Matrimony - DePaul University

and the nominees are...
excellence in contexts
2010-2011

excellence
Once again, we are excited to announce the Claude S. Fischer
Awards for Excellence in Contexts. Named for Contexts’ founding
editor, the “Claudes” are meant to recognize and highlight some
of the most accessible and engaging pieces from the magazine.
This ebook contains the second slate of nominees for the award,
selected from articles that appeared in the 2010 and 2011
volumes (volumes 9 and 10).
In an intensive workshop process, the nominees were hand-picked
by the Contexts editorial office and Minnesota graduate student
board. Representing the best of Contexts over the past two years,
the winners will now be selected by the Contexts editorial board,
comprised of esteemed sociologists from around the nation and
the world. The recipients of the Claudes will be announced at the
2011 ASA meetings in Las Vegas this August.
Please join us in congratulating all the nominees and celebrating
their efforts to bring sociological insights to the wider world.
Doug Hartmann and Chris Uggen
University of Minnesota
P.S. To preserve the formatting of the original articles but make
navigating this ebook easier, we’ve left the original page numbers
in the page footers while adding Excellence in Contexts page
numbers in the top right corner of each page.

features
permanent impermanence
syed ali
how schools
really matter
douglas b. downey,
benjamin g. gibbs
photo essays
literacy through
photography
katherine hyde
culture reviews
depression chic—
shopping our way to
recovery
bryant simon
book reviews
from the music man
to methland
maria kefalas
one thing i know
falling upward
dalton conley
is hooking up
bad for women?
elizabeth a. armstrong,
laura hamilton,
paula england
the scarcity fallacy
stephen j. scanlan,
j. craig jenkins,
lindsey peterson
matrimony
greg scott
neoliberalism and the
realities of reality tv
david grazian
empire of games
andrew m. lindner
the poverty fight
joe soss
women of god
orit avishai
situating memory
in argentina
barbara sutton
the purchase
of enlightenment
sarah knudson
the world without us
diane pike
sexuality has no
exiration date
linda j. waite

Photo by Patrick A. Smith via Creative Commons
26 contexts.org
by syed ali
eic 1

Iwasstandingonthehelipadofanew,swankyhighriseapartment
building in the Dubai Marina with my friend Vishul in the summer
of 2006. We took in the panoramic, nighttime view of skyscrapers
in the making, each capped with cranes lit red and white like so
many giant Transformer action figures. Vishul, who’d grown up
in Dubai, turned three hundred
and sixty degrees and jokingly
exclaimed, “This is the future!”
And, until the global economic
meltdown hit in late 2008, it
probably was.
Dubai has been lauded by Western statesmen and the media
as a model for the rest of the Muslim world to follow—a capitalist,
consumerist paradise tolerant of alternative (read: Western)
lifestyles and undisturbed by terrorism. This city of the
future is ruled over by a benign autocrat, Sheikh Mohammed
bin Rashid Al Maktoum, and is populated mainly by foreigners.
These expatriates, who comprise over ninety percent of
the population, account for ninety-nine percent of the private
sector workforce and ninety percent of
the public sector workforce in jobs ranging
from construction workers and
maids to engineers, architects, and
bankers. Because Dubai has been a
migrant-receiving city since the early
1900s, its massive foreign population is
nothing new. In fact, even before the
United Arab Emirates (of which Dubai is
asemi-autonomousmember)receivedindependencein1971,
Dubai’s migrant population exceeded its native citizen population.
What’s astounding, though, is that all expatriates are in
Dubai on short-term visas. Unlike immigrant-receiving countries
such as the U.S., U.K., France, and Germany, Dubai has no
form of permanent immigrant incorporation. Even in countries
as strict as Switzerland, migrants, including lower-skilled “guest
workers,” can find roads to permanent settlement and family
reunification. So while guest workers and their children throughout
Europe may find it varyingly difficult to acquire citizenship,
they often have the legal right to stay permanently.
In Dubai, expatriates willingly give up political rights such
as free speech and due process, and they live precariously on
short-term visas that can be revoked at any time for any reason.
In exchange, they earn tax-free wages as “economic mercenaries,”
fully aware that they are there solely to work. For
lower-level workers from developing countries, the trade-off
includes the unstated promise that they will live and toil in
harsh conditions in Dubai so they can send remittances and
make a better life for themselves back home. The middle class,
mainly South Asians and Arabs from outside the Arabian Gulf
who fill the bulk of lower and middle white-collar positions,
find better occupational possibilities, better schools, more comfortable
family living, and a largely crime-free environment
enticing. And for upper-class professionals (Westerners, but
also South Asians, Arabs, and others) there is the lure of the
“good life”—comprised of cheap household help (maids alone
Dubai has been lauded as a model for the rest of
the Muslim world—a capitalist, consumerist
paradise tolerant of alternative lifestyles and
undisturbed by terrorism.
Contexts, Vol. 9, No. 2, pp. 26-31. ISSN 1536-5042, electronic ISSN 1537-6052. (c) 2010 American Sociological Association.
All rights reserved. For permission to photocopy or reproduce, see http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp. DOI:
10.1525/ctx.2010.9.2.26.
form ten percent of the population), luxury accommodations,
spas, clubs, bars, restaurants, outdoor sports, and prostitution—that
has made Dubai so famous in the West.
On its surface, the case of Dubai and its permanently
impermanent workforce seems singular. But, as many Western
countries implement restrictive guest worker programs that
limit immigrants’ ability to stay and circumscribe many of their
spring 2010 contexts
eic 2
27
Photo © Getty Images

ights, the case of Dubai’s expatriates may actually be a harbinger
of the future of global migration.
a mercenary life
All expatriates in Dubai, even those born in Dubai, are on
short-term, renewable visas, regulated through the kafala, or
sponsorship, system. Expatriates’ residence visas are, as in the
rest of the Arabian Gulf countries, tied to their sponsors, usually
their employers. Changing jobs is virtually out of the question,
and any expatriates who quit or are fired, with some
exceptions for professionals, have to leave the country for a
six-month period before they can return to take another job.
Even before the United Arab Emirates received
independence, Dubai’s migrant population
exceeded its native citizen population.
Photo by Stephan Geyer via Creative Commons
So long as expatriates in Dubai hold on to their jobs and don’t
bring negative attention to themselves, though, they can stay
until the retirement age of 60, at which point, unless they own
a business or receive permission on a case-by-case basis, they
must leave.
Not unexpectedly, laborers, the middle class, and professionals
experience their temporariness differently. Laborers including
construction workers, maids, cab drivers, and lower-level
service workers (who generally earn slightly better than thirdworld
level wages) constitute the vast majority of Dubai’s population
and are highly regulated in their working and social lives.
Their passports are confiscated upon arrival (an illegal practice that
even government ministries engage in), their wages are often
withheld for months at a time to prevent them from quitting (a
practice the government tolerates), and unions and strikes are
illegal. Workers who have participated in strikes or protests have
been immediately deported without a trial or due process of any
kind. Many men (especially construction workers) are housed in
remote, overcrowded, filthy labor camps, and most of the rest
of the working class shares rooms in overcrowded, filthy, and
dilapidated villas or apartment buildings. Socially, they fare no bet-
28 contexts.org
ter: construction workers, for example, are often denied entry to
the shopping malls they build.
Where laborers’ lives are largely regulated by this series of
“sticks,” the middle class and professionals’ lives are regulated
mostly with “carrots” like high salaries, fast professional advancement,
and luxury living. The government doesn’t need to enforce
discipline, as these expatriates essentially live in a “gilded cage,”
willingly trading political rights for economic possibilities. And
the government is more than happy to allow these expatriates
wide latitude in their social behaviors (they’re free to worship
as they like, drink, and openly visit prostitutes, for instance) so
long as none of those behaviors looks remotely political.
While professionals, and to a lesser
extent the middle class, find a great
degree of social freedom, in the end
they too, like laborers, are simply factors
of production, there to create
wealth for the ruler, the government,
and the national citizen population. The
kafala system essentially defines the bulk of the population as
disposable and temporary. It is not incidental that the government
insists expatriates are “guest workers.”
The transience of expatriates is underscored by the fact
that citizenship is basically unattainable and there is no such category
as permanent residence. The most commonly stated reasons
given by government officials for denying citizenship or
permanent residence are the threats of cultural extinction and
demographic imbalance posed by the possibility of absorbing
so many expatriates into the pool of citizens. These twin arguments
are repeated time and time again. However, there are
two critical but unstated factors that are central to the management
of expatriates in Dubai and the government’s stance
on naturalization. First, the government’s legitimacy depends
to a great degree on its ability to guarantee a high standard of
living to national citizens. Allowing expatriates to naturalize
might lead to the state having to spread its welfare largesse
among a much larger pool of recipients. Second, the kafala
system provides a simple and effective mechanism of social
control. As expatriates are in Dubai primarily to work, the mere
possibility of deportation is enough to stifle any kind of threat
they may pose to the political-economic order.
Many scholars argue that formal, legal citizenship is
becoming less important in an increasingly globalized world. As
money, goods, ideas, and people move further and faster than
ever before, legal and social barriers to movement have weakened.
The idea of dual citizenship is more widely accepted than
it ever has been, further eroding the historical notion that citizens
should have loyalty to only one place. Even illegal migrants
can often become legal by proving that they have conducted
themselves like “good citizens” in their new land.
The literature on citizenship has expanded the concept to
take into consideration how the boundaries of the nation-state
eic 3

have become, literally and figuratively, more
permeable and, in some ways, less relevant
over time. International treaties and institutions
(especially those making human
rights universal) and the free movement of
people and capital greatly affect the sovereignty
of states and how they relate to both
citizens and noncitizens living within their
borders. In the past 20 years, terms such as
“flexible citizenship,” “post-national citizenship”
and “denationalized citizenship”
have gained currency. And while there are
major differences between these influential
concepts and other ideas that expand upon
the notion of what is and who is a citizen,
taken together they announce that “citizen”
is more than simply a legal category
and that people can claim to “belong” to
aplacewithoutlegally belonging to that
place.
But legal citizenship and the realistic possibility of obtaining
it remains important—you simply cannot legally and
securely live somewhere without a proper visa or citizenship.
The non-legal dimensions of citizenship, including the cultural,
economic, consumer, and psychological angles, are largely
meaningless without formal legal standing. Consider one of
the most basic factors of citizenship: generally, you cannot be
deported—and if you are deported, the other forms of citizenship
become moot. For noncitizens, these other forms of citizenship
can only be meaningful if the threat of deportation is
minimal.
These are things that expatriates in Dubai, most of whom
are from the developing world, understand all too well. While
there are no publicly available data on
the numbers of deportations, they occur
frequently enough that stories of deportees
serve as widely-known cautionary
tales that help keep laborers, the middle
class, and professional expatriates
in line. These nonnatives are careful to
stay out of trouble with the police, they
make certain not to engage in behavior that might look political,
and they avoid criticizing the ruling family or national citizens
in general. At any point and for practically any reason, the
government or an employer may arbitrarily cancel a worker’s
visa and trigger immediate deportation.
The threat of deportation and the lack of any legal recourse
is one reason why so many expatriates would welcome the
possibility of naturalization or, at least, permanent residence.
Without these possibilities, expatriates understand that their
stay in Dubai, no matter how long-term, is by definition temporary.
They plan accordingly: Westerners know they will return
Construction workers from Pakistan and Afghanistan on a site in Dubai.
to the West. Laborers know they will also go back home. South
Asian and Arab middle class and professional expatriates must
either go home (an undesirable outcome for many) or attempt
to go to the West seeking new professional opportunities for
themselves or education for their children.
Expatriates born in Dubai also understand that they are
temporary residents. Of the forty-five South Asian and Arab second-generation
expatriates I interviewed, more than half had
acquired permanent residence or citizenship in Western countries,
and most of the rest were trying to do the same. Hardly anyone
Iinterviewedintendedtoreturntotheirlegalhomeintheirparents’
third-world country of origin, but few had any illusions of
calling Dubai home. I was stunned to hear one young, Indian
Laborers’ lives are regulated by a series of
“sticks,” while the middle class and professionals’
lives are regulated mostly with “carrots.”
corporate headhunter say bluntly, “Dubai is a pitstop, a place
where you come, make a good amount of money and you get
out.” Why was this so shocking? The young man in question
had been born and raised in this “pitstop.” Until just before we
met, he’d never even been outside the U.A.E.
In response to recent international pressure and spiraling unemployment
among national citizens, some Arabian Gulf states
have begun to rethink the kafala system. Bahrain was the first
to initiate radical change, discarding the sponsorship system
altogether in August 2009. Its expatriates will now be “sponsored”
directly by the government, and their visas will no longer
spring 2010 contexts
eic 4
Photo by Paul Keller via Creative Commons
29

e tied to a particular job. Following Bahrain, Kuwait took a
first step toward abolishing the kafala system when it announced
that its expatriates would be able to change jobs after three
years without sponsor approval or after one year if the sponsor
doesn’t object. Using language that Human Rights Watch would
approve of, a Kuwaiti minister lauded the change and called
the kafala system “modern-day slavery.”
The abolition of the kafala system could lead to higher
wages, especially at the middle and lower ends of the job market,
where most workers are from the developing world and
paid accordingly. Bahrain and Kuwait also hope that the current
high unemployment rates among national citizens will be
reduced, as the financial costs of hiring and training nationals
become more attractive to private-sector firms. Conspicuously
though, officials in Dubai have remained mum on any similar
changes. Their silence is deafening—and unsurprising, given
that Dubai’s government-owned companies in construction,
hospitality, and other sectors employ tens of thousands of
workers at all levels, and government coffers are enriched
through those depressed wages.
These policy changes represent a monumental shift for
the region. The basic premise of my research has been that the
kafala system colors every aspect of life in Dubai. If similar, rad-
30 contexts.org
Outside Dubai’s airport.
Dubai’s expatriates live in a “gilded cage,”
willingly trading political rights for economic
possibilities.
ical changes were undertaken in Dubai, the way of life for
expatriates and national citizens alike would be drastically
altered. Expatriates would have freedom of mobility in the labor
market and would no longer have to fear deportation should
they lose or quit their jobs. This is a particularly important issue
today, as Dubai is in the middle of a recession, with megaprojects
at a standstill and many completed highrises standing
empty. Workers are being laid off in such large numbers that
some estimate Dubai’s population may have shrunk by an
incredible seventeen percent in 2009.
the “dubai effect”
The story of Dubai’s expatriate population feels, at first,
like an outlier. But it may end up being replicated beyond Dubai
and the Arabian Gulf countries. While Bahrain and Kuwait are
in the process of abandoning the kafala
system, Western countries are increasingly
adopting labor policies similar to
those of Dubai and the other Gulf countries.
These policies mainly concern
working-class laborers, but as in the
Gulf, professionals may find themselves
living under similar visa regimes. For example, more than half
of skilled workers from non-European Union countries arrive in
the U.K. on “intra-company” transfers. As of a 2008 overhaul,
the U.K.’s visa system is largely grounded through employers.
While Tier 1 visas, issued for highly skilled professional migrants,
do not require a sponsor, Tier 2 employees applying for permanent
status must be sponsored or they’ll be forced to leave.
Further, in 2009, the government was considering banning
Photo by Nico Crosafilli via Creative Coomons
eic 5

Photo by Paul Keller via Creative Commons
transferred, “intra-company” workers from citizenship altogether,
a move that could conceivably turn them into Dubailike
expatriates: legal, but impermanent.
Similarly, the U.S. has programs limiting the ability of professionals
from overseas to stay, most notably the H1B visa
program. The H-1B program is mostly for IT professionals,
whose visas are tied to their employers. They can stay up to
six years, so long as they are employed,
and they are allowed to apply for permanent
residency. There is, however, no
guarantee that it will be granted; my
friend Vishul tried, but failed, to adjust
his own H-1B status and had to leave
the country. At its peak, the H-1B program
covered roughly 200,000 people a year, but the number
of these visas being issued yearly has since dropped to its original
1999 level of 65,000.
The U.S. has also toyed with the idea of a wide-ranging
guest worker program for lower-skilled workers. This would
echo the Bracero Program, which brought temporary Mexican
agricultural laborers to the U.S. from 1942-1964, but ended in
part because of widespread abuse of workers. In 2006, Congress
proposed a plan to create a permanent guest worker program
that would admit 400,000 more workers a year. While
it was not enacted, many in Congress made it clear that when
immigration reform is eventually addressed it must include
some kind of temporary guest worker program.
Recognizing aspects of the kafala system creeping into
national policy debates, the Nobel Prize winning economist Paul
Krugman mused on what he called “the Dubai Effect” in the
New York Times. Writing in 2006, Krugman said that a guest
worker program could amount to a dangerous betrayal of the
United States’ democratic ideals. It would, he wrote, basically
form an entrenched caste system of temporary workers whose
Indian workers stroll past some of Dubai’s enormous—and
mostly empty—skyscrapers.
interests would largely be ignored and whose rights would be
circumscribed. Further, their wages would undoubtedly be less
than those of people with greater labor market mobility, though
the ripple effects of a glut of guest workers would be expected
to lower wages for all workers in sectors where guest workers
are “bonded” to their employers, Dubai-style.
Following Krugman, I wonder if Western states increas-
Economist Paul Krugman writes that a guest
worker program could amount to a dangerous
betrayal of the United States’ democratic ideals.
ingly adopt policies like those in the Arabian Gulf countries,
they will see situations of non-assimilation similar to those
played out among expatriates in Dubai. Of course, unlike in
Dubai, any children born in the U.S. acquire citizenship by birth,
but there would still be a sizeable community of adults who were
essentially in the country, but not of it. If that’s the case, Dubai
and its permanently impermanent population would look less
like a unique example and more like a prescient harbinger of
the future experience of incorporation—or lack thereof.
recommended resources:
Human Rights Watch. Building Towers, Cheating Workers: Exploitation
of Migrant Construction Workers in the United Arab Emirates
(November, 2006). Examines government collusion in employers’
exploitation of workers in the UAE.
Andrzej Kapiszewski. Nationals and Expatriates: Population and
Labour Dilemmas of the Gulf Cooperation Council States (Ithaca
Press, 2001). Explores how Arabian Gulf countries controlled their
expatriate labor force and kept their citizens happy before the latest
economic boom.
Aihwa Ong. Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality
(Duke University Press, 1999). Details how globalization and
transnational behavior have changed the meaning of citizenship.
Yasemin Soysal. Limits of Citizenship: Migrants and Postnational
Membership in Europe (University of Chicago Press, 1994). Shows
how formal citizenship declines as states, influenced by the global
discourse of human rights, increasingly grant rights and benefits
to noncitizens.
Syed Ali is in the sociology/anthropology department at Long Island University in
Brooklyn, NY. He is the author of Dubai: Gilded Cage.
spring 2010 contexts
eic 6
31

22 contexts.org
is bad for
young women?
by elizabeth a. armstrong, laura hamilton, and paula england
eic 7
Photo by Lucky Girl Lefty via Creative Commons

“Girls can’t be guys in matters of the heart, even though they think
they can,” says Laura Sessions Stepp, author of Unhooked: How Young
Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love, and Lose at Both, published in 2007.
In her view, “hooking up”—casual sexual activity ranging from
kissing to intercourse—places women at risk of “low self-esteem,
depression, alcoholism, and eating disorders.” Stepp is only one of
half a dozen journalists currently engaged in the business of detailing
the dangers of casual sex.
On the other side, pop culture feminists such as Jessica Valenti,
author of The Purity Myth: How America’s Obsession with Virginity
is Hurting Young Women (2010), argue that the problem
isn’t casual sex, but a “moral panic” over casual sex. And
still a third set of writers like Ariel Levy, author of Female Chauvinist
Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture (2005),
questions whether it’s empowering for young women to show
up at parties dressed to imitate porn stars or to strip in “Girls
Gone Wild” fashion. Levy’s concern isn’t necessarily moral, but
rather that these young women seem less focused on their
own sexual pleasure and more worried about being seen as
“hot” by men.
Following on the heels of the mass media obsession, sociologists
and psychologists have begun to investigate adolescent
and young adult hookups more systematically. In this essay,
we draw on systematic data and studies of youth sexual practices
over time to counter claims that hooking up represents a
sudden and alarming change in youth sexual culture. The research
shows that there is some truth to popular claims that hookups
are bad for women. However, it also demonstrates that women’s
Contexts, Vol. 9, No. 3, pp. 22-27. ISSN 1536-5042, electronic ISSN 1537-6052. © 2010 American Sociological Association.
All rights reserved. For permission to photocopy or reproduce, see http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp. DOI:
10.1525/ctx.2010.9.3.22.
hookup experiences are quite varied and far from uniformly negative
and that monogamous, long-term relationships are not an
ideal alternative. Scholarship suggests that pop culture feminists
have correctly zeroed in on sexual double standards as a key
source of gender inequality in sexuality.
the rise of limited liability hedonism
Before examining the consequences of hooking up for
girls and young women, we need to look more carefully at the
facts. Unhooked author Stepp describes girls “stripping in the
student center in front of dozens of boys they didn’t know.”
She asserts that “young people have virtually abandoned dating”
and that “relationships have been replaced by the casual
sexual encounters known as hookups.” Her sensationalist tone
suggests that young people are having more sex at earlier ages
in more casual contexts than their Baby Boomer parents.
This characterization is simply not true. Young people
today are not having more sex at younger ages than their parents.
The sexual practices of American youth changed in the
20 th century, but the big change came with the Baby Boom
summer 2010 contexts
eic 8
23

