Abstract
Birth Control, Religion, and the Social Construction of Whiteness
Most people think of access to birth control as a women’s issue, but its history is a lot more complicated. Melissa Wilde and Sabrina Danielsen describe the birth control movement’s tangled web of race, class, and religious dynamics in the American Journal of Sociology. They argue that women’s rights were not the central concern in the religious debate over birth control—instead, religious leaders focused on the preservation of Whiteness.
Carrie E. Buck was committed to the Virginia Colony for Epileptics and the Feeble-Minded. She lost the 1927 Supreme Court Case Buck v. Bell and was sterilized so that she might not burden the state with any more “undesirable” children, like her daughter Emma.
University of Albany, State University of New York educational archives
In “Fewer and Better Children: Race, Class, Religion, and Birth Control Reform in America,” Wilde and Danielsen categorize the pervasive religious groups of the early 1900s by their attitudes toward contraception and “race suicide”—the eugenicist belief that White Anglo-Saxon Protestants were being outbred by southern and eastern European immigrants. Based on religious articles and sermons, they find a surprising amount of overlap between the two topics. In fact, the American Eugenics Society recruited many religious groups to the cause of legal birth control.
The central debate between outspoken birth control advocates and opponents often came down to whether people in the second wave European immigrants (specifically Catholics) were considered White. All religious groups seemed to agree that widespread use of birth control would most strongly impact birth rates among the poor, but Christian sects in the North supported birth control to minimize Catholic growth and preserve traditional Whiteness and Protestant dominance. Christian sects in the South opposed birth control in hopes that the immigrant Catholic community would expand and become recognized as White to counteract the growing Black population.
Both sides of the debate left little room for any discussion of women’s rights. If anything, the authors find, religious leaders assumed that White members of their own congregations would avoid using contraception in order to reproduce more than ever. Ultimately, the historical religious birth control debate boiled down to an argument over which kind of White supremacy would suit the United States best.
Financial Aid in Crisis
Next time you’re looking to start a conversation with a college student (or college survivor), test-drive this question: “Is college affordable?” If you think the response might unleash a torrent, you’re probably aware of the pandemic of poignant stories of students and families struggling to finance higher education.
The crushing need for a financial aid system that actually makes college affordable has driven even the American Enterprise Institute (whose mission flies the flag “Freedom Opportunity Enterprise”) to get involved, hosting a group of researchers, practitioners, and policymakers from a wide spectrum of political perspectives. Among them are sociologist Sara Goldrick-Rab and political scientist Andrew Kelly, co-editors of a new volume called Reinventing Financial Aid: Charting a New Course to College Affordability.
Although Goldrick-Rab and Kelly—and the scholarship they’ve curated—offer quite different tacks for solving the problem of college affordability, they agree that solutions require rigorous analysis of empirical data and the assumptions behind it.
One key takeaway from their combined effort is a compelling argument that the way financial aid is delivered often undermines its ultimate purpose. Many aspects of financial aid policy are treated as normal and unchangeable, particularly the idea that aid—and the burden of paying it back—must go directly to students. Reinventing financial aid, the authors argue, is a crucial step toward ensuring that state and federal government, along with colleges and universities, make college access and completion affordable and equitable.
Orange is Mostly the Same Gender
People noticed Orange is the New Black for its attention to gender and sexuality. The show features a transgender character, Sophia, which gives welcome representation to the struggle over transgender rights. But because of her transition through gender reassignment surgery, does the character actually reinforce binary notions of gender?
Writing in Gender & Society in 2014, Laurel Westbrook and Kristen Schilt explore how contexts play a role in the criteria used to determine gender, drawing on three cases: public debates over transgender employment rights, policies that decide eligibility for transgender people in sports, and proposals to remove the genital surgery requirement to change sex categories on birth certificates. From these cases, the authors identify two main ways gender is determined: through identity-based criteria or through biology-based criteria. Social context affects which criteria are used.
In gender-integrated spaces, the tendency is to use identity-based criteria, relying on cues people use to represent themselves. But in gender-segregated spaces—like the women’s prison in which OITNB takes place—the tendency is toward biology-based criteria, such as genitalia.
Actress Laverne Cox presents, “Ain’t I a Woman?” on a 2014 speaking tour.
