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.

Doing Gender with Wallets and Purses

Cross-posted at Sociological Images

I once heard a transgender woman give a talk about the process of socially transitioning to being recognized as a woman. She discussed various decisions she made in taking some final critical steps toward the social identity of woman.  She talked at length about her hair. She asked, “What kind of woman am I and how is my haircut going to indicate that?”  She talked about being preoccupied with her hair for a long time as she attempted to figure out a cut and style that “felt right.” But what struck me the most was her discussion of carrying a purse.  She said that getting used to carrying a purse everywhere was one of the more challenging elements of the transition.  If asked what I thought would be a significant everyday challenge if I were a woman, I don’t think purse would have been high on my list.  But, it was high on hers.  She discussed remembering to bring it, how to carry it, norms surrounding purse protection in public, but also more intimate details like: what belongs in a purse?

Purses and wallets are gendered spaces.  There’s nothing inherent in men’s and women’s constitutions that naturally recommends carrying money and belongings in different containers.  Like the use of urinals in men’s restrooms, wallets and purses are a way of producing understandings of gender difference rather than as a natural consequence of differences.

I got the idea for this post after reading Christena Nippert-Eng’s book, Islands of Privacy—a sociological study of privacy in everyday life.  One chapter deals specifically with wallets and purses.  In it, Nippert-Eng discusses one way she interviewed her participants about privacy.  She used participants’ wallets and purses as a means of getting them to think more critically about privacy.  Participants were asked to empty the contents of their wallets and purses and to form two piles with the contents: “more private” and “more public.”  As they sifted through the contents of their wallets and purses, they talked about why they carried what they carried as well as how and why they thought about it as public or private.

After collecting responses, she documented all of the contents and created categories and distinctions between objects based on how people thought about them as public or private.  One question that was clearly related to privacy was whether the objects were personally meaningful to the participant.  Invariably, objects defined as more personally meaningful were also considered more private.  Another question that routinely arose as participants made sense of the objects they carry around everyday was how damaging it might be for participants if a specific object was taken.  Based on this findings, she creates a useful table delineating participants concerns surrounding and understandings of the objects they carry with them (see left).

On Queering Parenting and Gender-Neutrality

by: D’Lane Compton and Tristan Bridges

–Cross-posted at Social (In)Queery and Your Queer Prof

 

Becoming a parent is fascinating, but becoming a parent who studies gender and sexuality, and—for one of us—identifies as queer… well let’s just say that creates a whole different level of awareness and curiosity. Prior to becoming parents, we both had a fine-tuned appreciation of the ways that gender and sexuality structure our experiences and opportunities. Anne Fausto-Sterling draws a great metaphor comparing the onset of gender binaries to the process of water erosion. At first, the erosion (read: gender) may not be visible. Small watery tributaries begin to form—the arms of future rivers that could, at this stage, easily change route. Gradually, streams emerge, slowly becoming rivers. And before long, you end up with something like the Grand Canyon. Yet, looking at the Grand Canyon disguises all of the crises that the fledgling streams navigated—a watery path whose flow, course, and geography were yet to be determined. Gender, said Fausto-Sterling, is no different. It takes time to learn to think of it as permanent and predetermined when it is actually anything but.

Just to put this in context, let us provide an example illustrating this issue as well as the sociological imagination of children at work. It involves a trip to the grocery store, a bold 3-year-old girl and her mother. At the checkout line, the girl trotted up to Tristan’s cart with her mother, pointed at Tristan’s son, and asked her mother, “Is that little baby a boy or a baby girl?” The mother looked at Tristan. He smiled, revealing nothing. “That’s… um… a boy, honey,” the mother responded, with a questioning tone (guarding, I’m assuming for the possibility of having mistaken a him for a her). “Why?” the little girl asked. Rolling her eyes at Tristan, the mother looked down and gave that classic parenting response—“Because!” she said. “Will he always be a boy?” she continued. The mother awkwardly chuckled, shrugging her shoulders, grinning and shaking her head at Tristan. “Yes, honey,” she laughed, “He’ll always be a boy.” And with that, they moved on.