cohort who came of age more than 40 years ago. The National
Health and Social Life Survey—the gold standard of American
sexual practice surveys—found that those born after 1942 were
more sexually active at younger ages than those born from
1933-42. However, the trend toward greater sexual activity
among young people appears to halt or reverse among the
youngest cohort in the NHSLS, those born from 1963-72. Examining
the National Survey of Family Growth, Lawrence B. Finer,
Director of Domestic Research for the Guttmacher Institute,
found that the percent of women who have had premarital
sex by age 20 (65-76 percent) is roughly the same for all cohorts
born after 1948. He also found that the women in the youngest
cohort in this survey—those born from 1979-1984—were less
likely to have premarital sex by age 20 than those born before
them. The Centers for Disease Control, reporting on the results
of the National Youth Risk Behavior Survey, report that rates of
sexual intercourse among 9 th-12 th graders decreased from
1991-2007, as did numbers of partners. Reports of condom
use increased. So what are young people doing to cause such
angst among Boomers?
Hooking up isn’t the rampant, hedonistic free-forall
portrayed by the media.
The pervasiveness of casual sexual activity among today’s
youth may be at the heart of Boomers’ concerns. England surveyed
more than 14,000 students from 19 universities and colleges
about their hookup, dating, and relationship experiences.
Seventy-two percent of both men and women participating in
the survey reported at least one hookup by their senior year in
college. What the Boomer panic may gloss over, however, is
the fact that college students don’t, on average, hook up that
much. By senior year, roughly 40 percent of those who ever
hooked up had engaged in three or fewer hookups, 40 percent
between four and nine hookups, and only 20 percent in ten or
more hookups. About 80 percent of students hook up, on average,
less than once per semester over the course of college.
In addition, the sexual activity in hookups is often relatively
light. Only about one third engaged in intercourse in their
most recent hookup. Another third had engaged in oral sex or
manual stimulation of the genitals. The other third of hookups
only involved kissing and non-genital touching. A full 20 percent
of survey respondents in their fourth year of college had
never had vaginal intercourse. In addition, hookups between
total strangers are relatively uncommon, while hooking up with
the same person multiple times is common. Ongoing sexual
relationships without commitment are labeled as “repeat,”
“regular,” or “continuing” hookups, and sometimes as “friends
with benefits.” Often there is friendship or socializing both
before and after the hookup.
24 contexts.org
Hooking up hasn’t replaced committed relationships.
Students often participate in both at different times during college.
By their senior year, 69 percent of heterosexual students
had been in a college relationship of at least six months.
Hookups sometimes became committed relationships and vice
versa; generally the distinction revolved around the agreed
upon level of exclusivity and the willingness to refer to each
other as “girlfriend/boyfriend.”
And, finally, hooking up isn’t radically new. As suggested
above, the big change in adolescent and young adult sexual
behavior occurred with the Baby Boomers. This makes sense,
as the forces giving rise to casual sexual activity among the
young—the availability of birth control pill, the women’s and
sexual liberation movements, and the decline of in loco parentis
on college campuses—took hold in the 1960s. But
changes in youth sexual culture did not stop with the major
behavioral changes wrought by the Sexual Revolution.
Contemporary hookup culture among adolescents and
young adults may rework aspects of the Sexual Revolution to
get some of its pleasures while reducing its physical and emotional
risks. Young people today—par-
ticularly young whites from affluent
families—are expected to delay the
commitments of adulthood while they
invest in careers. They get the message
that sex is okay, as long as it doesn’t jeopardize their futures;
STDs and early pregnancies are to be avoided. This generates
a sort of limited liability hedonism. For instance, friendship is
prioritized a bit more than romance, and oral sex appeals
because of its relative safety. Hookups may be the most explicit
example of a calculating approach to sexual exploration. They
make it possible to be sexually active while avoiding behaviors
with the highest physical and emotional risks (e.g., intercourse,
intense relationships). Media panic over hooking up may be at
least in part a result of adult confusion about youth sexual culture—that
is, not understanding that oral sex and sexual experimentation
with friends are actually some young people’s ways
of balancing fun and risk.
Even though hooking up in college isn’t the rampant hedonistic
free-for-all portrayed by the media, it does involve the
movement of sexual activity outside of relationships. When
Contexts addressed youth sex in 2002, Barbara Risman and
Pepper Schwartz speculated that the slowdown in youth sexual
activity in the 1990s might be a result of “girls’ increasing
control over the conditions of sexual intercourse,” marked by
the restriction of sex to relationships. They expressed optimism
about gender equality in sexuality on the grounds that girls are
more empowered in relationship sex than casual sex. It appears
now that these scholars were overly optimistic about the
progress of the gender revolution in sex. Not only is casual sex
common, it seems that romantic relationships themselves are
riddled with gender inequality.
eic 9

hookup problems, relationship
pleasures
Hookups are problematic for girls and young
women for several related reasons. As many
observers of American youth sexual culture have
found, a sexual double standard continues to be
pervasive. As one woman Hamilton interviewed
explained, “Guys can have sex with all the girls
and it makes them more of a man, but if a girl
does then all of a sudden she’s a ‘ho’ and she’s
not as quality of a person.” Sexual labeling among
adolescents and young adults may only loosely
relate to actual sexual behavior; for example, one
woman complained in her interview that she was
a virgin the first time she was called a “slut.” The
lack of clear rules about what is “slutty” and what
is not contribute to women’s fears of stigma.
On college campuses, this sexual double standard
often finds its most vociferous expression in
the Greek scene. Fraternities are often the only
venues where large groups of underage students
can readily access alcohol. Consequently, one of the easiest
places to find hookup partners is in a male-dominated party
context. As a variety of scholars have observed, fraternity men
often use their control of the situation to undermine women’s
ability to freely consent to sex (e.g., by pushing women to drink
too heavily, barring their exit from private rooms, or refusing
them rides home). Women report varying degrees of sexual
disrespect in the fraternity culture, and the dynamics of this
scene predictably produce some amount of sexual assault.
The most commonly encountered disadvantage of hookups,
though, is that sex in relationships is far better for women. England’s
survey revealed that women orgasm more often and report
higher levels of sexual satisfaction in relationship sex than in
hookup sex. This is in part because sex in relationships is more
likely to include sexual activities conducive to women’s orgasm.
In hookups, men are much more likely to receive fellatio than
women are to receive cunnilingus. In relationships, oral sex is
more likely to be reciprocal. In interviews
conducted by England’s research team,
men report more concern with the sexual
pleasure of girlfriends than hookup
partners, while women seem equally
invested in pleasing hookup partners and
boyfriends.
The continuing salience of the sexual double standard
mars women’s hookup experiences. In contrast, relationships
provide a context in which sex is viewed as acceptable for
women, protecting them from stigma and establishing sexual
reciprocity as a basic expectation. In addition, relationships
offer love and companionship.
There are are up-sides and down-sides to both monogamous relationships
and hookups.
relationship problems, hookup pleasures
Relationships are good for sex but, unfortunately, they
have a dark side as well. Relationships are “greedy,” getting in
the way of other things that young women want to be doing
as adolescents and young adults, and they are often characterized
by gender inequality—sometimes even violence.
Talking to young people, two of us (Hamilton and Armstrong)
found that committed relationships detracted from
what women saw as main tasks of college. The women we
interviewed complained, for example, that relationships made
it difficult to meet people. As a woman who had just ended a
relationship explained:
I’m happy that I’m able to go out and meet new people…
I feel like I’m doing what a college student
should be doing. I don’t need to be tied down to my
high school boyfriend for two years when this is the
time to be meeting people.
The most commonly encountered disadvantage of
hookups is that sex in relationships is far better for
women.
Women also complained that committed relationships
competed with schoolwork. One woman remarked, “[My
boyfriend] doesn’t understand why I can’t pick up and go see
him all the time. But I have school… I just want to be a college
kid.” Another told one of us (Hamilton) that her major was
not compatible with the demands of a boyfriend. She said, “I
wouldn’t mind having a boyfriend again, but it’s a lot of work.
summer 2010 contexts
eic 10
Photo by Kevin Fitzgerald via Getty Images
25

Right now with [my major] and everything… I wouldn’t have
time even to see him.” Women feared that they would be
devoured by relationships and sometimes struggled to keep
their self-development projects going when they did get
involved.
Subjects told us that relationships were not only time-consuming,
but also marked by power inequalities and abuse.
Women reported that boyfriends tried to control their social
lives, the time they spent with friends, and even what they
wore. One woman described her boyfriend, saying, “He is a
The costs of bad hookups tend to be less than
the costs of bad relationships: bad hookups are
isolated events, but bad relationships wreak havoc
with whole lives.
Photo by Cyndy Andrews via Creative Commons
very controlling person… He’s like, ‘What are you wearing
tonight?’… It’s like a joke but serious at the same time.”
Women also became jealous. Coping with jealousy was painful
and emotionally absorbing. One woman noted that she would
“do anything to make this relationship work.” She elaborated,
“I was so nervous being with Dan because I knew he had
cheated on his [prior] girlfriend… [but] I’m getting over it.
When I go [to visit him] now…I let him go to the bar, whatever.
Istayedinhisapartmentbecausetherewasnothingelseto
do.” Other women changed the way they dressed, their friends,
and where they went in the hope of keeping boyfriends.
When women attempted to end relationships, they often
Problems posed by relationships range from time conflicts with schoolwork to the more serious
issue of relationship violence.
26 contexts.org
reported that men’s efforts to control them escalated. In the
course of interviewing 46 respondents, two of us (Hamilton
and Armstrong) heard ten accounts of men using abuse to
keep women in relationships. One woman spent months dealing
with a boyfriend who accused her of cheating on him.
When she tried to break up, he cut his wrist in her apartment.
Another woman tried to end a relationship, but was forced to
flee the state when her car windows were broken and her
safety was threatened. And a third woman reported that her
ex-boyfriend stalked her for months—even showing up at her
workplace, showering her with flowers
and gifts, and blocking her entry into
her workplace until the police arrived.
For most women, the costs of bad
hookups tended to be less than costs
of bad relationships. Bad hookups were
isolated events, while bad relationships
wreaked havoc with whole lives. Abusive
relationships led to lost semesters,
wrecked friendships, damaged property, aborted pregnancies,
depression, and time-consuming involvement with police and
courts.
The abuse that women reported to us is not unusual. Intimate
partner violence among adolescents and young adults is
common. In a survey of 15,000 adolescents conducted in 2007,
the Centers for Disease Control found that 10 perecent of students
had been “hit, slapped, or physically hurt on purpose by
their boyfriend or girlfriend” in the last 12 months.
If relationships threaten academic achievement, get in the
way of friendship, and can involve jealousy, manipulation, stalking,
and abuse, it is no wonder that young women sometimes
opt for casual sex. Being open
to hooking up means being
able to go out and fit into the
social scene, get attention
from young men, and learn
about sexuality. Women we
interviewed gushed about parties
they attended and attention
they received from boys.
As one noted, “Everyone was
so excited. It was a big fun
party.” They reported turning
on their “make out radar,”
explaining that “it’s fun to
know that a guy’s attracted to
you and is willing to kiss you.”
Women reported enjoying
hookups, and few reported
regretting their last hookup.
Over half the time women participating
in England’s survey
eic 11

eported no relational interest before or after their hookup,
although more women than men showed interest in a relationship
both before and after hookups. The gender gap in
relationship interest is slightly larger after the hookup, with 48
percent of women and 36 percent of men reporting interest in
a relationship.
toward gender equality in sex
Like others, Stepp, the author of Unhooked, suggests that
restricting sex to relationships is the way to challenge gender
inequality in youth sex. Certainly, sex in relationships is better
for women than hookup sex. However, research suggests two
reasons why Stepp’s strategy won’t work: first, relationships
are also plagued by inequality. Second, valorizing relationships
as the ideal context for women’s sexual activity reinforces the
notion that women shouldn’t want sex outside of relationships
and stigmatizes women who do. A better approach would
challenge gender inequality in both relationships and hookups.
It is critical to attack the tenacious sexual double standard that
leads men to disrespect their hookup partners. Ironically, this
could improve relationships because women would be less
likely to tolerate “greedy” or abusive relationships if they were
treated better in hookups. Fostering relationships among young
adults should go hand-in-hand with efforts to decrease intimate
partner violence and to build egalitarian relationships
that allow more space for other aspects of life—such as school,
work, and friendship.
recommended resources
Kathleen A. Bogle. Hooking Up: Sex, Dating, and Relationships on
Campus (New York University Press, 2008). A provocative investigation
of college hookups based on 76 interviews.
Paula England, Emily Fitzgibbons Shafer, and Alison C. K. Fogarty.
“Hooking Up and Forming Romantic Relationships on Today's
College Campuses.” In M. Kimmel and A. Aronson (eds.), The
Gendered Society Reader, 3rd edition (Oxford University Press,
2008). Overview of the role of gender in the college hookup scene.
Norval Glenn and Elizabeth Marquardt. Hooking Up, Hanging Out,
and Hoping for Mr. Right: College Women on Mating and Dating
Today (Institute for American Values, 2001). One of the first empirical
investigations of college hookups.
Laura Hamilton and Elizabeth A. Armstrong. “Double Binds and
Flawed Options: Gendered Sexuality in Early Adulthood,” Gender
& Sexuality (2009), 23: 589-616. Provides methodological details
of Hamilton and Armstrong’s interview study and elaborates on
costs and benefits of hookups and relationships for young women.
Derek A. Kreager and Jeremy Staff. “The Sexual Double Standard
and Adolescent Peer Acceptance,” Social Psychology Quarterly
(2009), 72: 143-164. New empirical research confirming the continued
existence of sexual double standards.
Wendy D. Manning, Peggy C. Giordano, and Monica A. Longmore.
“Hooking Up: The Relationship Contexts of 'Nonrelationship’ Sex,”
Journal of Adolescent Research (2006), 21: 459-483. Part of a series
on sexual activity among younger adolescents.
Elizabeth A.Armstrong is in the department of sociology at the University of Michigan,
and Laura Hamilton is in the department of sociology at the University of
California-Merced.Together, they study how social class shapes women’s academic,
social, and romantic pathways through and out of the university. Paula England
is in the department of sociology at Stanford University. Her research focuses on
gender inequality in labor markets and how gender and class affect family life.
summer 2010 contexts
eic 12
27

Is God bad for women? Media consumers in North America and
Europe are probably familiar with this narrative: conservative and
fundamentalist religions—those that take religion seriously and politicize
religiosity—are on the rise, and that’s bad for women. In France,
wearing a the headscarf in public spaces is decried as an affront to
French notions of citizenship and to women’s personhood. In the
United States, Afghan women’s plight at the hands of the Taliban was
used as a justification for American intervention. Since the emancipation
of women and the diversification of family forms and sexualities
are among the hallmarks of modernity and secularization, and since
fundamentalist religious groups tend to hold traditional views on gender,
sexuality, and the family, conservative religions are typically viewed
as antithetical to women’s interests (not to mention modern, democratic
ideals of choice and the freedom to chart one’s own destiny).
46 contexts.org
women
ofgodby orit avishai
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In a sense, conservative religions have earned this bad reputation;
the historical record is full of instances in which girls
and women have been restricted from access to health care,
education, and employment in the name of God. Girls’ and
women’s bodies and mobility are regulated, their chastity is
“protected,” and sometimes they are even maimed or killed as
a marker of national or tribal pride, identity, unity, or boundaries.
If this is the case, how can we explain women’s willingness
and motivation to participate in these religions? Some
feel the Marxist explanation—religion is the opiate of the people—and
its feminist incarnation—women’s participation in
conservative religions is a form of false consciousness—are
sufficient. Others believe women involved in conservative religions
are simply oppressed.
Sociologists, anthropologists, historians, and political scientists
who study women’s experiences in a range of religious
traditions in diverse geographical locations have found that
the “God is bad for women” formulation provides an impoverished
picture of experiences with conservative religions. These
studies show that women are simultaneously oppressed and
empowered by their religion, that their compliance is as much
aproductofactivestrategizingaspassivecompliance,andthat
religion is as much a site of negotiating traditional gender
norms as it is a site of reproducing patriarchal gender relationships.
If that’s true, it’s certainly possible that conservative religions
aren’t inherently and universally antithetical to women’s interests
(at least not all of the time).
Some commentators make an even more provocative
Contexts, Vol. 9, No. 4, pp. 46-51. ISSN 1536-5042, electronic ISSN 1537-6052. © 2010 American Sociological Association.
All rights reserved. For permission to photocopy or reproduce, see http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp.
DOI: 10.1525/ctx.2010.9.4.46.
claim: the “God is bad for women” formulation rests on false
assumptions about religion and liberal notions of freedom and
choice. That is, these scholars argue that the trope ignores the
similarities between women’s complicity with religious regimes
and their complicity with other gendered practices like Western
beauty norms.
religion is bad for women
Religion is often viewed as a primary site for the articulation,
reproduction, and institutionalization of gender inequality. The
combination of male gods, institutions that encode gender
inequality (think male-only clergy) and women’s subordination
(such as Evangelical teachings on male headship), ambivalence
toward the female body (think the veil across the Muslim world
and a Jewish man’s daily prayer with a line that thanks God for
not “having made me a woman”), and the belief that gender
differences are natural and essential has produced a deep-seated
suspicion toward conservative religions among the reformminded.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton captured this spirit in 1885
when she wrote, “History shows that the moral degradation of
woman is due more to theological superstitions than to all other
influences together.” Such sentiments were echoed by many
second wave American feminists who viewed religiously inspired
ideas about women’s work, reproduction, and bodies as detrimental
to the women’s movement’s goals of gender equality
and freedom.
This view of religion poses a problem, though: women
are involved with conservative religions. They join, and they
fall 2010 contexts
eic 14
Matthew Klein Steve Rhodes Mike Blyth Stefan Jansson
47

stay. Are these women opposed to equality and freedom? Do
they not recognize their complicity in a regime that requires
submission? Until the 1980s, the general view was that religion—as
an ideology and as an institution—was nothing but
a constraint on women’s lives, so women’s active involvement
with conservative religions was viewed as the product of oppression,
lack of agency, or false consciousness.
Yet, when researchers turned to study women’s actual
experiences with religion (as opposed to ideologically driven
assessments) in the late 1980s, their findings were startling:
women—Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, Hindu, and others—
are not necessarily oppressed and deprived of free choice by their
religion.
Until the 1980s, the general view was that religion
—as an ideology and as an institution—was
nothing but a constraint on women’s lives.
multiple meanings
When scholars looked past religious dogma to lived experiences,
they found discrepancies between ideologies and practices.
Women, they saw, don’t blindly submit to religious
prescriptions; instead, they adapt their religious practices (if not
iterations of belief) to the realities of their lives and to dominant
gender ideologies. In the process, they sometimes (consciously
or unconsciously) subvert and resist official teachings without
much fanfare and without explicitly resisting religious gender
norms.
This subtlety, though, serves to perpetuate the myth that
women are uniformly oppressed by religion. For example, when
sociologists Sally Gallagher and Christian Smith interviewed Evangelical
men and women in the U.S. about their family lives, their
respondents professed an unwavering support for ideologies
such as male headship and women’s submission while rejecting
egalitarian gender ideologies. Nevertheless, their real-life choices
about work, family, and child rearing exhibited a de-facto egalitarianism
that belied their ideological stance: most of the Evangelical
women in their study worked outside the home and
routinely participated in domestic decision making. Gallagher
and Smith labeled this disjuncture “symbolic traditionalism and
pragmatic egalitarianism.”
In other cases, researchers have found that what looks like
oppression is often a set of strategic choices made to help women
navigate gender relations. In a now-classic study, sociologist Lynn
Davidman explored why educated American women might
embrace highly patriarchal and conservative strands of Orthodox
Judaism. Rather than being duped into an anachronistic religion,
these women said that they consciously turned to Orthodox
Judaism as a response to problems generated by modern American
culture, including its emphasis on careerism, individualism,
48 contexts.org
and gender equality. Caroline Chen, a sociologist who studied
the experiences of Taiwanese women who converted to conservative
strands of Buddhism and Christianity after immigrating
to the U.S., found women used religion to negotiate with patriarchal
family structures and to carve out a space of independence
and authority. Their newfound religion allowed women to
undermine oppressive traditional Taiwanese practices that left
them without much power within the family. Gallagher also saw
similar dynamics in her study of low-income Syrian women, who
use religious and cultural rationales to improve their access to
income and employment while avoiding unattractive employment
opportunities. The Syrian women consciously enlist religion
to expand their autonomy while simultaneously maintaining
asemblanceofdeference.Defining
their economic activities as “not work,”
for example, means they can contribute
to the family economy (sometimes
earning up to 40 percent of the family’s
income) in a society that emphasizes
women’s primary responsibilities
as domestic. The point is: some women achieve progressive ends
using traditional, but subversive, means.
So, women aren’t oppressed dupes. On the contrary,
women like these use religion to make choices and improve
their lives; they are strategic actors who appropriate religious
traditions and practices to meet the demands of contemporary
life, often to further extra-religious ends such as economic
opportunities, domestic relations, political ideologies, and cultural
affiliation.
Other studies show how seemingly oppressive practices can
serve empowering and liberating functions. This is the case
with regard to the issue that best symbolizes conservative religion’s
purported oppression of women: the veil.
In the 1980s, when political scientist Arlene MacLeod and
Turkish sociologist Nulifer Gole studied the emergent phenomenon
of Muslim women’s embrace of veiling in Egypt and Turkey,
respectively, each found that context matters. In the Egyptian
case, women’s embrace of the veil came at a time when economic
conditions compelled women to find gainful employment
outside the home. Their movement into the workplace was at
odds with traditional Egyptian notions of modesty and domesticity.
These ideas had discouraged women from venturing into
public spaces unaccompanied by men and frowned upon close
contact between unrelated men and women. Veiling provided
asolution,asitpreservedwomen’smodestyandaffirmedtheir
domesticity while also providing the mobility to work outside
the home. As it opened unprecedented opportunities for women
to venture beyond the domestic, the veil became liberating.
Macleod terms the veil’s liberating potential as “accommodating
protest.”
In Turkey, Gole found that, to the generation of young, edu-
eic 15

cated, women who embraced the veil on college campuses, veiling
symbolized resistance to Western values. Veiling, Gole argues,
wasn’t imposed on these women, so the act of veiling reveals
them to be empowered and strategic political actors. Research
on Latin American Pentecostal women reports similar dynamics
of women’s empowerment through the embrace of religion.
These studies notwithstanding, not all commentators are
equally impressed by religion’s liberating potential. In her awardwinning
study of South Korean Evangelical women, sociologist
Kelly Chong writes that conversion to Evangelical Christianity
helps some women navigate the forces of modernity while also
reinforcing highly patriarchal and non-egalitarian gender dynamics.
Further, Chong asserts that religion is also asitewherethe
rules of gender relations are constantly being rewritten.
The aggregate message of these studies is that conservative
religions are not necessarily oppressive, nor is religion thoroughly
anti-modern. Context is extremely
important but often lost in popular
depictions of conservative religions and
their symbols—the veil, men’s headship,
male-only clergy—as uniformly
oppressive. In some instances, the forces
of modernity increase the appeal of
conservative religion. In others, the embrace of religion helps
women cope with and sometimes even challenge preexisting
oppressive gender norms and social structures.
Yet, it seems that each study begins with the notion that
women’s involvement with conservative religions is paradoxical—only
to find, time and time again, that this formula provides
only a very narrow perspective on the religious experience.
More recent research takes issue with the notion that women’s
complicity and submission are paradoxical, investigating, instead,
the assumptions on which this perspective is based.
past the paradox
Experts’ bewilderment over women’s embrace of conservative
religions is symptomatic of the broader assumptions about
religiosity and modern personhood that have shaped discussions
of religion since the Enlightenment. One set of assumptions
concerns the incompatibility of religion and modernity.
Throughout much of the 20 th century, everyone expected the
significance of religion would progressively decline. Known as
the “secularization thesis,” the theory was that modernization
and secularization (and, implicitly, westernization) are intrinsically
related and that progress—including the emancipation of
women from the hold of oppressive religions—follows a uniform
and linear (western) trajectory. Religion, in this conception,
is incompatible with rational, complex, and individualistic
modern societies. When empirical reality proved this theory
wrong (conservative and fundamentalist religious movements,
This view of religion poses a problem, though:
women are involved with conservative religions.
They join, and they stay.
for instance, have been on the rise around the world since the
1980s, as evidenced by the 1979 Iranian revolution, the rise of
Pentecostalism in Latin America, the increased visibility of Evangelicals
in American political life, and the fervor of Orthodox
Jewish nationalists), the secularization thesis was replaced by
explanations that recognized that some aspects of religion were
compatible with modernity.
However, a second set of assumptions about the incompatibility
of religion with liberal notions of agency, freedom,
and choice persists. It is in this set of assumptions that the paradox
approach is rooted. The liberal notion of freedom assumes
that individuals should strive to be free of commitment and
fall 2010 contexts
eic 16
Mait Jüriado Nasser Gazi Austcare-World Humanitarian Aid
49

