ASA, Sociology of Health

Dr. Jacqui Angel Wins ASA Outstanding Publication Award

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Dr. Jacqui Angel. Photo courtesy of the LBJ School of Public Affairs.
Dr. Jacqui Angel. Photo courtesy of the LBJ School of Public Affairs.

Dr. Jacqui Angel is a winner of the 2013 Outstanding Publication Award from the American Sociological Association section on Aging and the Life Course. This award honors an outstanding recent contribution to the field of sociology of aging and the life course. The award is honoring the book, co-authored by Dr. Angel and Dr. Rick Settersten (Oregon State University), Handbook of Sociology of Aging. Dr. Angel and Dr. Settersten will receive the award at this year’s ASA meetings in New York.

Congratulations, Jacqui! 

Demography, Sociology of Health

The Health Toll of Immigration

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Dr Robert Hummer speaks to The New York Times about how life in the United States can lead to poor health for immigrants.

Esther Angeles, 41, with her daughter, Johanna Marisol Gomez, 7. Ms. Angeles has developed diabetes since coming to the United States and struggles to see that her daughter eats healthfully. Photo courtesy of The New York Times.
Esther Angeles, 41, with her daughter, Johanna Marisol Gomez, 7. Ms. Angeles has developed diabetes since coming to the United States and struggles to see that her daughter eats healthfully. Photo courtesy of The New York Times.

Excerpt:

A growing body of mortality research on immigrants has shown that the longer they live in this country, the worse their rates of heart disease, high blood pressure and diabetes. And while their American-born children may have more money, they tend to live shorter lives than the parents.

“There’s something about life in the United States that is not conducive to good health across generations,” said Robert A. Hummer, a social demographer at the University of Texas at Austin.

Click here to read the full article.

Sociology of Religion

Faith, Family and Filipino American Community Life by Stephen Cherry

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Cherry_CVR_Poster
Former Longhorn, Stephen M. Cherry’s first book entitled Faith, Family, and Filipino American Community Life from Rutgers University Press will be released this December. The book draws upon a rich set of ethnographic and survey data, collected over a six-year period, to explore the roles that Catholicism and family play in shaping Filipino American community life. From the planning and construction of community centers, to volunteering at health fairs or protesting against abortion, the book illustrates the powerful ways these forces structure and animate not only how first-generation Filipino Americans think and feel about their community, but are compelled to engage issues deemed important to the sanctity of the family. The Filipino American community is the second-largest immigrant community in the United States, and the second-largest source of Catholic immigration to this country. This ground-breaking study outlines how first-generation Filipino Americans have the potential to reshape American Catholicism and are already having an impact on American civic life through the engagement of their faith. Stephen is currently an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Houston–Clear Lake. He is also co-editor of Global Religious Movements across Borders: Sacred Service forthcoming from Ashgate.

Gender and Sexuality, Out of My Habitus, Race and Ethnicity, Sociology of Gender

Out of My Habitus – “I’m Just Saying”: Students who “debate you” and undermine you through racial and gendered performances of “smartness”

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By Juan Portillo

If you’re a TA or professor, this has probably happened to you: a student in class challenges something you are teaching and ends their spiel by saying: “I’m just saying…,” leaving the ball in your court. For many, this may be an uneventful conversation between a professor in a position of authority and a student. But what if what they’re “just saying” is not harmless? What if it is part of an epistemically violent strategy to “perform smartness” and undermine the TA or professor along the lines of gender and race? As Deborah Tannen writes in Gender and Discourse: “social relations as dominance and subordination are constructed in interaction” (Tannen, 1996, p. 10), and often when students feel challenged by feminist and anti-racist discourses they can resort to a claim of power by delegitimizing the TA or professor. They do this by invoking white-centric, andro-centric, and heteronormative knowledge and claim that they are “just saying” it, normalizing it and making you appear as different and not normal. In this post, I locate these issues with respect to: (a) what the students think they know as the “official” knowledge; and (b) how they perform their “smartness” to try to place female and non-white TAs and professors as illegitimate holders of knowledge. I am writing this post in the spirit of self-preservation as someone who has had to deal with this, and as a way to spark strategic alliances within our department to disrupt what the students are “just saying.” In particular, it was a recent experience with a white, heterosexual, male, middle-class student who wanted to debate me on the existence of reverse racism that sparked the idea to write this post.

