Archive for the 'Sociology' Category

Lisa Bufano

Published
by
Kim
1 day, 5 hours ago
in Culture, Disability, Feminism and Video
. 5 Comments

I’ve been wanting for ages to find a pretext for posting this, but I can’t, so I’m giving up and just posting it. Hey, it’s Friday night! Check out the amazing dance work of Lisa Bufano, a quadruple amputee who lost all her fingers and had a bilateral below knee amputation at age 21 due to toxic shock. I’ve been following her work as an artist - including her amazing dolls and her various performance art intertubes endeavours - for quite a few years now. It’s fabulous to see her now coming into her own as a recognised and celebrated dancer. You can read an article about Lisa at Girlistic Magazine’s Feminism and Fashion issue (scroll down through the pdf to page 24) - which looks at the feminist politics of her work - and you can have a look at her more recent dance work via vodcasts downloadable from her website.

Originally focused on animation and doll making as a means to explore her body, in 2005 she turned the tables and made her body the focus of her creative expression, exploring dance and performance.

Image courtesy of Strange Dolls.

She and I share a leg. In a way!

Continue reading ‘Lisa Bufano’

Class and Big Brother 2008

Published
by
Kim
2 days, 2 hours ago
in Astroturf, Big Brother 2008, Blogging, Consumerism, Culture, Politics, Relationships, Sociology, Television and Women
. 93 Comments

You can’t talk about Big Brother without talking about class, it seems. Over at Troppo, Ken Parish, who should be familiar with the BB concept of the grenade lob, lobs one in comments:

Far from being careful, I’ll throw petrol on the fire. I think the phenomenon of people who should have more taste and intelligence professing to like BB is just a pretentious affectation, like ending a post with “just sayin’”. Then again, all these shows (including Ladettes to Ladies and the assorted Gordon Ramsey shows) have a certain macabre fascination, sort of like not being able to resist looking at a particularly gruesome car smash as you drive past.

The really vexing thing is that these shows are also a calculated cost-saving gambit by the free-to-air channels. It doesn’t cost all that much to make them because they don’t have to pay the actors. A truly principled lefty would boycott them (although, as Jen pointed out last night, you can make a similar point about the employment effects of blogging on professional journalists).

I don’t know about the logic of boycotting tv shows for political reasons - I suspect it’s only ever invoked in this sort of context, and one could counter with the fact that a lot of writers and other “creatives” get employed by these mega shows (which are actually far more expensive to produce, but also more lucrative, than a lot of the cut-price free to air drama that’s around). And Corey Delaney is Worth(ington) 10 grand a show apparently. Though there’d be an interesting angle in thinking about how “creatives”, anyway, are self-exploiting - freed of career paths, permanent employment, and all those other things that go with not being a contract for hire and an entrepreneurial micro-business. And the lack of reflexivity that comes with seeing one’s endeavours as a big quest for that one big break has uncanny parallels with the show’s refusal of any solidarity to its Housemates. But, whatever, Ken probably thinks I’m displaying an “affectation” - while I think that the BB hatin’ *and actually I don’t enjoy this season, I just find it interesting* is a classic “that’s for the Bogans” Distinction. Proper people, of course, go to the theatre, dahling.

In a way, though, it was ironic that John Howard was a BB hater, because the Inmates couldn’t be more aspirational and individualistic. Some might even drive utes, and you can bet they’re big alcopop drinkers. I’m sure Brendan probably feels their pain. (And I’m sure that he’d probably jump at the chance to be an intruder. Might be useful training for all those frontbench wars.) But class is at issue within the House too, as another excellent post from Eye on Big Brother shows. Continue reading ‘Class and Big Brother 2008′

Death and the Internet

Published
by
Darlene
2 days, 10 hours ago
in Sociology and The Web
. 19 Comments

There have been a number of tragedies of late (e.g. the suicides in Bridgend) which supposedly featured the Internet in some capacity or another.

Of course, when such things happen people who didn’t grow up with the Internet put the blame on that relatively new medium for such tragedies.

While such views are misguided, it’s still worth wondering what the role of the Internet is in influencing the decisions made by the people concerned.

It’s also worth considering what the Internet tells us about the way we respond to such tragedies today.

