Chapter 3 Sociology PDF

THE LURE OF IDENTITY In 1939, Germany invaded Poland and declared war on France and the United Kingdom. It was the dawn of World War II. In the next six years, more than 100 million people from more than thirty countries would fight in that war. As many as 60 million people died. This included 6 mil...

THE LURE OF IDENTITY In 1939, Germany invaded Poland and declared war on France and the United Kingdom. It was the dawn of World War II. In the next six years, more than 100 million people from more than thirty countries would fight in that war. As many as 60 million people died. This included 6 million Jews, who were imprisoned and then slaughtered in German concentration camps, a gruesome feat accomplished by a murderous dictator with the cooperation of many German soldiers and some civilians. Henri Tajfel was twenty years old when the war broke out. As a Jew, he was familiar with anti-Semitism. He was born in Poland, where laws limited Jews’ opportunities for education, so he enrolled in college in France to study chemistry. Recognizing the threat posed by Germany’s leader, Adolf Hitler, Tajfel enlisted in the French army. After a year of fighting, he was captured by Nazi soldiers. He survived as a prisoner of war only because his religion was never exposed. When he was released at the end of the war, he learned that no one in his family had survived. To ease his own grief, Tajfel took a job helping children who’d been lost or orphaned during the war. When he eventually went back to school, he set chemistry aside to study people. Like many of his contemporaries, Tajfel struggled to understand how ordinary people could have participated in or tolerated such unimaginable violence. To try to answer this question, he started at the beginning: Where did these identities come from? How do they come to mean so much to us? And what makes them the basis of conflict? Sociologically speaking, these questions were about the process of distinction, active efforts to affirm identity categories and place ourselves and others into their subcategories. They’re also about the desire for positive distinction, the claim that members of our own group are superior to members of other groups. This produces in-group bias, preferential treatment of members of our own group and mistreatment of others.3 One of Tajfel’s most famous studies revealed that people need only the smallest reason to form such groups. To demonstrate this, he did an experiment in which he brought sixty-four teenage boys into his laboratory and showed them a series of slides, each displayed for no longer than half a second.4 On the slides were dots—lots of dots—and Tajfel instructed the boys to estimate how many. So, the boys wrote down their best guess for each slide and handed their answers to the experimenters. Behind closed doors, Tajfel and his collaborators tossed aside the students’ estimations and randomly assigned them to one of two groups. Group One was told that they overestimated the number of dots on the slides, and Group Two was told that they underestimated the number. Neither group was told that their answers were more correct, simply different, and each was told privately, so no student knew which of their peers were in which group. The task was deliberately designed to have as little significance to the boys as possible. Why would anyone care whether they were an over- or underestimator of dots? It shouldn’t matter to them as anything more than a curiosity. And it certainly wasn’t a good reason to form groups and decide that their own group was more deserving of a good outcome. Right? Wrong. Tajfel measured in-group bias by giving each boy the opportunity to give small rewards to their fellow research subjects. Consistent with the hypothesis, the boys penalized the other group and favored their own, people with whom they shared nothing but the outcome of a silly, contrived, and wholly fake exercise involving dots. The fact that people were so quick to form groups and punish outsiders was so surprising, and so haunting in light of the Holocaust, that a new research program emerged. Many studies later, we have good evidence that humans are partial to in- group affiliation. We can induce group loyalty by doing something as simple as flipping a coin and putting people into “heads” groups and “tails” groups. Once the group exists, people behave as group members, not simply individuals. You got tails? Hey, me too! This is called the minimal group paradigm, the tendency of people to form groups and actively distinguish themselves from others for the most trivial of reasons.5 TABLE 3.1: How to Socially Construct an Identity Step Description 1. Invent Establishing a human feature as a basis of identity. 2. Divide Deciding what will differentiate people within identity subcategories. 3. Stereotype Giving identity subcategories different symbolic meanings. 4. Perform Doing social identities in accordance with stereotypes. Together these observations are called social identity theory: People are inclined to form social groups, incorporate group membership into their identity, take steps to enforce group boundaries, and maximize positive distinction and in-group success. This happens in real life as well as the laboratory. Table 3.1 lists five steps by which a human feature becomes a social identity. Categories of identity are invented, and subcategories are carved out. Identities are made meaningful, such that they signify something socially relevant. These identities guide our behavior and we usually act in accordance with them. Finally, identity subcategories are arrayed into a hierarchy. Once social identities are established, they intersect. We each have many social identities and how we experience any one of them is influenced by the others we carry. The remainder of this chapter is dedicated to exploring these things in depth, starting with the invention of identities and a return to sexual orientation. 5. Rank Elevating some identity subcategories over others. Glossary distinction active efforts to affirm identity categories and place ourselves and others into their subcategories positive distinction the claim that members of our own group are superior to members of other groups in-group bias preferential treatment of members of our own group and mistreatment of others minimal group paradigm the tendency of people to form groups and actively distinguish themselves from others for the most trivial of reasons social identity theory the idea that people are inclined to form social groups, incorporate group membership into their identity, take steps to enforce group boundaries, and maximize positive distinction and in-group success Endnotes Note 03: Henri Tajfel, ed., Differentiation between Social Groups: Studies in the Social Psychology of Intergroup Relations (London: Academic Press, 1978).Return to reference 3​ Note 04: Henri Tajfel, M. G. Billig, R. P. Bundy, and Claude Flament, “Social Categorization and Intergroup Behaviour,” European Journal of Social Psychology 1, no. 2 (1971): 149–178, https://doi.org/10.1002/EJSP.2420030103.Return to reference 4 Note 05: Miles Hewstone, Mark Rubin, and Hazel Willis, “Intergroup Bias,” Annual Review of Psychology 53 (2002): 575–604, https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.psych.53.100901.135109.Return to reference 5 STEP 1: INVENT The Origin of Sexual Identity We see sexual behavior between individuals of the same sex anywhere we look in nature, and humans are no exception.6 Because we’re cultural creatures, though, how we experience and express same-sex sexual desire depends on where and when we were raised. If we had been born prior to the mid-1900s, for example, we may have recognized such desires but not been able to imagine building an identity, or a life, around them. All that would soon change. In the 1920s and ’30s, a Paris nightclub called Le Monocle was a haven for artists, bohemians, and burlesque dancers. Named after a lesbian fashion of the time—the wearing of monocles—it also hosted a vibrant gay and lesbian nightlife. Major changes in the organization of everyday life laid the groundwork. First was urbanization: the shrinking of rural populations and the growth of cities.7 For most of U.S. history, Americans had lived in small towns or in the country, but by 1920 more than half lived in urban locations. These new urban centers provided an unprecedented level of freedom from the surveillance that characterized small communities. This was true especially for men, who were given more freedom than women. In hidden corners of cities, gay subcultures began forming. Second was industrialization, the shift to an economy based primarily on large-scale mechanized industry.8 Before the United States industrialized, it was common for people to make their living in family units where they aimed for self-sufficiency. On farms, home was a workplace and family members were the workers. Children were not optional. They grew up more quickly back then and worked on the farm alongside their parents. Heterosexual sex, if not heterosexuality, was a matter of survival. City life under industrial capitalism was organized differently.9 People no longer worked as families to produce the food and goods they needed; they worked for money to buy those things and were paid as individuals. It was legal to pay women substantially less than men, so women were still dependent on the family unit. But wages for men were high enough that some could consider building lifestyles around desire instead of reproduction, and they did. The third factor was World War II, fought between 1939 and 1945. In the United States, one out of every eight males—almost every fit man between eighteen and twenty-six years old—served in the war.10 As a result, unmarried people on both the front lines and the home front found