The questions seemed odd to the mother, but the little girl clearly wasn’t joking. And she learned something significant in the interaction, even if her mother wasn’t actively teaching a lesson. In fact, some of the most important lessons we teach children are probably not on purpose—showing them what’s worthy of attention, what to ignore, what should be noticed but not discussed, and more. This little girl learned one of the ways that we think about gender in this culture—as a permanent state of being. To think otherwise, she learned, is laughable. This little girl seemed to understand gender as a young stream capable of becoming many different rivers. Her mother seemed equally sure that the stream had a predetermined path. And here’s where things get tricky—they’re both right. It’s likely Tristan’s son will identify as a boy (and later on, as a man). Most boys do. But treating this process as inevitable disguises the fact that… well… it’s not. This question came out of a 3-year-old because she’s actually in the process of acquiring what psychologists refer to as “gender constancy”—an understanding of gender as a permanent state of being. She’s not there yet, but interactions like the one discussed above are fast helping her along. These beliefs are institutionalized throughout our culture in ways that don’t make interactions like these completely predetermined, but make them much more likely.

Why More Lesbians (Might) Live in Rural Communities than Gay Men

I recently posted on the fact that a larger proportion of gay people live in larger cities than “the country” in the U.S. (here). The post prompted a wonderful discussion about some additional issues that deserve more attention.  One is that the forces that may have called gay men and women to the city over the course of the 20th century might be subsiding.  For instance, Amin Ghaziani addresses the alleged demise of the “Gayborhood” as gay urban enclaves have recently started to be seen as less desirable places to live for more gay men and lesbians (this is an issue I discuss in more depth here).  Another issue that I briefly addressed in that initial post is whether “the city” has the same draw for (or effect on) gay men and lesbians alike, and/or whether different issues structure the geographic living considerations of gay men and lesbians in different ways.  It is this latter issue that I’ll discuss here.

In the initial post, I was prompted by a recent Gallup report presenting the relative prevalence of the LGBT population by state (a measurement that I felt concealed some important issues).  The finding that LGBT individuals are not evenly distributed throughout the U.S. is probably not that surprising.  But the “where,” “how” and “why” are wonderfully rich questions as sociologists are interested in how people make choices within systems of structured constraint.  When individuals and groups all start making the same or really similar decisions, sociologists get interested in the kinds of social and cultural forces at work helping them come to—or providing a framework for—those decisions.

At the conclusion of the initial post I addressed the two hypotheses proposed to account for the larger proportions of LGB-identifying individuals in cities.  One theory is that they move there (the “migration hypothesis”)–they migrate to spaces where more people who identify in similar ways might congregate. The other explanation is that living in the city plays a critical role in structuring sexual identity—that cities might either invite or allow people to identify as gay more readily (the “elicitation/opportunity hypothesis”).  Both hypotheses are likely at work, but the latter—the elicitation/opportunity hypothesis—had much more explanatory power for men than for women.  Simply put, cities—they suggested—play a larger role in inviting/allowing men to identify as gay than they do for women.  But what about the gay men and lesbians who elect to live in rural areas.  Does a migration or elicitation/opportunity perspective make sense of their experiences?  And if so, what might that mean?

The U.S. Gender Gap in Bicycle Traffic

I’ve written on traffic as a gendered space before (here).  Women, as it turns out, make up the vast majority of congestion among automobiles on the road.  And, as I wrote, there are really two ways of looking at this issue: (1) women are either causing more traffic (a popular view until it was challenged by feminist traffic scholars); or that (2) women are enduring more traffic.  The latter of the two is the one that has received empirical support.  For a variety of reasons that stem from inequitable divisions of household labor, care work, and more, women are more likely than men to be driving someone else somewhere they need to go, chaining trips together to complete multiple tasks in a single “trip,” and on top of this, they’re also more likely to leave just a bit later than men, hitting peak hours of bad traffic.

But, driving isn’t the only form of traffic, and it’s not the only gendered traffic space.  Many people in cities bike, and biking, as it turns out, is gendered too.  Most estimates suggest that men are about three times as likely as women to be biking in the U.S. (see also: here).  This is significant, because men don’t bike more than women everywhere in the world.  But they do in the United States.  In some European countries (like Germany, the Netherlands, and Demark), biking is undertaken much more evenly between men and women.  The U.S. Department of Transportation found that only about 24% of biking trips were made by women in 2009.  So, not only are more men biking, but they’re biking—on average—more often than the women who bike too.  There are a few explanations for this that have to do with gender and space.