Megan Meier killed herself after being bullied via MySpace

Continue reading ‘Death and the Internet’

Opposition Budget politics, 2008 style

Published
by
Mark
3 days, 4 hours ago
in Budget 2008, Howardia, Media and Parenting
. 15 Comments

It was interesting to read the acres of newsprint devoted to Budget specials today for two reasons - one to note that so much of the “interest group” reaction is typical - one headline - “teachers say more is needed for schools” - probably writes itself, and could be run nearly every year. That’s not to have a go at the teachers, but it might be more to the point if the media spent more time on doing specialist analyses of each portfolio (as New Matilda has been doing for a few) and less on highlighting understandable (from the point of view of those concerned) calls for more spending. An assessment of priorities and discrete policy initiatives might be more informative than a de facto assumption that the cake is of infinite dimensions - which it would almost have to be if every interest group were placated. In some ways, being Treasurer would be an unenviable task, and as I argued last night, the politics of the budget include a real attempt to persuade people to look at the collective public good rather than “what’s in it for me?”. Obviously people want to understand how they (and policy areas they care about) are affected, but the sort of “thinking” that goes into this sort of nonsense - “Yet again, Generation X gets screwed” - makes me wince, even as a member of said generation (not to mention the factual vacuum contained in that silly little article).

This leads me onto my other observation - the paucity of any reference to any views that the opposition might have. Shadow Ministers were clearly not - on the whole - interested, informed enough or motivated to release anything portfolio specific. So all we got was short shrift - at least in the print media - to the rather inconsistent and confused bleatings of Malcolm Turnbull and Brendan Nelson, who according to Trevor Cook, looked like he was “on life support” on the telly. A couple of paras on average across the two 30 something page budget liftouts I read. So, how do the attention deprived respond?

By musing (threatening might be far too strong a word) about blocking the changes to the baby bonus in the Senate. Continue reading ‘Opposition Budget politics, 2008 style’

So how about that credit crunch?

Published
by
Kim
3 days, 16 hours ago
in Economics, Markets, Media and Sociology
. 85 Comments

Terms like “securitisation”, “derivatives”, “longitudinal diversification” and “dynamic hedging” would make most of our eyes glaze over, I suspect. Yet all this arcana is now having an impact on us - vie the subprime mortgage crisis and the shock waves it’s set off in the world economy. There are at least two factors which mitigate against discussion and examination of causes and solutions - the arcane nature of the math and language used by the finance wonks, and the reactive press coverage - attuned more to reporting on what pollies and regulators are saying or doing than assessing causes and debating the way forward. So I’d thoroughly recommend taking the time to read author and sociologist Robin Blackburn’s article The Subprime Crisis. It took me about half an hour to read, but I think it was time well spent, as Blackburn takes great care to demystify the nature and history of the crisis, and thus provides a basis for thinking about its implications which is far better than skimming spin laden or impenetrably written articles.

Continue reading ‘So how about that credit crunch?’

More complacent denigration

Published
by
tigtog
4 days, 14 hours ago
in Culture Wars, Health, Indigenous, Media, Poverty and Race
. 34 Comments

Last year Paul Norton wrote with some sadness and much asperity “Is David Burchell brain-dead?”

Referring to the particular column which prompted the post, Paul contrasted ex-communist Burchell’s stance with the positions taken by anti-communist Robert Manne thusly:

David Burchell’s column, by contrast, repeatedly trivialises left-liberal positions on those issues and complacently denigrates those who hold such views.

Well, Burchell appears to be at it again, holding up as if it is an entirely new concept that the panoply of social ills afflicting many indigenous communities are more a product of poverty than of racism per se, because many of the same problems afflict the non-indigenous urban poor.

It’s true that some remote Aboriginal communities, caught in a morass of isolation, neglect and joblessness, have sunk to levels of dysfunction unknown to white Australians.

Yet dysfunction is remarkably colour-blind. If, as we did until relatively recently, you put white families, preselected for their turbulent family histories, into welfare ghettoes on the fringes of the main cities, they will struggle to hold their lives together, too. And then, exactly like indigenous families, they will weave narratives of defeat and despair to console them for their marginality.