The student mentioned above (not a direct student of mine) was not the first one to question what I thought or knew with regards to a topic that was uncomfortable for him (“does reverse racism exist?”). However, what impacted me the most was the way the student was shut off from learning anything. He was already set in what he “knew” about the word “racism” and what the official dictionary and other texts said, how he believed in equality as sameness, and how my knowledge was less legitimate than his. While he identified my ways of knowing as coming from feminist and non-white authors/texts (which he hinted at as being biased), he never situated his own knowledge as stemming from authors with white and male bodies who had already filtered and shaped that knowledge through their experience of the world. Moreover, he accused me of getting too agitated, of not being civil in the discussion, and pointed to his own behavior as calm and civil, which he highlighted as something that I should appreciate because as a white man he was taking interest “my” topic. While I can admit I was upset because he was: (a) positioning me as an illegitimate holder of knowledge, and (b) making me seem uncivilized and fiery, he was reacting to the way I challenged him and his beliefs. In particular, I started pointing out his own way of speaking to me and how that was a strategy to position me as less legitimate than he. I also sarcastically thanked him for taking interest in issues of race, which disrupted his “white savior” mentality. In addition, he was also reacting to how I tried to explain that we live in a white supremacist system that is, as bell hooks writes, an ideology that overlays how white people interact with people of color, characterized by moving away from overtly racist acts yet still maintaining an attitude of superiority and control (hooks, 2003). I disrupted his performance of “smartness” (which I elaborate below) and his “official knowledge” by pointing out how they are rooted in a heterosexist, white supremacist system, and apparently that made me uncivilized. Why did this interaction unfold this way?

Paula Moya writes in Learning From Experience: Minority Identities, Multicultural Struggles (2002) that when interviewing for her position at Stanford University in the English department, the Dean questioned her legitimacy and her belonging by asking her why she felt she would fit in an English department and not a Chicano Studies or Women’s Studies one. She uses this example to point out how a seemingly “neutral” field such as English is really characterized by bodies that are white, often male, and class-privileged. Therefore, according to Moya, these situations reveal how female and non-white faculty are seen as embodying subjective and non-relevant knowledge at odds with “whitestream” (Urrieta Jr., 2009) schooling. Nirmal Puwar writes that the presence of bodies who are not the “somatic norm” usually “disturbs and interrupts a certain white, usually male, sense of public institutional place” (Puwar, 2004, p. 42). This leaves faculty and TAs who are not “the somatic norm” of the academy (Puwar, 2004) (i.e. white, male, middle-class) vulnerable to questioning by students, faculty and staff who embody maleness and whiteness. This extends even to female and non-white students who adopt masculine and white mannerisms (Bourdieu, 2010) in order to distinguish themselves and delegitimize female and non-white professors or TAs. These mannerisms convey a particular way of performing how “smart” you are in opposition to those who think are you not, as explained next.

In Smartness As A Cultural Practice In Schools (Hatt, 2011), Beth Hatt explains that what we think of as “smart” is not just an ideology or discourse, but also a practice or performance. Moreover, she writes that smartness “is something done to other as social positioning” (Hatt, 2011, p. 2). In other words, education institutions are cultural spaces where being smart is tied to the recognition of certain cultural behavior, where students with particular social capital are identified as smarter than those who lack it. By observing a kindergarten class, Hatt reveals that the teacher organized and hierarchized students by measuring how well they “behaved” according to a white, middle-class expectation. The students themselves identified this hierarchy in terms of “smartness,” where quiet and assertive white students were rewarded while loud and hyperactive black students were punished. In the end, Hatt suggests that in a hierarchical educational system, students are judged by how well they perform whiteness, including their verbal and non-verbal communication patterns. This is in line with other research that shows that judging students of color as “loud” and “out of control” is a way to differentiate students of color as “bad students” when compared to white students (Garcia, 2010; Hatt, 2011; Hyams, 2000; Lewis, 2004; Urrieta Jr., 2009).

To Hatt’s analysis I would add that there is a gender component to this performance of smartness as well, which does not exist in isolation but rather in relation to race, social class, and other identities. Deborah Tannen writes in Gender and Discourse that “misunderstandings can arise in conversation, both cross-cultural and cross-gender, because of systematic differences in communicative style” (Tannen, 1996, p. 5). She believes that men and white people will claim superiority by judging how women and non-whites fail to communicate in the way that they do (e.g. listening as opposed to debate). Women of color, often stereotyped as the “fiery Latina,” “dragon lady,” and “angry Black woman,” learn early on in school that they must perform their raced femininity in very narrow and specific ways to avoid being punished out of school (Hyams, 2000; Lei, 2003; Portillo, 2012). This stems from anxieties over stereotypes of women of color, particularly Latina and Black young women, as being “out of control” (Garcia, 2010). The moment they step out of a submissive performance, they are positioned as uncivilized and anything they have to say is delegitimized and discounted.