One contributing factor may be that bike stores are “masculine” spaces (here).  Though the conclusions from Genevieve Walker’s analysis of bike stores are a bit offensive (e.g., if we want more women to bike, bike stores need: “really good information,” “good clothing options,” and “a hot guy standing behind the counter”), the notion the bike stores are “masculine” is interesting.  It reminds me of Carey Sargent’s analysis of how musical instrument stores are culturally gendered in ways that reproduce our cultural understanding of “rock musician” as masculine.  She explicitly draws the comparison to bike shops, among other kinds of stores that cater to specific consumer “lifestyle choices.” 

Can Living in the City Make you Gay?

–Cross-posted as Social (In)Queery

Gallup recently published results from a new question garnering a nationally representative sample of more than 120,000 Americans: “Do you, personally, identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender?”  The results come out of interviews conducted in 2012 and confirm recent estimates by demographer Gary Gates on the size of the LGBT population in the U.S.  Combining data from a range of surveys, Gates suggested that approximately 3.5% of the adult population in the U.S. identifies as lesbian, gay, or bisexual, and an additional 0.3% identifies as transgendered.  The Gallup poll also found that around 3.5% of the U.S. adult population says “yes” when asked whether they “identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender.”

These findings are interesting and important for a number of reasons.  One issue that they bring up is simply the issue of actually measuring sexuality.*  It’s harder than you might assume.  For instance, Gallup asks how people identify themselves.  Questions about sexual identification produce some of the lowest percentage of LGBT responses on surveys.  Asking questions about  sexual desires and behaviors produces higher percentages.  Questions about same-sex attraction have found that as much as 11% of the U.S. population can be classified as LGB.  Similarly, questions concerning same-sex behaviors have produced numbers as high as 8.8% of the U.S. population.  This doesn’t mean that the Gallup findings are unimportant; it means that we need to recognize that sexuality is more dynamic that we might initially assume.

Subsequently, Gallup released a report documenting the relative prevalence of LGBT individuals throughout the U.S.  Simply put, LGBT individuals are not uniformly distributed throughout the country.  Some places have relatively high numbers, while other have lower numbers.  Gallup chose to break this down by state.  The state with the highest proportion is not actually a state at all; it’s a federal district—the District of Columbia (10%).  The state with the lowest proportion of “yes’s” to the question was North Dakota (1.7%).

Toward a Sociology of “Grindr”

–Cross-posted on Social (In)Queery

Apps like Grindr have really changed the ways gay men can interact in public.  I’ve heard Grindr described in different ways, but it—and apps like it—are often talked about as “gay GPS.”  They’ll tell you, based on your current location, who in your vicinity is also on the App.  As with Myspace, Facebook and other social networking sites, Grindr became popular among a diverse group of gay, bi, and curious men, prompting some groups to remain, while others migrate to different digital spaces.  The most recent I saw marketed is Distinc.tt which is clearly being marketed as a space for those looking for a gay digital space devoid of what are framed at Distinc.tt as the less savory elements of Grindr culture.

As they put it, Distinc.tt is “prettier and less sketchy.”  Organizing themselves around more than just Grindr’s “who, specifically around me is gay” approach, Distinc.tt also tells users about where local “hot spots” are (locations with a critical mass of Distinc.tt users).  So, while Grindr’s ploy has been to market the sheer volume of users it has, Distinc.tt is framed in a way that suggests fewer users–a smaller, elite collection of the “right” kind of gay men.

How these apps are marketed (i.e., who they’re “intended to be used by,” who they’re hoping to dissuade from use, and precisely what the app states as it’s intended use) illustrates racialized, classed, and gender-presentational tensions and dynamics at work in organizing gay men’s public erotic lives.  Distinc.tt (left) doesn’t state this explicitly, but it seems intended to be used by a more economically and culturally elite group of (primarily) white, young, gay men.  Conversely, Grindr (right) is presented as more of a free-for-all of younger gay men of all different races and classes.

Adam Isaiah Green’s theorization of sexual fields and erotic capital is a great analytical tool to discuss these social spaces that occupy that fuzzy terrain between the digital and physical.  “Sexual fields” refer to spaces within which a specific set of “erotic capital” are understood to have purchase.  Green defines erotic capital in this way: “the quality and quantity of attributes that an individual possesses, which elicit an erotic response in another” (here: 29).  So, a constellation of physical, emotional, sensual, and aesthetic elements of identity are at play in this definition.  Yet, like Bourdieu’s conceptualization of cultural capital—and similar to my theorization of gender capital—how much erotic capital one has depends on the field one occupies.  Green conceptualizes sexual fields—within Bourdieu’s theoretical framing of “fields”—as “semiautonomous arenas” (here: 26).  By this he is arguing that they are the social spaces defined by the erotic capital understood to have purchase.