Unlike Burchell, I’m not a literary academic writing in the area of public policy, and have only a few undergraduate course credits in social studies from the early 80s under my belt, yet I’d be amazed if he could point to one, single, solitary social studies course which did not identify poverty as the primary component of social disadvantage in blackfella communities here in Australia (as well as in communities of colour amongst our immigrant population and in other nations as well). That correlation with poverty, and particularly de facto ghettoised poverty, has never been in contention. The question he studiously avoids is - why is there such a strong correlation in so many countries between socioeconomic class and the melanin content of one’s skin?
Continue reading ‘More complacent denigration’

Are you obsessed with sects?

Published
by
Paul Norton
4 days, 14 hours ago
in Asshattery, Authoritarianism, Politics and Religion
. 41 Comments

If so, you’ll be interested to hear that the Democratic Socialist Party has expelled a minority faction calling itself the “Leninist Party Faction”.

The LPF has its own website on which it has posted the relevant internal DSP/Resistance and LPF documents. On a cursory examination it would appear that the procedure by which the LPF has been purged shows the kind of disdain for “bourgeois prejudices” such as due process which one has long since come to expect from the Stupid Cult of Cuba. As one of the purgees notes:

Continue reading ‘Are you obsessed with sects?’

Big Brother eats its own (princess): a cautionary tale of the S word

Published
by
Kim
5 days, 2 hours ago
in Australiana, Big Brother 2008, Ethics, Media, Television and Women
. 38 Comments

The Big Brother narrative takes yet another snarky turn. As Eye on Big Brother notes, all the glee on the panel show tonight (Big Mouth or whatever) was directed at the hapless Brigitte. The evictee’s privilege of doing something really nasty, not very well justified by the not so redeemed Saxon, was to take away her wardrobe and her makeup for the week indefinitely. This from part of the loathsome “Spa Mafia” whose idea of fun was hiding “Princess Sparkles” - her toy unicorn - as the first of their japes. I can’t help wondering if Brigitte’s failure to fulfil the FHM dream girl role of flirting with the boys - she’s too obviously occupied just being Brigitte (it’s a bit like Being There) - led to this particular nastiness. But as Eye observes, she’s quickly (and predictably) earned the ire of the other women in the House as well. Now Big Brother, in the form of the almighty narrative, piles on too.

And there’s another ethical conundrum here.

Continue reading ‘Big Brother eats its own (princess): a cautionary tale of the S word’

…In which I loudly condemn narratives of personal redemption on Big Brother

Published
by
Mark
6 days, 3 hours ago
in Big Brother 2008, Life, Philosophy, Politics, Sociology and Television
. 29 Comments

Eye on Big Brother has been keeping a very close eye indeed on the confected narrative of “Corey Worthington (or Delaney) redeems himself as a house guest”, most recently looking at how this narrative has only been maintained with difficulty because of “Nanna” Terri refusing to play the role cast for her, and Bianca’s far too loud condemnation of Corey in his persona of “just an average seventeen year old kid”, and how their refusal or inability to perform as expected has led to the narrative turning on them, in predictable misogynistic mode.

If Rima Haditchi has just decided to leave (rather than retiring hurt), as now seems increasingly obvious, she would seem to have made a sensible decision.

…It’s interesting, in this context, to see how Saxon the UFO lover failed in his own quest for redemption. Although apparently he got some kudos from the eviction night crowd for overcoming his admitted racism and homophobia by cuddling up to Nobbi (aptly named, as has been said before) and the bizarre though rather likeable Travis, the screen time given to his aggressive defence of what seems core to his sense of self - his belief in a conspiracy that hides the evidence of aliens from the rest of us (”the truth is out there”, one imagines) - surely doomed him. Saxon was actually displaying one of the key fracture lines in the postmodern personality of surfaces, and the culture of individualism as it affects civility - on one hand trying to defend his “passionate” “beliefs” with reference to protocols of truth and evidence, and when called on it, falling back on the default position of “how dare you diss me - my strange beliefs are myself?”… But what he didn’t realise was that Franz Kafka might have been writing about him when he said:

There’s infinite hope, but none at all for us.