One clear example was documented by Kevin Leander (2002) in his article Locating Latanya: The Situated Production of Identity Artifacts in Classroom Interaction. Leander aimed to understand how cultural artifacts and discourses circulating in the classroom semiotically mediated students’ identities “as a means of marking power relationships” (Leander, 2002, p. 203). During a “Derogatory Terms Activity,” students were asked to discuss language and power issues by writing insults on a banner that everyone could see. Latanya, one of the only Black, female students in class, added the word “honkey” to the banner. Immediately, white, male students began pointing to how the word “honkey” was not reprimanded the way “nigger” was, hinting that there was reverse racism and that Black people like to pretend they are only victims. As Latanya became uneasy because of the way she was being positioned as a “reverse racist” and because white students were saying the word “nigger” and portraying themselves as victims, other Black students jumped in and demanded that she stopped “acting ghetto.” Latanya became more upset as she began to be disciplined by other Black students who understood the consequences of being loud and disagreeable in a classroom setting characterized by white sociocultural values. Moreover, the white students said that they were speaking in “generalities,” with a body language that clearly stood in juxtaposition to Latanya’s. In the end, the white, male students succeeded in portraying Latanya as an out of control, Black woman, while portraying themselves as calm, rational, and “[constructing] an embodied artifact of [themselves] as ‘good student,’ facing forward and addressing the teacher” (Leander, 2002, p. 219). The author writes about the response of one of the white, male students: “From a relational perspective on social space, Ian was not simply projecting a separate space from Latanya but suggesting the relative power of his (institutional classroom) space with respect to Latanya’s (taboo, banner) space” (Leander, 2002, p. 219).

Racialized and gendered assumptions of self-display and self-control shape how “the consequences of style differences work to the disadvantage of members of groups that are stigmatized in our society, and to the advantage of those who have the power to enforce their interpretations” (Tannen, 1996, p. 8). Thus, the educational identity of students is shaped by particular raced and gendered performances that limit the subjectivities of students who deviate from an idealized male, white, and middle-class norm, and empower those who embody and perform whiteness and maleness. In my own example, the student resorted to labeling me (explicitly) as angry, while labeling himself as calm and seeking a civilized conversation. This was a performance of “smartness” through behavior that depends on both his embodiment of whiteness and maleness and his relation to my brown body and my feminism. It was a way to claim power created dialogically in our interaction but drawing from the way his embodied knowledge is privileged over mine. Moreover, it had a gendered component, as he relied on a performance of hegemonic masculinity that aimed to be a “savior” if only my feminist ideas would cut him some slack.

How to disrupt this? I personally have two approaches, and I welcome more ideas in the comments section. The first is to recognize the value of knowledge created from experiencing the racial, gender, sexuality, class, and ability bias of the world. Moya asserts that certain bodies have “epistemic privilege” which “refers to a special advantage with respect to possessing or acquiring knowledge about how fundamental aspects of our society (such as race, class, gender, and sexuality) operate to sustain matrices of power” (Moya, 2002, p. 90). In other words, people who are marginalized by heteropatriarchy and white supremacy have access to knowledge about how these systems of oppression work that people who derive privilege from them will not know. Secondly, I tend to draw attention to how the students try to “debate” from a position of privilege. Paying attention to and calling out their discursive practices throws students out of the loop and with any luck in a more receptive state.

I write this blog in an interest of self-preservation. Having anyone question your legitimacy in the academy because your knowledge is not “official” or too biased can be very dehumanizing and painful. The intersection of race and gender (as well as other identities that I have not included here and thus limit my own analysis) can result in specific experiences of inadequacy in an environment where even undergraduate students can hold on to racial and gender privilege to position you as subordinate to them. This is even more aggravating when students, colleagues, and professors make you feel like you are uncivilized, fiery, angry, agitated, and otherwise not as calm as they are. These people hide behind a “I’m just saying…” strategy where they invoke “official” knowledge (whether it’s a dictionary definition or canonized theories) to mark the Other as subordinate in the classroom. Recognizing how ALL of our experiences and embodiments affect and filter what we know and how we know it would be a great step towards making our department, our field, and our university more inclusive. This should be paired with a recognition of power dynamics to avoid a democratization of oppression where white men can claim oppression based on their race and gender, but also where people of color and women can realize how they/we have a stake in and support white supremacist and heteropatriarchal epistemologies.

References

Bourdieu, P. (2010). Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. (R. Nice, Trans.). New York, NY: Routledge.

Garcia, L. (2010). Respect Yourself, Protect Yourself: Latina Girls and Sexual Identity (Kindle.). New York, NY: NYU Press.

Hatt, B. (2011). Smartness as a Cultural Practice in Schools. American Educational Research Journal, 1–23. doi:10.3102/0002831211415661

hooks,  bell. (2003). Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope (1st ed.). Routledge.

Hyams, M. S. (2000). “Pay attention in class…[and] don’t get pregnant”: a discourse of academic success among adolescent Latinas. Environment and Planning A, 32, 635–654.

Leander, K. M. (2002). Locating Latanya: The Situated Production of Identity Artifacts in Classroom Interaction. Research in the Teaching of English, 37, 198–250.

Lei, J. (2003). (Un)Necessary Toughness?: Those “Loud Black Girls” and Those “Quiet Asian Boys.” Anthropology and Education Quarterly, 32(2), 158–181.

