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Sociological Images
thesocietypages.org/socimages
31
Sociological Images encourages people to exercise and develop their sociological imaginations with discussions of compelling visuals that span the breadth of sociological inquiry.
#43044 in All

Women, Never Forget Your Body Is Being Judged

Melissa Fletcher Pirkey, a grad student at Notre Dame, sent in an image she saw in a catalog for Spanx, a company that sells shapewear. This page from the catalog reminds women that our bodies are al...

4 days ago

Absence of Women in U.S. Naval Academy Ritual

Earlier this week a series of photographs of sweaty men climbing a greased up phallic symbol went ’round the blogosphere. The pictures were of a naval tradition: at the end of their first year,...

4 days ago

“Sexy” according to Victoria’s Secret

Victoria’s Secret has released this year’s list of the sexiest womenin 18 categories. Alongside the obvious, 16 of the 21 women are blond, er “blond.” Maybe 15. Whatever. Have...

5 days ago

Non-White-Centric Uses of Terms Like “Nude”

I recently posted a series of examples of the words “nude,” “skin-toned,” and “flesh-colored” being used to describe light-tan. In other words, a linguistic erasur...

6 days ago

Illustrating the Gender Pay Gap

While income inequality between the sexes has decreased in recent decades, women still only make seventy-seven cents for every dollar a man is paid. Matt Separa from the Center for American Progress ...

6 days ago

Race and Politics in Appalachia

Cross-posted at Montclair SocioBlog. In recent Democratic primaries in Appalachian states, Obama lost 40% of the vote. The anti-Obama Democrats voted for candidates like “uncommitted” (Kentucky), an ...

25 may 12

% of U.S. Population on Active Military Duty

Yesterday the Pew Research Center posted a graph showing the proportion of the overall U.S. population on active military duty since 1940. From a high of almost 9% of the population during World War ...

25 may 12

James Mollison’s Musical “Tribes”

James Mollison, the photographer who brought us Where Children Sleep, has a fantastic series called The Disciples in which he captures die-hard music fans (he calls them “tribes”). The re...

24 may 12

Religion, Wealth, and Global Fertility Rates

In this talk, statistician Hans Rosling looks at whether, globally, religion impacts national fertility rates. His conclusion? Nah, not really. He also points out that while fertility rates are certa...

24 may 12

Framing and Social Movement Slam Dunks

NPR reports that Beef Products Incorporated, the company that makes “finely textured beef” (a chemically-treated paste made from non-muscle cow parts used as a filler in ground beef), wil...

23 may 12

Vintage Anti-JFK Coloring Book

Recently Talking Points Memo posted a 1960s coloring book sent in by a reader, who found it among her grandmother’s things. The coloring book, New Frontier, mocks John F. Kennedy and a number o...

23 may 12

The Unemployed as Background Noise

We seem to have a way of regularizing the pain felt by working people — worsening living conditions become little more than background noise to business as usual. The situation for the unemploy...

23 may 12

Part III: Historical Perspective on the LEGO Gender Gap

The splashy introduction of the new LEGO friends line earlier this year stirred up a lot of controversy. My goal with this set of posts is to provide some historical perspective for the valid concern...

22 may 12

She Works Hard For No Money

Cross-posted at Montclair SocioBlog. The politics of motherhood reared its head again last month when Hilary Rosen, who the news identified as a “Democratic strategist,” said that Ann Romney (Mrs. Mi...

22 may 12

Round-Up of Gendering Stuff for Kids

Today I thought we’d do another round-up of gendered children’s stuff, since we’ve gotten a number of submissions. So here we go. Missy C. noticed that the manufacturer’s prod...

22 may 12

Student Loan Debt Now Exceeds 100 Billion. Why?

You’ve probably heard someone in media or politics bemoan the ballooning student debt in the U.S. In fact, debt has been rising. It’s more than doubled in the last ten years (that’s...

21 may 12

Jay Smooth: “Don’t Freak Out” about Trends in Births

Last week, the Census Bureau announced that as of July 1, 2011, for the first time the majority (50.4%) of babies under age 1 in the U.S. were not non-Hispanic Whites. Animal New York posted a video ...

21 may 12

Profiles of Pre-Recession & Recession-Era Graduates

This weekend is commencement at my college, Occidental, and I thought it the perfect day to post new data on the job experiences of recent graduates. The data, a survey of 444 people in who graduated...

20 may 12

The Difference Between “i.e.” and “e.g.”

Every once in a while we post something for those of us who are teaching (and learning) how to write. This is one of those times. Get it! Because you use “i.e.” to mean “what I mean...

19 may 12

Norm Breaching: Social Responses to Mild Deviance

A crazy character named Andrew Hales, a student at Utah Valley University, has put up a series of You Tube videos in which he — knowingly or not — does a classic Sociology 101 experiment ...

18 may 12

Are Our Politics More Consistent Than Our Opinions?

Americans were recently asked whether they believed that President Obama could do much to lower gas prices. The answer was highly correlated with political party affiliation: 65% of Republicans said ...

17 may 12

Fastest Growing and Declining Occupations, 1983-2002

The National Bureau of Economic Research recently released a paper by Emin Dinlersoz and Jeremy Greenwood about unionization in the U.S.. They argue that economic shifts that changed the relative pre...

17 may 12

“In God We Trust”: Communism, Atheism, & the U.S. Dollar

Americans are familiar with seeing the phrase “In God We Trust” on our paper money. The motto is, indeed, the official United States motto. It wasn’t always that way, however. While...

16 may 12

Changes in Federal Spending

NPR’s Planet Money blog posted this image showing changes in major categories of federal spending over the past 50 years. Notably, though defense spending (which includes veteran benefits) is s...

16 may 12

“Guestimating” the Size of the LGBT Population

Cross-posted at Family Inequality. There is no one answer to the question, “How many people are lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender?” But demographer Gary Gates, who works for the Williams Institut...

15 may 12

Part II: Historical Perspective on the LEGO Gender Gap

The splashy introduction of the new LEGO friends line earlier this year stirred up a lot of controversy. My goal with this set of posts is to provide some historical perspective for the valid concern...

15 may 12

Myths and the Media: A Case Study

This morning NPR aired a segment on media stories about the “boomerang generation,” college-education children who return to live with their parents after graduation. A widely-repeated fi...

15 may 12

The Network Effect

Network effect is a concept from economics that explains situations in which something becomes more valuable as more people use it. The classic example is the telephone; as more people and businesses...

14 may 12

Changing the Story with the Stroke of a Key

Earlier this year a University of Wisconsin-Madison student at a fraternity house yelled racial slurs and threw a glass bottle at two Black female students. The story is reported in the Wisconsin Sta...

14 may 12

(Gu)Estimating the size of the LGBT population

There is no one answer to the question, “How many people are lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender?” But demographer Gary Gates, who works for the Williams Institute at UCLA’s Schoo...

14 may 12

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