Goodnight Moon – The Story of a Lost Room

I’ve read Goodnight Moon to my son over 300 times now. So, I feel I can speak with renewed confidence when telling students about the benefits, joys, and new frustrations than come from re-reading a text.

Goodnight Moon is a simple enough story. My son isn’t yet old enough to begin to play the game that parents have recognized at least since Margaret Wise Brown wrote this book. The game is “delaying bedtime,” and it’s a classic! If the clocks depicted in the images are correct, the bunny in the story is able to successfully delay bedtime from 7:00 to about 8:10 (though the moon’s descent into the night sky provides a shorter time table). That’s not bad, particularly considering he’s being “hushed” by an “old lady” the whole time.

There are a number of oddities throughout the book that the repeat reader will find difficult to ignore. More thorough analyses of the text have explored these in greater detail. Beyond the depiction of a different colored set of curtains on the cover (red and green) than appear throughout the book (yellow and green), however, the room itself is a bit strange by modern standards. For starters, the room is enormous! If you consider the number of objects it holds, combined with the amount of space between them, the room must be gigantic. This is part of what makes this story magical.

Book Review–“Punished” and “Hidden Truth”

I just finished two books in anticipation of assigning one in my “Sociology of Men and Masculinities” course next semester: 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.  Both deal broadly with masculinity, youth, race, class, inequality in urban spaces, and criminalization and incarceration.  I talked about the books recently with a colleague who suggested that both offer a glimpse into what might have happened next in the lives of Ann Arnet Ferguson’s “bad boys.”

Ferguson’s book is so powerful because she manages to show how those who are there to help these young African-American boys in school (teachers, principals, school staff) often play an unintentional, but integral role in reproducing inequality.  Rios and Reich illustrate the ways in which it is not only schools that play this role in young, lower-class, and often non-white boys’ lives.  The spaces in which they work, play, live and learn are shaped by structures and discourses of “punishment” that constrain these boys’ likely futures, but simultaneously provide the seeds of enabling the critical thinking necessary to move beyond them.  Both authors show, in different ways, how young boys navigate hostile social spaces that might claim to be designed to help them stay off the “wrong path,” but also seem to systematically make finding a “right path” all the more challenging.

Daryl Vocat–Challenging the Boy Scouts through Art

My parents never signed me up for Scouts. So, I’m always an outsider when groups of men have the “How close to Eagle Scout were you?” conversation. The object of this status game (as far as I can tell) is to have been closer than your opponent, or – in the event of a tie – to have had a cooler, more daring, or more significant project to have achieved the rank. I remember thinking (or better said: I remember correctly realizing) that the outfits were ugly. But I did like the idea of collecting the badges. Even before I studied masculinity academically, I also remember thinking that tying knots and pitching tents were sort of odd things to decide that all “real boys” ought to know.

The Boy Scouts has always been a movement about masculinity. From its beginnings, The Boy Scouts of America was understood as necessary as economic transformations caused men to play smaller roles in the raising of their sons. As families moved from farms to cities, many worried that young men would never learn to embody the manliness forged in the daily toil of rural life. American boys–so we were told–needed traditions restored that were thought to be responsible for turning their fathers and grandfathers into the men they became. So, the Scouts stepped in at a historical moment in which men were stepping out of family life, creating “masculine” social spaces in which men could help turn boys into men.

There’s a nostalgia that surrounds the group that can’t be ignored. The Boys Scouts are an organization that we like to think can do no harm. Sure they segregate boys and girls, but there are Girl Scouts too. Sure they’ve systematically denied access to non-heterosexual boys and Scoutmasters, but those cases were brought to court. And most recently, sure they participated in a cover-up of that concealed instances of child abuse and molestation, but… Well, we’re still waiting to hear how this “but” gets worked out.

Scouting manuals are a source of tremendous cultural nostalgia as well (see Kathleen Denny‘s work on Girl and Boy Scout handbooks here). The Scouts and Scoutmasters were drawn in a very particular style. You know the style: we still use it for “how-to” instructions when we depict people in them. White, heterosexual-appearing, middle- middle-upper class boys and men were drawn as well-groomed, of medium weight and build, casually interacting in ways that illustrated focused attention on a common goal. It’s potentially the case that few boys experienced Boy Scouts as it was depicted in those manuals, but the power of those stuffy old anesthetized images is palpable.