themselves largely in the company of the same sex. Indulging in homoerotic encounters became easier and more tempting, so much so that one pair of historians called World War II “a nationwide ‘coming out’ experience.”11 Living in cities and able to earn an income outside of the heterosexual family, some individuals who experimented with homosexuality during the war decided to organize their lives around their sexual desires when they came home. This was when the idea of the gay person burst into daily life. The first openly gay bars in the United States opened in the 1940s and the first gay advocacy organization was founded in 1951. Homosexuality was no longer just something people could do, it was something they could be. Today we use the term sexual minorities to describe people who are gay, lesbian, bisexual, or otherwise non-heterosexual. The journey from homosexual behavior to sexual identity illustrates the first step in the process of distinction: seeing something as an identity at all. The second step is to socially construct the relevant subcategories; from “heterosexual” and “homosexual,” for example, to the abundance of sexual identities we have today. To look at how specific subcategories of identity develop, we’ll move from sexual orientation to race and ethnicity. Glossary sexual minorities people who are gay, lesbian, bisexual, or otherwise non-heterosexual Endnotes Note 06: Joan Roughgarden, Evolution’s Rainbow: Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2009).Return to reference 6​ Note 07: George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World: 1890–1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1994); John D’Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America (New York: Harper & Row, 1988); Joy Hakim, War, Peace, and All That Jazz: 1918–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).Return to reference 7 Note 08: John D’Emilio, “Capitalism and Gay Identity,” in The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, eds. Henry Abelove, Michèle Aina Barale, and David Halperin (New York: Routledge, 1993): 467– 476.Return to reference 8​ Note 09: Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap (New York: Basic Books, 1992).Return to reference 9​ Note 10: United States Selective Service System, Selective Service and Victory (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1948): 91.Return to reference 10​ Note 11: D’Emilio and Freedman, Intimate Matters.Return to reference 11 STEP 2: DIVIDE Race, Ethnicity, and the Emergence of Subcategories The racial groups with which we’re familiar, whatever they are, are not biological facts.12 Roughly 85 percent of human genetic variation is found within any group of people we identify as racially alike.13 Almost all of that variation is contained in sub-Saharan Africa, where the most genetically diverse populations of humans live.14 This means that there’s more genetic difference among Black people than there is between Black people and any other racial subcategory.15 The same is true for other group comparisons. Race, though, is a fact. It’s a social fact.16 Race is a socially meaningful set of artificial distinctions falsely based on superficial and imagined biological differences. Certain physical features, like eye shape or hair texture, are made to exemplify a racial subcategory and certain characteristics are attributed to people with those physical features. We are then socialized to read people for signs of their race and ignore the diversity within subcategories. As a result, we learn to see races that do not exist in nature. Instead of being biological, racial subcategories are social constructs; they are products of human invention, not biological evolution. For this reason, the subcategories recognized by different countries vary dramatically. Table 3.2 offers some examples. In the United States, the most culturally stark distinction is between “Black” and “White,” though these subcategories did not exist when English colonizers arrived in 1607.17 At that time, Africans shared their position at the bottom of the economic ladder with poor Europeans. Both groups were subjected to indentured servitude: bound to a period of enslavement, after which they would be freed.18 Given their shared class interests, indentured servants of all colors joined together and sometimes rebelled against their so-called masters. TABLE 3.2: Official Governmental Racial Subcategories in Select Countries Australia Brazil Bulgariaa Aboriginal White Black Yellow Pardo Indigenous Torres Strait Islander South Africab Guam United Statesc Black African Chamorro Samoan White​ Coloured Indian Carolinian Filipino Black or African or Asian White Japanese Korean American American Palauan Tongan Indian or Alaska Native Asian Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander The colonists seized upon color as a way to end these rebellions.19 In 1705, they introduced the subcategories of White and Black, passing laws that tied rights to skin color. European indentured servants’ rights were protected and enhanced, and the potential for Africans to earn their freedom was eliminated. Now Africans could never work hard or long enough to be freed, and their light-skinned former friends were given the right to order, oversee, punish, and capture them. Race was a way to divide and conquer. Those in the new subcategory of White were given what the sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois called a psychological wage, a noneconomic good given to one group as a measure of superiority over other groups.20 White people’s psychological wage—the promise that they had more in common with the White folk at the top of the economic hierarchy than the Black folk at the bottom—motivated them to protect a racial hierarchy that offered them little more than someone to look down on. When slavery was abolished, race lived on. The U.S. federal government continued to use racial subcategories to further White supremacy. In 1890, the U.S. Census included the subcategories of “mulatto” (defined as three-eighths to five-eighths African ancestry), “quadroon” (one-fourth), and “octoroon” (one-eighth or less). Distinguishing and quantifying multiracial people was an effort to ensure that the line between White and non-White remained strong. In 1930, the government went the other direction, officially defining multiracial people out of existence. Instead of marking all the gradations “in between” Black and White, they counted as Black anyone who had even “one drop” of “Black blood.” This is called the one-drop rule, the idea that anyone with any trace of Black ancestry should be considered Black. According to the one-drop rule, White people are White, Black people are Black, and multiracial people are Black too. In 1922 and 1923, the U.S. Supreme Court considered a pair of lawsuits challenging the exclusion of Asians from the subcategory of White.21 One came from Takao Ozawa, a Japanese man who had lived in the United States for twenty years and started a successful business. The other suit was filed by Bhagat Singh Thind, an immigrant from India who had fought for the United States in World War I. Both men were seeking citizenship, which, in the early 1920s, was only extended to people identified as either White or Black. So, both Ozawa and Thind sued, not on the basis that people of other races should be eligible for citizenship, but on the basis that Japanese and Indian people were White. Ozawa was up first, arguing that if White was a color, he was it. As evidence he displayed his own skin, which he pointed out was just as light as that of Europeans. The court agreed that his skin was light but insisted that White wasn’t a color. Instead, it was a word that meant “Caucasian,” which was a reference to people from the Caucasus Mountains, a range in Southern Russia that connects Eastern Europe to West Asia. Japan was in the far east of Asia, nowhere near the West. Therefore, Ozawa was not Caucasian and could not be considered White. Up next was Thind, who was very pleased with the arguments in the Ozawa case. First, he was from Northern India, far west of Japan and much nearer to the Caucasus Mountains. Second, he was a descendent of genuine Caucasians who had invaded his region of India. His lawyers paraded anthropologists in front of the judges, each of whom argued that people from Thind’s region of India were Caucasian and, therefore, White. It seemed like a slam dunk. The Supreme Court agreed that Thind was Caucasian but argued that no reasonable person would mistake him for White. Reversing their logic from just a few months before, they insisted that White didn’t mean Caucasian but was instead an idea based on a “common understanding” among the people. White was, in other words, not a color and not a reference to a geographical place. It was whatever White people wanted it to be. The very last American to sue to claim a White identity was a woman from Sulphur, Louisiana, by the name of Susie Guillory Phipps. She discovered at the age of forty-three that her birth certificate identified her as “colored,” a word that, at the time, cast her as non-White. She protested, spending at least $49,000 on legal fees. Like Ozawa and Thind, she lost. At the time, Louisiana law specified that a person with 1/32nd or more Black ancestry was legally Black. One of Phipps’s thirty-two great-great-great grandparents had been identified by the state as Black. She had what someone might describe as one drop of Black blood. It was 1981. Interestingly, Phipps’s argument wasn’t based on color, geography, or common understanding. It was based on lifestyle. She claimed that she lived a White life. “I am White,” she explained. “I was raised as a White child. I went to White school. I married White twice.”22 No one around her growing up, she claimed, “except the hired