Continue reading ‘…In which I loudly condemn narratives of personal redemption on Big Brother’

Tracking urban eccentrics

Published
by
Mark
1 week, 1 day ago
in Blogging, Brisbane, Sociology, The Web and Urbanism
. 45 Comments

There’s a really fascinating article at Wired about blogs and websites tracking down urban eccentrics. You know who I mean. In Brisbane, I can think of “Rock & Roll George”, the Marilyn Monroe woman (always impeccably groomed), the evil homeless guy who hits people with his umbrella, the plastic bag man who used to sleep outside the Anglican church in Toowong, the fake nun in the white tuxedo who pushed an empty wheelchair down the middle of New Farm streets for many years, and the cowboy whom I once overheard refusing at Rics to explain to the barwoman why he was what he was or who he was, all the while conscious of his minor celebrity.

The article doesn’t cover stalking or the right to privacy, which raises some questions. It also doesn’t really adequately get to grips with the sociological phenomenon of why we talk about such folks and what they feel about it all. Any thoughts?

Papal apology?

Published
by
Mark
1 week, 2 days ago
in Australiana, Religion, Sexuality, Sydney and Women
. 28 Comments

The Pope had a lot to say about sexual abuse when he was in America recently. It’s now being reported that there’s “pressure” on him to repeat his apology to victims specifically in the Australian context, when he’s out here for World Youth Day. I have no doubt Benedict will, and I suspect the pressure in this instance isn’t needed. While an apology promotes healing for individuals directly damaged by clerical sexual abuse, it doesn’t address the broader problem, and nor do the protocols the church now has in place for dealing with complaints and reparations, welcome as they are. What should be quite familiar to Benedict is the concept of “structural sin” - something originating in liberation theology which he in his incarnation as Cardinal Ratzinger acknowledged as a valid manifestation of human evil and wickedness, even as he disagreed with the political and some of the theological overtones of liberation theology as theorised and practiced in Latin America (and in - significantly - Germany).

The Pope would also know very well that in Catholic sacramental and moral theology, an act of contrition and indeed an act of reparation are worthless without an awareness of the fault that led to a sin, and a genuine intention to “go and sin no more”, as Someone or other put it rather pithily. All this raises the question of whether the conditions of possibility of sexual abuse are genuinely being addressed.

Continue reading ‘Papal apology?’

A national/natural history of memory and forgetting

Published
by
Mark
1 week, 4 days ago
in Books, Writers & Writing, Culture, Europe, History, Language, Philosophy, Politics and Sociology
. 36 Comments

Image of the Prague skyline courtesy of Pavelm - licenced under Creative Commons.

I didn’t comment, but I read the thread on Kim’s post on the crimes of Joseph Fritzl and discourses in the media (Austrian and otherwise) about cultural and national responsibility. I found the thread a fascinating read, and I’m not certain that anyone could finally arbitrate the question of whether a certain Nazism or its social legacy was actually at stake here or whether to think that is to misunderstand the nature of causation and social pathologies as they manifest themselves in individual lives and choices. That’s forcing the two positions argued somewhat, and occluding a lot of nuance, but I suspect that the debate’s conditions of possibility include different levels of explanation and different methods of thought and intellectual work - I thought some of the borders of the social scientific and humanistic worldviews were both marked out and blurred in that discussion. It ought to be possible to integrate the two, but saying that is harder than doing it because there is a certain split - that’s not just manifested in disciplinary training and territory in the academy - between a more hermeneutic and a more positivist style of thought. That’s actually a dividing line that’s inscribed in our everyday culture as well as in our intellectual traditions in the West, and it’s possibly a most unfortunate divide. But then national borders, and cultures, are contingent constructions of Western modernity too.

Anyway, that’s something of a prelude to some thoughts the thread stimulated for me. I remembered I’d written a post back in December 2004 on W.G. Sebald’s work. At the time, I wrote, apropos of his A Natural History of Destruction:

Literature has often been seen as a mirror of meaning, a way of sense-making, what the literary scholar Erich Auerbach called, following Aristotle, Mimesis. To take the example of the hitherto unparalleled destruction wrought by the Thirty Years War from 1618 to 1648, German literature produced such classics as Johann Jakob Von Grimmelshausen’s Simplicissimus (first published in 1669) and much more recently, Günter Grass ’ The Meeting at Telgte.

