“The Man Aisle” – On the Masculinization of Grocery Shopping

 — Cross-posted at Femme-O-Nomics

Spatial segregation does a lot of things simultaneously. It physically separates groups while its very existence provides structural (spatial and even architectural) justification for continued separation. Bathrooms are the example that we often use in classrooms to talk about this issue. In Erving Goffman’s work on gender, he found it fascinating that we have designed toilets that make no sense for women to use–urinals. Now, there are plenty of other reasons for bathroom segregation that get brought up when you address that issue in particular, but it’s a great example of how we literally create the infrastructure that perpetuates our belief that men and women must be separated.

A grocery store on the Upper West Side of New York City recently opened a new aisle. It’s just for men, dubbed “the man aisle”–or, as the store prefers “The Man Isle.” The New York Post announced, “Get ready to stock up your man cave!” as the aisle challenges men to consume the right things. I’ve written before about how men were sold the historically feminized activity of consumption by challenging the masculinity of those who failed to consume (here).

Punishing Black Masculinities in School

Ann Arnet Ferguson’s (2001) book, Bad Boys: Public Schools in the Making of Black Masculinity, is a wonderful school ethnography. I regularly assign what is probably the most reproduced chapter in the book—“Naughty by Nature”—in courses I teach about gender. She deftly illustrates the ways that teachers, administrators, and public schools more generally participate in criminalizing young black boys and masculinities.

The book is probably best known for Ferguson’s conceptualization of what she refers to as “adultification.” “By this I mean their transgressions are made to take on a sinister, intentional, fully conscious tone that is stripped of any element of childish naïveté” (here: 83). Young black boys’ behavior is interpreted through discursive frames usually applied to adults and their bad behavior is understood to stand not only for what they are capable of, but of who they will become. Pascoe (here and here) finds something similar in her discussion of boys’ use of “fag” in school. Black boys were punished more heavily and immediately for using the term while white boys were often ignored.

Ferguson also, however, has a fantastic discussion of physical space in the school—the social sites of punishment. She highlights the significance of the spaces in which punishment occurs in wonderful ethnographic detail. The second chapter of the book—“The Punishing Room”—details two separate rooms in the school reserved for students who misbehave: the “Punishing Room” and the “Jailhouse.”