submission to a higher power—thereby precluding many forms
of religious devotion. This is why explanations of women’s
involvement with conservative religion that revolve around
strategic choice, the liberatory potential of religion, or passive
resistance have been so attractive: women who realize their
own economic, political, or intimate interests against the weight
of custom and tradition are redeemed.
Yet, such explanations ultimately provide binary explanations
of religion: either it’s a site where women are oppressed and
gender inequality is reproduced, or it’s a site of empowerment,
resistance, strategic planning and negotiation of gender. What’s
missing is the possibility that women embrace religious practices
such as veiling and male headship in pursuit of religious goals—
namely, the cultivation of oneself as a pious religious subject.
This is the account that anthropologist Saba Mahmood
provides in her study of Islamic revival and piety among women
in Cairo. Starting in the 1990s, many Egyptian women began
to attend mosques to teach each other Islamic doctrine. This
trend, facilitated by women’s increased mobility and education,
has subversive potential since scholarly and theological
materials had previously been the sole purview of learned men.
Yet, these Muslim women were not seeking to undermine existing
power structures or to resist the secular state, which discouraged
their kind of learning and religious piety. Rather, their
main motivation was to learn, attain, and uphold Islamic virtues
of modesty and docility and reintegrate Islamic knowledge and
practices (including those that organize gender relationships)
into everyday Egyptian life. For Westerners, it seems impossibly
paradoxical: the nature of piety that these women promote
50 contexts.org
depends on subordination to Islamic virtues of femininity that
includes modesty and docility and is achieved by teaching the
body “modest disciplines” through practices such as veiling
and the cultivation of shyness.
It’s easy to dismiss something like the cultivation of shyness
as oppressive, functional, or a symbol of resistance to the
forces of modernity. However, Mahmood presents a different
Giorgio Montersino Scott Gunn Loretta Prencipe msarchivist
Women don’t blindly submit to religious prescriptions;
instead, they adapt their religious practices to the
realities of their lives.
explanation: this practice provides a pathway to achieve piety
and to make meaning in the world. Mahmood likens the
achievement of piety through submission to the lengthy and
painful regime of learning to which musicians or dancers subject
themselves as they seek mastery in their field. Like a dancer
or musician, the religious woman submits herself to a lifelong
regime of ongoing discipline; she becomes a masterful religious
woman through daily practice. But, like the dancer or the musician,
the religious woman is not oppressed by her regime; rather,
her very personhood and agency are predicated upon the ability
to be instructed and transformed by
submission to her practices.
Mahmood came under fire for
positing that the embrace of docility
doesn’t necessarily amount to oppression
and that “freedom” and “choice”
aren’t universal terms; most discussions
of religion, it seems, still spring from the “God is bad for women”
formulation. Yet, the most important point that Mahmood makes
is that the assumptions that shape discussions of women’s experiences
with conservative religions are flawed. A shift in perspective
opens up new avenues for thinking about religion as
asiteofidentitymaking.Othercommentatorsapproachthis
question of assumptions from a different perspective by noting
the irony of anti-religious fervor among Westerners and citing the
similarities between patriarchal regulations emanating from religious
dogma and those hailing from cultural norms and standards
like the Western beauty ideal.
eic 17

church of god, church of beauty
Bring up conservative religion and its symbols on any American
college campus, and students will immediately point out
paradoxes of complicity. With astonishing predictability, they
associate compliance with conservative religions with lack of
agency, choice, or freedom. Students are usually willing to concede
that complicity sometimes masks strategic choices or latent
resistance, but arguments such as Mahmood’s—that women
find meaning through docility—are a hard sell. Students like
to point out—triumphantly—that their lives in a modern
democracy that values women are free of the constraints that
characterize the lives of veiled women.
Fatima Mernissi, a Moroccan soci-
ologist who has written extensively
about gender and religion in the Middle
East, puts these self-satisfied indictments
in perspective. In the late 1990s,
Mernissi lectured extensively in Europe and the U.S. about her
memoir. In it, she recounts her childhood in a typical Moroccan
household: a harem. This multi-generational living arrangement
housed siblings, families, and parents. The harem limited women’s
spatial mobility, but was also a site of ongoing power struggles.
In the course of her book tour, Mernissi was inundated by questions
that exposed the depth of Westerners’ ignorance about
gender relations in Muslim societies. Westerners, she learned,
assumed that Muslims were women-haters and that Muslim
women were oppressed, dependent, sex starved, and powerless.
Intrigued by the dissonance between Western perceptions
and her own experiences, Mernissi set out on a complementary
mission (and wrote a complementary book) to uncover how
Westerns represent Muslim gender relations. In the process,
Mernissi stumbled upon a revelation: Westerners, too, have their
own harem, one that she titles “size 6.” Mernissi criticizes Western
commentators for feigning ignorance in light of the similarities
between the oppressive nature of the Church of God and
the oppressive nature of the church of beauty. Recounting her
experience in an American department store, where she was
deemed “too big” for its elegant selection, Mernissi revealed
parallels between the violence of the veil that restricts women’s
movement and the violence of Western beauty norms that compel
women to follow strict diet regimes and undergo dangerous
surgeries.
Mernissi’s rhetoric is simplistic, but the simplicity helps drive
home a more sophisticated claim: the “God is bad for women”
formulation is not the truism many believe. Instead, it’s a myth
that hinges on assumptions about the nature of religion, personhood,
freedom, and choice.
Overall, then, is God bad for women? Research over the past
twenty years has shattered conventional views of conservative
religions as monolithic sources of oppression. Social scientists
have demonstrated that women can be empowered by their
religion, that compliance is often strategic, that religion is a
site where gender rules are constantly being rewritten, and
that religiosity is produced through acts of devotion. More than
anything, these studies show that asking “Is God bad for
women?” is misguided, based on ideological assumptions
rather than on sound empirical evidence. Ultimately, like most
questions about culture and society, the answer can only be
“it depends.” Context—social, cultural, historical—is paramount,
and it’s impossible to assess the implications of women’s
involvement with religion without taking into account the
diverse circumstances in which women encounter conservative
religions. It’s not God, but man, who’s detrimental to or
It’s not God, but man, who’s detrimental to or
affirming of women’s interests.
affirming of women’s interests, both in the practices and behaviors
we condemn and condone.
recommended readings
Evelyn Bush. “Explaining Religious Market Failure: A Gendered
Critique of the Religious Economies Model.” Sociological Theory
(September, 2010). 28(3). Argues that although women constitute
the majority of religious participants, religious messages continue
to favor men’s interests.
Kelly H. Chong. Deliverance and Submission: Evangelical Women
and the Negotiation of Patriarchy in South Korea (Harvard University
Press, 2009). Explores how women’s religious participation
constitutes part of their effort to negotiate the dilemmas of contemporary
family and gender relations.
Lynn Davidman. Tradition in a Rootless World: Women Turn to
Orthodox Judaism (University of California Press, 1991). A nowclassic
look at women’s embrace of a conservative religion.
Sally K. Gallagher. Evangelical Identity and Gendered Family Life
(Rutgers University Press, 2003). A balanced study of Evangelicals’
perspectives on gender, family life, and faith.
Saba Mahmood. Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the
Feminist Subject (University of Chicago Press, 2005). A study of
Islamic revival in Egypt that challenges key assumptions within
feminist theory about religious practices.
Fatima Mernissi. Scheherazade Goes West: Different Cultures,
Different Harems (Washington Square Press, 2001). Probes representations
of Muslim women in Western culture and juxtaposes
the relations between men and women in Europe with those in the
Muslim world.
Orit Avishai is in the sociology and anthropology department at Fordham University.
She studies how religion shapes conversations about gender, sexuality, and family
life among Orthodox Jews in Israel and Evangelicals in the United States.
All photos via Creative Commons.
fall 2010 contexts
eic 18
51

how schools really matter
There’s an old joke about a man on a street corner, down on his
hands and knees searching for his lost wallet. A passerby stops to
help, asking, “So you lost it right around here?” “Oh no,” the man
replies, “I lost the wallet several blocks ago. I’m just looking on
this street corner because this is where the lighting is good.”
It’s tempting to look for the source of a problem in places
where the lighting is good even if we’re not in the right place.
When we hear about high dropout rates; persistent black/white
gaps in test scores; low American reading, math, and science
scores; dramatic differences in resources among schools; and
even growing childhood obesity, it’s sort of easy to ascribe
these negative outcomes to schools. In fact, this is the “traditional”
story we hear about American schools.
the traditional tale of schools
The tendency to view schools as the source of so many
problems is especially true when we consider equality of opportunity,
an important American value. There are many good reasons
to believe that schools are the primary engines of
inequality. First, children attending schools with lots of highincome
children tend to perform better on standardized tests
than kids at schools with lots of low-income children. Second,
50 contexts.org
by douglas b. downey and benjamin g. gibbs
Photo by Tom Woodward via Creative Commons
there are clear resource differences between these schools,
rooted in the fact that, in most states, local tax revenues constitute
a significant portion of the school’s budget. For example,
Ohio’s local taxes constitute about half of a school’s budget
(state taxes constitute 43% and federal taxes about 7%). As
a result of the heavy emphasis on local taxes, some schools are
able to spend substantially more money per student than others.
This means schools located in areas with expensive houses
and successful businesses can spend more on new textbooks,
teacher pay, recreational facilities, extracurricular activities, and
help for students with special needs. Third, in high-resource
schools, teachers encounter fewer children with behavioral
problems and more parents engaged in their children’s education,
factors that can attract and retain better teachers. Based
on these patterns, it seems obvious that if we want to improve
the quality of life for the disadvantaged in the U.S., the best
place to start is schools.
eic 19

But this traditional story has developed largely without
understanding the way in which children’s academic outcomes
are shaped by many factors outside of schools. Simply look at the
amount of time children spend outside of school. If we focus on
the 9-month academic year only, the proportion of time children
spend in school is about one-third. And if we include the
non-school summer, children spend just one-quarter of their
waking hours in school each year. Now if we also include the
years before kindergarten—which certainly affect children—we
find that the typical 18-year-old American has spent just 13% of
his or her waking hours in school. For most of us, it’s surprising
to learn that such a large percentage of children’s time is spent
outside of school, but it’s important to keep in mind if we’re serious
about understanding how schools really matter.
A contextual perspective reminds us to look at the rest of
kids’ lives. For instance, not every student comes to school with
the same economic, social, or cultural resources. Even with the
same educational opportunities, some students benefit from
home environments that prepare them for school work and so
they are better able to take advantage of education.
Moving away from the traditional, narrow view of schools
that forgets the importance of children’s time outside the classroom,
we endorse adopting a contextualized (or impact) view
of schools. This new emphasis can really change how we think
about what schools can—and can’t—do for our kids.
pianos and parents
Imagine that we want to compare the effectiveness of
two piano instructors who will both teach 10-week piano
classes for beginners. We flip a coin and assign one instructor
to place A and the other to place B. Our goal is complicated,
however, by the fact that in place B,
due to cost, almost no students come
from a home with a piano, whereas in
place A, whose parents have more disposable
income, most students have
a piano at home. As a result, place A’s
students have already had some practice time on a piano,
whereas place B’s students have had little to none. In addition,
while both instructors teach a session once a week, place A’s
students practice on their own several times a week, whereas
in place B—where few have pianos at home—students have
a much harder time finding a way to practice.
Obviously, if we just compared the piano students’ skills
at the end of the 10-week program we couldn’t accurately
assess the quality of the two instructors—the two groups’ skills
differed before the lessons began. And if we compared how
much the students’ skills improved during the instructional
period, it would still be hard to know which instructor was
more effective because place A’s students practiced more often
than place B’s students did. Given that these two instructors face
different challenges, is there a way to evaluate them fairly?
Can we isolate how the piano teachers really mattered?
This is the quandary we have when trying to understand
how schools (or teachers) matter for children’s lives; the same
kinds of complicating factors are at work. First, children begin
schooling with very different levels of academic skills. For example,
the black/white gap in math and reading skills is roughly
a standard deviation at the end of high school, but half of this
gap is evident at the beginning of kindergarten, before schools
have had a chance to matter. And the differences in skills
between high- and low-socioeconomic status (SES) students
at the start of kindergarten are even larger. Obviously, these
variations aren’t a consequence of differences in school quality,
but of the different kinds of students schools serve.
Thinking contextually, some home environments complement
what occurs at school as parents help with homework,
communicate with teachers, reinforce school concepts, provide
The typical 18-year-old American has spent just
13% of his or her waking hours in school.
Contexts, Vol. 9, No. 2, pp. 50-54. ISSN 1536-5042, electronic ISSN 1537-6052. (c) 2010 American Sociological Association.
All rights reserved. For permission to photocopy or reproduce, see http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp. DOI:
10.1525/ctx.2010.9.2.50.
As sociologist Annette Lareau describes, some home
environments complement what happens at school.
a safe and stable environment for study, and attend to children’s
medical needs (by, for instance, providing consistent visits to doctors
and dentists). In her book Home Advantage, sociologist
Annette Lareau gives a poignant description of just how important
parents can be, getting involved in their child’s coursework
and with their teachers in ways that promote academic success
and instilling in their children a kind of academic entitlement.
She wrote that these parents “made an effort to integrate edu-
spring 2010 contexts
eic 20
Photo by woodley wonderworks via Creative Commons
51

cational goals into family life including teaching children new
words when driving by billboards, having children practice penmanship
and vocabulary by writing out shopping lists, practicing
mathematics during baking projects, and practicing
vocabulary during breakfast time.” Interacting with instructors,
the upper-middle class parents Lareau observed requested specific
classroom teachers or asked that their child be placed in
school programs for the gifted, for speech therapy, or with the
learning resource center. In contrast, low-SES parents tended to
have less time for involvement with their children’s schoolwork,
leaving educational experiences in the hands of the “experts.”
Much like having a piano at home, these contexts of advantage
and disadvantage play a critical role in shaping how children
gain academic skills during their school years.
bringing in context
By using a contextual perspective, sociologists have
contributed considerably to our understanding of how schools
matter. One of the most influential studies was the 1966 Coleman
Report, a massive analysis of American schools that was
commissioned by the Federal Department of Education. James
Coleman, the lead author of the report, directed the collection
of data from 4,000 schools and more than 645,000 American
school children in the early 1960s. The researchers were interested
in why some children had high math and reading skills and
High- and low-socioeconomic status students gain
academic skills at about the same rate during the
school year. The gaps in their skills develop during
the summer.
others did not. They measured many characteristics of schools
(including school curriculum, facilities, teacher qualities, and student
body characteristics) and many characteristics of children’s
home lives (like parents’ SES—education, income, and occupation
level) to see which were more closely related to academic
skills. Surprisingly, school characteristics were only weakly related
to academic skills. It turned out that differences between
52 contexts.org
schools in terms of quality played only a small role in understanding
the variation in students’ academic skills while home life
(parents’ SES showed the strongest relationship) mattered much
more. Skeptics of this conclusion, such as sociologist Christopher
Jencks, re-evaluated Coleman’s conclusion with new data,
but ended up finding similar patterns.
Of course, one limitation of this approach is that it depends
heavily on whether Coleman and Jencks were measuring the
right things about schools. Maybe they were missing what
really mattered. While they were measuring per pupil expenditures,
teacher/student ratios, and racial composition, they
missed critical factors like teacher quality. If they failed to measure
a lot of important things about schools, then their conclusions
that schools play only a minor role in explaining inequality
of skills might be wrong.
seasonal comparison research
What researchers need is a way to untangle the role of
school and non-school influences. Observing student learning
during the school year tells us little about how schools matter
because students are exposed to both school and non-school
environments. When we compare annually-collected test scores,
for example, it becomes very difficult to know why some students
fall behind and some get ahead. Sociologist Barbara
Heyns pointed out that during the summer children are influenced
by non-school factors only. The
best way to understand how schools
matter, she reasoned, was to observe
how things change between the nonschool
period (summer) and the school
period. This strategy works like a natural
experiment, separating the “treatment”
from the treated. Knowing
what happens to group-level differences in achievement by
race, class, or gender when school is in session (the treatment)
compared to when it is not (the control) is a good way to know
if schools make educational gaps bigger or smaller.
This important insight led Heyns to collect a different kind
of data. She evaluated fifth, sixth, and seventh grade students
at the beginning and end of the academic years in Atlanta. By
eic 21

testing them both in the fall and spring, she was able to tell
how much they learned during the summer, when school was
out. This study design allowed her to uncover a provocative pattern—high-
and low-SES students gained academic skills at
about the same rate during the nine-month academic year.
Gaps in skills developed during the summers. Although schools
did not close achievement gaps
between groups, these results bolstered
Coleman and Jencks’s initial conclusions
that schools were not the primary
reason for group-level inequalities.
Heyns’s provocative findings were replicated by sociologists Doris
Entwisle and Karl Alexander in Baltimore and, more recently,
by myself with colleagues at Ohio State. With nationally representative
data, we found that low- and high-SES children learned
math and reading at similar rates during the 9-month kindergarten
and first grade periods, but that gaps in skills grew quickly
during the summer in between, when school was out.
Taken together, the overall pattern from this seasonal
research supports Coleman’s conclusion: schools are not the
source of inequality. The seasonal approach to understanding
schools gives us a much more accurate understanding of how
schools influence inequality. This research consistently produces
an unconventional conclusion—if we lived in a world with no
schools at all, inequality would be much worse. In other words,
when it comes to inequality, schools are more part of the solution
than the problem.
This contextual way of thinking about schools and inequality
is difficult to reconcile, however, with the “traditional”
story—that wide variations in school quality are the engine of
inequality. By adopting a more contextual perspective on
schools, we can understand this counterintuitive claim: despite
the fact that some schools have more resources than others,
schools end up being an equalizing force. The key is that the
inequalities that exist outside of school are considerably larger
than the ones students experience in school.
schools, context, and policy
At the beginning of this article, we pointed out that it’s natural
to look to schools for the source of many of our kids’ prob-
lems—they’re the corner with the best “lighting.” The oftenunexplored
terrain outside of schools, though, remains shadowy
and seemingly inaccessible. This doesn’t need to be the case.
And, though extending the light beyond schools reveals that
group-level inequality would be much worse if not for schools,
it doesn’t mean that schools are off the hook. In fact, using school
impact as a guide, many “successful” schools in the traditional
view are revealed as low-impact—good students don’t always
signal good instructors. In these schools, children pass proficiency
exams, but since they started off in a better position, it’s arguable
that the schools didn’t actually serve their students.
Clearly, when we employ a contextual perspective, we
think about school policy, child development, and social problems
in a new light. A contextual approach to schools promotes
sensible policy, efficiently targeted resources, and
reasonable assessment tools that recognize that some schools
and teachers face very different challenges than others.
For example, a tremendous amount of energy and money
is directed toward developing accountability systems for schools.
But recall the analogy of the two piano instructors. It’s difficult
to determine which instructor is best, given that place A has
students that start with more skills and practice more outside
of instruction. Now suppose that we knew one more piece of
information: how fast each group of piano players gained skills
when not taking lessons. Suddenly, we could compare the rate
of improvement outside of instruction with the rate observed
during the instructional period. We could see how much instruction
mattered.
This “impact” view has recently been applied to schools.
In 2008, with fellow sociologists Paul T. von Hippel and Melanie
Hughes, I constructed impact measures by taking a school’s
average difference between its students’ first-grade learning
rate and the learning rate observed in the summer prior to first
grade. The key finding was that not all the schools deemed as
“failing” under traditional criteria were really failing. Indeed,
spring 2010 contexts
eic 22
Photo by Scott Feldstein via Creative Commons
When it comes to inequality, schools are more the
solution than the problem.
53

three out of four schools had been incorrectly evaluated. That’s
not to say that there were no variations in school quality, but
many schools did much better than expected when we took a
contextual approach to measurement. And some did much
worse. If impact evaluations are more accurate, then teachers
serving disadvantaged children are doing a better job than previously
thought and current methods of school evaluation are
producing substantial errors.
With its contextual orientation, seasonal research has also
provided insights into other ways that schools matter. For example,
researchers have considered whether “summer setback”
can be avoided by modifying the school year so that there is
no long gap in school exposure. Von Hippel has compared
math and reading learning in schools with year-long calendars
versus those with traditional school-year/summer break calendars.
In both conditions, children attended school for about
180 days a year, but the timing of those days was spread more
evenly in year-round schools. It turned out that, once a calendar
year was up, both groups had learned about the same.
The policy lesson is that increasing school exposure is probably
more important than fiddling with how school days are distributed
across the year.
Given that school exposure appears critical, many have
viewed summer school (restricted to academically struggling
children) as an attractive option for reducing inequality. It turns
out, though, that children attending summer school gain fewer
academic skills than we would expect. This may be because
the academic programs in the summer are of lower quality,
but it may also be because the kinds of students who typically
attend summer school are also the kind who would typically suffer
a “summer setback” without it. Viewed in this light, just
treading water or maintaining the same academic skills during
the summer could be viewed as a positive outcome.
And in other research employing seasonal comparisons,
researchers have shown that children gain body mass index
(BMI) three times faster during the summer than during the
school year. Obviously, schools shouldn’t abandon attempts to
improve the quality of lunches or the schooling environment,
but research suggests that attention should be paid to nonschool
factors as the primary sources of childhood obesity.
In the end, looking at schools through a contextual lens provides
exciting insights. When we forget how other aspects of
children’s lives figure into their development, we create a distorted
view of schools. The contextual perspective corrects this
54 contexts.org
Students play during recess.
A contextual approach to schools recognizes that
some schools and teachers face very different
challenges than others.
error and produces a more accurate understanding of how
schools really matter. It suggests that if we are serious about
improving American children’s school performance, we will
need to take a broader view of education policy. In addition
to school reform, we must also aim to improve children’s lives
where they spend the vast majority of their time—with their families
and in their neighborhoods.
recommended resources
James S. Coleman. “Equality of Educational Opportunity,” United
States Office of Education and National Center for Education Statistics
(1966). The classic large-scale study
of American schools and factors related
to test score performance.
Douglas B. Downey, Paul T. von Hippel,
and Melanie Hughes. “Are ‘Failing’
Schools Really Failing? Using Seasonal
Comparisons to Evaluate School Effectiveness,”
Sociology of Education (2008),
81(3):242-270. Introduces impact evaluation,
which isolates school from nonschool
factors in child achievement via seasonal comparisons.
Doris R. Entwisle, Karl L. Alexander, and Linda S. Olson. Children,
Schools & Inequality (Westview Press, 1997). Uses data from Baltimore
to show how social context shapes children’s early schooling
experiences.
Barbara Heyns. Summer Learning and the Effects of Schooling (Academic
Press, 1978). Describes the seminal use of “seasonal comparisons”
to report the results of summer versus school-time learning.
Annette Lareau. Home Advantage: Social Class and Parental Intervention
in Elementary Education (Rowman & Littlefield, 2000). A
vivid ethnographic account of the different ways working and middle-class
families prepare their children for school and interact with
teachers.
Douglas B. Downey is in the sociology department at Ohio State University. He
studies schools and inequality. Benjamin G. Gibbs is in the sociology department
at Brigham Young University. He studies the origins of social stratification.
Photo by visual.dichotomy via Creative Commons eic 23

the scarcity fallacy
by stephen j. scanlan, j. craig jenkins, and lindsey peterson
For the first time in human history, the world is home to
more than one billion hungry people. New data from
the United Nations suggest that a higher proportion of
the Earth’s people are hungry now than just a decade
ago, the reverse of a long and otherwise positive trend.
34 contexts.org
Photo by Getty Images, Christopher Furlong eic 24