Lewis, A. E. (2004). Race in the Schoolyard: Negotiating the color line in classrooms and communities (3rd Paperback.). Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Moya, P. M. L. (2002). Learning from Experience: Minority Identities, Multicultural Struggles. University of California Press.

Portillo, J. (2012, August). “Hips Don’t Lie:” Mexican American Female Students’ Identity Construction at The University of Texas at Austin. The University of Texas at Austin, Austin.

Puwar, N. (2004). Space Invaders: Race, Gender and Bodies Out of Place (1st ed.). New York, NY: Berg Publishers.

Tannen, D. (1996). Gender and Discourse. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, USA.

Urrieta Jr., L. (2009). Working from Within: Chicana and Chicano Activist Educators in Whitestream Schools. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press.

Latin American Studies, Uncategorized, University of Texas at Austin Sociology

Violence at the Urban Margins: Longhorns & Latin American Ethnography

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Last week, the Department of Sociology – in conjunction with the Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies, the Rappaport Cenntennial Professorship of Liberal Arts, and the Office of Graduate Studies – hosted a collaborative workshop that offered a space for students, researchers, and

Nancy Scheper-Hughes
Nancy Scheper-Hughes

professors to come together in the name of productive conversation, meaningful work, and camaraderie.  The workshop featured the research of scholars from sociology and anthropology whose ethnographic work offers significant insights into the complex ways in which interpersonal violence is shaping the lives of those living at the urban margins in contemporary North, Central, and South America.   Participants ranged from burgeoning new voices such as Matthew Desmond and Alice Goffman to the “giants in the field” Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Philippe Bourgois, who were featured in the final keynote session.

This workshop also functioned as a way for UT graduate students to meet these important scholars and read/react

Dr. Javier Auyero offers some introductory thoughts
Javier Auyero offers some introductory thoughts

to their work.  To that end, students in Dr. Javier Auyero’s Poverty and Marginality in the Americas seminar were offered the chance to serve as discussants for the papers presented at the workshop.  Your faithful blog editor tracked down a few of these upcoming intellectuals and managed to get some final reflections at the end of a productive, stimulating, and tiring week:

 

Pamela Neumann:

This past week I had the privilege of serving as one of seven graduate student discussants for a workshop on Violence at the Urban Margins. The workshop brought together a range of scholars to discuss ethnographic work in progress concerning violence in the Americas.

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Pamela Neumann

One of the themes that emerged during the workshop was the “moral economy of violence.” The moral economy of violence refers to the idea that the forms of violence that occur in a given context have their own particular logic, one that is shaped by specific historical, social, political, and economic conditions, but also by the perceptions and attitudes of the specific actors involved. Whether such violence occurs in the relative absence of the state or through the active presence of a hyper-militarized state can dramatically affect the localized meanings and functions attributed to different forms of violence, including which kinds of violence are deemed “acceptable” and which are not, For example, the violence perpetuated by a neighborhood gang may be viewed as a source of protection or danger (or both), provoking fear or solidarity depending on the precise nature of the interactions that gang members have with their surrounding community.

One of my takeaways from the workshop is that understanding the production of localized cultural logics concerning violence is a critical component of grasping its myriad effects in the daily lives of people located at the urban margins. However, explorations of these internal logics must be accompanied by similarly nuanced analysis of the political economy surrounding the incidence of violence. Such an analysis, as several workshop participants pointed out, must attend not only to the changing actions of the state (which are often quite contradictory) but also to a number of other factors, including: the contours of the international drug trade, the expanding role of international corporations, and the ways

Pamela Neumann and fellow graduate sociologist Yu Chen engage in a moment of intellectual conversation
Pamela Neumann and fellow graduate sociologist Yu Chen engage in a moment of intellectual conversation

that international financial institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund have circumscribed the available options for many governments throughout the developing world.

On a personal level, the workshop was an incredible space for intellectual exchange and spirited dialogue and reflection with other scholars, and I am very grateful that I had the opportunity to learn from them, and to participate in the conversation on this critical topic.

 

Jacinto Cuvi Escobar:

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Philippe Bourgois

The workshop was fun and inspiring. Watching these big-shots fight over ideas (e.g. What is agency and why do scholars keep looking for it? Can some people lose it completely?) made me think of a wrestling contest – with some of the intellectual stimuli that the latter usually lack. It was a refreshing break from the studious and solitary routine of preparing for comps. And I enjoyed the opportunity to take part in the “fight” myself by discussing one of the papers. My favorite moment, however, took place during the evening, at Javier (Auyero)’s house, where the wrestlers were mingling in a much warmer manner, helped by beer and wine. I’ll never forget Philippe Bourgois mimicking himself as a graduate student, some thirty years ago, running after the agrarian reform in Central America – first because it was Philippe Bourgois, and second because it evoked the excitement and sense of purpose that any young sociologist should feel about her work.