hands,” were anything but White.23 By being raised as a White person, going to school alongside White people, and marrying White men, she claimed to have lived in a White way. And that, she insisted, was why she was White. Because race is a social construction, its logic can always be distorted to include and exclude arbitrarily. More often than not, in U.S. history, this has been done to exclude. But when inclusion is advantageous to certain interests, unwanted assimilation can happen too. Just four years after the one-drop rule became law, the United States introduced the blood quantum rule, a law limiting legal recognition of American Indians to those who have at least a certain level of indigenous ancestry.24 Unlike the one-drop rule, which pushed people out of the subcategory of White, the blood-quantum rule pulled people into the subcategory. Why? Because the government had agreed to provide American Indian citizens with services. By artificially shrinking the number of American citizens who could legally identify as American Indian, the government reduced its obligations. To this day, members of tribal nations must have a federally issued card that attests to their “certified degree of Indian blood.” Around the same time, in response to the influx of immigrants from Mexico after a revolution, the United States added “Mexican” to the racial subcategories on the census. It would only appear once. Both Mexican Americans and Mexican nationals were alarmed. They looked at the racial politics of the United States and decided they wanted nothing to do with a racial subcategory all their own. They allied with the Mexican government to get the subcategory removed from the census, arguing that Mexicans were not just White but the “sum and substance of the White race.” Under substantial pressure, the United States accepted their logic. That’s why “Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish” isn’t included as a race even today but is instead listed as an ethnicity, an identity based on collective memories of a shared history and distinctive culture. This brief tour of the history of some U.S. racial and ethnic subcategories reveals that, like the emergence of sexual orientation as an identity, the subcategories within an identity are also socially constructed. In the case of race and ethnicity, the subcategories are products of changing political priorities in a society based on racial and ethnic divides. Gender is another social identity, and it will be used to explore the attribution of meaning. Glossary race psychological wage a noneconomic good given to one group as a measure of superiority over other groups one-drop rule the idea that anyone with any trace of Black ancestry should be considered Black blood quantum rule a law limiting legal recognition of American Indians to those who have at least a certain level of documented indigenous ancestry ethnicity an identity based on collective memories of a shared history and distinctive culture a socially meaningful set of artificial distinctions falsely based on superficial and imagined biological differences Endnotes Note 12: American Association of Physical Anthropologists, “AAPA Statement on Biological Aspects of Race,” American Journal of Physical Anthropology 101 (1996): 569–570.Return to reference 12 Note 13: Ryan A. Brown and George J. Armelagos, “Apportionment of Racial Diversity: A Review,” Evolutionary Anthropology 10 (2001): 34–40, https://doi.org/10.1002/1520-6505(2001)10:13.0.CO;2-P; Richard C. Lewontin, “Confusions about Human Races,” Race and Genomics, June 7, 2006, http://raceandgenomics.ssrc.org/Lewontin/.Return to reference 13 Note 14: Felicia Gomez, Jibril Hirbo, and Sarah A. Tishkoff, “Genetic Variation and Adaptation in Africa: Implications for Human Evolution and Disease,” Cold Spring Harbor Perspectives in Biology (2014): 1– 21, https://doi.org/10.1101/cshperspect.a008524.Return to reference 14 Note 15: Ning Yu et al., “Larger Genetic Differences within Africans Than Between Africans and Eurasians,” GENETICS 161, no. 1 (2002): 269–274, https://www.genetics.org/content/161/1/269.Return to reference 15 Note 16: Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States (New York: Routledge, 1994).Return to reference 16 Note 17: Nell Irvin Painter, The History of White People (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010).Return to reference 17 Note 18: Lerone Bennett Jr., The Shaping of Black America (Chicago: Johnson Publishing, 1975); Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975).Return to reference 18 Note 19: William J. Cooper Jr., Liberty and Slavery: Southern Politics to 1860 (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2001).Return to reference 19​ Note 20: W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).Return to reference 20 Note 21: Ian Haney López, White by Law (New York: New York University Press, 1996).Return to reference 21 Note 22: Associated Press, “Slave Descendant Fights Race Listing,” New York Times, September 15, 1982.Return to reference 22​ Note 23: Art Harris, “Louisiana Court Sees No Shades of Gray in Woman’s Request,” Washington Post, May 21, 1983, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1983/05/21/louisian a-court-sees-no-shades-of-gray-in-womans-request/ddb0f1df-ba5d- 4141-9aa0-6347e60ce52d/.Return to reference 23 Note 24: Paul Spruhan, “A Legal History of Blood Quantum in Federal Indian Law to 1935,” South Dakota Law Review 51, no. 1 (2006), https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm? abstract_id+955032.Return to reference 24 Note a:Bulgaria does not recognize any racial groups.Return to reference a​ Note b:South Africa uses the phrase “population groups.”Return to reference b Note c:In the United States, “Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish” is an ethnicity, not a race.Return to reference c STEP 3: STEREOTYPE Filling Gender Subcategories with Contents The word gender refers to the signifiers of masculinity and femininity—the ideas, traits, interests, and skills that we associate with being biologically male or female. In the United States, we generally layer gendered signifiers onto sex, a reference to physical traits related to sexual reproduction. The words male and female refer to the two body types, roughly, that human sexual reproduction requires. The subcategories of “men” and “women” are socially constructed identities that conflate maleness with masculinity and femaleness with femininity. The two categories are positioned as opposites, or placed in a gender binary. This is the idea that people come in two and only two types, males who are masculine and females who are feminine. Human variety in bodies is natural. Based on their anatomy, some people are assigned male at birth, some are assigned female at birth, and some are designated as intersex—those with physical characteristics typical of both people assigned male and people assigned female at birth. The term cisgender is used to refer to people assigned male at birth who identify as men as well as people assigned female at birth who identify as women. In other words, a cisgender person’s assigned sex and gender identity align according to cultural norms. People who aren’t cisgender may be transgender, or trans. The transgender population includes people assigned male at birth who don’t identify as men as well as people assigned female at birth who don’t identify as women. People (including trans people) can also be nonbinary or identify as both man and woman or neither man nor woman. As with other identities, the language we use and subcategories we recognize change over time and are different across cultures. To ascribe masculinity to people assigned male at birth and femininity to people assigned female at birth is to invoke a stereotype, clusters of ideas attached by social convention to people with specific social identities.25 In the United States, women and girls are stereotyped as warm and expressive, nurturing of others, relationship-oriented, and with limited physical strength and sexual desire.26 Stereotypes of men and boys portray them as the inverse of this: self-interested and competitive, logical and mathematically inclined, independent, aggressive, physically strong, and intensely sexual. It’s hard to believe, perhaps, but these stereotypes are only about one hundred years old. They emerged out of the same move to city life and wage work that made space for sexual orientation to become an identity. As industrialization took hold of the American economy and people moved off farms and into cities, home was separated from work for the first time. The workplace, newly considered a place for men, was cast as ruthless and competitive; the home, newly seen as a space for women, was cast as a reprieve from the workplace: a place for togetherness, selflessness, care, kindness, and cooperation. Nico Tortorella and Bethany C. Meyers are nonbinary. Both use the personal pronoun they/them/theirs. For their wedding, they wore “genderbending ensembles” that seamlessly invoked both the masculine and the feminine. They hope that their love story will help other nonbinary people “feel less alone” and stand as a testament to “different ways to love.”68 Onto work and home were laid the now-familiar gender stereotypes. Men went to work and earned money, while women stayed home and cared for their husbands and children. If work was competitive and cutthroat, men were too. And if the home was sentimental and sweet, it’s because women made it that way. We were suddenly “opposite sexes”: distinctly different, with complementary strengths and weaknesses. These stereotypes are still alive and well in our culture. One way of demonstrating this is with content analysis, a way of carefully documenting the content of media, whether visual, audio, or print (see “The Science of Sociology”). A