The conventional wisdom is that world hunger exists primarily
because of natural disasters, population pressure, and shortfalls
in food production. These problems are compounded, it is
believed, by ecological crises and global warming, which
together result in further food scarcity. Ergo, hunger exists simply
because there isn’t enough food to go around. Increase
the food supply, and we will solve the problem of hunger on
a global scale.
Scarcity is a compelling, common-sense perspective that
dominates both popular perceptions and public policy. But,
while food concerns may start with limited supply, there’s much
more to world hunger than that.
A good deal of thinking and research in sociology, building
off the ideas of Nobel laureate economist Amartya Sen,
suggests that world hunger has less to do with the shortage
of food than with a shortage of affordable or accessible food.
Sociologists have found that social inequalities, distribution
systems, and other economic and political factors create
barriers to food access. Hunger, in this sociological conception,
is part of the broader concept of “food security,” which the
World Bank describes as the inability to acquire the food necessary
to sustain an active and healthy life. A central sociological
element of this is “food poverty.”
the (recycled) rhetoric of scarcity
The idea that hunger is due to scarcity has roots in Thomas
Malthus’s classic 1798 book An Essay on the Principle of Population.
Malthus predicted widespread
suffering and death from famine would
result from the planet’s inability to feed
itself, stemming from its failure to cope
with exponential population growth.
Malthus turned out to be wrong—food
production grew much faster than population—but
his arguments have been recycled over generations,
and today, especially with ongoing threats to Earth’s carrying
capacity, they have come to define conventional wisdom on
hunger in the mainstream media and general public as well as
for policymakers.
Food scarcity has long been the focus of agencies such as
the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the U.S.
Department of Agriculture, and the U.S. Agency for International
Development. Each uses some version of the scarcity argument
to shape food security and development policies in collaboration
with global agribusiness and food scientists. In such
arrangements, concerns about hunger are viewed as production,
marketing, and logistics problems that have solutions in
the market-based policies of the global food system.
Fighting hunger from this approach means the top priority
is reducing scarcity. This is most often addressed by increasing food
yields with new technologies and by shipping food to more
places more efficiently. The underlying goal in this approach is
Contexts, Vol. 9, No. 1, pp. 34-39. ISSN 1536-5042, electronic ISSN 1537-6052. © 2010 American Sociological Association.
All rights reserved. For permission to photocopy or reproduce, see http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp. DOI:
10.1525/ctx.2010.9.1.34.
Pallets of canned goods at a food pantry in the Bronx.
to facilitate what has been called the “supermarket revolution”—
atermusedbytheWorldBanktodescribethegrowingreliance
of global citizens on large-scale agricultural industries and commodity
chains to obtain their food.
This supermarket model has created steady growth in the
global import and export of food. But it can also produce its
own problems and be counter-productive. What’s worse is that
the increased prices that often accompany market-based production
make food less affordable for those in need. Furthermore,
increased production may do nothing at all to guarantee
more food. For example, the market model has increased use
of crops for biofuel, which shifts agriculture away from producing
food. In an oft-cited Washington Post editorial, Earth Policy
Institute president Lester R. Brown noted that the same amount
of grain needed to fill an SUV’s 25-gallon gas tank with ethanol
could feed a single person for a whole year.
The bigger problem with emphasizing food supply as the
problem, however, is that scarcity is largely a myth. On a per capita
basis, food is more plentiful today than any other time in human
history. Figures on the next pages reveal that over the last several
decades food production (represented here in a common
staple, cereals) and the average daily food availability per capita
have grown, outpacing what has been the most rapid expansion
of human population ever. Data such as these from the FAO reveal
that even in times of localized production shortfalls or regional
famines there has long been a global food surplus.
The problem is ensuring access to this food and distributing
it more equitably. A 2002 New York Times headline proclaiming
“India’s Poor Starve as Wheat Rots” dramatically, if tragically,
illustrates this point. Starvation amidst plenty has occurred in
many a famine, as in Bangladesh in 1974 or Ethiopia in the
winter 2010 contexts
eic 25
Sociological research suggests that world hunger
has less to do with the shortage of food than with
a shortage of affordable or accessible food.
Photo by Getty Images, Spencer Platt
35

Estimated hungry population in the world
1200 million
1000
800
600
400
200
c.1996 c.1997 c.1998 c.1999 c.2000 c.2001 c.2002 c.2004 2007 2008 2009
Source: U.N. Food & Agriculture
The time periods are three-year reporting periods as presented by the
U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization’s State of Food Insecurity (SOFI)
from various years, with the exception of 2007–2009, which are from press
releases specific to those years. The trend line is a two-year moving average
for these figures. Missing years indicate periods where SOFI didn’t report
clear estimates.
1980s. Even Ireland during the Great Famine exported vast
quantities of food. Hunger in contemporary world societies is
often no different. Markets are overflowing and even when
shortfalls occur in emergencies, the global surplus is more than
adequate to address such concerns.
Crop science can produce more food, and transportation
and storage improvements can distribute greater amounts of
it, but these don’t guarantee access for all—a scenario that
became quite evident with the 2007 global food crisis and
spikes in food prices. Indeed, the global supermarket revolution
can actually be devastating and counterproductive on the
local level when prices increase and make food unaffordable
for hundreds of millions of people.
Scarcity, in short, isn’t the problem, and giving it undue
attention reinforces many of the myths that get in the way of
understanding hunger. In World Hunger:
Twelve Myths, food scholars Frances Moore
Lappé, Joseph Collins, and Peter Rosset have
elaborated on this, addressing the problems
of misplaced focus. Blaming population
growth, food shortages, or natural disasters
sidetracks attention from the challenges of
the global food distribution system, the
authors argue. They warn that free markets,
free trade, food aid, or even green revolution
technologies, for example, can all be
barriers to obtaining food when inequalities
are deeply ingrained. Rather than food
scarcity, then, we should focus our attention
on the persistent inequalities that often
accompany the growth in food supply.
beyond scarcity
The basic statistics about world hunger
are staggering—and revealing. Some 96
36 contexts.org
Estimated percentage of the world that is hungry
15.5 percent hungry
15.0
14.5
14.0
13.5
13.0
12.5
c.1996 c.1997 c.1998 c.1999 c.2000 c.2001 c.2002 c.2004 2007 2008 2009
Source: U.N. Food & Agriculture
The Turkana tribe in Kenya
distributes food aid from Oxfam
with a democratic voting process.
percent of hungry people live in developing countries and
according to Unicef nearly a quarter of them are children. The
U.N. World Food Programme notes that in developing countries,
the poorest citizens spend upwards of 60 percent of their
income on food. By way of contrast, according to a New York
Times editorial the poorest Americans only spend between 15
percent and 20 percent on food. With declining disposable
income, those who already may eat only two very simple meals
each day now may have to cut back to one.
These statistics reveal a clear link between poverty and
hunger. Two-thirds of the countries in the world with the most
severe extreme poverty—rates greater than 35 percent—also
have child hunger rates of 35 percent or more. As evidenced by
the prevalence of hunger in the world’s 77 low-income food
deficit countries (LIFDCs) as designated by the FAO, poverty is
inseparable from hunger and should thus be considered its primary
root cause. No wonder the 2000 U.N. Millennium Summit
concluded that the most serious problem confronting the world
is persistent poverty and its connection to hunger. The prevalence
of hunger in LIFDCs is particularly important
because these countries are not only
among the world’s poorest by World Bank
classification standards but are also net
importers of basic foodstuffs because they
are unable to produce amounts to meet
their own needs. This makes them more at
risk in that they lack sufficient foreign
exchange in the international marketplace,
something further exacerbated by global
price spikes like those experienced in 2007.
As evidence of the prevalence of food insecurity
in LIFDCs, 23 of the 25 countries with
the highest rates of child hunger in the
world are also designated as LIFDCs (the
exceptions being Burma and Maldives) and
Photo by Getty Images, Christopher Furlong
they continue to be predominant well down
this list. Without guaranteed entitlements
or other assistance, hunger is certain to persist
among these most vulnerable nations,
eic 26

Global daily caloric availability per capita
3000
2800
800
2600
2400
2200
1961 1965 1970 1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2003
Source: U.N. Food & Agriculture FAOSTAT database
where addressing it is least affordable.
Moreover, most of the LIFDCs are in Sub-Saharan Africa,
where very little progress on hunger has been made over the
last couple of decades—children, for example, fare only slightly
better now than in 1990, child hunger having declined only
0.5 percent. In contrast, the remaining regions of the world
have made much larger gains; East Asia and the Pacific, for
example, have reduced child hunger 16 percent. Stagnation
in the African subcontinent can be attributed directly to its persistent
and pervasive poverty and underdevelopment, which
creates further problems with conflict, health crises, and political
instability, among other problems that contribute to hunger.
The developing world isn’t alone in its hunger and poverty,
though. Demand on food pantries in the United States is
increasing according to a 2009 survey of
food banks by the organization Feeding
America (formerly America’s Second
Harvest). Evidence of poverty and loss
of employment income as a primary
cause of food insecurity can be even
more evident in stark contrast to the
relative well-being of U.S. citizens or elsewhere in the industrialized
world. Here, food scarcity isn’t even (or shouldn’t be)
a consideration. In difficult times and tight budgets, as freelance
journalist and senior fellow at the policy and advocacy
organization Demos, Sasha Abramsky, found in Breadline
U.S.A., families keep gas in the car to get to work, prescriptions
filled, and the heat and lights turned on but often cut their
food budgets, with the hope public or private assistance will
help put dinner on the table.
Poverty, though, is only one form of inequality. Gender,
ethnic, and other types of stratification have contributed considerably
to hunger as well. Women are disproportionately
likely to suffer from hunger, and in fact constitute approximately
60 percent of the world’s hungry. This is particularly
troubling given that women do as much as 80 percent of the
world’s agricultural labor, working land that in more than a
few places they may not be legally entitled to own.
Global population and cereal production
25,000,000
20,000,000
800
15,000,000
10,000,000
5,000,000
Global cereals production (100s of metric tonnes)
Global population (1000s of people)
1961 1965 1970 1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2007
Source: U.N. Food & Agriculture FAOSTAT database, U.S. Census International database
As we have found in our own work, countries with more
gender inequality (especially in education) have the greatest
degree of child hunger. Gender inequality also influences
women’s health and access to contraception as well as limits
their opportunities in society, potentially condemning them to
lives where childrearing is their only opportunity for social status.
In this context, large numbers of children may not be a
cause of scarcity so much as a consequence of poverty and
powerlessness.
Ethnic inequality can also contribute significantly to world
hunger, especially in countries with marginalized minorities
and a history or present situation of ethnic violence. Such
“minorities at risk,” as social movements scholar Ted Gurr calls
them in People versus States, have long been threatened with
Scarcity, in short, isn’t the problem. Giving it
undue attention reinforces myths that get in the
way of understanding hunger.
hunger. Eritrea, Indonesia, Rwanda, Sri Lanka, and the Sudan
are among many such places. While contributing to rampant
militarism and armed conflicts, ethnic discrimination also silently
marginalizes minorities to less desirable lands and occupations.
The effects of ethnic discrimination then go beyond immediate
violence, creating market disruptions, dispersed labor, and
land degradation that destroys what for many is their only
chance to produce or earn money for food.
Further exacerbating the effects of these social inequalities,
international food aid—initiated by the US government in
the 1960s to remove surplus grain from domestic markets and
assist military allies—has long been ineffective and misdirected.
According to Public Law 480, U.S. aid must travel in U.S.flagged
vessels and depends on market surpluses. The results,
critics contend, is that the major beneficiaries are not those in
need of food but U.S. shipping companies, agri-business, and
countries with geopolitical value for the United States.
winter 2010 contexts
eic 27
37

Photo by AFP/Getty Images, Fred Dufour
“Eating is a right!“ declares a young woman on the eve of
2009’s World Food Day.
Studies of who gets food aid partially support this criticism.
In an article in Food Policy aid specialists Daniel C. Clay, Daniel
Molla, and Debebe Habtewold, for example, found no relationship
between need and food aid in Ethiopia. Food aid was instead
allocated to areas where organizations had stable operations,
to favored ethnicities, and to female and aged heads of households
regardless of need. Tina Kassebaum, a senior research scientist
at Strategic Research Group, has found that program aid
(bilateral U.S. donations) is unrelated to a country’s share of child
hunger, while emergency/project aid (multilateral World Food
Programme donations) is targeted at needy countries.
Making matters worse, emergency food delivery, which has
become one of the most visible forms of assistance to those in
need of food, has been corrupt on many fronts in recent years.
According to Michael Slackman at the New York Times, in Egypt,
the government subsidizes flour so that it can be baked into
bread and sold cheaply to the population. However, the aid is routinely
diverted into the black market and sold at a much greater
profit while corrupt inspectors are bribed to certify that it has
gone to assist the hungry. In the Democratic Republic of Congo,
a15-yearcivilwarhasbeenfoughtbetweentheremnantsofthe
Hutu guerrilla force that perpetrated the 1994 Rwandan geno-
At the very least, food must be upheld as a
human right.
cide and other parties. In refugee camps, food is often used as
aweapon—campguardsallocateittothosewhowillkeep
order, not to those most in need, while also having connections
to widespread use of rape. Grim reports such as these have
appeared in media outlets such as The Guardian, The Gazette
(Montreal), and the New York Times who further note a key tactic
in this battle has been attacking food aid and relief convoys,
leading to threat and withdrawal of relief agencies, thus further
compounding hunger as refugees and internally-displaced persons
flee for safety, left to fend for themselves. Similar patterns
have occurred in Darfur and other conflict-ridden zones.
Some argue that corruption is a product of scarcity, and
38 contexts.org
that if food did not have to be delivered to areas where it was
in short supply such fraud would not exist. This argument is
true to a point, but such disruptions in the food distribution
chain are much more attributable to conflict and inequality,
with power and powerlessness at the core of the problem.
Corruption is simply another barrier to access—especially in
times of acute conflict. Indeed, the poor and powerless are
ultimately those most affected by these failures in the systems
designed to help them.
Poverty, inequality, conflict, and corruption are all crucial
contributors to world hunger, then. But what may be even more
important and difficult to understand is how these can all fit
together, reinforce one another, and even intensify the impacts
of more basic food crises or the limits of various natural
resources—that is, of scarcity itself. Environmental scarcity can,
for example, be both a cause and a consequence of the inequalities
associated with hunger. Entrenched poverty can contribute
to further conflict and environmental destruction. This limits food
access and reinforces a feedback cycle causing more conflict,
which in turn creates more scarcity, and so on. As we’ve learned
from Oxford economist Paul Collier’s The Bottom Billion, hunger
can be a product of a vicious cycle in which violent conflicts
borne of corrupt and repressive government, poverty, and ethnic
marginalization reinforce one another.
addressing hunger
Addressing world hunger is difficult and complex. To do
it properly, we must get beyond the limited rhetoric of scarcity
and instead focus on the inequalities, social conflicts, and
organizational deficiencies at its roots.
To get at inequality, policy must give attention to democratic
governance and human rights, fixing the politics of food
aid, and tending to the challenges posed by the global political
economy. At the very least, food must be upheld as a human
right. In Freedom from Want, for example, political scientist
George Kent places hunger squarely in the discussion of politics
and the global human rights system. In his view, for hunger to
be adequately addressed there must be
worldwide recognition of food as a fundamental
human right bound up in
international law. It is only in this way
that that both moral and legal accountability for failing to meet
the needs of those not empowered to ensure their own food
security can be established. Connecting this to our own work,
we have found that democratization and increased protection of
political rights reduces child hunger, paralleling a reduction of
ethnic and gender inequality. Recognition of this fundamental
human rights premise could elevate hunger to a higher level in
international discussions and ultimately render it a non-issue,
safeguarding it from the negative impacts of inequality, conflict,
and politics.
Upholding this principle would also protect vulnerable
citizens in industrialized countries who are finding it increasingly
eic 28

difficult to afford food as prices increase, real wages decline,
and unemployment grows. Moreover, plans emphasizing nutrition
and health, such as school feeding programs or those that
target women, infants, and children, could be justified on the
grounds of human rights and equal protection for the deserving
poor entitled to assistance.
Asecondfocusshouldbeensuringthatinternationalfoodaid
actually gets to those in need, overcoming the problems of inefficiency
and corruption that have long plagued such efforts. Fortunately,
the news here is not all negative. Over the last decade
international aid has moved toward less politicized emergency/project
aid. Studies of the impact of this kind of food aid have
revealed a relatively favorable picture, Still, this kind of aid, at best
atemporarycorrective,canbeimprovedbyattendingmoredirectly
to the underlying conditions of poverty and inequality.
There is, for example, a longstanding debate over in-kind
aid versus cash assistance. Oxfam International argues that the
developed world should not dump cheap, subsidized food aid
that undermines local food production and markets in the developing
economies it purports to help. A better solution would be
to provide direct cash assistance to promote food purchases in
local or regional economies. Recognizing that many poor depend
on land for their income, such an approach would channel money
to those who need it most, rather than to global agri-business
and shipping companies profiting from food aid politics (this is
amoreecologicallysoundpracticeaswell).Ifreformedandeffectively
managed with minimal corruption, this approach could
have a huge impact at minimal cost.
Leading up to the 2009 G-20 meetings in London, World
Bank president Robert Zoellick noted that it would cost less
than one percent of the current U.S. stimulus package to save
agenerationaroundtheworldfrompovertyanditsconsequences,
including hunger. An influx of money could stabilize
hundreds of countries throughout the world, not just with
regard to hunger but politics and social conditions as well.
Fiscal challenges are further complicated by the fact that
they are intricately connected with the global political economy,
a third focus area. A number of ideas exist for making
the globalized world more equitable so that ending hunger is
asignificantpositiveoutcome.Strategiesshouldempowersocieties
and individuals to become more food-sovereign (able to
exercise power over their food decisions).
Promoting sustainable agriculture with an emphasis on
local food systems and empowering farmers to compete in
their own markets is one such dimension. It will reduce ecological
scarcity and go far toward ensuring food security, and ultimately
food sovereignty, while having the added benefit of
injecting additional money into local communities.
Effective long-term solutions through development of production
capabilities, however, won’t succeed unless ethnic and
gender inequality are reduced or better yet, eliminated. Freeing
ethnic minorities from the fear they will face violence if they
come to aid distribution stations or, better yet, providing them
Sorting at the International Rice Research Institute in the
Philippines.
with the tools to produce their own food and economic sustenance,
will contribute greatly to reducing hunger. Too, providing
women with control over childbearing, giving them access to
education, allowing them the right to own land and businesses,
and facilitating their economic activities with micro-credit and
other innovations will significantly reduce hunger. Investing in
the well-being of women and reducing gender inequality not
only can improve their lives but benefit entire countries.
The challenge, in short, is to create a more equitable and
just society in which food access is ensured for all. Food scarcity
matters. However, it is rooted in social conditions and institutional
dynamics that must be the focus of any policy innovations
that might make a real difference.
recommended resources
Laurie DeRose, Ellen Messer, and Sara Millman, eds. Who’s Hungry?
And How Do We Know? (United Nations University, 1998).
A social scientific treatment of the causes and conceptualization
of hunger as well as appropriate responses to it.
Food and Agricultural Organization of the UN. The State of Food
Insecurity in the World (FAO, various years). An annual assessment
of world hunger, including the latest figures and most recent policy
discussions.
Amartya Senn. Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and
Deprivation (Oxford University Press, 1981). A presentation of “entitlement
failure,” the seminal theory for understanding global
hunger as connected problems of distribution, access, and the
human causes of famine.
James Vernon. Hunger: A Modern History (Belknap Press, 2007).
Ausefulhistoricalaccountofevolvingconceptionsofworldhunger.
Stephen J. Scanlan is in the department of sociology and anthropology at Ohio
University. He studies comparative social change with an emphasis on food insecurity
and development. J. Craig Jenkins and Lindsey Peterson are in the department of
sociology at The Ohio State University. Jenkins specializes in conflict and its effects on
social change, while Peterson studies stratification, movements, and political sociology.
winter 2010 contexts
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Photo by AFP/Getty Images, Romeo Gacad
39

photo essay
literacy through photography
by katherine hyde
Artists, activists, and teachers around the world have put cameras into the hands of children, asking and allowing them
to share their visions and stories. The resulting images are illuminating and the experience is memorable, if often fleeting.
Literacy Through Photography is a student-centered critical pedagogy that integrates writing and photography
into classroom instruction. Developed by the artist and educator Wendy Ewald at Duke University’s Center for
Documentary Studies, LTP has collaborated with the Durham public school system for 20 years, and for the last decade
has been a teacher-training program for educators from across the U.S. and abroad. Since 2008, a small staff from
CDS and a rotating group of Duke University student fellows sponsored by DukeEngage have spent each summer in
Tanzania, first training local teachers in LTP’s methods and then assisting in the development and teaching of
classroom-based LTP projects.
The LTP program in Tanzania aspires to make an impression on children while working more broadly to influence
ways of learning and styles of pedagogy within Tanzanian schools. The work begins not with children, but with the teachers
who once studied in traditional classrooms based on rote memorization and are now charged by the Tanzanian
government with a shift toward participatory methods of instruction.
Whether in North Carolina or in Tanzania, any LTP activity—whether “reading” a photograph, brainstorming how
to represent conceptual ideas visually, framing and shooting photographs, or writing creative stories or narrative descriptions
about pictures—emphasizes critical thinking as well as visual, cultural, and written literacy. Drawing on many years of
experience, the Duke staff and students learn alongside the Tanzanian teachers and students. Together they continue
to recognize the meaning, potential, and challenges of LTP in Tanzania in light of restricted resources, class sizes that
reach 100 children, strict national curricula, and educational reform efforts.
In addition to managing logistical hurdles, the Duke staff are discovering how to navigate differing priorities and
even assumptions about photography. Does it show the “real thing”? Are photographs open to interpretation? And
how should photography be folded into a lesson plan? A Durham teacher, for instance, might emphasize self-expression,
assigning students to create a self-portrait in a language arts class. But a Tanzanian teacher might ask students
to illustrate specific English or Swahili verbs, accomplishing both a process-oriented goal—a grammar lesson—and a
product-oriented goal—the creation of prints to be used as visual classroom aides, which are noticeably missing in
most Tanzanian schools.
LTP has trained over 150 teachers from 45 primary and secondary schools and several teachers’ colleges in Tanzania,
and well over 2,000 Tanzanian children have participated in school-based LTP projects. To foster the program’s sustainability,
the LTP Teacher Resource Center has been established to house a growing collection of cameras, printers, and other photography
supplies. The LTP program abroad continues year-round under the leadership of a Tanzanian teacher and artist
and with the counsel of a local advisory committee comprised of experienced LTP teachers. These teachers recognize that
not all students learn by one method, so photography and the LTP program can open up opportunities for shy or less
eloquent students to participate in learning. One teacher says he feels that East Africans often turn a blind eye to
students, but LTP opens up a new educational opportunity. As his fellow teacher put it, the best thing about LTP is how
it allows teachers to see how their students see—and how they imagine.
Katherine Hyde is a sociologist based at Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies, where she directs the Literacy Through Photography program and teaches
visual sociology.
Note: The LTP process of planning and shooting photographs is collaborative, so the images here are not assigned to a single photographer.
56 contexts.org
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Geography—Tanzanian tourism
Mount Kilimanjaro is a critical source of both water and tourism in
Tanzania. While pictures of Kilimanjaro are ubiquitous, advertising
everything from beer to tour companies, the photographs students
in this 6th grade geography class made give an insider perspective
on this star of the landscape. Watching the lively discussions as students
planned their photos, the teacher commented that usually “in
class it’s learning, learning, learning what’s in the book. [Here] I can
see they’re really thinking hard.” While a group of teachers doing a
similar exercise had photographed a mural of the mountain, this
student led her group to this water fountain, directed her classmates
where to stand and when to shoot, and with her gesture and
gaze, portrayed the mountain’s power and beauty in a more complex,
nuanced way.
Contexts, Vol. 9, No. 2, pp. 56-63. ISSN 1536-5042, electronic ISSN 1537-6052. (c) 2010 American Sociological Association.
All rights reserved. For permission to photocopy or reproduce, see http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp. DOI:
10.1525/ctx.2010.9.2.56.
spring 2010 contexts
eic 31
57