What’s in a name?—The Controversy Over “Manholes”

Occupational gender segregation matters and can be attributed to a number of factors.  But, a significant factor is cultural.  Jobs are gendered.  Often not in any necessarily straight-forward way, but jobs acquire gendered attributes and meanings.  In fact, occupational gender segregation probably plays a key role in producing our understandings of what is “masculine” or “feminine” in the first place.  As Joan Acker famously argued, the “abstract worker” is imagined to be a man (here).  This idea is perpetuated in a variety of ways—through formal and informal workplace policies, through curricular gender segregation as areas of study acquire “gendered” meaning, through the ways we frame the work itself as demanding a “masculine” or “feminine” strengths and/or sensibilities, and often, through things as simple as job titles.

The feminist movement fought long and hard to have firemen referred to as firefighters, policemen as police officers, etc.  The lack of gender-neutral language was a subtle, but symbolic, way through which women were culturally excluded from certain occupations (even in cases where no laws or formal policies necessarily precluded women’s entry).  This is a shift that is–to put it mildly–incomplete.  For instance, many high schools, colleges and universities still refer to incoming cohorts of students as “freshmen,” while others have opted for the more gender-neutral language of “first-years” (though not without the occasional backlash).

Language is important.  It’s a small part of a larger system of power and inequality that helps to organize our lives.  Legal feminist scholars have asked that we rid ourselves of language in laws that reflect gender bias.  I know what you’re thinking, but it’s more complicated that clicking Command+F and either replacing “men” with “people” or “men and women” and adding “/she” to the “he’s” or replacing them with “them/their” instead.  The tricky part has been when we literally lack gender-neutral language for something.  As one journalist put it, “Some gender-specific words just aren’t that easy to replace” (here).  While firefighter, police officer, and first-year might have been interpreted as easy changes, more difficulty surrounded words and positions like: ombudsman, penmanship, servicemen.

And this brings us to the “manhole.”

“Dear Abby”–A Space for Political Protest?

Pauline Philips, the original “Dear Abby” columnist, recently died.  She wrote under the pen name Abigail Van Buren and captivated her readership.  Her column has been a mainstay in newspapers ever since it first appeared in The San Francisco Chronicle in 1956.  Today, “Dear Abby” is written by Phillips’ daughter and remains the most widely syndicated column on the face of the earth.

“Dear Abby” offers a space to complain, to seek advice or counsel, and to discuss something you might not voice in the company of someone other than Abby.  “Dear Abby” offered an anonymous space for people to share their fears, dreads, ideas, dilemmas, and more, ostensibly testing them out on Abby before committing to a solution.

While “Dear Abby” is likely read by many with a similar level of interest to reading the comics, the column was and is a political platform of sorts.  “Dear Abby” often supported gender equality, challenged men for writing in with patriarchal demands of their wives or daughters, and subtly (and sometimes not-so-subtly) teased those whose dilemmas she thought had less to do with the dilemma and more to do with an understanding of the world rooted in systems of power and inequality.

Mary McIntosh–Toward a Sociology of Sexuality

Mary McIntosh recently passed, and it allowed me to reflect on the significance of her work.  Her work is part of a small body of scholarship that quite literally created a sociology of sexuality.  It’s hard for scholars of my generation to fully appreciate the power of Mary McIntosh’s (1968) opening sentence in the abstract of her article, “The Homosexual Role.”

The current conceptualization of homosexuality as a condition is a false one, resulting from ethnocentric bias. (McIntosh 1968: 182)

Like many of the early attempts by both gender and sexuality scholars recognizing problems with a structural-functionalist approach, McIntosh operates inside of functionalist theory.  McIntosh wrote this essay during a time in which if homosexuality was taught at all in sociology courses, it appeared in courses on deviance.  McIntosh’s work was a small—but pivotal—example of the kinds of work that have helped to question it’s categorization as “deviant” in the first place.  Today, students are just as likely to deal with questions of same-sex desire and identity in sociology of families, courses on race and ethnicity, gender, identity, and inequalities more generally.  Sexuality is a topic that appears in introductory textbooks as well.