content analysis of 436 toys for sale on the U.S. Disney Store website, for example, found stereotyping that sent gendered messages about the personalities of boys and girls.27 Ninety-eight percent of the action figures and 100 percent of the cars and trucks, weapons, and building toys were listed as boy toys, while 97 percent of the dolls and 100 percent of the domestic toys, like play kitchens, were listed as girl toys. The portrayal of boys as busy workers (driving, defending, and building) and girls as happy homemakers (raising children and keeping house) reflects the stereotypes invented during the Industrial Revolution. THE SCIENCE OF SOCIOLOGY Content Analyses Content analysis is a research method that involves counting and describing patterns of themes in media. The media can include print, still images, audio, video, or any other medium that sends messages. One could analyze advertisements, song lyrics, movies, social media updates, podcasts, newspapers, billboards, or even the graphics on clothes people wear. Researchers decide what content to examine, then decide whether to analyze all of the content or a subset of it. The researchers studying the toys for sale on the Disney website decided to analyze all the toys on the website. In other cases, there may be too much content to analyze (Amazon, for instance, lists over 300,000 toys for sale), in which case researchers will analyze only a sample of it. To do the analysis, researchers decide on codes to apply, or the features of the content that are relevant to their research question. When analyzing a toy, for example, the researchers coded for whether its colors were bold (masculine) or pastel (feminine) and whether it was a stereotypically masculine or feminine toy (like an action figure or a Barbie doll). Applying the codes to content transforms it into data. Once the coding is completed, the researcher will look for patterns. This might include identifying common words, associations, visual images, sounds, plot devices, or types of people. Analysis can be quantitative, qualitative, or both. Quantitative content analysis involves counting and correlating codes. Qualitative content analysis involves rich descriptions of specific instances of codes. Using both of them together offers a useful characterization of the content, as researchers can explain both how often certain themes occur and what they are like when they do. Carefully examining media for persistent themes and messages is an excellent way to show that social constructs are not just in our heads but genuinely present in our culture. When concerned with social identities, content analysis can be used to measure representation, whether members of social groups are portrayed, and misrepresentation, inaccurate and sometimes harmful representations of social groups. This can reveal what stereotypes are present, how frequently they’re communicated, by whom, and in what media. Are these stereotypes accurate? They’re not. Scientists have produced thousands of studies comparing men’s and women’s thoughts, feelings, behavior, intelligence, communication, skills, personalities, physical abilities, and more. Exploiting this abundance of research, scientists perform meta-analyses, a method of statistically joining a pool of studies with the aim of aggregating their results to produce a more conclusive finding than any individual study can offer alone. Dozens or hundreds of studies on a single trait can be mathematically combined to determine whether the collected evidence suggests that men and women are different or alike. FIGURE 3.1: Gender Differences in Levels of Self-Esteem SOURCE: Kristen C. Kling, Janet S. Hyde, Carolin J. Showers, and Brenda N. Buswell, “Gender Differences in Self-Esteem: A Meta-Analysis,” Psychological Bulletin, 125, no. 4 (1999): 484. In 2015, a team of scholars performed what they called a meta-synthesis, a meta-analysis of meta-analyses.28 They merged 106 meta-analyses representing over 20,000 individual studies involving more than 12 million people. It included over 21,000 measures of 386 traits. The researchers found that the differences between men and women on 85 percent of traits were small to nonexistent, 12 percent were medium, and 3 percent were large. The average difference between men and women—on all traits included—fell into the small category. The bell curve in Figure 3.1 depicts the small difference in levels of self-esteem between men and women, revealing that men’s and women’s self-esteem levels are much more similar than different. The results of this meta-synthesis don’t support the idea that men and women are exactly the same, but it does offer strong evidence—the strongest scientific evidence currently conceivable—that they’re more alike than different. The Disney website misrepresents the truth about the relationship between sex and gender. It, along with many other media sources in U.S. society, socially constructs the subcategories of male and female, making them signify caricatures of work and home, respectively. Depending on what identities we carry, certain stereotypes apply. As individuals living in the world, we have to contend with the fact that others expect us to embody those stereotypes. The expectation that we perform our identities is the subject of the next section, which focuses on age. Glossary gender the ideas, traits, interests, and skills that we associate with being biologically male or female sex gender binary the idea that people come in two and only two types, males who are masculine and females who are feminine intersex people with physical characteristics typical of both people assigned male and people assigned female at birth cisgender people who are assigned male at birth who identify as men as well as people assigned female at birth who identify as women transgender people assigned male at birth who don’t identify as men as well as people assigned female at birth who don’t identify as women nonbinary people who identify as both man and woman or neither man nor woman stereotype clusters of ideas attached by social convention to people with specific social identities content analysis a research method that involves counting and describing patterns of themes in media a reference to physical traits related to sexual reproduction Endnotes Note 25: Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (San Diego: Harcourt, Brace, 1922).Return to reference 25​ Note 26: Elizabeth L. Haines, Kay Deaux, and Nicole Lofaro, “The Times They Are a-Changing... or Are They Not? A Comparison of Gender Stereotypes, 1983–2014,” Psychology of Women Quarterly 40, no. 3 (2016): 353–363, https://doi.org/10.1177/0361684316634081.Return to reference 26 Note 27: Carol J. Auster and Claire S. Mansbach, “The Gender Marketing of Toys: An Analysis of Color and Type of Toy on the Disney Store Website,” Sex Roles 67 (2012): 375–388, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11199-012-0177-8.Return to reference 27 Note 28: Ethan Zell, Zlatan Krizan, and Sabrina R. Teeter, “Evaluating Gender Similarities and Differences Using Metasynthesis,” American Psychologist 70, no. 1 (2015): 10–20, https://doi.org/10.1037/a0038208.Return to reference 28 Note 68: Nico Tortorella and Bethany C. Meyers, “Inside Nico Tortorella and Bethany Meyers’ Private, Epic Wedding,” Them, March 17, 2018, https://www.them.us/story/inside-nico-tortorella-and- bethany-meyers-private-epic-wedding.Return to reference 68 STEP 4: PERFORM Act Your Age At least some of the differences we see between people are the result of stereotypes. Collectively, we bring stereotypes to life by acting in ways that are consistent with them. None of us perfectly conforms to the stereotypes that apply to us, and many of us feel uncomfortable about conforming, but we all perform our identities at least somewhat. That is, we behave in ways that are consistent with the expectations other people have for members of our social groups. This is described as doing identity, or the active performance of social identities. To elaborate this idea, let’s consider age. The sociologist Cheryl Laz wrote that it “seems almost absurd to think about age as anything but a chronological fact and as something every individual simply is.”29 Age, though, is also something we do. There are right ways to be twenty, fifty, or eighty, and we have a specific language with which we admonish people who do their age wrong. Laz explained: “Act your age. Stop being so childish,” we say to other adults we think are being irresponsible. “Act your age; you’re not as young as you used to be,” we say to an old person pursuing “youthful” activities. The sanctioned actions vary, but the command “act!” remains the same. When we say “act your age” we press for behavior that conforms to norms.30 The social construction of age is part of why the internet found such delight in the modeling of Liu Xianping.31 At seventy-two years old, Liu began modeling for his granddaughter’s boutique, which catered to teen girls. Liu dressed in women’s clothes, and specifically in clothes for very young women. He was playing with the performance of both gender and age. The result was a set of delightfully unusual fashion photographs. The doing of age extends to our appearance, our behavior, and how we spend our time and with whom. When we encounter a person, for example, we look at their face and body to determine how old they are, but we also look at other visual cues too: clothing, hair, makeup, accessories. There’s a certain phase of life, for example, in which it’s considered socially acceptable to wear a mini-skirt, and it has both a beginning and an end. Likewise, thirty-five-year-old women who dye their hair to hide their gray may be praised for “keeping themselves up,” while sixty-five-year-olds who do so might be criticized as “trying too hard.” Middle-aged moms