Scene from the Disney film "Beauty and the Beast" Tags: children/youth, gender, violence, femininity, types of domestic abuse, socialization, 00 to 05 mins Year: 2002 Length: 3:41 Access: YouTube Summary: Although it may happen behind closed doors, domestic violence is a public issue that has serious psychological, social, and physical consequences. This short clip (start 0:00; end 3:41) from the documentary Mickey Mouse Monopoly (2002) is useful for illustrating how pop cultural messages in children's media socialize girls (and boys) to accept and overlook intimate partner violence. This clip brings to light the normalization and romanticization of partner abuse in Beauty and the Beast. As scholars in the documentary argue, the film teaches girls that a woman should be patient and supportive of her abusive partner in order to help him change his behavior (i.e., transform into a prince). Such messages are harmful when, in reality, women and girls should be encouraged to leave abusive relationships and seek help if their partner is mean, violent, and coercive. After screening the clip, instructors might ask some of the following questions: What are the types of partner abuse we see in this clip? How does Disney sugarcoat the Beast’s abuse as “just a short temper?” How might these messages about the normalization and romanticization of partner abuse be dangerous to children? The clip is a great segue into a broader discussion of how femininity is represented in Disney films. What desirable feminine qualities are associated with princesses (e.g., beauty, helplessness, passivity, etc)? What kinds of undesirable qualities are associated with female villains in Disney films (e.g., independent, single, agentic, powerful, ugly, etc.)? For additional teaching resources, check out this study guide for Mickey Mouse Monopoly, complete with assignment ideas and additional discussion questions. Submitted By: Patricia Louie
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Tags: capitalism, class, economic sociology, inequality, marx/marxism, political economy, social mvmts/social change/resistance, theory, class consciousness, exploitation, hegemony, ideology, 00 to 05 mins Year: 1998 Length: 1:14 Access: YouTube Summary: Disney's Pixar film, A Bug’s Life, follows the life of a young ant, Flik, who leads a rebellion against greedy grasshoppers that feed on food harvested by the ants. In this clip, Hopper, the head Grasshopper, berates one of his minions for suggesting that the grasshoppers give in to the demands of one ant. Hopper points out that one ant's actions may be miniscule in effect, but several ants acting in unified collective action can overthrow the entire system that allows the grasshoppers to live such a comfortable life of abundance. This clip can be used to stimulate discussion on several Marxian theories and concepts. For example, given that the grasshoppers rely on the surplus of the ants' labor to maintain their own way of life, it illustrates Marx's theory of exploitation. But as Hopper notes here, "those puny little ants outnumber us 100-to-1, and if they figure that out, there goes our way of life." So if the ants were to recognize their class interests in this system, thereby attaining class consciousness, they would be likely to organize and fight back against the exploitative grasshoppers. He further notes "it's not about food, it's about keeping those ants in line." Viewers may reflect on what Hopper means by this. Specifically, the grasshoppers cannot give in to one ant's demands and believe they are entitled to the food they harvested. They have to keep the ants from recognizing their right to the food, and therefore must maintain ideological control (i.e. belief in ideas that support the ruling class) over the oppressed ants. The film clip can also be used in illustrating social movements and inequalities in general because it provides a cogent example of collective agency and its possible relationship to individual resistance. Submitted By: Chris Hardnack The "You Can Play" project promotes sexual equality Tags: gender, inequality, lgbtq, prejudice/discrimination, sex/sexuality, social mvmts/social change/resistance, sports, 00 to 05 mins Year: 2012 Length: 1:00 Access: You Can Play Project Summary: The You Can Play project brings athletes, gay and straight, together to promote and educate other athletes and sports fans about equity in all levels of sport from professional to recreational. The project argues "It’s time to talk about sports and it’s time for us to create change. It’s one of the last bastions of society where discrimination and slurs are tolerated. It doesn’t have to be this way. There’s an assumption in sports that gay and lesbian players are shunned by all athletes. It’s just not true and You Can Play is dedicated to providing positive messages from athletes, coaches and fans." Their website features a growing library of video clips, each 30-60 seconds long, with professional and collegiate athletes and team personnel describing their support for the initiative. Some videos simply show athletes' meanings of sport without vocalizing their support, while other videos feature explicit statements of support (e.g. San Jose Sharks forward Tommy Wingels says "I am proud to support LGBT athletes everywhere"). The videos can be used to discuss gender and sexuality stereotypes in sport, to challenge these stereotypes, and show how sport can also function as a site for education and social change. Submitted By: Margaret Austin Smith Tags: children/youth, gender, psychology/social psychology, cognitive-development theory, gender constancy, socialization, 00 to 05 mins Year: 2009 Length: 0:41 Access: YouTube Summary: This short clip is useful for teaching cognitive-development theory or, the way child development affects gender socialization. Specifically, the clip demonstrates and challenges the concept of gender constancy and how our understanding of gender as something constant and immutable is not inherent. Rather, what we consider natural or obvious is the product of social learning, i.e., socialization. Note that the older girl seems to regard the categories of "boy" and "girl" as more stable and