an accident in my living room.  Like a great deal of stores dedicated to selling niche home décor, Yankee primarily caters to women.  Desiring your home to smell like “Fluffy Towels,” “Autumn Leaves,” a “Bahama Breeze,” or “Home Sweet Home” is something that many people likely classify as a “feminine” desire (regardless of the gender of the desirer in question).

Like a number of products catering primarily to women, Yankee has developed a “men’s line.”  I’ve always thought that gendering scents has been somewhat ridiculous–that the line between perfume and cologne was less clear than it’s often depicted.  Smells don’t have a gender, do they?

Incarceration Mapping–Toward a More Sociological Visualization of Crime and Criminal Behavior

I caught an interesting story on NPR on the way home from work yesterday about changes in the ways in which we’re looking at data with respect to recidivism rates—the rate at which individuals who have been to prison or jail re-offend and end up back in those same institutions.  For a long time, scholars looked at mapped crime rates for different areas, and different organizations and institutions used this information in different ways.  So, police may have used that data to bulk up the police presence in areas that showed high rates of crime (so-called “impact zones“), while others more concerned with social services and welfare could have discussed the presence or lack of resources in those areas.

More recently, however, scholars investigating this have begun to consider new ways of conceptualizing the relationship between crime and space.  The story on NPR discussed a new method of mapping that tells a different story.  Scholars refer to the new method as “incarceration mapping” as opposed to “crime mapping.”  Crime mapping uses GIS to map where crimes occur.  Incarceration mapping collects data on the prison and jail populations asking where they live (along with a host of other demographic variables).  With this collection of home addresses, scholars are able to identity the various rates of different neighborhoods and communities with respect to who is going to prison and jail.  And with this data, they’re able to estimate how much money state and federal governments are spending to incarcerate people in specific neighborhoods and communities (see the figure to the left for an example).

This concerns gender as the overwhelming majority of people in jail and prison is the U.S. are men—and non-white men are disproportionately represented as well (see here and here).*  I happened to have just finished two books that gave me some context to think about this—Victor Rios’ (2011), Punished: Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys and Adam Reich’s (2010), Hidden Truth: Young Men Navigating Lives In and Out of Juvenile Prison (I posted here on both).

What interested me about the story I heard was how, after policy-makers, legislators, city council members, and researchers got hold of this data, the ways in which they talked about crime and criminality shifted.  It shifted from a conversation about individuals to a conversation about space.  For instance, some of the research surrounds communities with high incarceration rates within and around New Haven, CT.  This way of visualizing crime played a role in changing how people understood criminal activity.  On the radio, they said it this way:

One of the things we noticed right away when legislators and others started to see this, is they talked about this issue differently. Instead of getting stuck in the “being soft, get tough” paradox, they started to talk about neighborhoods …