are supposed to have minivans, while middle-aged men are allowed to splurge on a sports car. Liu Xianping’s fashion photographs went viral because he posed not just in women’s clothes, but in young women’s clothes. The seventy-three- year-old grandfather was performing both femininity and youth, and in the most delightful way. Our behavior is expected to change with age too. Eight-year-olds and eighty-year-olds are not supposed to talk explicitly about sex. We’re surprised when grandmothers curse and unsurprised when elderly uncles express out-of-date opinions. There’s a certain age range when it’s acceptable to go out and get irresponsibly drunk several nights each week. But the almost-forty binge drinker might be scolded: “You’re not as young as you used to be” and “Don’t you think it’s time to settle down?” “Settling down” is a reference to the fact that, as we get older, we are expected to fulfill specific roles in a predictable sequence, like spouse, homeowner, parent and, finally, grandparent. That’s why we say things like “they married young” or “he retired late” and why we have labels for people who do things late, early, out of order, or never: “nontraditional student,” “teenage mother,” “single dad,” “spinster.” The fact that we have such sayings in our language reveals that age isn’t natural. If it was, we wouldn’t have the opportunity to be surprised when ninety-year-olds curse, because they wouldn’t. Likewise, if it was natural to go gray at sixty-five—but not one day before—no one would buy dye to hide their gray. And if it was natural for women to have their first child at thirty, we wouldn’t have to instruct them to be abstinent or use birth control before then. Aging is natural, but age is socially constructed. It’s an identity that’s divvied up into sequential life stages onto which stereotypes are heaped. Aging is also stigmatized. Americans generally consider it better to be young than old. Hence the “over the hill” parties. This is true for sexual orientation, gender, and race and ethnicity too. Some identity subcategories are accorded greater esteem than others. This hierarchy building is the topic of the next section. Glossary doing identity the active performance of social identities Endnotes Note 29: Cheryl Laz, “Act Your Age,” Sociological Forum 13 (1998): 85, https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1022160015408.Return to reference 29 Note 30: Ibid.Return to reference 30​ Note 31: Ellie Krupnick, “Chinese Grandfather, Liu Xianping, Models Women’s Clothing for Granddaughter’s Boutique, Yuekou,” Huffington Post, November 20, 2012, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/20/chinese-grandfather-liu- xianping-models-womens-clothing_n_2164197.html.Return to reference 31 STEP 5: RANK The Building of Body Hierarchies Prior to around 1900, plumpness was desirable.32 An ample waistline on a woman was believed to be both beautiful and necessary: evidence that she could make hearty, healthy babies of equal rotundness. Thinness was for preteens. Grown women were supposed to be voluptuous. Accordingly, women were admired for being buxom. The early advocate for women’s rights, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, was praised for being “plump as a partridge,” while her counterpart Susan B. Anthony was criticized for being too skinny. Stanton, protective of Anthony, admitted that she was “sharp, angular, [and] cross-grained” on the outside but “broad and generous” on the inside.33 Fashion of the time emphasized women’s curves, revealing extravagant arcs of flesh. Corsets were used not just to cinch the waist but to squeeze out the breasts and hips. The fashion didn’t hide women’s girth so much as arrange it in pleasing ways. Upper-class women even padded their bodies underneath their clothes and added bustles to artificially inflate their rear end. They wore “fat suits.” On purpose. On a man, a fat body signified a fat bank account. Only rich men could eat until they were good and stout. Proud of their size, men formed fat men’s clubs: networking opportunities for the rich and powerful. They made a good time of it, eating together, hosting competitive weigh-ins, and engaging in contests of strength. Prominent physicians agreed that fat men were the very picture of virility. “Plumpness, roundness, size... are rightly believed to indicate well-balanced health,” said one.34 A man without heft was considered insufficiently masculine: soft, resource-poor, sexually feeble. The story behind how the United States went from a fat-loving to a fat- hating society furthers one of this chapter’s central arguments: that the identities that matter to us, and our evaluation of them, is a matter of cultural and historical change. In this case, the change in fat’s value occurred in response to a new abundance. Agricultural production more than doubled between 1870 and 1900.35 Food was plentiful and cheap. This made fat bodies accessible to all, not just the rich. In the early 1900s, fat men had the reputation of being wealthy, strong, and sexually virile. Proud of their heft, they formed fat men's clubs that celebrated their large bodies. Rising rates of other types of consumption—the use of wages to purchase goods and services—left cultural critics worried that Americans were becoming greedy, materialistic, and immodest. In 1899, in fact, the sociologist Thorstein Veblen coined the phrase conspicuous consumption to describe the phenomenon of spending elaborately on items and services with the sole purpose of displaying one’s wealth.36 All of this undisciplined self-indulgence offended the ideals of self-restraint that characterized much of American history. The rich, in particular—perhaps because they were uniquely positioned to spend lavishly—embodied this new form of moral failing, calling into question their collective character. Thin bodies were a two-part solution for the rich.37 First, now that anyone could get fat, the rich needed a new way to create a positive distinction between themselves and the middle and working classes. They used their outsized power to turn the tables on the rest of the population, embracing and valorizing thinness. Then, they turned their thin bodies—accessible to them because they had leisure time and financial resources—into a symbol of their supposedly superior willpower. Regardless of how loosely and flashily they spent their money, their bodies stood as evidence of self- discipline, proof that they were a higher-quality people than the unrestrained masses. In a sudden reversal, thin became good and fat became bad. Today, to be fat is to carry stigma, a personal attribute that is widely devalued by members of one’s society. Having aborted a pregnancy can be stigmatizing, for example, as is being unable to afford housing or publicly proclaiming a very unpopular opinion. Some bodies are stigmatized too. People who are missing teeth, for instance, are often discredited, as are people with certain kinds of physical disabilities. Fat bodies are an example of a stigmatizing physical trait. Content analyses of media show that fat characters are often criticized, made the butt of jokes, and portrayed as self-hating. They’re more likely than thin characters to be presented as unemployed, ugly, unhappy, angry, unintelligent, unlovable, violent, and evil.38 Media often portray fat people as unhealthy, which is one of the most pernicious lies about fat. A recent meta-analysis of ninety- seven studies with a combined sample of nearly 3 million individuals, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, found that the healthiest people in the United States—the ones least likely to get sick or die early—are ones who are defined as “overweight.”39 The sociologist Patricia Hill Collins would call stigmatizing ideas like these controlling images, pervasive negative stereotypes that serve to justify or uphold inequality. She originally discussed the concept when describing stereotypes about Black women, feeling that the word stereotype didn’t do justice to the degree of harm these representations did to them, nor how damaging stereotypes are to wider debates about public policy. Controlling images, she argued, do more than characterize members of low-status groups one way or another; they do so in distinctly harmful ways, by demeaning, diminishing, or demonizing them. In doing so, she argues, they “make racism, sexism, poverty, and other forms of social injustice appear to be natural, normal, and inevitable parts of everyday life.”40 Such misrepresentation matters. Asked about a series of trade-offs, almost half of respondents said they’d rather give up a year of their life than be obese.41 A quarter said they’d rather be infertile, 30 percent said they’d rather get divorced, and 15 percent said they’d rather be depressed or become an alcoholic. These responses reflect prejudice, attitudinal bias against individuals based on their membership in a social group. Most people who live in the United States harbor at least some bias against people seen as fat.42 In the past few decades—armed with a wide array of research methods— scholars have made impressive strides in understanding prejudice. One of these scholars is the sociologist Cecilia Ridgeway. She grew up in the 1960s, a time when the United States was on the brink of revolutionary changes, and she was inspired to study inequality. She graduated high school at just sixteen years old and ultimately embarked on a career-long research program.43 She would win lifetime achievement awards for her work on gender inequality and serve a term as the president of the American Sociological Association. Ridgeway’s research has produced robust evidence that highly regarded traits are more often and more easily attributed to people with some identities than others. Identities differ, in other words, in the extent to which