Katie Jensen:

Participating in the Violence at the Urban Margins Workshop meant many more activities than just serving as the discussant on a presenter’s paper.  It meant picking participants up at the airport; eating breakfasts, lunches and dinners together; driving speakers back and forth between their hotels and the conference.  And it was this variety of opportunities to share ideas, laughs and constructive criticisms – about the conference topics, the academy, or whatever – that marked the highlight of the conference for me.  I not only had the

Matthew Desmond (left), Katie Jensen (center), and Javier Auyero (right) sharing some final thoughts at the conference's concusion
Matthew Desmond (left), Katie Jensen (center), and Javier Auyero (right) sharing some final thoughts at the conference’s concusion

opportunity to perform academically (serving as paper discussant and practicing my “elevator schpeel” while driving), but I also had the opportunity to share real, human moments – over Torchy’s tacos, coffees or as we meandered through Austin traffic – with scholars I hold in very high esteem.

While there are many moments to cherish from the conference for me personally, the workshop and its unique format I hope will continue to serve as an alternative model for academic engagement.  That model worked to breakdown the hierarchies between junior and senior scholars, and spur collaborative dialogue.  Many agreed they had never seen anything like it.  Let’s hope it catches on.

 

Family Sociology, Gender and Sexuality, Latin American Studies, Race and Ethnicity, Sociology of Gender, Uncategorized, University of Texas at Austin Sociology

Feeling the Body: Embodying Sociology at the CWGS Conference

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Recently, the Center for Women’s and Gender Studies hosted a productive and stimulating academic conference entitled “The Feeling Body.”  With the emerging attention the body and affect are receiving in research, this was a great chance for graduate students across disciplines to generate new conversations around the ways in which the body shapes knowledge.  Below we offer brief abstracts of the eight sociology imagesstudents who presented work at the conference.  Congratulations to the students, and congratulations to CWGS for another enriching and informative conference!

Caitlyn Collins:  “Some Girls, They Rape So Easy”: Conservative Discourses on Abortion and Rape in the 2012 U.S. Presidential Election

The United States has a sordid history of controlling women’s reproductive rights – ranging from forced sterilization to regulations on abortion. Most recently, the debate over abortion in the context of rape took center stage during the 2012 Presidential election. Republican politicians polarized voters by voicing their support for mandatory ultrasound laws, which would require women to have an ultrasound prior to obtaining an abortion, often vaginally using a probe – even for victims of incest or rape. Based on these lawmakers’ comments, what do the American people learn about conservatives’ opinions on women and their bodies? What are we taught to believe about women? And how might women feel in hearing these comments? I employ a feminist sociological perspective to examine Republican politicians’ comments during this past election in order to understand larger conservative discourses on abortion and rape. I examine six dominant themes in their rhetoric: pregnancy from rape is rare; sometimes women ask to be raped; sometimes women don’t know what rape is; some women lie about rape; legitimate rape can’t produce a pregnancy; and some rape is intentional because the product is a gift. I argue that these claims and larger discourses (a) are instruments of patriarchal social control over women’s bodies, (b) are forms of sexual violence and sexual terrorism, and (c) contribute to rape culture in the United States.

Juan Portillo: “You Better Not Get Pregnant!”: Epistemic violence and the regulation of Chicana students’ integration to higher education

In this paper, I center the brown, female bodies of six Mexican American students at The University of Texas at Austin as the site where social structures and ideologies are contested as they navigate a privileged space that has been imagined without them in mind (Puwar, 2004). I uncover the racial, gender, and class bias that members of the university take for granted by looking at the students’ identity formation and meaning making practices. I pay attention to their identity construction practices because these: (a) reveal the different strategies and cultural resources the students must use to overcome the racial, gender, and class barriers of the institution; and (b) reveal the racial, gender, and class microaggressions that students and professors perpetrate on the students to discipline and position them as subordinate. Concurrently, I look at the students’ experiences through a Chicana feminist lens, particularly Gloria Anzaldua’s (1987) concept of mestiza consciousness, in order to better understand their ambivalent and liminal social position. In addition, Chicana feminisms allow me to see the body as a site of potential theorizing (Cruz, 2001) and understand subjective personal experience as useful knowledge. As Paula Moya writes: “Since identities are indexical – since they refer outward to social structures and embody social relations – they are potentially rich sources of information about the world we share” (Moya, 2002, p. 131).

Shantel Buggs: “Your Momma is Day Glow White”: Questioning the Politics of Racial Identity, Loyalty and Obligation

Mixed race individuals in the U.S. consistently must negotiate their racial identities in relation to changing social contexts; the ability to shift and “perform” different racial identities has the potential to not only challenge hierarchical racial orders, but can cause strife within the individual’s family and friend groups.  As Azoulay describes in Black, Jewish and Interracial, passing or identifying more so with one racial group can be considered a “rejection” of other racial ancestry. This project utilizes an autoethnographic approach to explore the impact of larger racial/ethnic categorization on the experiences of mixed race individuals in terms of individual identity and familial/cultural group obligation(s), focusing on an incidence of public policing through a popular social networking platform and the invocation of racial obligation by white friends and family members. I analyze how racism manifests within the interracial family, how racial loyalty and obligation are used as means of regulating mixed race identity performance and how these negotiations affect the mixed race individual.