58 contexts.org
History—Slave trade
This high school history project began with a lecture
on six methods used to enslave East Africans.
Students then moved freely around the schoolyard
as they considered the best backgrounds and
angles for pictures representing these tactics.
Once they made their photographs, students wrote
about the images from either the perspective of a
slave or that of a slave trader.
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Language—English verbs
Tanzanian teachers have integrated LTP into language classes by asking students
to make photographs to learn vocabulary and grammatical rules and to inspire
creative writing. These examples were made in classes of 100 students, where the
LTP assignments yielded practical flash cards. In one assignment, students photographed
common English verbs such as to smile (pictured above), love, decide,
cook, climb, and work. The photograph below belongs to a series depicting usages
of the past tense with “used to.” Here the caption says “When I was young I used
to play football with my friends. This is the ground where I used to play football.”
spring 2010 contexts
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59

60 contexts.org
Science
3rd grade students created this representation
of “hearing” in a study of the five senses.
7th grade students created photos to promote
awareness about HIV. This image’s caption
reads, “This picture shows a friend who is
giving her friend advice to have a V-C-T test
before getting married.”
Here high school students represent
“hibernation” in a study of homeostasis.
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Math
In this statistics project, high school students created a frequency graph representing
the number of siblings per student. In their aerial photo, students represent actual
data points, and later, students labeled the axes and calculated the mean, median,
mode, and range. Participating in the making of the graph and the study of the
photograph enhanced students’ comprehension of concepts and calculations
fundamental to statistics.
spring 2010 contexts
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61

Language—visual and written portraits
Other LTP assignments emphasize students’ creative expression in asking them to
make self-portraits or pictures of dreams, fantasies, or their home lives. The first
picture was taken in a 3rd grade class where students were asked to imagine taking
a trip anywhere in the world. These students described an imagined trip to the U.S.
to meet President Obama. They chose the tallest of the 60 students to be Obama,
and they highlighted their savvy awareness of global media imagery by making
sure he was wearing a tie and a diplomatic expression. In the photograph below,
a 6th grade student depicts a dream: “I was a hero/A great hero/ I saved life of
people/I helped people/I catched thieves when they stole from the bank/People
loves to see me helping them/I was happy/I be a hero.”
62 contexts.org
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Life skills—Gender
During advanced LTP workshops, Tanzanian teachers design their
own LTP curricula specifying content (how the activity fits into the
standard curricula) and logistics (how to accomplish the project
considering class size and available photographic supplies). These
photographs were made by teachers to illustrate concepts related
to gender in high school “life skills” courses, which cover topics like
HIV and home economics. The upper image depicts “quiet” and
the lower shows “pain.”
spring 2010 contexts
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63

photo ESSAY
matrimony
by greg scott
The documentary film from which these images
come, “Matrimony,” melds ethnography with the
art and craft of digital cinema to explore and chronicle
the daily making of a marriage. In this case, the
union happens to involve an often-homeless, heroinaddicted
couple I’ve known for 10 years. “Pony Tail”
Steve and “Sapphire” Pam comprise one of the core dyads of a long-standing, West-side Chicago community in
ashantyvillageknownlocallyas“TheBrickyard.”Thisshadowcommunityismadeupofheroinandcrackaddicts,
alcoholics, prostitutes, thieves, exiled gang members, and freight train “hobos”—but also a dizzying array of white,
upper middle class men and women seeking intoxicative reprieve and refuge from their shame.
As an ethnographer committed to long-term fieldwork in The Brickyard, I entered Steve’s life in 2001. This was
well before he and Pam became a couple, seven years before I witnessed their marriage at City Hall. Over the years,
they’ve welcomed me into their various Brickyard “homes,” and they’ve stayed with me in my home. I once
rescued Steve from a heroin overdose. He saved me from taking “carnal” sociology too far.
In the spring of 2009, I decided to make their marriage the subject of my next ethnographilm (my term
for a documentary film in which the rhetorical structure emerges from systematically collected ethnographic
audiovisual data). As a work of artistic social science, “Matrimony” grew out of the question I was so often asked
when I talked about Pam and Steve: “Is this a real marriage?” Early on, I took umbrage at people’s insistence on
distinguishing the sacred unions of so-called normal people from the profane romantic liaisons of “junkies.” But
then I realized that even I harbored skepticism about marriage between homeless heroin addicts. So it was that
my own deep-seated prejudice prompted me to go out into the field and make this film.
Ultimately, however, this film isn’t about the marriage of Pam and Steve; it’s not even about marriage between
homeless heroin addicts. Rather, it’s an ethnographic account of marriage in contemporary America. The particularities
of the protagonists’ situations allow the viewer to examine more generic marital relations without all
the distracting “noise”—they can consider marriage without its conventional trappings, including the thicket
of legitimating institutional affiliations supporting “acceptable” unions. In other words, the atypicality of Pam
and Steve’s marriage is exactly what makes it an ideal subject of study, an examination of what sociologist Georg
Simmel called the “superordinate” quality of the dyad-turned-marriage.
IobservedasSteveandPamcontendedwithrepeatedchallengestotheirmarriage.Theirresponseshelped
distinguish marriage, as a social form, from other types of coupling. For example, clinical addiction all but
precludes an addict from contributing to concerns beyond his or her individual well-being, but marriage depends
on creating and nurturing supra-individual structures. So a marriage of addicts casts “what it takes” to make
amarriageworkintoboldrelief.Second,conventionalmarriagesenjoysynergisticrelationswithothernormative
institutions. In “Matrimony,” we see how two people enact the superordinate quality of their state-sanctioned
(if not state- or community-supported) relationship—in marriage, even Pam and Steve are more than just “a
couple.” Continually deprived of the taken-for-granted appurtenances of married life (such as the luxury of sleeping
in the same bed at night and the simple assumption that one’s spouse will be alive in the morning), these two
nevertheless create an undeniable marriage.
By their first anniversary, Pam and Steve (just like their mainstream counterparts) realize that marriage is no more
or less than what you make of it. It is this “making of legitimacy” that these film stills are intended to capture.
Greg Scott is in the sociology department and directs the Social Science Research Center at DePaul University. He studies the people, places, and things in the world of
illicit drugs.
50 contexts.org
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An elegant and formal invitation to the “event” designed
to summon viewers’ preconceived notions of marriage
and thereby establish the opening gambit in the film’s
rhetorical structure.
In my living room, I elucidate ground rules for filming
and remind them, “It’s your life, but it’s my film.” This will be
my story of their story. Although I strive to “get it right,”
they might not like everything they see.
On the drive to City Hall, Pam said, “For once we’re going
before a judge but not as criminals.” They view entering into
the legal institution of marriage as a step toward fulfilling a
conventional American dream.
Physical intimacy abounds, against all odds, in this marriage.
The stereotypical junky holds no thing precious. Steve and Pam,
however, have managed to keep their rings out of the
pawnbroker’s hands.
Contexts, Vol. 10, No. 1, pp. 50-57. ISSN 1536-5042, electronic ISSN 1537-6052. © 2011 American Sociological Association.
http://contexts.sagepub.com. DOI 10.1177/1536504211399051
Steve is optimistic, a dreamer, though a bit Pollyannaish
regarding what marriage will “do” for them. He loves being
in love with Pam, a pragmatist who is more ardently devoted
to the dope fiend life. Steve hopes marriage will “cure” their
addiction.
Even with an injured knee, Pam leads the way in nearly every
significant maneuver they make during a given day. She “calls
the shots” in this marriage; Steve follows along, for the most
part happily.
Together Steve and Pam spend hours on buses and trains,
negotiating their way to and from work, the dope spot, and
shelter. In transit, Steve plays “scratch-off” (lottery), fantasizing
amillionaire’slife,whilePamschemesthenexthustle.
Here Pam calls the dope dealer and makes arrangements for
Steve to meet and buy their “medicine.” Dealers respond more
favorably to women’s requests, but “copping is a man’s job.”
To watch “Matrimony,” please visit http://condor.depaul.edu/ethnodoc/matrimony/.
winter 2011 contexts
eic 39
51

photo ESSAY
With “medicine” (heroin and crack cocaine) in hand, they find
asafe,warmplacewheretheycanuse.Thisabandoned
building is a “shooting gallery” where people gather to use
and experience their drugs.
Once we’ve entered the building, we must crawl through this
hole in the wall to reach the stairs that will take us to the 2nd
floor. Pam goes first (as usual), then Steve and I.
Once in the stairwell, the visitor is greeted by a message that
reveals one of the core rules that defines the ethos of dope
fiend culture: Never snitch on or betray a fellow junky.
52 contexts.org
Amidst the supposed lawlessness of the drug world, Steve
and Pam exist as a sacrosanct institution sanctioned by the
State, a bona fide couple whose transient union achieves
some stability in graffiti.
Heroin is a third party to this marriage. It’s the fulcrum around
which Steve and Pam’s days revolve, the connective tissue of
their respective daily grinds. Injecting together is an act of
unparalleled intimacy.
Steve injects heroin 6-8 times each day. As with most “junkies,”
the drug (counter-intuitively perhaps) energizes him, makes
him more lucid, and provides a feeling of being “at home.”
To the heroin addict, every drop matters. In the context of an
addicted couple, the precise (and equitable) division of heroin
(and money) is essential. “Every drop means status quo or
conflict,” Steve says.
Most female injectors eventually resort to using veins in
their extremities. This frame captures the ritualized act of
drug injection in relation to the institutions of marriage,
religion, and poverty.
eic 40

Like most heroin addicts in this area, Steve and Pam also use
crack cocaine, mainly to “wake up” from the depressant effects
of heroin. Pam smokes it, while Steve typically injects it.
The gallery braces them against the cruel outdoor elements,
but its naked windows give way to the scorching light of late
winter. Steve plays “scratch-off” and nods gently while Pam
figures out their next move.
After an hour’s break in a day of constant movement, Steve and
Pam venture back into the “real world,” where time unfolds in
4-hour increments between “doses” of heroin.
Heading back into the hustle and bustle of street life, Pam leads
the way. The light of day offers cold comfort. They have no
money, and “dope sickness” (withdrawal) is only 4 hours away.
Pam is far ahead of Steve as they move to the next sequence in
the self-perpetuating cycle of addiction. “It’s like prison,” Steve
reports, “but addiction is the warden.”
Amarriageinmotion.Bothincharacter,Pamboardsthebus
first and Steve examines the distance while trying to keep hold
of the present. It’s almost always Steve who initiates the small
acts of physical intimacy throughout the day.
Everything they own—the trappings of their domicile—must
be portable, small enough and sufficiently lightweight to fit
into this bag. Every thing has only this place.
At a very busy suburban Chicago intersection, anchored by a
major department store, Pam and Steve “set up shop.” In this
wide open space, they must stake their claim and make enough
money, because the clock is ticking.
winter 2011 contexts
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53

photo ESSAY
Once firmly ensconced on their corner, Steve and Pam “go to
work.” Panhandling is their job, and it’s grueling labor. Itinerant,
addicted supplicants, who walk more than 15 miles a day.
At least three of the 15 miles they walk each day consist of
back-and-forth treks between cars. Steve feigns a leg injury, but
he always offers to work and gives a “God bless you,” even
though he’s agnostic.
Pam is the breadwinner. But their division of labor—according
to which Steve carries out the “riskier” tasks (e.g., copping)—
allows for usually harmonious pooling and equal sharing
of resources.
In a rare moment of levity, Pam tosses an orange in the air.
In the course of a day, their commitment to each other, and
to heroin, keeps them too occupied, too busy, for “play.”
54 contexts.org
After a few hours of panhandling, Steve takes his “medicine
break.” He casually strolls through the department store, heading
toward the washroom. “Act like a customer,” he tells me.
Steve washes his hands and locks himself in a stall of the men’s
room. He proceeds to ingest the day’s third “dose” of heroin.
“I make sure to leave the place cleaner than I found it,” he says.
Squatting on the ground between two very busy lanes of rush
hour traffic, I framed this shot deliberately to capture and
convey poignancy—down-up angle, hair blowing in the wind,
noise fading to silence.
After panhandling enough money for their next bag of heroin,
they walk to the drugstore, where they convert change to cash.
En route, we pass a wedding cake store, whose elegant, formal
offerings clash with the reality of marriage.
eic 42

Pam handles the conversion of coin to cash, because dope
dealers won’t accept more than a dollar or so in coinage. Pam
hurriedly operates the “Green Machine” as a manager
approaches, intent on removing us from the store.
With cash safely in hand, Steve proposes that they “go sit and
read” at the local chain bookstore or else “get our library cards
renewed.” Ultimately Pam decides: pay extra for a dope delivery
and wait until the shelter opens for the night.
Back to the corner, Steve and Pam receive their delivery of
heroin, pack up their stuff, and board the bus that will take
them to the shelter where they hope to spend the night
together, but apart.
Once on the bus or train, Steve and Pam work hard to “fit in”
or at least not stand out from the commuter crowd. “Passing” is
important, as they rely heavily on public transit’s tolerance.
Pam nonchalantly blows a gum bubble and makes designs on
the evening ahead; specifically, she calculates how to maximize
the benefit of their stay in the free shelter.
Anear-suburbanChicagoorganizationrunsasystemofshelters
involving an alliance of seven different churches, one for each
night of the week, but all with their own unique and strictly
enforced rules.
Demand for shelter space far outpaces supply. On this frigid
night, Steve and Pam wait outside with several dozen other
“vagrants.” Steve wonders aloud what will happen if one of
them gets in but the other does not.
Because of the demand-supply imbalance, every shelter operates
on a lottery system. It’s not uncommon for Steve’s shelter
ID card to be selected and Pam’s to go unpicked (or vice versa).
The tension mounts.
winter 2011 contexts
eic 43
55

photo ESSAY
Meanwhile, the shelter volunteers have converted the large
cafeteria into a dining room and men’s quarters and one of the
offices into women’s quarters. Every resident gets a bedroll
(pad), blanket, pillow, and food.
On this lucky night, the lottery system favors them both.
Steve visits Pam in the women’s quarters, as she makes her bed.
Their division of domestic labor is regulated by forces external
to the marriage.
56 contexts.org
Before dinner, Steve washes his hands. “Just because
we’re homeless doesn’t mean we have to be dirty,” he says.
He reluctantly scrubs from his fingers the words Pam wrote
earlier in the day: “Pam / Love.”
Mess hall-style dinner, nearly “all you can eat.” They stock up
on food, for this is the only reliable source of food they have
during the winter season. Each knows the other’s eating habits,
repeatedly anticipating such requests as “pass the salt.”
Pam retrieves a pair of donated eyeglasses. Nonplussed by the
effects the optics have on her vision, she suddenly realizes, “Oh,
they’re bifocals.” Steve tells her, “I’ll keep them on me, just in
case there’s an emergency and you need them. They’re sturdy.”
Smoke break. Ninety percent of the night’s residents file outside.
Soon it’s “lights out,” after which no one may venture out.
Soon Steve and Pam will be separated. If they break the rules
and try to visit each other after bedtime, they will be evicted.
Pam listens while Steve talks about how he always tries to get
the bed closest to Pam’s bed, even though they’re usually in
different rooms and separated by a hallway. Recently they
were evicted from a shelter for holding hands.
Shelter staff allow Steve and Pam a goodnight kiss in the
hallway, the best-lit and most observable space in the
shelter. Neither ever takes intimacy for granted; for them,
it’s always been an accomplishment.
eic 44

Steve’s reluctance to separate from Pam for the night manifests
in his trepidatious walk back to the men’s quarters. Each
of them knows the other will be sneaking a “dose” in the
middle of the night, and each fears the other’s quiet death
by overdose.
Five hours’ worth of sleep and it’s time to get up and face the
next day. Here we see the toll an average day takes on Steve’s
feet, not to mention his body, his mind, and his marriage.
Every morning, Pam rises before Steve. She directs the
movement, quite literally, of their union. For Steve, every
morning begins with a kiss from his sweetheart. “I love you
baby,” he says groggily.
Every shelter resident must clean his/her own “pad” and pillow
with ammonia and toss the sheets into the laundry bin. Rise at
6a.m.Cleanup.Eatat6:30a.m.Leaveby7a.m.Noexceptions.
Steve returns his pillow to its proper bin in the church
basement. In this moment, sleep-deprived, dope sick, and
cold, Steve’s body conveys exasperation as he says, “That’s
that.” The ”rip and run” awaits.
Somewhat rested, well-fed, and cleaned up, Pam once again
spearheads the motion of this marriage from one place to the
next. Transition and transience are two of the most prominent
features of their life together.
Pam and Steve gather themselves on a park bench to plan their
day over coffee. Steve talks of their future and how he wants to
settle down, get an apartment, a job, maybe even a dog. Just
then, a dog walks by: “But not that dog. That’s an ugly dog.
Looks like they shaved its ass.” Another rare moment of levity.
Walking to the train, Pam criticizes the residents of this highly
affluent neighborhood: “They don’t take care of their stuff.”
She then spots, off camera, two men holding hands and asks
Steve, “Do you think they’re married?” The viewer is left
wondering the same of Steve and Pam. Is this a real marriage?
winter 2011 contexts
eic 45
57

photo essay
situating memory in argentina
by barbara sutton
Ileftthefacilitywithastrongdesiretowashmyhands,perhapstoshedanytraceofhorrorinmybody.YetasanArgentine,
how could I not be implicated in the history of state violence that still haunts the nation?
52 contexts.org
More than two decades after the last military dictatorship in Argentina ended (1976-1983), its legacy of terror is still an
open wound. In the name of national security and of defending Western Civilization from the threat of leftist “subversion,”
the military regime tortured and “disappeared” tens of thousands of people. One emblematic site of such practices is the E.S.M.A.
(Escuela de Mecánica de la Armada,SchoolofNavalMechanics),afacilityIgainedaccesstoin2007aspartofaguidedvisit.
The E.S.M.A. was among around 500 facilities turned into clandestine detention centers during Argentina’s dictatorship. It
operated as a concentration camp, torture center, and platform from which detainees were taken on “death flights” to be
thrown into the ocean or river to drown.
Now open to the public and managed by human rights groups, the E.S.M.A. has been transformed into a “Space of Mem-
ory and for the Promotion and Defense of Human Rights.” As I left the E.S.M.A., the cold, humid quality of the buildings seemed
to have penetrated my bones. The screams of the people subjected to torment remained in the silent walls. Reverberating in
my head were the words capucha (hood) and capuchita (little hood) (rooms where detainees were kept shackled with eyes
covered), “avenue of happiness” (corridor in a torture area), and “the Sardá” (a small room—named after the Maternity
Sardá—where pregnant detainees gave birth, only to have their babies taken away). The military regime’s penchant for twist-
ing the meanings of words mirrored its systematic distortion of other aspects of reality. After all, what is the meaning of secu-
rity when a government brutally turns against its own population?
The experience of state terrorism in Argentina embodies social suffering which anthropologists Arthur Kleinman, Veena
Das, and Margaret Lock say stems from “what political, economic, and institutional power does to people, and, reciprocally,
from how these forms of power themselves influence responses to social problems.” How do people collectively struggle with
trauma related to state-sponsored atrocities? How do movements seek to redress such events? The following pictures feature
various strategies of memorialization linked with the goal of bringing about truth and justice. The photo essay focuses on four
sites in Buenos Aires, Argentina: the Park of Memory and the Human Rights Walk (places of remembrance and tribute to the
victims of state terrorism) and the E.S.M.A. and “Olimpo” (former clandestine detention centers, now refashioned by human
rights organizations). The pictures illustrate the diverse methods human rights advocates use to raise awareness, construct
memory, and garner political support: testimony, displays, public art, and cultural events that build cross-movement solidarity.
Above all, these images capture the critical roles that the reclamation and resignification of formerly terrifying physical spaces
play in grappling with social suffering and human rights.
Barbara Sutton is in the women’s studies department at the University at Albany, State University of New York. She is the author of Bodies in Crisis: Culture, Violence, and
Women’s Resistance in Neoliberal Argentina. All photos courtesy Barbara Sutton.
eic 46

park of memory
The last military dictatorship
in Argentina operated under
the same “concentration
camp logic” that was applied
to society as a whole. The
barbed wire surrounding the
Park of Memory is reminiscent
of this experience.
The masculine word desaparecidos
(“disappeared”)
obscures the presence of
women, but it is estimated
that about thirty percent of
the disappeared were
women.
Like many Argentines, artist
Liliana Felipe (here, outside
the Park of Memory) left due
to political persecution under
the dictatorship.
Located by the river (Río de la
Plata) inasparseareaofthe
city, the Park of Memory
quietly evokes “death flights”
in which detainees were
thrown into the water to die.
Contexts, Vol. 9, No. 3, pp. 52-57. ISSN 1536-5042, electronic ISSN 1537-6052. © 2010 American Sociological Association.
All rights reserved. For permission to photocopy or reproduce, see http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp. DOI:
10.1525/ctx.2010.9.3.52.
A collection of photos of the
disappeared represents the
large number of people targeted
by the military regime.
The pictures symbolically
bring their bodies back to
populate the space.
This sculpture in the Park of
Memory is based on the work
of the late Argentine artist
Roberto Aizenberg and symbolizes
his partner Matilde
Herrera’s three children who
were disappeared during the
dictatorship.
summer 2010 contexts
eic 47
53

human rights walk
54 contexts.org
Situated within a larger park
(the Parque Indoamericano)
in a working-class district,
this site uses different groves
of trees to commemorate
20 groups of people who
disappeared.
A plaque in remembrance of
Mercedes Benz workers
attests to military repression
specifically targeted at the
labor sector.
Among the commemorative
plaques is this “tribute to the
1,900 Jewish disappeared.”
Jews were overrepresented
among the people taken by
the military regime.
One grove is reserved for
disappeared members of the
University of Buenos Aires’s
schools of engineering,
architecture, and economic
sciences. Dedicated to “their
dreams and struggles,” this
sign urges the abandonment
of the culture of “no te
metas” (not intervening),
which has implicitly authorized
atrocities.
eic 48

e.s.m.a.
The fence and vigilance towers
surrounding the E.S.M.A.
remind us of the pervasive
control and surveillance during
the military regime, both
within and beyond clandestine
detention centers.
The basement of the Casino
de Oficiales was originally
divided into smaller chambers
where detainees were taken
for interrogation and torture.
The E.S.M.A. comprises a
group of buildings formerly
under the control of the Navy.
The Casino de Oficiales was
the central building dedicated
to various repressive activities.
Human rights advocates work
to expose the horror that
took place inside the E.S.M.A.
A series of silhouettes (including
pregnant women) are
now displayed on the fence
to signify captives.
It is estimated that 5,000
detainees (most still unaccounted
for) went through
the E.S.M.A. This silhouette
evokes the psychological and
physical trauma of the victims.
One of the E.S.M.A.’s buildings
is now the Cultural Space
Nuestros Hijos (Our Children).
Managed by the Association
Mothers of the Plaza de
Mayo, the venue exhibits a
“Gallery of Revolutionary
Faces” to pay tribute to the
disappeared.
summer 2010 contexts
eic 49
55

el ”olimpo”
“The Center of Detention,
Torture, and Extermination
‘Olimpo’ functioned here
between August 16, 1978
and the end of January 1979,”
reads a sign at this site where
hundreds of people were
tortured and eventually killed.
The event featured a reading
in support of the Zapatista
movement in Chiapas, Mexico.
Through cultural gatherings
like these, a place of horror
and death has been transformed
into a site of memory,
cultural expression, and political
solidarity.
56 contexts.org
The “Olimpo” was part of a
larger repressive circuit operated
by the Army. Formerly in
the orbit of the Federal Police,
this site is now managed by
Human Rights groups that
coordinate educational and
cultural events.
Like the “Gallery of Revolutionary
Faces” at the E.S.M.A., this recent
mural at the “Olimpo” reclaims the
ideals that inspired the activism of
many of the disappeared: “From
their hands we take their banners.
Until Victory Always.”
At one memory-building
event, an “Olimpo” survivor
shared her story. Mother of
the Plaza de Mayo, Nora
Cortiñas (wearing the white
headscarf that identifies
mothers of the disappeared),
also participated.
eic 50