they’re attributed status, high or low esteem. High-status identities are ones for which we have high regard, so people with those identities will be seen as generally more valuable than people without those identities. Unless there’s a reason to think otherwise, people with high-status identities will be assumed to be better than others in a variety of ways: smarter, nicer, more talented, better looking, more trustworthy and generous, harder working, exceptional parents, more devoted friends, and better in bed. There is status we can earn, like the kind that comes with good deeds, learned skills, and impressive accomplishments, but there’s also status that we are simply granted by virtue of who we are. Above and beyond stereotypes, our thinking about people with different social identities is warped by these ideas. Sociologists call them status beliefs, collectively shared ideas about which social groups are more or less deserving of esteem. Sometimes our status beliefs are attitudes that we hold explicitly. Explicit attitudes are beliefs that we choose to have or at least know we have. Other times these attitudes are implicit. Implicit attitudes are beliefs that we’ve absorbed involuntarily and of which we’re mostly unaware.44 We learn implicit attitudes through socialization and our brains retrieve these beliefs automatically, often without our conscious knowledge. While only some of us carry explicitly prejudicial beliefs, it’s probably fair to say that we all carry implicit prejudices. In fact, people’s explicit and implicit attitudes often diverge; many people committed to fairness nonetheless test positive for implicit bias.45 Since our implicit attitudes are not conscious, scholars invented a creative way to detect them. They do so with a form of computer-assisted research, or a set of methods that uses computers to collect data (see “The Science of Sociology”). To test for implicit attitudes, research subjects play a kind of computer game in which they sort low- and high-status ideas and identities. Sometimes they’re asked to pair identities and ideas with a similar level of status (like thin with good or fat with bad). Other times, they’re asked to pair identities and ideas with inverse levels of status (like thin with bad and fat with good). We’re generally able to match positive ideas with group members we see as highly valued just a hair quicker than we can match them with negative ideas, and vice versa. Longer times mean weaker associations and shorter times mean stronger associations. Computers can measure the speed of our responses with great accuracy, giving us a real, true test of our implicit biases. In this way, the test gets straight into our brains, able to detect implicit biases that we may not know we have. At the time of this writing, over a million people have taken the implicit attitudes test for preference for fat or thin people: 9 percent showed a preference for fat people, 15 percent little or no preference either way, and 84 percent showed a preference for thin people.46 (You can test your own implicit biases by going to Harvard’s Project Implicit website.) In sum, prejudice isn’t something we’re born with; it’s something we learn, whether we like it or not. Most Americans have learned to fear fat, both in others and in ourselves, and to dislike or disdain other kinds of people too. Tests of explicit and implicit attitudes also reveal prejudice against people of color, sexual minorities, immigrants, people without advanced education, the rich and the poor, the conventionally unattractive, atheists, Muslims, Jews, and conservative Christians.47 These are socially constructed hierarchies. THE SCIENCE OF SOCIOLOGY Computational Sociology Computer-assisted research involves a set of methods that uses computers. Computers can detect and record things that human observers generally cannot, like the direction and trajectory of people’s gazes, minute differences in the length of time it takes to respond to a prompt, or the brain activity of an individual exposed to different images or sounds. One form of computer-assisted research is computational sociology, a research method that uses computers to extract and analyze data. Computing power has become especially useful in the era of “big data,” extremely large and growing sources of information. Google has uploaded, for example, 40 million books to the web, while Twitter users send 500 million tweets every single day. This is easily accessible information, but at a scale unmanageable by humans. Computers, however, can be programmed to do the work in our place. Sociologists program computers to scour the internet for certain kinds of information, then program them to “read” that information for specific kinds of data and organize it in interpretable ways. For computational sociologists, data can include “digital life” (including social media accounts, discussion boards, streaming sites, search records, and collective projects like Wikipedia), “digital traces” (incomplete records of online activity, including tax data, voter records, death certificates, and data on political contributions), and material that has been “digitalized” (originally nonelectronic information that’s been uploaded, like book, newspaper, and photo archives). Computational sociology is essential for taking advantage of the flood of data made available by the introduction of the internet. Without it, sociologists would be at a loss to contribute valuable knowledge about how life works in the digital age. The ability to program computers, write algorithms, and input massive amounts of data also lets sociologists join other scientists in building sophisticated models and predicting the likely outcomes of interaction on a massive scale. We are carriers of prejudice, but we’re also its victims. Some of us carry many stigmatized or otherwise devalued identities, while others of us carry few. The latter are the status elite, people who carry many positively regarded social identities. The advantages and disadvantages that come with our positions in social hierarchies will be an ongoing theme of the rest of this book. The five steps of social identity construction, then, involve choosing a human feature on which to differentiate some people from others, creating subcategories, and giving those categories symbolic meaning. We are then held accountable to those meanings and pressed to perform our identities. And, finally, identity subcategories are placed in hierarchies, making some more advantageous to carry than others. Thus far, identities have been discussed in isolation; for example, race and ethnicity separately from sexual orientation. But that’s not how we actually experience our identities. Rather, we experience them all at once. This fact is called intersectionality. Glossary consumption the use of wages to purchase goods and services conspicuous consumption spending elaborately on items and services with the sole purpose of displaying one’s wealth stigma a personal attribute that is widely devalued by members of one’s society controlling images pervasive negative stereotypes that serve to justify or uphold inequality prejudice attitudinal bias against individuals based on their membership in a social group status high or low esteem status beliefs collectively shared ideas about which social groups are more or less deserving of esteem status elite people who carry many positively regarded social identities computational sociology a research method that uses computers to extract and analyze data Endnotes Note 32: Peter N. Stearns, Fat History: Bodies and Beauty in the Modern West (New York: New York University Press, 1997).Return to reference 32​ Note 33: Amy Erdman Farrell, Fat Shame: Stigma and the Fat Body in American Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2011).Return to reference 33​ Note 34: Stearns, Fat History.Return to reference 34​ Note 35: Giovanni Federico, “The Growth of World Agricultural Production, 1800–1938,” Research in Economic History 22 (2004): 125–181, https://doi.org/10.1016/S0363-3268(04)22003-1.Return to reference 35​ Note 36: Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Macmillan 1899).Return to reference 36​ Note 37: Harvey A. Levenstein, Paradox of Plenty: A Social History of Eating in Modern America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).Return to reference 37​ Note 38: Farrell, Fat Shame.Return to reference 38​ Note 39: Katherine M. Flegal, Brian K. Kit, Heather Orpana, and Barry I. Graubard, “Association of All-Cause Mortality with Overweight and Obesity Using Standard Body Mass Index Categories: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis,” Journal of the American Medical Association 309, no. 1 (2013): 71–82, https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.2012.113905; Abigail C. Saguy, What’s Wrong with Fat? (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).Return to reference 39​ Note 40: Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (New York: Routledge, 2008): 69.Return to reference 40​ Note 41: Marlene B. Schwartz, Lenny R. Vartanian, Brian A. Nosek, and Kelly D. Brownell, “The Influence of One’s Own Body Weight on Implicit and Explicit Anti-fat Bias,” Obesity 14, no. 3 (2006): 440– 447, https://doi.org/10.1038/oby.2006.58.Return to reference 41 Note 42: Rheanna N. Ata and J. Kevin Thompson, “Weight Bias in the Media: A Review of Recent Research,” Obesity Facts 3, no. 1 (2010): 41–46; Rebecca M. Puhl and Chelsea A. Heuer, “The Stigma of Obesity: A Review and Update,” Obesity 17, no. 5 (2009): 941–964, https://doi.org/10.1038/oby.2008.636.Return to reference 42 Note 43: Shelley J. Correll and Kathryne M. Young, “Meet the 2013 ASA President: Cecilia Ridgeway,” American Sociological Association, http://www.asanet.org/cecilia-ridgeway.Return to reference 43 Note 44: Cheryl Staats, “State