KOMUNews via Flickr Creative Commons
So does OITNB’s Sophia challenge the prevailing sex/gender/sexuality system? Yes and no. Yes, there is an opportunity for the category “woman” to be expanded by trans representation. But mostly no, because Sophia is quickly reabsorbed into that system. For Sophia to belong, the audience is led to imagine that she has transitioned, importantly, removing anatomical markers of maleness. For example, when the prison reduces Sophia’s dose of estrogen, there is a moment of gender-related panic: without the correct dose, is she a woman? This could have been a powerful moment of undoing, bringing into question gender and the problematic assumptions that police gender-segregated spaces. Instead, a flashback confirming that Sophia is in prison for committing fraud to finance her gender reassignment surgery dissolves the panic and reabsorbs her into an unquestioned gender binary.
Neoliberal Mothering
In 2008, actress Jenny McCarthy created a media frenzy when she rejected the use of vaccines for children, citing what she believed to be a link between vaccines and her son’s autism. She asserted that providing a healthy diet and safe, clean environment for her son would protect his health as well as any vaccine. Apparently, a lot of middle- and upper-class parents agree.
The majority of parents who seek and obtain vaccine exemptions for their children in the U.S. are White and middle- and upper-class. Writing in Gender & Society, Jennifer Reich describes vaccine-refusing mothers as displaying “neoliberal mothering.” They assert their individual choice to manage their children independently of the influence of medical institutions and government. For these mothers, good parenting rests on the ability to intervene between children and external institutions.
Reich thus suggests that vaccine refusal is an elite process in which mothers embrace and replicate privilege in order to advocate for their children against state public health standards.
A Massachusetts Health Center poster urges parents to vaccinate.
Sarah Kaiser via Juhan Sonin, Flickr Creative Commons
She interviewed 25 mothers who obtained vaccine exemptions for their children. The majority of the women were married, heterosexual, White, and middle- to upper-class. The interviews uncovered the three factors that contributed to the mother’s decisions: the perception of vaccine risk and necessity, feeding as health promotion, and the management of risk from imagined gated communities. These women demonstrate neoliberal mothering by investing primarily in their own children’s health, whose non-immunity comes at the expense of other children, who are exposed to more pathogens when fewer children are vaccinated. Ultimately, neoliberal mothers exercise their own agency regarding their child’s health, while poor mothers experience constraints because they lack similar resources.
Terrified
According to the concept of resonance, civil society organizations spur cultural change at critical moments with messages that evoke the larger culture’s prevailing themes. In his new book Terrified: How Anti-Muslim Fringe Organizations Became Mainstream, sociologist Christopher Bail challenges this view, which he says mostly reflects a focus on successful movements and overlooks the countless organizations that have tried the same strategy unsuccessfully. To advance his alternative, evolutionary theory, Bail uses a mixed-methods approach to analyze how anti-Muslim fringe organizations became part of the mainstream in the post-9/11 world.
Using plagiarism detection analysis programs to analyze text, Bail studied media messages before and after the 9/11 attacks. He also analyzed data from Facebook and Twitter to get direct measures of fringe organizations’ influence on the larger American public. Prior to 9/11, anti-Muslim organizations in the U.S. were few and had little effect on the largely non-existent cultural narrative regarding Muslims and Islam. After 9/11, the media amplified these once-fringe organizations.
The Huntington Theater Company via Flickr Creative Commons
The rise of anti-Muslim rhetoric in the media and the media attention these organizations got, Bail finds, helped such groups develop new network ties to raise money and gain new legitimacy as “terrorism experts.” Eventually, this influence translated into political power. Contrary to the resonance argument, these fringe organizations created rather than responded to prevailing cultural themes.
The IPhone Effect on Social Interaction
Last September, Apple sold 10 million iPhone 6 devices in a weekend. Are those just 10 million new ways to hinder face-to-face interaction?
Shalini Misra and her colleagues, writing in Environment and Behavior, argue that mobile devices aren’t just distracting as toys, they also have strong symbolic meaning as tools that connect us to other social networks and information. So being in the company of mobile phones can split our attention between two worlds of social interaction—face-to-face and digital—undermining the quality of interaction in both.
They conducted a naturalistic experiment to investigate the “iPhone effect.” A hundred pairs of people were recruited at coffee shops and randomly assigned a topic for conversation. A hidden researcher watched the 10-minute conversation, tracking whether either participant brought a mobile device into the environment.