less susceptible to change. Submitted By: Michelle Sandhoff A scene from Victor Kossakovsky's film, "Lullaby." Tags: art/music, class, inequality, theory, bourdieu, homelessness, poverty, social distance, 00 to 05 mins Length: 3:02 Year: 2012 Access: New York Times Summary: Part of the larger multi-media project Why Poverty?, this short documentary film poem entitled "Lullaby" can be used to teach Pierre Bourdieu's concept of social distance. The film depicts homeless people sleeping by A.T.M. machines in banks, and the reactions of people who encounter them. In a description of the film, filmmaker Victor Kossakovsky references the term social distance: "I wanted the film to be more universal—to emphasize the social distance between most people and the homeless people they encounter, wherever they are in the world." While Kossakovsky does not mention Bourdieu, instructors can use the clip and Kossakovsky's quote to initiate a discussion around Bourdieu's application of the term. As Erica Haimes (2003) summarizes in her article, Embodied Spaces, Social Places and Bourdieu: Locating and Dislocating the Child in Family Relationships: "Notions of space and place are central to Bourdieu’s work. He uses the term space literally (activities occur, and actors act, in physical spaces which have practical and symbolic significance in relation to each other) and metaphorically (preferring the term ‘social space’ to ‘society’ (2000:130-5). Actors occupy multiple places within multiple 'relatively autonomous’ fields that together constitute the social space. These places constitute their status, class, social position: their place within society" (11). Bourdieu is interested in understanding the processes that result in people's varying social positions relative to one another or, the social distance between people. After screening the film, instructors can ask: What activities are occurring in this space? How are actors acting? What practical and symbolic significances do these activities and actions have in relation to each other? Further, how do these activities and actions constitute and reinforce the status, class, and social positions of the people in the film? For example, viewers might consider the different activities occurring in this space (e.g., sleeping vs. completing a bank transaction) and the different ways actors act in this space (e.g., laying on the ground, stepping over a sleeping person, turning back around, etc...), and how these different activities and actions shed light on the multiple statuses, classes, and positions—or social distance—actors occupy relative to one another in the film. Does the film succeed at illustrating, in Kossakovsky's words, "the social distance between most people and the homeless people they encounter"? Submitted By: Valerie Chepp Tags: crime/law/deviance, durkheim, theory, anomie, collective conscience, functionalism, mechanical social sanctions, norms, 00 to 05 mins Year: 2012 Length: 1:14 Access: YouTube Summary: Deviant acts are transgressions of social norms. For instance, when a woman uses the urinal in the men's restroom she is clearly breaking a social norm. Her transgression is an act of deviance. But people break rules all the time. Norms after all are only informal directives for action, and humans aren't programmable. In some cases, norms are accidentally broken, and in other cases, they are purposely broken by a rebellious actor, who is unafraid of the potential sanctions. In still other cases, social actors improvise to redefine the situation, thereby temporarily changing the set of applicable norms. For instance, the bathroom bound woman may signal verbally or through her body language that in order to avoid an embarrassing public scene she needs immediate access to a toilet, which just happens to be available in the men's room. By redefining the situation as an emergency, she gains access to the men's room. Norms are relatively malleable, but once they are codified as laws, much of this malleability is lost. Breaking a law is no less an act of deviance, but this particular type of transgression is known as a crime. Unlike norms, laws are generally more difficult to circumvent, and the formal social sanctions applied to law breakers are far more severe. The above clip features a school bus driver's amateur footage of an impatient woman illegally zooming past his bus' stop sign. In this unambiguous criminal act of deviance, she drives her car on a sidewalk next to the bus, just in front of a daycare center. Note the glee in the voices of the school children, who watch as the woman is stopped by a police officer who witnessed the entire event. In addition to catalyzing a conversation about deviance, norms, and law, the video can also be drawn on to discuss Durkheim's insight that just as this woman's crime seems to have improved the solidarity among children in the bus, crime in general can paradoxically improve the social solidarity within a society. In this case, the woman's $500.00 fine can be understood as a mechanical social sanction. It is an opportunity for those who witness and hear about the event to unite in their shared disgust over the brazen disregard for laws designed to protect the lives of children, and it's an opportunity to further promote the sacred values of the community. Submitted By: Lester Andrist Tags: economic sociology, inequality, methodology/statistics, organizations/occupations/work, prejudice/discrimination, race/ethnicity, affirmative action, field experiment, hiring, institutional discrimination, labor market, racism, stratification, 00 to 05 mins Length: 3:40 Year: 2010 Access: no free online access (but currently available on netflix); YouTube preview Summary: In this clip from Freakonomics (start 13:50; end 17:30), economist Sendhil Mullainathan discusses his (and co-author Marianne Bertrand's) 2004 field experiment that examined racial discrimination in the labor market (article here). They sent out 5,000 resumes to real job ads. Everything in the job ads were the same except that half of the names had traditionally African-American names (e.g. “Lakisha Washington” or “Jamal Jones”) and half had typical white names (e.g. “Emily Walsh” or “Greg Baker”). As they illustrate, people with African-American-sounding names have to send out 50% more resumes to get the same number of callbacks as people with white-sounding names. In the video, everyday people also discuss how others make assumptions about a person's race based on their name. This is important to understanding how racial stratification is reproduced through the labor market, and explains part of the racial gap in income. This study is further supported by Devah Pager's (2003) classic audit study, where she documented similar effects of racial discrimination through in-person applications. These studies also highlight the importance of affirmative action policies in attempting to level the playing field (although Bertrand and Mullainathan's study showed federal contractors did not favor applicants with African-American sounding names). The video can also be used in a methods class to illustrate field experiments. Note that this is the second post on The Sociological Cinema, which draws from the film Freakonomics. Submitted By: Paul Dean Jessie J in the music video "Do it Like a Dude" Tags: art/music, gender, intersectionality, race/ethnicity, sex/sexuality, androcentrism, female masculinity, gender performance, masculinity, schemas, 00 to 05 mins Year: 2010 Length: 3:21 Access: YouTube Summary: [Trigger warning: there is explicit language used in this clip.] This is the official music video for English pop singer and songwriter Jessie J's debut single "Do it Like a Dude" (2010). I use this video to discuss gender schemas, or cognitive processes by which individuals become gendered in society. I begin by asking students to identify, according to the video and society at large, the different characteristics that compose "doing it like a dude." Students might mention such things as wearing certain attire, making certain movements or gestures, drinking beer, smoking cigars, having money, being aggressive, or having heterosexual penetrative sex. Students can be encouraged to think how our ideas about these behaviors serve to gender individuals. The video is also a useful catalyst for a discussion about intersectionality and the multiplicities of masculinities (and femininities). For example, instructors might ask students to identify characteristic associated with racialized constructions of gender (e.g., Black masculinity, Latino masculinity, white masculinity, etc...), and how different constructions of masculinity are similar and/or different from one another. Further, the juxtaposition between the lyrics and the styling of Jessie J is also a useful illustration of capitalism and marketing. While singing about performing masculinity, Jessie J performs a sexualized femininity, and students are often quick to connect this with the drive to sell albums. Finally, the video can be used to discuss issues related to androcentrism—can we imagine a male artist trying to "do it like a woman?" Submitted By: Michelle Sandhoff Tags: children/youth, gender, marketing/brands, media, sex/sexuality, gender binary, 00 to 05 mins Year: 2010 Length: 0:29 Access: YouTube Summary: This diaper advertisement from Australia is an excellent illustration of how sex and gender are treated as the same thing. Sociologists have long drawn attention to the difference between sex and gender, where sex refers to biological or physiological differences such as chromosomes, hormonal make-up, and sex organs (internal and external) and gender refers to characteristics that a society or culture define as masculine or feminine. In this ad, diapers targeting physiological differences are marketed with images of gender differences (and stereotypical ones at that). I find this advertisement useful for getting students to discuss gender binaries and the difference between sex and gender. Submitted By: Michelle Sandhoff Tags: class, economic sociology, inequality, intersectionality, race/ethnicity, great recession, wealth, 00 to 05 mins Year: 2011 Length: 2:33 Access: YouTube Summary: This CBS news report shows dramatic wealth inequalities across race, and how the inequalities have increased dramatically during the Great Recession. Like Oliver and Shapiro's classic book, Black Wealth/White Wealth, the report documents that in 1995, the median white household had a net worth 7 times larger than black and Hispanic households. Citing Census data analyzed by the Pew Center, the video shows that in 2010 white households ($113,000) now have 18 times the net worth of Hispanics ($6,325) and 20 times the net worth of African-Americans ($5,677). It notes that part of this growing difference is that the net worth of most racial minorities is found in their homes, while whites are more likely to also own financial assets. The news team argues that this asset allocation explains why white wealth has rebounded significantly from its recent losses and increased the wealth divide. While this is true, they largely miss other important factors. For example, Melvin Oliver's 2008 report found that African-Americans were the subject of systematic predatory lending during the housing bubble that led to the Great Recession. He noted that "minorities were steered away from safe, conventional loans by brokers who received incentives for jacking up the interest rate" and that their mortgages had "high hidden costs, exploding adjustable rates, and prepayment penalties to preclude refinancing." This not only lead to a drop in the value of minority wealth, but actually stripped much of their assets as borrowers who defaulted on their loans. The video closes by saying "experts say it could be a decade before the wealth gap closes," although they do not cite any experts that say this. Viewers may question the optimism of this prediction and reflect on why it is likely to take much more than a decade for something like wealth (which is passed down from one generation to another) to be more equitably distributed across race. The video is a great accompaniment to the readings linked to above, and perhaps even this comedic video from Chris Rock on race and the differences between being rich and wealthy. Submitted By: Paul Dean |
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