Decades later, laws that prevented the
prosecution of most of the dictatorship’s
crimes have been overturned. The new
trials underway are part of Argentina’s
movement toward “memory, truth, and
justice.”
summer 2010 contexts
eic 51
57

depression chic—shopping our way to recovery
by bryant simon
The news just went from bad to worse.
First came the ramblings of the subprime
mortgage crisis, followed by reports of
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac faltering.
Then AIG and Lehman Brothers
imploded. The New Recession was definitely
on. Unemployment claims rose
each month through the fall of 2008,
and, by the start of the new year, the
number of Americans without work
pushed into double-digits. A quick turnaround
didn’t seem likely.
Trend-watchers and marketers
scrambled to figure out how the new
financial times would influence consumer
behavior and buying patterns.
They determined that, while retail in
general would suffer, some sectors
would do better than others. Wal-Mart
and McDonald’s flourished as people
looked for bargains and luxury buying
tapered off. In fact, according to a survey
of international consumers conducted
in 2009, luxury purchases started
to elicit rising levels of guilt. A third of
all buyers said they felt pangs of regret
after picking up a new necklace or
designer handbag. The numbers seemed
to back this up. The Financial Times
noted that in the last quarter of 2008,
marquee luxury brands like Bvlgari and
Gucci registered sharp drops in sales.
Maybe the Great Collapse would lead to
some new buying patterns after all.
As magazine editor Maggie Buckley
remarked in the New York Times, “Shopping
is almost embarrassing, and a little
vulgar now.” Even when money wasn’t
really an issue for some buyers—that third
of the luxury market indentified above—
they still seemed to feel bad about the
hard times (for others). More than a few
didn’t want to spend on over-the-top
items, at least in public, when others were
hurting. Some in this group felt that if
they were going to keep on buying they
should at least spend their money on
items that seemed appropriate
for the times, that conveyed
austerity or usefulness
or at least gestured in the
direction of limits. In those
uncertain days after the Dow
Jones dipped below 8,000, a
Philadelphia limousine driver
reported, for instance, that his
high-end customers had
started asking all of a sudden
for gas-saving hybrids, often
Cadillac Esplanades with
blacked-out windows. Even
though these pop divas and
football heroes arrived in gasguzzling
private jets, they
wanted to look like they
cared, even if it was in slightly
extravagant way.
Others still felt guilty
about buying in the face of
ongoing economic bad news. But like
most things, guilt can cut two-ways, if
not more. While guilt can certainly inhibit
consumption, it can also trigger buying.
Neuropsychologists who study consumer
behavior have repeatedly found that
some buyers experience a surge of pleasure
when they act against their narrow
economic self-interests or indulge in useless
(or at least non-functional) purchasing.
This kind of buying, then, has a
counterintuitive logic and value, one that
could fuel non-utilitarian purchases in the
face of public talk of guilt, austerity, and
the need for new limits. And we saw a
lot of this kind of consuming after 2008,
with a twist of course.
Staring down the New Recession, a
Contexts, Vol. 9, No. 3, pp. 67-69. ISSN 1536-5042, electronic ISSN 1537-6052. © 2010 American Sociological Association.
All rights reserved. For permission to photocopy or reproduce, see http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp. DOI:
10.1525/ctx.2010.9.3.67.
At “Tweed Runs,” like this one held in London in
2009, hundreds of dapper cyclists take to the streets.
core of bourgeois bohemian (or “Bobo”)
consumers continued spending, but they
couldn’t totally erase the guilt generated
by the economic downturn or their desire
to distinguish themselves from others.
They sought out goods that somehow
Bourgeois bohemian buyers continue spending,
but seek out goods that reflect the moment and
project knowledge of the past.
reflected the moment and projected their
knowledge of the past—and, thus, their
desire to be seen as well-educated members
of society concerned about the
plight of others. In other words, they continued
to consume conspicuously. But
like those limo passengers in the hybrids,
they wanted their conspicuous consumption
to throw off a little dullness;
they wanted to simultaneously call attention
to their buying power and their
sophistication without indulging in the
summer 2010 contexts
eic 52
Photo by Matthew J. Shaw via Creative Commons
67

culture REVIEWS
obviously ostentatious. The New Recession
became a moment of inconspicuous
conspicuous consumption. “Flash
and pop has lost its appeal now,”
declared John Patrick, the designer of the
upscale line Organic. “People are flat
broke and starting to realize that more
and more each day. So it’s appropriate to
scale back. We’re starved for real things.”
The most popular “real” items in this
trend were ones that looked back and
quoted from the hard times of the 1930s
without, however, fully reproducing their
original purpose, significance, or political
engagement.
And so it came to pass that as world
markets collapsed, fashion designers and
home decorators debuted the latest
trend, Depression Chic. With a nod to
the nouveau Okies on the landscape,
those displaced by mortgage foreclosures,
bank failures, and wholesale layoffs,
marketers and new-age Mad Men
came up with overpriced goods that
harkened backwards about 70 years.
Models pranced down New York runways
in baggy, beige sack dresses.
“Trend savvy” clothier Forever 21, a selfdescribed
“source for the most current
fashions,” stocked its shelves with wool
newsboy hats and Mary Jane Shoes,
both period pieces from the 1930s.
Glossy magazine advertisements featured
broad-brimmed farmers’ hats and
retro-looking suspenders. Even furniture
makers got in on the trend, introducing
new chairs covered in worn burlap and
lamps made from beat-up broom handles.
But these accessories weren’t for
the victims of the Great Recession (unless
they were still racking up credit card
debt): the Depression Chic light fixtures
went for $1,600 a piece, while the chairs
came in at $3,600 a pair.
High-end consumption wasn’t the
68 contexts.org
only expression of Depression Chic during
this season of discontent. Business
Week’s Ellen Gibson discovered in the
fall of 2008 that traffic on eBay for items
that ran “Great Depression” taglines
jumped 15 percent. Sales of John Ken-
With a nod to the nouveau Okies on the landscape,
Forever 21 stocks its shelves with newsboy
hats and Mary Janes.
Elsewhere, in keeping with modern tradition, the recession becomes a sales pitch for
everything from flat caps to fixed gears.
neth Galbraith’s classic account, The
Great Crash, 1929, soared as the book
reached #87 on Amazon’s bestseller list.
At the same time, Netflix registered a 10
percent spike in rentals of the stark,
black-and-white John Ford film The
Grapes of Wrath. In its own attempt to
capitalize, the insurer All-State followed
up with an advertisement it called “Back
to Basics” that featured an actor walking
through a montage of Depressionera
photographs, including, of course,
Dorothea Lange’s “Migrant Mother.” A
voice-over explained solemnly that the
nation had suffered through twelve
recessions since the insurer first opened
in 1931. The way to get through this
economic downturn, the narrator said,
was the same as the others: get back to
the “basics” of home-cooked meals and
time with the family (and, presumably,
All-State Insurance). “There’s a financial
cry in the country right now,” eBay’s pop
culture expert, Karen Bard, told
Brandweek, “and that’s going to translate
into shopping.”
Well, it didn’t have to be this way.
To be sure, the paralyzing economic crisis
of the 1930s translated into some
shopping opportunities as well. Throughout
the decade, distressed families
bought tens of thousands of copies of
the board game Monopoly, invented not
long after the stock market crash by an
out-of-work Philadelphia engineer. Thousands
more lined up in front of theaters
to see Marx Brothers comedies and
gangster flicks and bought the soulwrenching
novels of Richard Wright and
Erskine Caldwell. But the adults of the
Depression didn’t just shop, and that’s
because they had outlets that allowed
them to do more than just feel distressed
and guilty about the sad state of the
economy. They organized. They built
union locals, unemployed councils, insurgent
political networks, and Townsend
clubs. They turned out on Election Day
for New Dealers and tacked up pictures
Photo by Ed Yourdon via Creative Commons
eic 53

of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt in
gilded frames over their mantles. Capturing
the tenor of the Great Depression
moment better than any hat or lamp
ever could—even a moderately priced
one—a steel worker in Thomas Bell’s
1941 novel Out of This Furnace assures
his fresh-off the boat working-class
neighbor in the late 1930s, “If you are a
worker in America, you are in politics.”
New Recession shopping doesn’t do
the same thing. Sure, in some ways it
captures this uncertain moment. Yet it
doesn’t seem like a transition, not the
way the 1930s did. As Obama’s presidency
starts to mark anniversaries, the
hope of 2008 often feels like a distant
memory. Faith in politicians, political
institutions, and the political process continues
to wane. “During the great
moments of social reform,” David
Brooks noted in a New York Times column
in early 2010, “at least 60 percent
of Americans trusted government to do
the right thing most of the time. Now,
only a quarter have that kind of trust.”
This growing doubt breeds disengagement
and renders references to the
Great Depression little more than quotes
and citations, strategies for marketing
products rather than invoking the “real”
past. In these depoliticized times we recognize
the New Recession by putting on
a textured dress or by watching a film,
knowingly nodding our heads when Tom
Joad delivers his powerful sermon about
empathy and organizing in the last
moments of The Grapes of Wrath. “I’ll
be there in the dark,” he says, peeking
out from under his wool newsboy hat,
“I’ll be ever’-where, wherever
you can look. Wherever there’s
afightsohungrypeoplecan
eat, I’ll be there. Wherever
there’s a cop beatin’ up a guy,
I’ll be there. I’ll be in the way
guys yell when they’re mad. I’ll
be in the way kids laugh when
they’re hungry an’ they know
supper’s ready. An’ when the
people are eatin’ the stuff they
raise, and livin’ in the houses
Contexts, Vol. 9, No. 3, pp. 69-71. ISSN 1536-5042, electronic ISSN 1537-6052. © 2010 American Sociological Association.
All rights reserved. For permission to photocopy or reproduce, see http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp. DOI:
10.1525/ctx.2010.9.3.69.
they build, I’ll be there, too.”
Perhaps we’ll all be there like Tom
Joad, wearing our hip wool newsboy
hats. We’ll be at the boutique downtown
or at the mall when The Gap mainstreams
this nostalgic trend of buying up
the past. Shoppers of the world will
unite and take over, but it won’t really
matter. There isn’t much at stake in
Depression Chic but more buying and
maybe some innocence by association—
distancing yourself from a problem by
purchasing something that says you care
and at least acknowledge that something
is wrong, even if you don’t know
how to fix the problem. That lamentable
tendency is what passes for politics
in the age of the New Recession.
Bryant Simon is at Temple University. He is the author
of Everything but the Coffee: Learning about America
from Starbucks.
summer 2010 contexts
eic 54
69

cculture REVIEWS
neoliberalism and the realities of reality
television
by david grazian
Along with mash-ups and Internet blogging,
the meteoric rise of reality television
came to define the last decade’s pop cultural
landscape for millions of Americans.
In 2000 the commercial success of
two new primetime series—Who Wants
to Be a Millionaire and Survivor—catapulted
the reality genre into the entertainment
mainstream. (Millionaire
earned the highest average Nielsen rating
among all television series for the
1999-2000 season, as did Survivor the
following season.) In August 2000, the
Survivor season finale attracted 51.7 million
viewers, making it the 13th mostwatched
television event of the 2000s,
bested only by the decade’s ten Super
Bowls, the 2007 NFC Championship
game, and the Friends series finale. In
2001 the Academy of Television Arts and
Sciences honored the FOX documentary
American High with its first ever Primetime
Emmy Award for Outstanding Reality
Program, and in 2003 the Academy
gave its first Emmy for Outstanding Reality-Competition
Program to CBS’s The
Amazing Race. Since the 2004-2005
season, FOX’s American Idol has annually
boasted the highest average ratings of
any other television program on the air,
arguably making it the most popular TV
show of the decade.
Critics and snarky audiences deride
reality television for the most obvious of
reasons, notably its thoroughly contrived
presentation of “reality”—the staged
theatricality of Donald Trump’s “boardroom,”
the insincerity of bachelorette
contestants, the highly orchestrated set-
68 contexts.org
tings in which bikini-clad women devour
live crickets for money. Others denigrate
the genre with a whiff of snobbery, noting
its tastelessness, its prurient lack of
wholesome content, and its exploitive
attempts to capture the lowest-common-denominator
of adolescent-minded
audiences. Yet shockingly few critics
have attempted to unpack the sociological
underpinnings of reality programming
as a product of its recent
The narrative conventions of reality TV echo the
most central policymaking paradigm in America in
the last decade: the neoliberal agenda.
historical context, the George W. Bush
era. In fact, such a reckoning illustrates
the extent to which the narrative conventions
of reality television echo the
most central policymaking paradigm in
American politics during the last decade,
the neoliberal agenda.
Informed by the free-market theories
of the conservative Chicago School
of economics and its acolytes, neoliberalism
represents a strategy of economic
growth developed in opposition to the
Keynesian approaches that shaped U.S.
monetary and fiscal policy during the
mid-twentieth century, from the New
Deal to the postwar era of economic
expansion. Neoliberal principles are associated
with global free trade and the
deregulation of industry, the weakening
of union labor, a decline in welfare assistance
and social service provision, and
the privatization of publicly-owned
resources. Although neoliberal ideology
has largely dominated the bipartisan
consensus that characterizes turn-of-thecentury
American public policies from
Reaganomics to NAFTA to welfare
reform to the recent bailout of the
nation’s banking industry, its influence
reached its apogee during the years of
the Bush Administration (2001-2009),
an era marked by union-busting, rising
corporate subsidies, and the deregulation
of markets; the unraveling of the
social safety net; the outsourcing of governmental
functions to the private sector;
and the abdication of responsibility
on the part of the U.S. federal government
to protect New Orleans and other
impoverished areas from the ravages of
Photo by Monty Brinton/CBS photo Archive/Getty Images eic 55

Photo by F. Micelotta/American Idol 2010/Getty Images for Fox
Aspiring Idol Jermaine Sellers made it
to 2010’s top 20 before getting the
boot.
Hurricane Katrina.
At first glance, neoliberal dogma
and reality television seem worlds
apart—that is, until one considers
exactly why the entertainment industry
developed the genre in the first place.
Much ink has been spilled about
the emergence of reality-based programming
as illustrative of the postmodern
blurring of boundaries
separating fact from fiction. But it bears
remembering that TV studios and networks
introduced the first generation of
reality television shows—notably the law
enforcement shows COPS and America’s
Most Wanted—in response to the 1988
Writers Guild of America strike. Their
goal was to create a form of programming
that would be largely immune
from union tactics from sit downs to
picket lines. Since reality television shows
do not rely on traditional scripts, producers
avoid the risks and expensive
costs associated with hiring unionized
writers. By casting amateur participants
willing to work for free, rather than professional
actors, producers also avoid
paying industry-standard union wages
to members of the Screen Actors Guild.
These strategies represent more than
cost-cutting measures. By hiring mostly
non-unionized workers, the studios and
networks that produce reality television
shield themselves from the collective
mobilization of organized labor in the
entertainment industries. The unionresistant
nature of reality TV was reaffirmed
during the 2007 Writers Guild
strike, when reality shows were left virtually
unaffected even as media production
work in more traditional sectors
came to an abrupt halt.
Consider also where reality television
creators produce their shows. They
have increasingly taken advantage of the
globalization of markets and flexibility
of national borders that neoliberal policies
make possible. It is no accident, for
example, that many seasons of Survivor
have been shot in Third World countries
undergoing rapid economic development,
where local authorities regularly
relax labor laws, child protections, health
codes and environmental regulations in
the interests of remaining “business
friendly.” These countries include China,
Thailand, Panama, and Guatemala—
some of the same developing nations in
which underpaid and mistreated workers
manufacture and export plastic toys,
branded sneakers, and other pop cultural
ephemera for the international
market, all in the name of free trade and
laissez-faire capitalism. Similarly, recent
seasons of The Amazing Race have been
filmed in China, Cambodia, Vietnam,
Thailand, and Malaysia.
Sweatshop laborers who work and
live in crowded factory and dormitory
spaces in offshore export processing
zones in Asia and Latin America share
Contexts, Vol. 9, No. 2, pp. 68-71. ISSN 1536-5042, electronic ISSN 1537-6052. (c) 2010 American Sociological Association.
All rights reserved. For permission to photocopy or reproduce, see http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp. DOI:
10.1525/ctx.2010.9.2.68.
much in common with reality television
actors. On FOX’s Hell’s Kitchen contestants
must live on the restaurant/studio
premises (and are forbidden to leave
unless chaperoned by a supervisor), work
extremely long hours performing numbingly
repetitive tasks, and subject themselves
to constant video surveillance.
Contestants on Survivor live in raindrenched
shantytowns and literally
starve while the world watches yet
remains on the couch. Moreover, since
reality TV actors are nonunionized workers
(like their exploited counterparts in
the developing world), they too lack the
collective-bargaining power that would
otherwise compel their employers to pay
them a living wage. In fact, it is rare for
reality TV actors or performers to even
be identified as workers, which is how
studios evade child labor laws on the sets
of “family-oriented” reality programs.
(On the exploitation of child performers
on reality TV, see Hilary Levey’s essay featured
in this issue.)
While the production of reality television
employs neoliberalism’s economic principles,
the genre’s narrative conventions
reflect its morals. Competitive programs
celebrate the radical right-wing values
championed especially by free market
Republicans. Both Survivor and The
Apprentice require sixteen or more participants
to fiercely compete against one
another in winner-take-all contests guaranteed
to produce extreme levels of
social inequality. Although team members
are initially expected to work cooperatively
on Survivor, they eventually vote
their collaborators out of the game in
naked displays of individualism and selfinterest—it’s
like the last days of Enron,
only with war paint and coconuts.
Meanwhile, programs like The
Apprentice emphasize the prestige of
spring 2010 contexts
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69

culture REVIEWS
celebrity CEOs and the entrepreneurial
acumen of wealthy businesspeople—
much like the Bush cabinet, which featured
former senior executives and board
chairmen from Alcoa, CSX, Goldman
Sachs, Halliburton, and yes, Enron. Like
any flexible corporation undergoing a
period of restructuring (especially in an
era of increasing unemployment and
poverty), audiences expect layoffs at the
conclusion of every episode. Participants
are encouraged to place their desire to
win above personal loyalties, but not
their slavish (if rarely reciprocated) devotion
to the boss, of course. Most notably,
on shows like The Apprentice the misdeeds
of elite business institutions or
their arrogant captains of industry are
never challenged or questioned—only
the actions of powerless, temporary
employees are up for dissection and second-guessing.
(Recall that the decade
bore witness to the really real collapse
of not only Enron but Arthur Andersen,
WorldCom, Lehman Brothers, Bear
Stearns, Washington Mutual, and count-
less other companies operating in deregulated
industries.)
Other reality shows feature young
people competing for the “opportunity”
to work as low-wage service workers or
no-wage interns in the glamorous worlds
of music, fashion, and magazine publishing.
Some of these programs feature
literal competitions in which contestants
vie for the chance to work as an underling
for a celebrity, such as VH1’s I Want
to Work for Diddy where winners were
awarded jobs as personal assistants for
70 contexts.org
rap producer and impresario Sean “P.
Diddy” Combs. Other reality shows simply
chronicle the trials and triumphs of
sycophantic interns as they labor away
at their non-remunerative jobs, gaining
valuable experience answering phones
and checking names off clipboards at
Survivor’s team members eventually vote their
collaborators out of the game in naked displays of
self-interest—it’s like the last days of Enron, only
with war paint and coconuts.
Members of the Writers Guild of America during a 2007 strike that focused on the
working conditions of scribes for so-called reality programs.
gala events. The MTV reality soap opera
The Hills portrays the central heroine,
Lauren “L.C.” Conrad, happily interning
at Teen Vogue while assisting high-end
fashion designers like Marc Jacobs.
Although Conrad’s insanely cushy madefor-TV
“internship” does not particularly
involve doing much work beyond gossiping
with costars and jet-setting to
Paris, The Hills nevertheless succeeds in
seducing young female viewers to seek
out fortune, fame, and even romance as
exploited and disposable workers in the
deregulated labor market.
Although the very design of competitive
reality programs like The Apprentice
or Hell’s Kitchen guarantees that
nearly all players must lose, such shows
inevitably emphasize the moral failings
of each contestant just before they are
deposed. Typically carried out by allknowing
judges and hosts, this smug
moralizing becomes practically unwatchable
on programs like The Biggest Loser,
in which fitness trainers personally criticize
the show’s overweight (and typically
working-class) contestants for their poor
health. In such instances, the contributions
of neoliberal federal policy to
increased health disparities in the U.S.—
notably the continued lack of affordable
and universal health care, and cutbacks
in welfare payments to indigent mothers
and their children—are ignored in favor
of arguments that blame the victims of
poverty for own misfortune. On reality
weight-loss programs, there are no collective
solutions to rampant inequalities
in wellness and health—say, an organized
boycott of inner-city supermarkets
that do not sell fresh yet inexpensive pro-
Photo by David McNew/Getty Images
eic 57

duce—only individual moral failures that
can be repaired by a belligerent drill sergeant,
breaking down the souls of his
charges in a televised theater of cruelty
that lasts until the season finale.
Perhaps the mirror-image of competitive
reality programs like The Biggest
Loser are home makeover shows in
which a TV network rebuilds the house
of a family victimized by extreme hardship,
whether a natural disaster or debilitating
illness. On ABC’s Extreme
Makeover: Home Edition, charismatic
host Ty Pennington grants miracles to
the misfortunate. During the 2005-06
season, for example, the show’s cast and
crew took part in community rebuilding
efforts in the Gulf region in the aftermath
of Hurricane Katrina. But while
programs like Extreme Makeover: Home
Edition may seem uplifting, their message
is no less neoliberal than The
Biggest Loser: like health care, housing
is never a right to be provided to all citizens
by the state, but a luxury sporadically
granted to the poor by affluent
private donors. Notably, home makeover
shows rarely spotlight fair housing
organizations that lobby state and federal
agencies to provide adequate housing
to the destitute. Instead, Pennington
and Co. rebuild the domiciles of the
most telegenic members of the so-called
“deserving” poor as acts of corporate
charity, just as Bush proposed that privately-run,
faith-based community partnerships
should replace the role of the
federal government in delivering social
services to the needy.
Is there hope for reality television? One
might recall that the medium’s offerings
were not always so homogenous. In July
1994 MTV premiered the third season
of The Real World. Set in a Lombard
Street house in San Francisco, the show
featured a diverse group of politically
aware youth representing a range of
viewpoints and perspectives. Pedro
Zamora was a 22-year-old HIV-positive
and openly gay AIDS activist; Rachel
Campos was a 23-year-old Hispanic-
American Republican who volunteered
for former U.S. congressman and Secretary
of Housing of Urban Development
Jack Kemp; Mohammed Bilal was a 24year-old
African-American and Muslim
singer-songwriter whose alternative hiphop
group Midnight Voices wedded
urban rap, jazz, funk, and world beat to
a politics of social activism. Along with
aJewishliberalcartoonist,anAsian
American medical student, a devout
Christian, and an eccentric bike messenger,
this dynamic cast helped make
the San Francisco season among the
most beloved and compelling in the
series’ history.
Ten years later, the 2004 season of
The Real World was shot in Philadelphia,
and featured seven great-looking but
hard-drinking nightclubbing post-adolescents
required to build a playground
for disadvantaged youth under the
supervision of the community-outreach
wing of the Philadelphia Soul arena football
team. (At least one or two cast
members showed up to work hung over
on most mornings.) In Sex, Drugs, and
Cocoa Puffs, pop culture critic Chuck
Klosterman quotes a former Real World
fan who explains her diminished enjoyment
of the show without mincing
words: “MTV used to pick people for
that show who I could relate to. Now
they just have these stupid little kids who
act like selfish twits.”
Now that we have begun yet
another decade, perhaps the increased
progressive and populist yearnings of the
times might not only counter our longstanding
neoliberal consensus in American
politics, but inspire new and
innovative ways to produce entertainment
media and popular culture as well. At the
very least, I’d settle for more diverse offerings
of reality television, particularly a
selection of programming devoid of conservative
ideology, shameless treacle, and
even, perhaps, live crickets.
David Grazian is in the sociology department at the
University of Pennsylvania and is the culture editor for
Contexts. He is the author of Mix It Up: Popular Culture,
Mass Media, and Society.
spring 2010 contexts
eic 58
On reality weight-loss programs, there are only
moral failures that can be repaired by a belligerent
drill sergeant.
71