There is a massive, and often fine, literature of the Holocaust. But going in search of a similar literature of the suffering of German citizens during the Second World War, Sebald was surprised to find it scant, and largely unsatisfactory.

Continue reading ‘A national/natural history of memory and forgetting’

Griffith Review goes “Forward from the Summit”

Published
by
Mark
1 week, 4 days ago
in Australia 2020 summit, Books, Writers & Writing, Brisbane, Media, Notices and Urbanism
. 11 Comments

Our friends at Griffith Review are holding an event in Brisbane tomorrow at the State Library of Queensland from 1 to 4pm:

The 2020 Summit was just the beginning. The more substantial and critical task is to advance the process by building consensus, by continually developing engagement and cooperation between traditionally divided streams, factions and ideologies. Join us for a free seminar featuring twenty Summit delegates who will report on their impressions from the Summit proceedings and consider pragmatic steps forward to identify and achieve Australia’s goals. Come early to enjoy lunch - your own or from Tognini’s Cafe - outside the State Library’s beautiful new building. Panellists include Julianne Schultz, Michael Wesley, Michael Good, George Williams, Matt Foley and many more.

RSVP here.

Incidentally, my copy of the May edition just arrived in the post. It’s on Cities, and I’m looking forward to a stimulating read as always. We’re hopeful we’ll be able to announce a discount bulk subscription offer for LPers in the not too distant future.

Guest post by Terry Flew: Farewell to liberal Hillary

Published
by
Administrator
1 week, 4 days ago
in American election 2008, Media, Sociology, Television and Video
. 18 Comments

LP’s Indiana correspondent, QUT academic Terry Flew writes:

Bloomington, Indiana is where I am at the moment, at the University of Indiana. It is best known as the home of Albert Kinsey, John Cougar Mellencamp, and the ‘Hoosiers’, a basketball team about whom a film was made in 1986 starring Gene Hackman as a coach and Dennis Hopper as a drunk.

Indiana is one of the two states voting tomorrow (Tuesday May 5) in the protracted and increasingly acrimonious Democratic Party primaries. Both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have worked these two states hard, even though they both typically vote Republican, as the long march to the Democrat nomination continues.

The striking feature at present is just how far to the right Hilary Clinton has turned in the course of this campaign. Having struggled against Obama for most core Democrat constituencies, she has over the last month increasingly pitched her campaign at what are known here as the ‘Reagan Democrats’ - white voters, often older or less educated, anxious about change, deeply patriotic, and suspicious of liberal reformers.

Given that the Clinton years in the White house were viewed by most outside of the U.S. as at least notionally progressive, and that Hillary Clinton was for so long the bete noire of American conservatives, this has come as a bit of a surprise, at least to me. She appeared on the FOX News Channel’s O’Reilly Factor last week, her defence of religion and guns, and her threats to get tough on China and to ‘obliterate’ Iran if Israel is attacked seem to be straight out of the Republican campaign book. And the favour seems to have been returned. She is getting endorsements from FOX News, The Weekly Standard and Rush Limbaugh.

Continue reading ‘Guest post by Terry Flew: Farewell to liberal Hillary’

Get naked

Published
by
Darlene
1 week, 5 days ago
in Sexuality and Women
. 46 Comments

look_good_naked_narrowweb__300x4480.jpg

Okay, I relented and watched a bit of Big Brother tonight, influenced by Kim no doubt. Nothing to report on that score except that Corey has that gawky teen boy thing happening in a big way - reminds me of certain nephews I know. Anyway, after Big Brother there was a new show on called How to Look Good Naked that demanded that women celebrate their bodies, and love themselves too. Carson Kressley, that guy who was one of the ”Queer Eyes”, basically talked a woman out of her bad body image. Why it takes a guy to tell a woman not to obsess about her weight is beyond me, but it’s a fun and worthy show that hopefully will influence some females to think again about the modern mania with looking like a twig.  Oh, and Good News Week is on now. Haven’t watched it for ages, and now I remember why. Laugh, nope I’m not.