Kate Averett: The Family as Assemblage: Toward a Queer Approach to Family Studies

Changes in family structure in the U.S. over the last several decades, including an increase in single-parent families and the increasing visibility of families headed by LGBTQ parents, have resulted in increased attention among researchers to the definition of family. This paper is considers the implications for theoretical understandings of the family for social scientific methodologies of family studies. Drawing on queer theory, particularly the work of Sara Ahmed, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, and Jasbir Puar, I propose that in order to better understand the multiplicity of experiences of the family, social scientists would benefit from an understanding of family as an assemblage of embodied relationships. I argue that this approach to studying the family allows for a more intersectional approach to the study of families, one which takes into account the variety of embodied experiences that exist within families along axes of race, class, gender, sexuality, and age. In particular, I argue that such an approach allows more fully for an accounting of the experiences and contributions of children to family life.

Kristine Kilanski: When women “gain,” men lose?: An analysis of reader responses to news reports on the changing gender compositions of the workforce

In 2009, news reports were released announcing that women were about to outnumber men on nonfarm payrolls for the first time in U.S. history. In this presentation, I provide a brief overview of the push and pull factors that contributed to women’s increased labor force participation in the 20th century, and contextualize what this announcement said about the economic, historical, cultural and sociological moment in which it occurred. Then, I analyze reader responses to news articles announcing the changing gender composition of the U.S. workforce. The reader responses provide insight into the backlash women face when they are perceived to be making “gains,” and reveal longstanding stereotypes and cultural expectations of men and women’s “roles.” However, the comments also reveal alternative narratives about women and work, and that people are engaging critically with capitalism itself and the consequences of so-called economic “progress.” I argue that some of the media reports on changes to the gender composition of the workforce contributed to the false notion that the U.S. is a post-gender society, one no longer in need of feminism.

Anima Adjepong: What do you call a white woman with one black eye? Alternate readings of bruises on women rugby players

Conventionally, women, especially middle class white women, are expected to fit within a paradigm of heterosexual femininity that renders them meek and mild mannered. Bruises are a visible mark of a departure from norms of white heterosexual femininity. This paper explores the ways that bruises are legible on different women’s bodies. Using data from in-depth interviews with women’s rugby players, I ask players about their bruises and how they experience these bruises outside of a sports context. How do they interact with strangers and intimates who see their bruises? When players display their bruises, depending on how they fit into the discourse of passive heterosexual white femininity, they simultaneously challenge the idea that women’s injuries are a result of domestic violence and reproduce the idea that white women’s injuries are the result of violence perpetrated against them. The different ways bruises are legible on women’s bodies are imbued with racial and class stereotypes about the women who sport bruises. I employ an intersectional analysis to examine how white women who play rugby reproduce and challenge ideas about violence and femininity, and allow for a rethinking of the functions of white privilege

Letisha Brown: Through the Looking Glass: Sexual Violence, Body Image and Eating Behaviors in Black Women

This essay critically assess the research related to sexual violence, distorted body image, and disordered eating behaviors among Black women. While sociological research dedicated to the linkages between sexual abuse and eating behaviors among women is limited in general, it is especially sparse in regards to Black women.  Using a Black feminist approach that utilized fictional representations—Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye—as well as autobiographies—Stephanie Covington’s Not All Black Girls Know How to Eat—in conjunction with scholarly research this essay makes the case that there is a growing need for research that pays close attention to these processes among Black women. A 2009 study conducted by Goree and colleagues revealed that African American, and low-income women, both Black and White, were at a higher risk to the development of and persistence in bulimic behaviors. This quantitative study, as well as the literature reviewed in this essay point to a need for qualitative research that focuses on mechanisms that lead Black women to bulimia including experiences of sexual violence, racism and discrimination.

Michelle Mott: Pain in Pleasure: Reading Racialized and Gendered Representation and Agency in Rihanna’s “S&M”

In this paper, I suggest that Rihanna’s song and video performance “S&M” is a playful acknowledgement and critique of the ways in which her sexuality gets taken up and portrayed in the processes of commodification of her as a black female pop-star. Using Black feminist theory and critical race theory, I argue that Rihanna’s performance can be read as an attempt to push back against the confines of the racist and misogynistic tropes that render black female sexuality as always and already degenerative and deviant and the historical practices of resistance that some have argued renders black female sexuality nonexistent.