cculture REVIEWS
the purchase of enlightenment
by sarah knudson
Eat Pray Love, the film adaptation of Elizabeth
Gilbert’s bestselling travel diary,
illustrates the type of soul-searching that
has become emblematic of life in an
increasingly individualized and selfabsorbed
society. Consumption is an
integral part of this quest for self-discovery,
supported by multi-billiondollar
industries that cater primarily to
middle-aged women. While the film
itself does not explicitly address themes
of sociodemographic change, consumerism,
or gender, the main character’s
journey invites reflection on these
bigger social phenomena.
Trapped in a marriage that is no
longer fulfilling, our protagonist Liz
decides to break free and confront her
unhappiness. “I used to have this
appetite for my life, and it is just gone,”
she tells her closest girlfriend. Her handsome
husband, cozy home in New York
City, and successful career all feel hollow—as
does her brief romance with a
similarly adrift Yogi from Yonkers.
Many women find themselves at a
crossroads. Liz, at the outset of the film,
is searching for enlightenment as a
newly single and emotionally empty individual.
The research of sociologists
Sharon Zukin and Jennifer Smith
Maguire suggests that Liz’s quest is not
unique—struggling to find oneself and
one’s place in the world is now a common,
if not universal, experience. This
obsession with self-discovery—a project
social theorist Zygmunt Bauman calls
“becoming what one is”—is arguably
the result of recent and dramatic social
changes. Key social structures that have,
in the past, provided individuals with
guidance on their relationships and general
life direction (such as the church)
have lost cultural potency. Moreover,
families, intimate relationships, jobs, and
career trajectories have become increasingly
insecure or unclear. Women have
66 contexts.org
Author Elizabeth Gilbert at the London Premiere of Eat Pray Love, starring Julia Roberts.
experienced the most significant
changes most directly, so they may also
be the most likely to wrestle with issues
of identity and life purpose. Fortunately
for women like Liz (that is, women of
means), lucrative industries are ready to
step in to help them navigate such crises
of identity.
After confiding in her closest friends,
Liz begins her quest by purchasing several
relationship advice books. As the bookstore
clerk rings in her copy of Crappy to
Happy, she casually mentions that they
“also have a whole divorce section
downstairs.” As this quip reveals, bookstores
are filled with self-help texts, and
Photo by Joanne Davidson/picturegroup, AP Images eic 59

this industry generates billions of dollars
of sales in North America, nearly doubling
in the past decade. The industry
grew by nearly 25 percent annually at
the turn of the millennium, and sales
now increase around 10 percent per year;
its estimated value hovers just below $14
billion in the U.S. And Women’s Health
magazine reports that Americans spend
over $600 million annually on these
books. Promoting emotional and spiritual
growth, the self-help industry thrives
on the search for identity and meaning.
This industry also includes magazines and
television programs, and each, in turn,
cross-promote products and services:
therapy and counseling, spiritual growth
workshops, and getaways that offer time
for deep thinking and reinvention. Oprah
Winfrey—one of the wealthiest and most
influential Americans—is at the center of
this consumption nexus promoting the
purchase of enlightenment. According
to the Wall Street Journal, she is behind
the career success of major self-help
gurus like Dr. Phil McGraw, Dr. Mehmet
Oz, and Suze Orman. Through her $2.4
billion media empire, Oprah has pushed
the popularity of the therapeutic discourse
that permeates self-help products
and mainstream North American culture.
And so, after reading several selfhelp
guides, Liz sets off on a multimonth
trip to Italy, India, and Indonesia.
Without any apparent concern about
financing her trip or making money
when she gets back home, Liz simply disappears,
buying her way out of a life
that’s suffocating her. While some popular
strategies for finding enlightenment
through consumption—like reading an
advice book or attending a personal
growth workshop—are within reach of
ordinary women, others demand more
resources than the average woman has
at her disposal. Despite claims that the
quest for self-discovery and enlighten-
ment has democratized, no longer
reserved for the ultra-wealthy with
unlimited time and resources, few
women could afford Liz’s luxurious
escape strategy.
Good thing that shortly after her
arrival at an Indian ashram, Liz is offered
an opportunity to contemplate her financial
fortune. Tulsi—an Indian girl working
at the retreat—is preparing to enter
into an arranged marriage with a young
man she barely knows and doesn’t find
physically attractive. Where is Tulsi’s
escape route? It’s hard to imagine that
she will be able to buy her way out if she
finds her marriage suffocating. Liz’s voyage
of discovery presupposes a middleor
upper-middle class lifestyle that is out
of reach for most of the world’s women.
Rather than spurring her to contemplate
privilege, Tulsi evokes in Liz only a memory
of marital entrapment.
From India, Liz proceeds to Indonesia
and meets Felipe, who has also gone
through a divorce and built a new life.
It is through Felipe, and his efforts to
open Liz’s heart, that the movie reveals
a moral hazard of reinvention and selfdiscovery:
selfishness. Felipe is frustrated
that while Liz has boldly set out to find
herself, she is unable to let go of her
fears and love him back. According to
social theorists Ulrich Beck and Elisabeth
Beck-Gernsheim, constant reinvention—
on one’s own terms—characterizes life
and love in the West today. But the
emphasis on individual self-discovery
doesn’t come without risk; when overdone,
it leads to unhealthy self-absorption.
As Felipe recognizes, Liz has taken
some risks in leaving her marriage and
embarking on her travels, but falls short
Contexts, Vol. 10, No. 2, pp. 66-67. ISSN 1536-5042, electronic ISSN 1537-6052. © 2011 American Sociological Association.
http://contexts.sagepub.com. DOI 10.1177/1536504211408921
of daring to love again. She seems too
focused on her own emotional needs.
The riskiest part of her journey will lie in
balancing her new sense of self with the
desire to love and be loved. It’s a common
challenge today: Liz is a typical
American, torn between a strong commitment
to intimate relationships and to
individualism.
But perhaps Felipe is too quick to
fault Liz for holding back and looking
inward. Women and the cultural goods
they consume in their search for enlightenment
are often criticized for their
Lucrative industries are ready to step in to help
women navigate crises of identity.
unabashed focus on the self. These
goods bear the imprint of neoliberal ideology—with
its emphasis on looking out
for oneself above all. Like Liz’s travels,
they are terribly indulgent and can undermine
women’s efforts to open up and let
the universe in. Worrisome multi-billiondollar
industries promoting enlightenment
push women to look deep inside
themselves without also encouraging
them to reach out and build relationships
that might open their hearts and minds.
While consumption empowers women
to (re)construct and display a self, ironically
it often hinders the development of
an other-directed and empathetic self. It
isn’t a perfect bowl of pasta or a quiet
afternoon at the ashram that brings Liz
closest to finding herself and her new
path—it’s the relationships she forges
along her journey. After all, in Bali, Liz
reflects, “When you set out in the world
to help yourself, sometimes you end up
helping tutti [everybody].”
Sarah Knudson is in the sociology program at the
University of Toronto. She studies self-help products
and their role in intimate relationships.
spring 2011 contexts
eic 60
67

from the music man to methland
by maria kefalas
Methland: The Death and Life of
an American Small Town
By Nick Reding
Bloomsbury, 2009, 272 pages
Nick Reding’s Iowa ain’t your grandmother’s
technicolor, barber-shop quartet,
gazebo-in-the square Music Man
Iowa. In his acclaimed Methland, Reding
takes stock of the rural crisis that has
seeped like a wasting disease into the
region. A journalist, the author transports
us to a broken Heartland in this
brilliant and horrifying account of how
methamphetamines have eaten away at
the northeastern railroad and meatpacking
town of Oelwein.
Commentators and policymakers
ramble on about globalization and jobless
recoveries and the threat to the
American Dream. In these discussions,
decline and downward mobility are existential
and theoretical possibilities, but
in Methland, we bear witness to people
fighting for their way of life. Worse,
they’re actually fighting for their very
lives. You can’t help but wonder how
many more places face futures like Oelwein’s;
if Iowa isn’t safe, is anywhere?
What ails Iowa, and the nation’s
Heartland as a whole, predates the Great
Recession. The downward mobility of
rural blue-collar workers was the canary
in the coal mine, warning of the American
Dream’s nightmarish turn. Unfortu-
nately, no one was bothering to pay
much attention. Academics deserve a
fair bit of the blame for this neglect. Too
many scholars only think about rural
America during the culture war’s skirmishes
or campaign seasons. So while
there is an array of scholarly research
devoted to chronicling urban decline,
small towns’ struggles happen off the
grid.
Upon close inspection, even though
conventional wisdom casts the small
town as embodiment of all that’s right
with America and the inner city as all
that’s wrong, the rural and urban crises
have a lot in common. William Julius Wilson
famously described how deindustrialization,
joblessness, middle-class flight,
depopulation, and global market shifts
gave rise to the urban hyper-ghettos of
the 1970s. Now the same forces are
afflicting the nation’s countryside. The
differences are just in the details: in
urban centers, young men in NBA jerseys
sling dime bags from vacant buildings,
while in small towns, drug dealers
wearing NASCAR shirts sell and use
meth in trailer parks. There’s no shortage
of guns in either setting, although in
North Philadelphia’s Badlands those
sidearms might be illegally tucked into
waistbands, while in the Midwest,
they’re displayed in polished oak cabinets.
And though urban neighborhoods
have become the public face of poverty,
residents of rural America are actually
more likely to be poor and uninsured
than their metropolitan counterparts.
They typically earn just 80 percent of
suburban and urban workers’ salaries.
Before the Heartland could be
infected by meth, the region would have
to be betrayed, first by the bankers who
created the credit bubble behind the
farm crisis of the 1980s, next, by the
politicians looking for ways to make the
region’s corporations more powerful and
Contexts, Vol. 10, No. 1, pp. 73-74. ISSN 1536-5042, electronic ISSN 1537-6052. © 2011 American Sociological Association.
http://contexts.sagepub.com. DOI 10.1177/1536504211399056
less accountable, and finally, by progress
itself. The rise of agri-business and the
globalized “new” economy meant that
family farms, locally owned “mom and
pop” businesses, and the unionized
Maytag and Winnebago jobs that once
supported the region have been replaced
by factory farms with hog hotels and
genetically modified crops, big-box retailers
(nothing more than Main Street
killers), and deskilled, minimum wage
work only destitute refugees would see
as a step up.
Meanwhile, meth has helped transform
Sarah Palin’s real America into a
wasteland. Like crack, meth is cheap and
highly addictive, and its users tend to be
unpredictable and dangerous. In a place
like Iowa, where farmers work as sharecroppers
serving multinational food conglomerates,
young men turn to the drug
to ease a gnawing realization: they’re the
first generation of Americans doing worse
than their parents or grandparents.
Iowa’s Department of Family Services
is now overwhelmed by “meth
babies,” born to parents consumed by
chasing highs or manufacturing the drug.
These kids are abused, neglected, and
exposed to chemicals so hazardous that
scientists haven’t yet comprehended the
full extent of the damage done to developing
minds and bodies. DEA agents,
driving tinted-window SUVs, riding in on
horseback, or circling overhead in helicopters,
coordinate massive drug raids
and later, haz mat (hazardous materials)
teams come in to try to clean up the toxic
mess. Not just a human disaster, meth
presents an environmental disaster: for
every pound of meth manufactured, six
pounds of toxic waste are produced.
Reding’s book reads like a fearless
documentary filmmaker recording every
detail with a hand-held camera. This
verite style makes Methland’s characters
stay with you. There is Nathan Lein, the
winter 2011 contexts
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73

ook REVIEWS
crusading county prosecutor who’s the
son of farmers but sees little future working
the land. Lein could’ve taken his three
university degrees and gotten out of
Dodge like everyone else from his high
school (Iowa has been evacuating its best
and brightest for decades). Instead, he
came home to lead the charge against
meth. Also fighting the good fight is Dr.
Clay Hallberg, one of Oelwein’s only doctors.
He’s a chain-smoking armchair
philosopher who, like Lein, spends a surprising
amount of time reading German
thinkers in sincere attempts to make
sense of the town that’s coming down
around them. (Iowa is filled with these
self-taught philosophers and historians.
When you’re 50 miles from the nearest
Starbucks and spotty reception liberates
you from the distractions possible with
an iPhone or Blackberry, you have plenty
of time to contemplate the meaning of
life.) His own past struggles with addiction
have created Hallberg’s deep well of
compassion for those afflicted by meth’s
demons.
Then there’s Roland Jarvis, a Beavis
and Butthead meth cook and addict
whose hellish existence proves once and
for all that there are things far worse than
death. Reding recounts how Jarvis was
burned alive in a lab explosion. Jarvis
“survived.” When the paramedics arrived
on the scene, they wondered if the merciful
thing to do was to let Jarvis succumb
to his wounds. Stunningly, Jarvis could’ve
escaped unharmed had he not run back
into the fire, repeatedly, to save his meth
74 contexts.org
lab and dope stash.
Reding’s portrait of Iowa and its
people evoke Dante and William S. Burroughs,
and it’s not surprising that Methland
will soon be adapted for film. And
while the first chapter of the book may
just be about perfect, Reding gets in trouble
when he moves from the anthropologists’
thick description to policy analysis.
Perhaps his editors advised him that readers
need discussions of big pharma and
federal agricultural policy to facilitate finger-pointing,
but Reding is less comfortable
when he steps back from the people
of Oelwein, as in the chapters where he
describes how the government is to
blame. Methland’s strength is that it’s the
In Iowa, young men turn to meth to ease a
gnawing realization: they’re the first generation
of Americans doing worse than their parents or
grandparents.
sort of participant observation that’s
scarce in this Institutional Review Board
era of research design scrutiny. Extreme
ethnography brings the nearly irresistible
temptation for sensationalism—but,
since he is a journalist and not an academic,
maybe it’s unfair to critique Reding
for choosing “the money shot” over
the “modal case.”
Then, there is the bigger question
about Reding’s focus on meth. I don’t
think meth is going to kill Iowa. After
all, we don’t hear too much about crack
these days. If inner cities could fight off
crack, then rural Iowa, which has far
more resilient civic institutions than Baltimore
or Camden, should be able to
blunt the drug’s worst effects.
To be sure, there’s plenty of trouble
in Iowa. The main problem is the economy
(such as it is). Iowa lost 48,000 jobs
from the start of the recession until the
middle of this 2010. The Winnebago
and Maytag factories shut their doors
for good. What work there is pays minimum
wage, often lacking the promise
of full-time hours. Young people with
college degrees are leaving the state
faster than ever, and this brain drain
means there are too many folks who
want jobs in construction or manufacturing
and too few who can work as
dentists or computer engineers. Iowa’s
economy lacks the diversity it needs to
support its people and grow for the
future.
So meth is still a problem in Iowa,
don’t get me wrong. But even Oelwein
hasn’t fallen over a cliff because of it.
State authorities have gotten a handle
on the situation, and there has been a
pretty dramatic reduction in the number
of small-time labs. Oddly, part of the reason
for this success in reducing the number
of meth labs brings to light the real
trouble facing Iowa and the Heartland
as a whole. Mexican drug cartels have
taken over the franchise for supplying
the drug to the region. With a steady
stream of meth imports, the prices have
collapsed. Independent cooks can’t compete.
The good news is that Iowa taxpayers
don’t have to pick up the tab for
the clean-ups and the raids as frequently
as before.
But now, the meth cooks complain
that their jobs got outsourced. Even
meth is no longer made in the good ole
U.S. of A.
Maria Kefalas is in the department of sociology and
the Institute for Violence Research and Prevention at
Saint Joseph’s University. She is the co-author, with
Patrick Carr, of Hollowing Out the Middle: The Rural
Brain Drain and What it Means for America, an ethnographic
account of a town less than 20 miles from
Oelwein, Iowa.
eic 62

empire of the games
by andrew m. lindner
Games of Empire: Global Capitalism
and Video Games
By Nick Dyer-Witheford and
Greig de Peuter
University of Minnesota Press, 2009
298 pages
Despite the cheerful mushrooms and
mustachioed plumbers that were the signature
of early video games, popular discourse
about video games since the
1999 massacre at Columbine High
School has envisioned them as machines
that turn innocent teens into sociopathic
killers. This condemnatory approach
relies on long-discredited theories about
unreflective interaction with media and
is often taken up most vehemently by
those with little or no experience with
video games. At the other extreme is a
generation of young scholars who, having
grown up with video games, take a
celebratory approach, decrying the
stigmatization of gaming and finding
benefits like creative expression and
enhanced strategic thinking skills in both
developing and playing games. Taking a
middle ground, scholars of race, class,
and gender have adopted a blended
approach to video games that denies
neither their possibilities for propaganda
nor their potential for liberation.
Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de
Peuter’s well-written Games of Empire
typifies this “third way” of understand-
Joystick Soldiers: The Politics of
Play in Military Video Games
Edited by Nina B. Huntemann
and Matthew Thomas Payne
Routledge, 2009
312 pages
ing video games. The authors draw
heavily on concepts developed by
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s in
their popular social and political theory
books Empire and Multitude. According
to Hardt and Negri, we are living in a
new age of empire in which a network
of nation-states, multi-national corporations,
and non-governmental organizations
combine to exert power in the
name of expanding profits and elite
interests. In this imperial order, we see
massive inequalities, the blurring of work
and play, and the securing of new markets
by military might. The multitude¾a
radical, democratic resistance to globalized
capital made up of publics worldwide¾is,
for Hardt and Negri, the only
potential opponent to empire.
In Games of Empire, Dyer-Witheford
and de Peuter use video games as
Contexts, Vol. 9, No. 4, pp. 77-79. ISSN 1536-5042, electronic ISSN 1537-6052. © 2010 American Sociological Association.
All rights reserved. For permission to photocopy or reproduce, see http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp.
DOI: 10.1525/ctx.2010.9.4.77.
a case study to illuminate the twin concepts
of empire and multitude. Though
theoretically satisfying, the book is
approachable as the authors explore a
diverse range of topics including the
early development of video games and
the “console wars” (Nintendo vs. Sega,
Playstation vs. XBox), the contemporary
production process of games, and the
militaristic and capitalistic logic of some
of the most popular games.
In one fascinating chapter, they
describe the studios where Electronic
Arts (EA) designs its games. EA attracts
many of its employees by touting the
hacker mythology of “work-as-play,”
contrasting the supposedly “rebellious
spirit” of their work environment with
the rigid “stiffness of the corporate
world.” In practice, however, EA employees
are regularly forced to work 80 to
100 hour weeks, sacrificing family life
and any sort of real leisure time. Moreover,
much of the work is so standardized
that it’s simply boring. As Dyer-Withe-
Scholars have adopted a blended approach to
video games, denying neither their possibilities for
propaganda nor their potential for liberation.
ford and de Peuter write, “...despite all
the talk of creativity and innovation, EA’s
production facilities tend much more to
aneo-Fordist,re-Taylorizeddisciplining
of the cognitariat.” In this way, EA’s
workshop exemplifies how labor is
organized and exploited in empire.
Elsewhere, the authors recast the
debate over the controversially violent
game series, Grand Theft Auto (GTA).
While GTA has often been criticized for
its violence, they argue that it is far more
significant for the way it envisions the
“imperial city,” saying that GTA is not so
much a “murder simulator” as an
fall 2010 contexts
eic 63
77