of the Science: Implicit Bias Review 2014,” Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity, http://kirwaninstitute.osu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/2014- implicit-bias.pdf.Return to reference 44 Note 45: Wilhelm Hofmann et al., “A Meta-Analysis on the Correlation between the Implicit Association Test and Explicit Self- Report Measures,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 31, no. 10 (2005): 1369–1385, https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167205275613.Return to reference 45 Note 46: Harvard University, “Project Implicit,” accessed November 10, 2020, https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit; Schwartz, Vartanian, Nosek, and Brownell, “Body Weight and Anti-Fat Bias,” 440– 447.Return to reference 46​ Note 47:​ William J. Hall et al., “Implicit Racial/Ethnic Bias among Health Care Professionals and Its Influence on Health Care Outcomes: A Systematic Review,” American Journal of Public Health 105, no. 12 (2015): 60–76, https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2015.302903; Janice A. Sabin, Rachel G. Riskind, and Brian A. Nosek, “Health Care Providers’ Implicit and Explicit Attitudes Toward Lesbian Women and Gay Men,” American Journal of Public Health 105, no. 9 (2015): 1831–1841, https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2015.302631; Elizabeth R. Peterson, Christine M. Rubie-Davies, Danny Osborne, and Chris G. Sibley, “Teachers’ Explicit Expectations and Implicit Prejudiced Attitudes to Educational Achievement: Relations with Student Achievement and the Ethnic Achievement Gap,” Learning and Instruction 42 (2016): 123–140, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.learninstruc.2016.01.010; Penny Edgell, Douglas Hartmann, Evan Stewart, and Joseph Gerteis, “Atheists and Other Cultural Outsiders: Moral Boundaries and the Non-Religious in the United States,” Social Forces 95, no. 2 (2016): 607–638, https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/sow063; James E. Driskell and Brian Mullen, “Status, Expectations, and Behavior: A Meta-Analytic Review and Test of the Theory,” Personal and Social Psychology Bulletin 16, no. 3 (1990): 541–553, https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167290163012; Will Kalkhoff and Shane R. Thye, “Expectation States Theory and Research: New Observations From Meta-Analysis,” Sociological Methods & Research 35, no. 2 (2006): 219–249, https://doi.org/10.1177/0049124106290311; Cecilia L. Ridgeway, “Understanding the Nature of Status Inequality: Why Is It Everywhere? Why Does It Matter?” Mayhew Lecture, University of South Carolina (2018): 1–24; Amy J. Cuddy, Susan T. Fiske, and Peter Glick, “The BIAS Map: Behaviors from Intergroup Affect and Stereotypes,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 92, no. 4 (2007): 631–648, https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.92.4.631; Susan T. Fiske, Amy J. Cuddy, Peter Glick, and Jun Xu, “A Model of (Often Mixed) Stereotype Content: Competence and Warmth Respectively Follow from Perceived Status and Competition,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 82, no. 6 (2002): 878–902, https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.82.6.878; Schwartz, Vartanian, Nosek, and Brownell, “Body Weight and Anti-Fat Bias,” 440–447; Brian A. Nosek et al., “Pervasiveness and Correlates of Implicit Attitudes and Stereotypes,” European Review of Social Psychology 18, no. 1 (2007): 1–53, https://doi.org/10.1080/10463280701489053; Laurie A. Rudman, Joshua Feinberg, and Kimberly Fairchild, “Minority Members’ Implicit Attitudes: Automatic Ingroup Bias as a Function of Group Status,” Social Cognition 20, no. 4 (2002): 294– 320, https://doi.org/10.1521/soco.20.4.294.19908; Tiffani “Tie” S. Wang-Jones et al., “Development of Gender Identity Implicit Association Tests to Assess Attitudes Toward Transmen and Transwomen,” Psychology of Sexual Orientation and Gender Diversity 4, no. 2 (2017): 169–183, https://doi.org/10.1037/sgd0000218; Rudman, Feinberg, and Fairchild, “Minority Members’ Implicit Attitudes”; William A. Cunningham, John B. Nezlek, and Mahzarin R. Banaji, “Implicit and Explicit Ethnocentrism: Revisiting the Ideologies of Prejudice,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 30, no. 10 (2004): 1332–1346, https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167204264654. Return to reference 47 INTERSECTIONALITY AND DISABILITY The social theorist Anna Julia Cooper (1858–1964) was born to an enslaved mother in Raleigh, North Carolina.48 Her mother, like all enslaved women, lived with the ever-looming possibility of White men’s sexual coercion and violence.49 Though her mother never said so, Cooper believed that her father was the man who enslaved them, or perhaps his brother.50 Hence, she lived with a visceral understanding that the experience of enslavement was different for women and men. Men were not spared the violence of sexual assault, but women bore its brunt. And while both men and women loved the children in their care, women uniquely carried and birthed the children conceived against their will. The mother of Black feminism, Anna Julia Cooper wrote the first book dedicated to the unique experiences of Black American women. Blessedly, the Emancipation Proclamation was signed when Cooper was five years old. At nine, she was granted a scholarship to begin her education. An excellent student, she ultimately enrolled at Oberlin College in 1881—one of the only colleges in the United States to accept Black students—and she opted for the more rigorous four-year “Gentlemen’s course” over the lighter two-year “Ladies’ course.”51 Eventually, she would become only the fourth American Black woman to earn a PhD, graduating from the Sorbonne in Paris at age sixty-seven. Cooper’s most important contribution to sociology may have been in part inspired by the circumstances of her birth. In a book titled A Voice from the South, Cooper argued that understanding the lives of Black women required thinking simultaneously about race and gender.52 Moreover, she suggested that Black women have unique insights not available to White women or Black men. She insisted on the importance of this point of view and concluded that Black people would never be truly free if Black women and Black men were not raised up in equal measure. This was the first book- length consideration of the lives of Black women, and her insights were so groundbreaking that she is now known as the mother of Black feminism. Almost exactly one hundred years later, another Black feminist—the law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw—would coin the phrase intersectionality to draw attention to the fact that our lives are shaped by multiple interacting identities.53 She came up with the term in response to a lawsuit against General Motors brought on behalf of five Black women.54 Their lawyers argued that because the company wasn’t hiring Black women, they were unfairly barred from employment at the company. Lawyers for the defense countered that because General Motors hired White women (that is, women) and Black men (that is, Black people), they were clearly not discriminating against either women or Black people. The court agreed. The women lost the case. Crenshaw used the lawsuit to illustrate the importance of thinking intersectionally. Echoing Cooper, she argued that the lives of Black women are shaped not by race or gender but by race and gender. This meant that their experiences, and the nature of their disadvantages in American society, were distinct from those of men of the same race and women of other races. General Motors may not have been discriminating against Black people or women, but they absolutely were discriminating against Black women. Since Crenshaw reintroduced the idea in the early 1990s, scholars have expanded the concept, demonstrating that no single identity truly captures anyone’s life experiences. To illustrate, this final section explores some of the experiences of people with disabilities. The experience of impairment is inflected by all of a person’s identities, including gender, sexual orientation, body size, and race. Exactly how an impairment influences our self-concept is often related to gender. Men more so than women are tasked with being strong and independent, so for them, a disability can threaten the gendered expectation that they be able to take care of themselves without help. This was how acquiring a spinal cord injury felt to a twenty-seven-year-old man named Forrest. He lives with his grandmother and depended greatly on both her and his brother to get by. “I can only do so much,” he said. “I’m always gonna need help.” Isaac, who also lives with a spinal cord injury, described the feeling in relation to his decreased sexual prowess. “You can’t throw [a sexual partner] on the table or the stove or the counter.... It’s just impossible. So that kinda takes some of your manhood too.”55 For women, a disability can affect their ability to perform physical attractiveness.56 Stereotypes about people with disabilities portray them as unsexy, even asexual, so women who are visibly impaired may find that their femininity and sexuality become invisible. “Ever since I’ve been in a wheelchair, I’ve stopped getting catcalled,” one woman observed, speculating that it’s because men stopped seeing her as “potentially doable.”57 Another woman agreed: “I am sure that other people see a wheelchair first, me second, and a woman third, if at all.”58 Other identities add further twists to the experience of being a wheelchair user. Andrew Gurza, for example, is a gay man with cerebral palsy. He writes about dating at the intersection of sexual orientation, gender, and ability. In one essay, he takes up the issue of the gay bar. All wheelchair users, he explains, will discover that