Gender and Sexuality, Health and Well-Being, Uncategorized

Rosio-Colored Glasses : Lessons in Community and Recognition

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By Pamela Neumann

A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to attend the annual winter meeting of Sociologists for Women in Society in New Mexico. Despite a fair amount of experience at professional conferences, this was my first time to attend an SWS meeting and I was admittedly nervous. Within the first hour, however, I realized that I had no reason to be. During the two days that followed, I met a diverse range of feminist scholars who in different ways made me feel at home. Women who asked me thoughtful questions and shared openly, not only about their research, but also about other aspects of their lives. In the midst of serious conversations about current and future feminist scholarship and projects for justice, we ate (huge) leisurely meals, did yoga, hiked, sang, laughed, danced, and cried. Our minds were deeply engaged, but so were our spirits, our bodies, our emotions.

Back here in Austin, I have continued to reflect on the spirit of community, learning and shared struggle that I experienced in that space. I ask myself: Was it some kind of utopia? Can similar kinds of spaces be recreated in our everyday worlds? Inclusive spaces where intellect and emotions are equally valued in the process of producing both knowledge and

Pamela Neumann, left, with fellow SWS meeting attendee Jenny Korn
Pamela Neumann, left, with fellow SWS meeting attendee Jenny Korn

greater mutual understanding?  I believe the answer is yes, because I have experienced such spaces both inside and outside my academic community here at UT. However, sustaining them is no easy task. When one considers our diverse social locations, epistemologies, practices, and the matrix of power within which they are embedded, even the most idealistic among us might be tempted to simply throw in the towel. Then, in a seminar last week led by Dr. Christine Williams, I learned about a concept known as “recognition of self in other” (or rosio). Deceptively simple in its formulation, rosio is nothing less than the ideal sustaining our attempts at communication and relationships: the sense that some kind of mutual recognition is possible in spite of the complex web of power and inequality that structures our society.

When I learned about rosio, I realized that it captured not only what I had experienced at the SWS meeting, but also among women in Nicaragua. Although I may not have had the vocabulary to articulate it quite this way before, the possibility of mutual recognition across difference is a fundamental part of why I am here, and why I do the research I do.

A longtime San Antonio (Texas) resident, Pamela Neumann earned her B.A. cum laude in political science from Trinity University. She has held several different positions since then, including AmeriCorps member and Program Manager with City Year San Antonio, Service-Learning Coordinator at the University of Texas at San Antonio, and Communications Specialist for Food for the Hungry in Nicaragua. Pamela’s thesis research examined the trajectory and effects of women’s participation in community development in Nicaragua.

Latin American Studies, Out of My Habitus, Race and Ethnicity, Sociological Theory, Sociology of Education, Uncategorized, University of Texas at Austin Sociology, Work, Occupations and Organizations

Out of My Habitus – Why my education and manners get in the way of doing research

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By Juan Portillo 

Linda Tuhiwai Smith writes in Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples that Western academia has historically engaged in a process of legitimizing “what counts as knowledge, as language, as literature, as curriculum and as the role of intellectuals” (Smith, 1999, p. 65). This process happens in an environment that envisions

Graduate student Juan Portillo
Graduate student Juan Portillo

researchers, data and the research process as cultureless and bodiless, “floating brains” if you will. The danger of doing research without thinking where our bodies and experiences fit in the process (with all of our privileges and disadvantages) is that our biases as humans will make it into our final conclusions, reproducing an intellectually stagnant body of knowledge that at best is very limited in its creativity and explanation, and at worst it has the potential of marginalizing the people we are writing about.

One way to address our limitations and acknowledge our humanity is to really think about our social location and our role as researchers. Pierre Bourdieu’s habitus is an excellent concept that can help to explain this dynamic and can prevent us from completely divorcing our bodies and biases from the research process. As researchers, we are embedded in a social landscape that has provided us with dispositions that help us make sense of the world around us. Our habitus also provides us with the manners through which we express ourselves, inevitably reproducing

Influential French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002)
Influential French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002)

our class, gender, sexuality, ability, race/ethnic identity, etc. However, we don’t always pay attention to how our disposition and manners affect the way we interact with and learn from the data we collect or the people we interview and observe. I am starting this blog series in an effort to provide a tool for researchers at UT Austin to practice reflexivity and improve their interpretations of their research as well as their interactions with research participants.

While it is hard to really analyze ourselves and identify our class, gender, racial and other biases, sometimes situations arise that give us a chance to put ourselves under the microscope. We may enter a classroom, a restaurant, an interview or a lab where suddenly something feels off and we are forced to respond through limited improvisations that reveal our social location as well as that of others. These are the times, particularly in an academic or research setting, where we can truly examine our approach to knowledge, learning, and conducting research. Ultimately, this information about ourselves can potentially help us compensate for our limitations due to our privileges, or turn our feelings of marginality into sites for theorizing.