“urban simulator.” By recreating the
cities of empire, GTA reinforces both divisions
of race and class and neoliberal
logic in which “market imperatives are literally
the rules of the game.” In GTA:
Vice City, for example, Miami is unmistakably
driven by the demands of commerce.
The capitalist message becomes
explicit when the game directs the player
to “crack some commie skulls” by beating
up striking workers. Likewise, though
GTA: San Andreas innovates by featuring
an African American protagonist, this
character is the ultimate incarnation of
the stereotypically criminal and sadistically
violent black man. He moves
through a racially segregated city where
the divisions seem justified due to the
criminality of the game’s African American
population. As Dyer-Witheford and
de Peuter argue, the economic and race
messages of GTA sync up neatly with a
neo-liberal ideology of empire that
attempts to justify the outrageous
inequalities it perpetuates.
Lest the reader come away thinking
video games are all bad, the authors
cite several examples of how games
might just offer a chance to resist
empire. Indeed, in several cases, video
game makers have had their technology
turned on them. With canny gamers
nearly always able to hack the software,
there have been a remarkable number
of subversive “mods” (player-made
modifications of a game). Using the
game Half Life, a group of activists constructed
a mod called Escape from
Woomera to protest a controversial realworld
Australian refugee detention cen-
78 contexts.org
ter. Velvet Strike, amodofCounter-
Strike, encouraged players to spray-paint
peace signs and make free love rather
than shoot each other. Perhaps more
meaningfully, in 2005, a French 26 yearold
used Lionhead’s The Movies, an animated
movie-making game, to create a
film about his experience of the immigrant
youth riots in the Parisian suburbs,
explaining the outrage of young people
living in these racially segregated communities.
Other activist programmers
have begun to design original games
that undermine the ideology of empire,
creating so-called “videogames of the
oppressed” with titles like Oligarchy,
McDonald’s: The Video Game, and the
economic and environmental policymaking
game, QB-QUEST. While such
games cannot directly change real-life
inequalities, Dyer-Witheford and de
Peuter see value in them as a means to
mount a popular critique of an unjust
society. Neither condemnatory nor celebratory,
Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter
understand video games as an expression
of empire, enacting and reinforcing
The economic and racial messages of Grand Theft
Auto sync up neatly with a neoliberal ideology of
empire.
global capitalism, neoliberalism, and militarism,
but also offering a means of
resistance for the multitude.
If Games of Empire offers a broad
critique of how a global network of
power benefits from video games, Nina
B. Huntemann and Matthew Thomas
Payne’s edited volume, Joystick Soldiers,
more narrowly focuses on the long relationship
between video games and militarism.
Indeed, one of the earliest
games, 1962’s Spacewar!, was an intergalactic
combat simulator. Since that
time, many of the most popular games
have been first-person shooters, in which
the player takes the perspective of a
gun-toting hero who navigates streets
and buildings, picking off opponents.
Companies with top-selling series like
Halo, Call of Duty, and the Pentagoncommissioned
game America’s Army
market a constant stream of sequels,
each with a slightly different story and
anewrangeofspectacularweapons.
Military organizations use such games
extensively for recruitment, training, and
even rehabilitation for soldiers suffering
from post-traumatic stress disorder.
Among recreational players, these firstperson
shooter games simply spread the
ideology of militarism.
The quality of the essays in Joystick
Soldiers is uneven and reading just one
or two will likely satisfy a casual reader.
One of the most intriguing essays is
Randy Nichols’s “Target Acquired” about
the collaboration between the U.S. Army
and Red Storm Entertainment to produce
America’s Army, an incredibly popular
“advergame” used for recruitment.
The game teaches players the core values
of the Army (“loyalty, duty, respect,
selflessness, service, and honor”) and
offers a first-person shooter with “realistic
sights and sounds” set in the
Afghani mountains. The development
and use of America’s Army, which by
2007 had been downloaded 40 million
times and had more than 8.5 million registered
users, speaks to both the continued
strength of the military-industrial
complex and the burgeoning “militaryentertainment
complex.”
In another essay, Scott A. Lukas
conducts interviews to examine how
young people understand one of the
central elements in any first-person
shooter: the gun. Contrary to popular
perception, gamers told Lukas they didn’t
usually run through each level with
eic 64

enormous automatic weapons blazing.
Rather, they spoke about the importance
of gun choice and how it had to fit the
broader narrative of the game. The
weapons were a way of expressing their
character. One gamer was quoted as saying,
“I don’t care for games that focus on
frenetic shooting without a sense of
story...,” while many other gamers even
claimed that they “abhorred real-life violence,”
but saw the games as puzzles of
strategic decision-making (like selecting
particular guns).
An assortment of guns allows the
user to choose between being a sloppy
mass murderer or precise sniper, but it
doesn’t offer the user the choice of smiling,
shaking hands, or talking it out with
their digital opponent. In the same way
that GTA reaffirms the ideology of
neoliberalism, games like America’s
Army suggest that our range of choices
is limited to militaristic ones. Joystick Sol-
diers does offer essays that show the
possibility of resistance to the pervasive
militarism of games, such as radical
“machinima” (movies made using the
visuals from games) that critique the horror
of war and unreality of games. But
the volume largely suggests that video
games cultivate the mind of the soldier,
even in a couch potato.
Of course, not all video games are
quite so serious. With the recent introduction
of a new range of video games
consciously targeted at women and
casual gamers, some popular titles now
feature perfectly peaceful activities like
cooking (Wii’s Cooking Mama), yoga
(Wii Fit Plus), and music performance
(Rock Band). By acknowledging such
alternatives and offering examples of
video games used to resist militarism and
empire, the authors of both books argue
that the medium is not the message:
video games can be art that challenges
us to envision a better world. Unfortunately,
for now the bulk of the evidence
suggests that most video games act as
powerful tools for maintaining the militaristic
empire in which we live.
Andrew M. Lindner is in the department of sociology
at Concordia College in Moorhead, MN. He studies
the intersection of mass media and political culture.
fall 2010 contexts
eic 65
The medium is not the message. Video games
can be art that challenges us to envision a better
world.
79

ook REVIEWS
the world without us?
by diane pike
The Last Professors: The Corporate
University and the Fate of the
Humanities
By Frank Donoghue
Fordham University Press, 2008
172 pages
Think “Chicken Little meets C. Wright
Mills” and you have a sense of the way you
might feel after reading literature scholar
Frank Donoghue’s The Last Professors and
Pulitzer Prize winner Louis Menand’s The
Marketplace of Ideas. The complex tale of
how higher education in the United States
has ended up where it is today doesn’t
have a happy ending. As a result of dramatic
shifts in the past hundred years, there
are significant public issues and private
troubles to address. For those who hold
anything close to a traditional view of what
a liberal education offers to individuals and
to society, the present, not to mention the
future, isn’t pretty.
Both books offer credible analyses
of the 20 th century’s evolution of higher
education, which responded to external
forces of economy, demography, and
wars, and to internal drives for institutional
change. Across loosely coupled
chapters, each author draws from
research in many fields. And the works
of sociologists like Mills and Thorstein
Veblen figure prominently alongside a
body of knowledge from the sociology
of institutions and professionalization.
76 contexts.org
The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform
and Resistance in the American
University
By Louis Menand
W.W. Norton, 2010
176 pages
Donoghue and Menand, both trained in
literature, recognize that they need structural
analysis at the sociological level to
make sense of what has happened to
the academic world.
In The Marketplace of Ideas,
Menand’s chapters range from assessing
why general education is so problematic
(he claims that faculty want to control
but not teach it) to a scathing critique of
the production of Ph.D.s in English departments
(it takes too long to complete the
degree and programs knowingly admit
too many students for whom there’ll be
no jobs). Next, he tackles the attention
given to interdisciplinarity, which he
believes only reinforces disciplines without
figuring out how to make liberal arts
disciplines relevant. And in the final chapter,
Menand analyzes why professors all
end up alike: we clone our disciplines,
rather than reproduce them, by limiting
opportunities for introducing variation.
Menand leaves us with the charge that
liberal education, and thereby the professoriate
itself, must more effectively
serve the needs of the public while we
also resist the world’s demand that its self
image be reproduced. We must challenge
the public we serve.
Taking a different tack, Donoghue
begins The Last Professors with a history
of attacks on the humanities. Starting in
the early 1900s with the likes of Andrew
Carnegie, self-made businessmen, politicians,
and writers such as Sinclair Lewis
displayed an unbridled anti-intellectualism
and promoted the practical arts over
the protectionist elitism of universities.
That attack continues today, with the former
president of the Internet-based University
of Phoenix proclaiming (with
pride?), “Our students don’t want an
education. They want what an education
can give them… better jobs, moving up
in their careers.” Donoghue goes on to
discuss other problems. He describes a
broken model of humanities research in
which the quest for prestige drives production.
He offers an appraisal of how
we cling to a “mirage of tenure” when
the reality is that much of the labor of
education is done by non-tenured faculty.
And he notes that, thanks to the rise of
for-profit colleges and the shift of students
from majors in the liberal arts to
majors in professional studies, particularly
business, humanities majors are disappearing
before our very eyes. The end of
the world as we know it is imminent.
Donoghue ends with an intriguing
argument about prestige envy among
universities searching for a brand; if we’re
not careful, we’ll be stuck with the competing
messages of “college as job training
and college as prestige marker.”
Donoghue believes public universities (the
state flagships) are particularly critical to
the future of the humanities, but if those
institutions cannot figure out how to get
beyond what he calls “mission multiplication”
and overcome the management
logic that “places business values on the
academic workplace,” the liberal arts will
become the hallmark of elites and
eic 66

humanities professors will “risk extinction.”
It may even be too late, Donoghue
writes: “the professors of the humanities
have already lost the power to rescue
themselves.” He offers only the slimmest
hope and interestingly, it is a sociological
solution. Invoking Mills, Donoghue claims
that to be ready for the future, professors
must “become not only sociologists but
also institutional historians of their own
profession.” In short, humanities professors
need to learn how their organizations
work so that they can better
influence how their future unfolds.
Despite the generally fine thinking in
both books as to why the sky is falling in
the liberal arts and the humanities, the
absence of any sort of satisfying “so now
what?” consideration is perplexing and
discouraging. (Stanley Fish and I are apparently
in agreement on this point; see his
November 8, 2010 New York Times column,
“The Woe-Is-Us Books.”) Why don’t
thinkers who have done this much heavy
lifting have anything to offer about how
to deal with the current situation?
The lack of a well-articulated case
for the liberal arts is perhaps as disturbing
a reflection of the liberal arts’ weakening
position as any of their other
problems. Neither Menand’s evenhanded
tone and tight, clever writing (it
is easy to see why he won a Pulitzer) nor
Donoghue’s Eeyore-like conclusions (one
critic declares The Last Professors not a
diagnosis but an autopsy!) satisfactorily
addresses how understanding this situation
can move us to do something
about the problem. Even the problem
itself can be difficult to track since arguments
tend to shift among units of
analysis, sometimes discussing liberal
arts, sometimes humanities, and sometimes
English; sometimes the problem is
research, other times teaching. Moreover,
neither Menand nor Donoghue is
clear about the future of the sciences as
part of the liberal arts.
Offering organizational solutions to
the troubles isn’t the same thing as making
the moral case for liberal arts. (In his
essay, Fish notes that some of the specific
organizational solutions offered by other
authors in this genre include more
money, mandatory retirement, and getting
rid of departments.) The fact is we
need both organizational remedies and
a cogent rationale for liberal arts. Perhaps
one thought-experiment might
contribute to helping future authors of
the next raft of books on higher education
make a case for securing or reinventing
the liberal arts in general and
the humanities in particular.
Alan Weisman’s bestselling book,
The World Without Us, researches
experts’ best guesses as to what would
happen if humans suddenly—snap!—
disappeared. How long would it take for
the New York subway to flood without
any human intervention? (Three days.)
How long would it take for your house
to decay, for nature to take over nuclear
power plants, cities, and other infrastructures?
The intended effect of this
chilling portrait of the world without
humans is to make us pause and consider
what we’ve materially created as a
species. By imagining the disappearance
of our built environment, perhaps we
can envision a different approach to the
challenges of our future.
So, let’s try this: if the humanities
shrink and become the property of elite
institutions and elite students, what will
the world look like? No English majors, no
theater, no arts. No more philosophers to
generate the ideas used in all those business
ethics courses. The picture might be
even bleaker if we imagine the world without
liberal arts. This surely would be a
lesser world. Although it is false consciousness
to see “the practical as the
enemy of the true,” as Menand smartly
puts it, being employed and being educated
is not the same thing. Whether referring
to the liberal arts, the humanities, or
even just English as the canary in the coal
Contexts, Vol. 10, No. 2, pp. 76-77. ISSN 1536-5042, electronic ISSN 1537-6052. © 2011 American Sociological Association.
http://contexts.sagepub.com. DOI 10.1177/1536504211408959
mine, deep consideration of the absence
of what the liberal arts provide could show
many of us what we must do beyond
shrugging and being grateful for having
had a traditional academic career before
it was too late. Perhaps the results from
such a thought experiment would be compelling
enough to help us explain clearly,
as the American Association of Colleges
and Universities is attempting to do in its
LEAP (Liberal Education and America’s
Promise) Program, why the world needs
the true. Making sense of our complex and
changing world requires the broad knowledge
provided by a liberal education.
We should look seriously at the landscape
of the liberal arts painted by these
two books. Each offers a narrative that
we can appreciate for identifying the triumphs
and challenges successfully and
unsuccessfully encountered over the last
hundred years. But when Chicken Little
is asked by Henny-Penny, “How do you
know the sky is falling?” he replies,
“Because it hit me on the head.” Neither
Chicken Little nor any of his fellow fowl
question the evidence or stop to think of
a solution (here is where the liberal arts
working together with the sciences might
be valuable). They all end up lured into
the fox’s den and are eaten. What hit
Chicken Little on the head was an acorn,
not the sky. Of course, whether or not
Menand and Donoghue are right about
the sky falling today doesn’t mean their
theories about how we got into our present
situation are wrong. But theories are
put forth for a reason. If faculty and citizens
are to exert some agency within the
structures that have been created, we
need to do more than just run around
spreading the alarm.
Diane Pike is in the department of sociology atAugsburg
College. She studies teaching and learning, particularly
curriculum development and effective pedagogy.
spring 2011 contexts
eic 67
If the humanities shrink and become the property
of elite institutions and elite students, what will
the world look like?
77

one thing i KNOW
ofalling upward
by dalton conley
The top one percent of Americans reaped 70 percent of income
growth during a period of economic expansion, average people
became over-leveraged, and stocks soared.
At its most concentrated, that top one percent took in nearly
a quarter of the national income. The economy got top heavy,
the stock market crashed, and economic depression descended
like a worldwide fog.
Sound familiar? Perhaps you’re thinking Lehman Brothers,
the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), and the subprime crisis.
But I’m talking about 1928-29. While the similarities in the
lead up to the Great Depression echo eerily across the century,
the aftermath of this crisis is anything but comparable. After
the Great Depression, inequality leveled out until 1969; since
2008, inequality has only continued its steady rise.
Tea Partiers and left-wingers who opposed TARP might say
the reason for this difference is obvious: in 1929 there was no bail
out of Wall Street (or the nascent auto industry, for that matter).
There wasn’t even deposit insurance. The free market was left
to destroy fortunes—ill-gotten or not—“correcting” gross wealth
inequalities in the process. No doubt, TARP (and even the FDIC)
does play a role in explaining the differences between income
inequality in the Great Depression and the Great Recession, but
these days there are deeper social forces that powerfully—though
subtly—alter the economic landscape and may have made TARP
and other pro-Wall Street policies inescapable.
And the forces driving labor market inequality don’t show
any signs of abating. Globalization combined with the rising skillpremium
of a knowledge economy means there are sure to be
more Bill Gates in our future (and work will continue to get
outsourced by their inventions). But the real kicker is that while
inequality in wages will likely continue to rise, the interests of
workers are increasingly yoked to those of their bosses.
Asset data are sketchy for the 1920s, but economic historians
know that, while stock market participation did expand during
those boom years, the overall rate was nothing like it is
today. Thanks largely to the shift to defined contribution pension
plans and the ease of internet investing, half of Americans
now have direct or indirect investments in the stock market.
The catch is that while many of us are in for a penny, it’s still the
super-wealthy who are in for a pound. A study by the St. Louis
Federal Reserve Bank found the richest 10 percent own upwards
of 85 percent of stocks and other financial assets. So if the rest
of us want to save our 401ks, we have to save the status quo
for the super-rich, too. Thank heavens Social Security wasn’t
84 contexts.org
privatized (as George W. Bush proposed in 2005), or we’d be
even more beholden to the financial industry.
Ditto for the housing market—home equity makes up a
greater and greater share of household wealth as we drift down
the income ladder. Back in 1930, fewer than half of Americans
owned a home; by its peak in the 2000s, the homeownership
rate had hit 70 percent. So we’re all invested in real estate values.
A sluggish housing market used to at least mean falling rents
for those at the bottom of the pyramid, but today, when most
of us keep our life savings in the form of housing equity, price drops
are devastating. Plus, home ownership reduces workers’ ability
to move for better job prospects; thus, limiting bargaining power.
Many scholars, including myself, have argued for the benefits
of wider-spread asset ownership as a way to spread opportunity,
good financial habits, a future orientation, and ultimately,
a greater stake in capitalism and the rule of law. But we must
be honest about the fact that an “ownership society” (to use
Bush’s term) also means a country in which the economic interests
of the wealthy and the non-wealthy are increasingly tied
to each other. Populist anger aside, letting robber barons sink
would drown the rest of us, too.
Taken together, these trends suggest inequality is a quasipermanent
feature of the economic landscape. While research
has yet to establish a causal link between inequality levels and
human outcomes, it seems intuitive that there must be some
effects of economic polarization. The problem is that while in
absolute terms, everyone wants the same things—rising house
and stock prices—in relative terms, those in the middle (and bottom)
fall further and further behind. In other words, a rising
tide lifts all boats, but that same tide causes more and bigger
financial waves that risk swamping the dinghies while sparing
the ocean liners and oil tankers.
Many on the left wonder why there isn’t more of a backlash
against rising inequality. But it’s really not too bewildering—we’re
all implicated in this Ponzi scheme. How to keep
from swindling ourselves is the trick.
Dalton Conley is in the department of sociology at New York University. He is
the author (with Annette Laureau) of Social Class: How Does it Work?
eic 68

one thing i KNOW
othe poverty fight
by joe soss
One thing I know is, if we’re going to significantly reduce poverty,
we’ll have to fight for it.
Liberals often discuss antipoverty strategies as if clever ideas could
somehow make political mobilization and conflict unnecessary.
This evasion of contentious politics takes many forms. Perhaps
the most common focuses on correcting public misconceptions
and stereotypes. If only we could educate the public, substituting
researchers’ facts for stigmatizing myths, then surely public
generosity would follow. If we could just get people to see poverty
as a structural feature of society, rather than as a matter of individual
choice, they would grasp the need for collective solutions.
If we could adopt a language of civic inclusion, people would
see their identities and interests in more enlightened ways, and
there’d be no need for a divisive political fight.
Similar hopes underlie the perennial search for new names
and frames to deflect attention from stigmatized subgroups of
the poor. We are told we should focus on sympathetic groups like
hungry children and the working poor who “play by the rules.”
Or, if a public program has drawn fire, rename it. Don’t use words
like welfare and, above all, don’t talk about race. In my work
with advocacy groups, I’m often asked to recommend framing
History suggests major antipoverty victories can be
achieved, but not by good will and smart ideas alone.
strategies that will “neutralize” the racial distortions that plague
poverty debates. Racism is seen as powerful enough to thwart
even the most commonsense initiatives. Yet somehow it’s also
weak enough that, without an open and collective fight for racial
justice, we can banish it with the right combination of words.
Harry Potter would be envious of such a powerful incantation.
At universities and conferences for experts, a striking number
of conversations seem to imply that we would have solved
the problem of poverty long ago, if only our policy analyses and
program evaluations had been more skillful. A fresh policy design
with a smarter incentive structure, a higher level of “cultural
competence” among social workers, a more precise estimate of
teen pregnancy rates… Amid the endless calls for improvements
in what Alice O’Connor calls “poverty knowledge,” hardly a
word is said about how to build and harness the power of political
organizations or about the importance of ordinary people
entering the political arena en masse as demand-making citizens.
On this point, the historical record is clear. The lower poverty
rates found in European social democracies today are products
84 contexts.org
of labor movements, unions, and parties that mobilized workers
to demand more adequate social supports. In the U.S., political
conflict and mass mobilization played key roles in both “big
bangs” of twentieth-century welfare state development, greatly
expanding efforts to reduce poverty in the ‘30s and ‘60s.
“Organized political combat,” as Jacob Hacker and Paul
Pierson write in Winner-Take-All Politics, has been no less central
to recent policy changes that have redistributed wealth to the
richest Americans and driven economic inequality skyward. Framing
strategies and policy ideas contributed to this redirection of
government, to be sure. But how were they advanced, and why
did they prevail? The answers can be found in a sustained mobilization
of investments and people, in the pressures exerted by
interest groups and think tanks, and in the new political forces
that transformed and empowered the Republican Party.
In the 1970s, sociologists clarified a number of reasons why
serious reductions in poverty are unlikely without a political fight.
Herbert Gans showed how impoverished groups serve a variety
of “positive functions” for other members of society, especially
the most powerful and well-heeled.
The burdens they shoulder are foundational
for the quality of life that middle-
and upper-class Americans have
come to expect. To the recent horror
of Glenn Beck, Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward explained
why the poor rarely prevail under the normal terms of organized
politics, and clarified how concessions can be won when
confrontational movements disrupt “politics as usual.” Fred Block
told us why the election of even the most liberal government
officials is unlikely, in the absence of pressures from below, to shift
the state away from policies that benefit powerful market actors
at the expense of the poor.
Their insights remain just as valid today. History suggests
major antipoverty victories can be achieved. But they won’t be
achieved by good will and smart ideas alone. They’ll be won
politically, when people—in poor communities, in advocacy
groups, in government, in the academy, and elsewhere—mobilize
to advance antipoverty agendas in ways that make politics
as usual untenable.
Joe Soss is in the Humphrey School of Public Affairs and the departments of
political science and sociology at the University of Minnesota. He is the coauthor
of Disciplining the Poor: Neoliberal Paternalism and the Persistent Power of Race.
Contexts, Vol. 10, No. 2, p. 84. ISSN 1536-5042, electronic ISSN 1537-6052. © 2011 American Sociological Association.
http://contexts.sagepub.com. DOI 10.1177/1536504211408977
eic 69

one thing i KNOW
osexuality has no expiration date
by linda j. waite
To the casual observer of television, movies, or popular magazines,
sexuality would seem like the province of the young. And the first
major national study of sex in the U.S., done in the early 1990s,
stopped at age 59, as if sexuality did too.
Of course, as any Baby Boomer can now tell you, this isn’t
the case. The aging of this cohort, combined with the development
of medications to treat sexual problems common
among older men, has brought the sexual interests of mature
adults into public discourse. Several recent surveys of sexuality
at older ages allow researchers to paint a detailed picture of
sex at older ages—including attitudes toward sex, motivation
to find a partner, sexual behavior, and sexual functioning.
Although sexual activity declines and some sexual problems
can arise with age, many older adults remain sexually active
and satisfied into their 80s.
Two key factors set the course of sexuality over the second
half of life: availability of a partner and health. Older men
are more likely than older women to have partners and more
likely to repartner should they lose one. Women tend to be
younger than their partner and tend to live longer. So by ages
75-85, about twice as many men as women have a partner
with whom they might have sex (clearly, that partner has to
function at some minimal level or sex isn’t in the cards). Those
in poor health face much worse prospects for an active sex life;
diabetes, cancer, arthritis, obesity all make sex more difficult
and less rewarding. Recent studies suggest that these challenges
of poor health take a bigger toll on the sex lives of men
than of women, perhaps because of men’s traditionally more
active role in initiating sex and in intercourse itself.
So the chances of having a partner drop with age, and
the chances of having sex (given that one has a partner) also
decline. Adults in their 50s and early 60s who have partners are
virtually all sexually active, regardless of their health. But by
their early- to mid-80s, the picture changes, and trajectories
of sexual behavior diverge for men and women, with health
playing a bigger role. More than half of older partnered men
in good health are sexually active, compared to about a quarter
of those in fair to poor health. Four in ten older partnered
women in the best health are sexually active in their 80s, but
among those in fair to poor health, only one in six is. Despite
these caveats, many older adults remain sexually active, and,
for those who do, sex is generally more than a once-in-a-long-
80 contexts.org
while activity; more than half of sexually active older adults in
their mid-70s to early-80s have sex several times a month and
about a quarter have sex at least several times a week.
Sexual attitudes and practices show a generational divide
of sorts. Those who came of age in the 1960s or later are more
liberal in their attitudes, more likely to masturbate, and more
likely to include oral sex in their repertoire than those who grew
up in an earlier and more conservative time. Older men are
more interested in sex than are older women (paralleling the
gender difference at younger ages), and interest in sex declines
with age for both men and women. Older unpartnered men are
much more likely to have had sex with someone in the past
year—about a quarter said they did—than are older women,
who almost never report this behavior.
And about half of older men and older women report at
least one problem with sex that bothers them. Women are
most likely to say that they lacked interest in sex, failed to lubricate,
or had difficulty reaching climax. Men are most likely to
report problems achieving or maintaining an erection, a lack of
interest in sex, or climaxing too quickly. Those in poor health
are more likely to have poor sexual function, some of which
could result from the consequences of disease.
Careful consideration shows that sex among older adults
seems like much else in life: functioning declines with age, but
fairly slowly, and many people function well even at advanced
ages. Further, despite our tendency to pretend otherwise, sexuality
exists in a dynamic relationship, intimately connected
with other aspects of good health over the entire adult life.
Linda J. Waite is in the sociology department and directs the Center on Aging at
the University of Chicago. She is also the principal investigator of the National
Social Life, Health, and Aging Project, funded by the National Institute on Aging.
Contexts, Vol. 9, No. 3, p. 80. ISSN 1536-5042, electronic ISSN 1537-6052. © 2010 American Sociological Association.
All rights reserved. For permission to photocopy or reproduce, see http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp. DOI:
10.1525/ctx.2010.9.3.80.
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