When a mobile device was visible, even if it was not actively being used, participants were more likely to report their conversations “less fulfilling” than participants who conversed in a device-free environment. The presence of mobile devices was also associated with less empathy, especially for participants who were close with another. Conversation topic, gender, ethnicity, age, and mood did not influence conversation ratings to the same extent as the “iPhone effect.”
Garry Knight via Flickr Creative Commons
The study provides evidence of the less obvious ways that phones, though they allow for expanding social networks online, can divert our attention from developing and maintaining offline relationships through personal interaction.
Football and University Prestige
Collegiate football is a dominant force within United States culture but it’s not just for the love of the game. In Sociology of Education, Arik Lifschitz, Michael Sauder, and Mitchell Stevens study the link between collegiate football and organizational prestige. They argue that, beyond national titles, college and university status is at stake on the field.
Letta Page
Rather than winning national championships, prestigious conferences protect their prestige through exclusivity. For instance, the Big Ten is both a football powerhouse and academically prestigious. Historically, it has been one of the most stable conferences, with few incoming and outgoing schools. That’s why the recent addition of Maryland and Rutgers caused such concern: Critics worry these schools will taint the Big Ten’s academic and athletic reputation.
The researchers analyzed 287 universities. They found that the most stable collegiate leagues incorporated the schools with the highest academic and athletic scores. Less stable leagues included schools that scored lower on both academic and athletic measures. Interestingly, it even appears that athletic exclusivity improves the academic reputation of football schools. In the United States—the only country that links sports so tightly to colleges and universities—football fans are bolstering not only their team’s reputation, but also their students’ brainy prestige.
The Consequences of Framing Fat
What’s making Americans fat, and how do we fix the “obesity epidemic”? These questions are constant and lead to headlines blaming gut bacteria, sedentary lifestyles, trans fats, and any number of other drivers of American obesity rates.
But what are the social consequences of these media reports themselves? In Social Science & Medicine, Abigail Saguy, David Frederick, and Kjerstin Gruys identify three different “weight frames” in media. These are ways of representing body weight as a social problem and include fat as a public crisis; fat as not necessarily bad and putting forward the “healthy at any size” idea; and “fat rights,” a storyline condemning weight-based discrimination.
A French anti-obesity ad.
Via imagur, provenance unknown
Using an experimental study design, the researchers exposed participants to these frames, using real articles about fat-related issues. Media frames influenced their readers. News reports framing fat as an “obesity epidemic” and blaming individuals for poor lifestyle choices worsened antifat prejudice among the participants. Reports focused on the healthy-at-every-size message or fat rights decreased participants’ concern about obesity as a public health crisis, though they did not decrease antifat prejudice.
Blaming overweight people and stigmatizing fat can result in denying overweight and obese people access to employment, earnings, and medical care. These results make it clear that changing attitudes and realities won’t be easy.
Gender and Status Matching
Research shows, women do not trade beauty for status when selecting male mates. A lot of previous research only examined attractiveness for women and status for men. Writing in American Sociological Review, however, Elizabeth Aura McClintock examined the role of exchange and matching in romance. When you consider both attractiveness and education traits for both partners, it turns out most people are matching on both. To collect her data, McClintock’s team used a personal attractiveness index to examine how equally-matched a particular couple was, considering physical attractiveness, grooming, and personality. The researchers found that across 1,507 couples, romantic partners tended to be equally attractive, regardless of socioeconomic status.
Embroidery by Hey Paul Studios, photo via Flickr Creative Commons
Meanwhile, researchers David McClendon, Janet Chen-Lan Kuo, and Kelly Raley, in the journal Demography, studied why men and women tend to select equally-educated partners. Rather than finding a simple story of advantaged people choosing advantaged partners, they found evidence that the labor market is facilitating graduate-to-graduate matches: more couples meet at work now that most women are employed. Since educational level strongly correlates with occupation, individuals are generally exposed to potential partners at the same educational level. The authors also found that women in occupations with more college graduates are more likely to marry and more likely to marry instead of cohabiting than those women in occupations with few degree holders. The pattern doesn’t hold for men.
These studies suggest women are wielding their own power—and standards—in the making of marriage.