This first post will contain one example of a time I have felt “out of my habitus” and forced to deal with my discomfort and conduct myself in a way that helped me grow instead of responding in a way that legitimized only my “expert” version of the social world. Recently, I attended the National Association of Chicano/Chicana Studies regional conference at UT Pan American in Edinburg, Texas. During this conference, I attended a workshop that Labeltaught us to link the knowledge we have gained from our parents and grandparents to the way we approach education in our current position. Most of the over 20 people participating in the workshop were first generation college students, all of them were Chicana/o, and most of them were female. All had immigrated to the United States while they were still young and the ones who had been here for a few generations had been marginalized because of their race, gender and class while attending school. Many had parents who were farm workers or low-wage workers. As I filled in the questions that were part of the exercise, I realized I am probably a 5th generation college graduate, I attended private school in San Salvador (El Salvador), and came to the United States over 9 years ago to pursue higher education.

I was definitely “out of my habitus” during this exercise, and I felt irked. I had a hard time really making sense of why I felt out of place, or why I felt bothered. However, this discomfort was an opportunity for me to engage with my privileges and be very mindful of my manners (including the way I looked/dressed, my language, my accent, my responses, my body language, etc.). After hearing someone talk about how they felt like their family was jealous or angry because she was pursuing a higher education (calling her white-washed and insinuating that she looked down on them), I thought about the costs to entering higher education, as a student and as a researcher. The costs for the people in this workshop (true of me as well) involve entering a new habitus and learning or adopting new mannerisms and dispositions to survive a competitive, middle-class, heteronormative and in many ways white supremacist (colonizing) environment. These mannerisms shine through in our way of speaking and writing, in the way we relate to others, in the way we assign importance to academic matters, and in the way we distance ourselves from whatever image of “bad” student we have.

In a country where students tend to be labeled as “bad” when they don’t give school as much importance as we do, where having an accent or not speaking the right version of English marks people as deviant students, and where the students who are marked the most often as “bad” students embody a particular look and mannerisms (Urrieta Jr., 2009; Valenzuela, 1999; Yosso, 2005; Yosso, Smith, Ceja, & Solorzano, 2009), then adopting the manners and dispositions of “good” students inevitably results in coming off as pretentious (as Bourdieu describes the petit bourgeoisie). Moreover, being successful in education demands that we participate in a process that distinguishes between the “good” and the “bad” students, a process of hierarchization characterized in some ways by our behavior (which I have heard undergrads at UT talk about it as “white-washing,” telling girls they’re acting too much like men, Mexican Americans telling other Mexican Americans that they’re acting “too Mexican,” or labeling certain students as disingenuous or pretentious).

Thus, being out of my habitus made me be mindful of how I was coming across to the people in that workshop. While I was irked, I decided to really listen to what was going on, and this allowed me to make a connection between the process of schooling and how my position as a researcher is mired with pretentions and manners that can be and often are marginalizing to others. Similar to (though not fully alike) the way one of the participants expressed discomfort with the way her family and friends thought she was pretentious because she was getting a college degree, my “credentials” and manners can result in research participants feeling marginalized or looked down on. Being conscious of this is one way to: (a) not blame the people I interact with for being hostile or unsupportive in my research projects; and (b) find ways to prevent myself as much as I can from marginalizing research participants and other people around me.

 References:

Smith, L. T. (1999). Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. New York, NY: Zed Books.

Urrieta Jr., L. (2009). Working from Within: Chicana and Chicano Activist Educators in Whitestream Schools. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press.

Valenzuela, A. (1999). Subtractive Schooling: U.S. Mexican Youth and the Politics of Caring. Albany, NY: State Univ of New York Press.

Yosso, T. J. (2005). Whose culture has capital? A critical race theory discussion of community cultural wealth. Race Ethnicity and Education, 8(1), 69–91. doi:10.1080/1361332052000341006

Yosso, T. J., Smith, W. A., Ceja, M., & Solorzano, D. G. (2009). Critical Race Theory, Racial Microaggressions, and Campus Racial Climate for Latina/o Undergraduates. Harvard Educational Review, 79(4), 659–690.

Juan was born and raised in San Salvador, El Salvador. He has a BBA in marketing from UT Austin, and a Master’s in Women’s and Gender Studies from UT Austin. His research interests include Chicana feminisms, anti-colonial methodologies, Mexican American / Latina college students’ experiences, and Latinas and the media.

University of Texas at Austin Sociology

Dr. Sheldon Ekland-Olson Is 2013 Outstanding Graduate Adviser

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Dr. Sheldon Ekland-Olson received the 2013 Outstanding Graduate Adviser Award.

The Graduate School Outstanding Graduate Adviser Award annually recognizes the exemplary service of one graduate adviser. Graduate advisers provide an invaluable service to the University and its community of students, faculty and staff, and this award is an opportunity to recognize these individuals.

The award includes a $3000 prize, which is presented at the Graduate School/University Co-op Awards Banquet in the spring.

Way to go, Sheldon!

Graduate Sociology Blog