some bars and clubs are inaccessible, but for a gay man wanting to visit a gay space, the options can be especially limited. There aren’t that many gay bars to begin with, so if some are eliminated because of accessibility issues, the options may be few and far between, maybe across town, or not where one’s friends want to go. As Gurza points out, this is about more than just the pleasure of “the prowl”; it’s about identity. Often a gay bar is the first place that a gay person feels truly safe. It’s one of the only places that gay people can be themselves without fear, especially if they live in an otherwise intolerant community. That, Gurza explains, is the “deeper issue”: “By not having access to these spaces, I am denied the opportunity to... [go] where [gay] sex and sexuality is free and fun.”59 Gurza struggles not just because he’s gay or male or disabled. It’s the specific intersection of the three. Change any one of those qualities and the particular struggles he faces would change. Kali, a woman with a connective tissue disorder who uses a mechanized wheelchair, sits at the intersection of disability and fat. This, she argues with frustration, is doubly stigmatizing. When thin people use wheelchairs, the assumption is that they require it.60 Its use is allowed by the viewer, while the fat person’s use is read as evidence of laziness (a controlling image of fat people). Kali routinely attracts stares and comments. Strangers express disgust, assuming she’s fat but otherwise healthy and therefore just extraordinarily lazy. “It makes me so damn mad,” she writes, “[to see them] har har over the way I use a scooter because I’m fat.”61 In reality, her joints and ligaments would strain to support her at any weight. Studies show that fat women like Kali are penalized more than fat men.62 The sociologist S. Bear Bergman, for example, who’s a self-described “gender-jammer” and uses the pronoun “he,” sometimes passes for male and sometimes for female.63 This has allowed Bergman to experience life as both a fat woman and a fat man. As a fat man, he confirms, he’s perceived as a “big dude” but “not outside the norm.” As a fat woman, though, others perceive him as “revolting.” “I am not only unattractively mannish,” he writes, “but also grossly fat.... G-d help me if I get caught eating (or even shopping [for food]) in public as a woman.”64 Fat women are stigmatized more heavily than fat men, and fat White women are penalized more than fat women of color.65 Women perceived to be heterosexual are judged more harshly for being fat than women believed to be non-heterosexual. They, in turn, are also judged less harshly than men perceived to be gay or bisexual, who are held to higher standards than men perceived to be heterosexual. So, as a fat White woman who is read as heterosexual, Kali attracts higher levels of fat stigma than people with a different constellation of identities. Cara Liebowitz, another White woman who uses a wheelchair, is reasonably thin, so she doesn’t deal with the exact same problems faced by Kali.She’s in her twenties and conventionally attractive. At worst, she says, people infantilize her and treat her as helpless. “I am the embodiment of innocence,” she writes: “eternally fragile and childlike.”66 Consequently, Liebowitz often struggles to get people to take her seriously as a robust adult who should be treated with respect. Her boyfriend has a very different experience. He’s young and fit, too, and he uses a wheelchair as well, but he’s Black and male. And that makes all the difference. “[W]hen people look at him,” Liebowitz writes, “they assume that his disability resulted from violence.” The stereotype of Black men as criminal shapes how people read his use of a wheelchair. “I realized that even though my boyfriend and I share the same disability,” Liebowitz explains, “we are having very different experiences in how society sees and treats our bodies. While people often viewed me with pity, they viewed him with distrust and even fear.”67 We live with many identities. Each interacts with the others we carry, creating constellations that intermix in complicated ways. Understanding any one person’s experience will mean seeing the whole person and attending to all their identities as well as their intersections. COMING UP... GROUP MEMBERSHIP is something that humans crave. We’re quick to draw lines between us and them. The groups that emerge as a result of this process—our social identities—are social constructs. We learn to think of ourselves in terms of these constructs. We perform our identities, too, and bring them to life. Our identities become a part of our self-concept, though if we had been born in a different time or place, we would think of ourselves differently. These identities are often a source of pleasure, pride, and solidarity. But they also grant us different levels of esteem. Stereotypes suggest that we’re good and bad at this or that, while status beliefs influence whether we’re considered generally worthy of esteem. Depending on how our identities intersect, this may bring us advantages or disadvantages. Our sense of self emerges, then, out of both our engagement with other people and the specific identities made available to us by our cultures. As the next chapter will show, we then bring those identities into interaction with other people. It discusses what sociologists have taught us about how we “do” everyday life. It marvels at the intricacy of it all, while also considering how our identities influence how we act. A chapter about how to be ordinary, and who can be ordinary, is next. Glossary intersectionality the recognition that our lives are shaped by multiple interacting identities Endnotes Note 48: Patricia Madoo Lengermann and Gillian Niebrugge, The Women Founders: Sociology and Social Theory 1830–1930 (Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, 2006).Return to reference 48​ Note 49: Rachel A. Feinstein, When Rape Was Legal: The Untold History of Sexual Violence during Slavery (New York: Routledge, 2018).Return to reference 49 Note 50: Archives of the Episcopal Church, “The Church Awakens: African Americans and the Struggle for Justice” (online exhibit), “Anna Julia Haywood Cooper, 1858–1964,” accessed November 10, 2020, https://episcopalarchives.org/church- awakens/exhibits/show/leadership/lay/cooper.Return to reference 50 Note 51: Episcopal Archives, “Anna Julia Hayward Cooper.” Return to reference 51 Note 52: Anna J. Cooper, A Voice From the South (Xenia, OH: The Aldine Printing Company, 1892).Return to reference 52​ Note 53:​ Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review 43, no. 6 (1991): 1241–1299, https://doi.org/10.2307/1229039; Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987); Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (New York: Routledge, 1991); Angela Y. Davis, Women, Race and Class (New York: Random House, 1983); Trinh T. Minh-ha, Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1989); Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, eds., This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (New York: Kitchen Table, 1981). Return to reference 53 Note 54: Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,” University of Chicago Legal Forum 1, no. 8 (1989): 139–167, https://philpapers.org/archive/CREDTI.pdf.Return to reference 54 Note 55: R. Noam Ostrander, “When Identities Collide: Masculinity, Disability, and Race,” Disability & Society 23, no. 6 (2008): 585–597, https://doi.org/10.1080/09687590802328451.Return to reference 55 Note 56: Tom Shakespeare, Kath Gillespie-Sells, and Dominic Davies, The Sexual Politics of Disability: Untold Desires. (London: Cassell, 1996).Return to reference 56​ Note 57: Fem Korsten, “Grappling with My Sexuality Now That I’m in a Wheelchair,” 2012, on the xoJane UK website, accessed January 29, 2017, http://www.xojane.co.uk/issues/disability-sexuality-street- harassment (site discontinued).Return to reference 57​ Note 58: Shakespeare, Gillespie-Sells, and Davies, Sexual Politics of Disability.Return to reference 58​ Note 59: Andrew Gurza, “Opening the Door to the Deliciously Disabled: The Importance of Having Accessibility in Sexual Spaces,” updated February 2, 2016, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/andrew- morrisongurza/opening-the-door-to-the-d_1_b_6868040.html.Return to reference 59​ Note 60: All Dolled Down, “The Intersectionality of Thin Privilege and Disability,” Tumblr, 2012, http://alldolleddown.tumblr.com/post/27362249503/the- intersectionality-of-thin-privilege-and-disability.Return to reference 60 Note 61: Kali, “About,” Brilliant Mind Broken Body (blog), 2009, accessed January 29, 2017, https://brilliantmindbrokenbody.wordpress.com/about/.Return to reference 61​ Note 62: Abigail C. Saguy, “Why Fat Is a Feminist Issue,” Sex Roles 68, no. 9 (2012): 600–607, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11199-011-0084- 4.Return to reference 62​ Note 63: S. Bear Bergman, “About,” on S. Bear Bergman’s website, accessed November 10, 2020, http://www.sbearbergman.com/about/.Return to reference 63​ Note 64: S. Bear Bergman, “Part-Time Fatso,” in The Fat Studies Reader, eds. Esther Rothblum and Sondra Solovay (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 139–142.Return to reference 64 Note 65: Janna Fikkan and Esther D. Rothblum, “Is Fat a Feminist Issue? Exploring the Gendered Nature of Weight Bias,” Sex Roles 66, no. 9 (2012): 575–592, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11199-011-0022-5; Saguy, “Why Fat Is a Feminist Issue,” 600–607.Return to reference 65 Note 66: Cara Liebowitz, “At the Intersection of White Privilege and Disability,” The Body Is Not an Apology, 2015, https://thebodyisnotanapology.com/magazine/at-the-intersection-of- White-privilege-and-disability/.Return to reference 66 Note 67: Ibid.Return to reference 67