Never Gender a Book by its Cover

Book covers are gendered spaces.  Not only authors names (one reason I’ve always been fond of using first initials rather than first names), but the colors, designs, scripts, and more are deeply gendered symbols.  Author Maureen Johnson tweeted about getting a lot of comments from men saying that they’d love to read her books, but require a “non-girly cover” to do so.  Johnson’s book covers have some pretty characteristic “feminine” features, from the women depicted on them, to the script used for the titles, to the colors, and more (see below for a sample).

Johnson challenged her readers to craft masculine covers for books with feminine covers and feminine covers for books with masculine covers.  She called the project “Coverflip,” and it spawned quite a bit of support (check out the #coverflip hashtag for more on the story in Huffington Post here).  Johnson wrote about it in this way:

Imagine that book was written by an author of the OPPOSITE GENDER. Or a genderqueer author. Imagine all the things you think of when you think GIRL book or BOY book or GENDERLESS book (do they EXIST?). And I’m not saying that these categorizations are RIGHT—but make no mistake, they’re there… Now, as a mental exercise, imagine [the author is a different gender]. The book has the same exact topic. Does the cover look like this? (here)

The call produced a stream of submissions.  To the right and left are two of Johnson’s books flipped.

The fact is, we do judge books by their covers.  Cover art matters.  So too does the gender of the author, the author’s name, the title, and more.  Covers are one way publishers can communicate to potential readers “what kind of book” a particular book is and who the intended audience might be.  I like to imagine people coming across #coverflip and thinking, “Well I’d never read that book… Buuuuutttttt… I’d read it with that cover.”

The Geography of Love (and Hate)

The Human Rights Campaign (HRC) created an image of a pink equal sign on a red background to signify support for gay marriage as the Supreme Court began meeting to consider the future of same-sex marriage in the U.S. The image was promoted by HRC in a variety of ways, and if your friend group is anything like mine, you probably saw facebook go red around the end of March in 2013. The meme took on a variety fo different forms, but the HRC image was the foundation. Martha Stewart’s iteration was my personal favorite (the red velvet cake to the right).

Facebook noticed the trend too. But can we measure support for same-sex marriage with facebook profile pictures? Not exactly. Millions of U.S. facebookers change their profile picture on any given day. Heck, I have a few friends overly fond of selfies who change their profile pictures more than once a day. But, on Tuesday, March 26^th—one day after HRC started the campaign urging people to change their profile pictures—2.7 million more Americans changed their profile pictures than normal. This is about 120% more than normal. Facebook was able to show that there was a strong correlation between this increase and the specific time that HRC started asking facebook users to change their profile pictures. They also showed that facebook profile picture updates were more likely among younger Americans (under 40 years old).

This is consistent with demographic data on shifts in American opinions about same-sex marriage and sexual equality more generally. For instance, a recent report released by the Pew Center documented that about 50% of Americans favor the legalization of same-sex marriage. But this conceals generational discrepancies in support like the fact that 70% of individuals born after 1980 favor same-sex marriage compared with less than 40% of baby boomers.

Anti-Anorexia PSA Ads–The Fashion Industry and the Institutionalization of Feminine Beauty and Body Ideals

–An abbreviated version of this post is cross-posted at Sociological Images

A Brazilian modeling agency, Star Models*, recently released a new series of anti-anorexia PSA advertisements that illustrate one of the ways ultra-thin body ideals characterizing women’s bodies in the fashion industry today are institutionalized. Fashion sketches anesthetize these bodies, with their exaggerated proportions, long slender limbs, and expressionless faces. The placement of real women alongside them, graphically altered to similar proportions, works to produce an understanding of eating disorders, body dissatisfaction, and beauty and body ideals as products of the cultures and industries in which they emerge.

Sociology professors are constantly asking students to analyze what they might be taking for granted. One issue we take for granted is that the images on the left are what “fashion” looks like and ought to look like. That they are culturally recognizable as fashion sketches speaks to the ways in which hyper-thin feminine bodies are institutionalized at a fundamental level in the fashion industry today.

Writing Gender on the Walls–Women and Graffiti Art

“…it’s a perfect example of how a seemingly inconsequential—or half-destructive act—like writing on the wall can actually promote social change… [simply by] making their gender visible on the wall.” —Jessica Pabón

I love graffiti art.  And I’m not talking about the sexist and racist tags you see in men’s bathroom stalls.  I’m talking about the artwork decorating urban spaces that graffiti artists refer to as “pieces.”  Graffiti is an interesting art form because the artists are–as Richard Lachmann put it–“involved simultaneously in an art world and a deviant subculture” (here: 230).

When walking past a particularly involved piece, I often find myself wondering lots of things.  “Who took the time to paint this?”  “Was it free hand or did the artist have a plan before starting?”  “What does it say?”  Or when I can read the writing, “What does it mean?”  “When did the artist do this?–In the middle of the night?”  “How did they get away with it?”  These are fleeting thoughts, but I’m always struck by the reclamation of public space.  It’s such a powerful, public statement, claiming and labeling social space.  As Jessica Pabón puts it:

Graffiti is a form of writing and writing is fundamentally a form of communicating.  So these writers are reclaiming public space.  They’re asserting their presence.  They’re saying, “I was here!… and here, and here, and here.” (here)

Rather than considering it a deviant act aimed at defacing property, sociologists have found that graffiti artists are drawn by twin processes of appreciating its aesthetic appeal in addition to considering graffiti a practice through which they can make friends and form and solidify communities (here).

In Elijah Anderson‘s Code of the Street, he addresses the ways that boys and young men navigate public space and engage in performances of self that garner “respect”–a resource providing status and safety.  While the book is primarily about boys and men, masculinity is not a dominant topic of analysis for Anderson.  Yet, his analysis of “the street” treats it as a masculine space–a space in which masculine identities and reputations are formed, validated, “put on,” challenged, and “on the line.”  Graffiti might be understood as part of Anderson’s code.  Graffiti has a very “masculine” feel to it, and–like Anderson’s work–scholarship on graffiti often implicitly assumes that it’s boys and men writing, drawing, and painting on walls.  Why men are doing this, and what graffiti means is the subject of the majority of research attention.  Less attention is given to analyzing why (or possibly if) girls and women might engage in graffiti too.  Jessica Pabón (above) articulates some of the ways women have been able to accomplish this within the masculinized subcultural arena of graffiti art.