Which Families Deserve Respect? One Thought on the Recent Killings of Teachers by Young Men

“Student Kills Math Teacher, Then Himself, at a Middle School in Nevada.”

“The boy, whose name and age have not been released, wounded two students during the attack.”

Two days later…

14-year-old Philip Chism  was arraigned as an adult for the alleged murder of a math teacher. 

Both cases are troubling and beg the question of what is causing boys, young men, and men to behave in such a way? How might the ideology of masculinity have shaped their behaviors is something we as a society should interrogate. Instead, we are more likely to have a conversation on gun availability (the Chism murder does not seem to involve a gun and only targeted one individual) and mental health. I completely agree that these are important conversations for us to all have. However, I think that the conversation remains incomplete when we fail to consider how the social construction of masculinity might contribute to these incidences.

However, this is not why I pen this post. My concern rests with how the media decides to share information about who is involved in such murders. 

Since this alleged murder I’ve learn about Chism's parents and about his life.

Meanwhile there is little information shared about the young man who murdered the teacher in Nevada and then committed suicide. We know nothing of the first young man except that he was in middle school.

How do we begin to theorize the media's differential treatment of these two young men (a term I use rather loosely as I see them as boys)? Why is it that so little information is provided on the first young man?

According to the New York Times, “The authorities say they are withholding the student’s name out of respect for his family.” Is Chism’s family not deserving of respect?  

How do we determine which families are deserving of respect? Who gets to make such determinations?

I don’t have the answers, but I do have to wonder: Might race play a factor? How might the social construction of race and violence influence the media's differential treatment of these young men? 

This is the eleventh post of my 31-day blogging challenge. You can tweet me at Dr_JZ using hash tag #31dbc to share your thoughts and share your stories. 

You better show skin if you want to be Sexy!?: What is “sexy” and who determines what “Sexy” is?

“If you are large keep yourself covered up.”

“God forbid, if you are big don’t show any skin.”

“Elle, how dear you?”

“Can’t big girls be sexy?”

“Too little skin”

“Is Melissa McCarthy Elle’s cover shameful?”

These are just a few of the statements/comments/questions I read or listened to in response to one of the recent covers of Elle magazine.

Melissa McCarthy’s cover is part of the Women in Hollywood series. Other women gracing the alternate covers include: Marion Cotillard, Shailene Woodley, Naomie Harris, and Reese Witherspoon. These women, such as Witherspoon, were captured in what some considered more revealing/sexy outfits. In other words, “there was more skin on display.”

McCarthy

How did we get to the point where sexiness seems to be defined by the level of nakedness we display? No I’m not being a prude. But I think that as we interrogate the cover we have to ask a series of questions to better understand our consumption of sexy. I don’t deny that Elle seems to be covering women with bodies over a certain size. There is a clear historical pattern. Elle did the same thing with the Adele and Gabourey Sidibe’s covers.

Elle is not shy about perpetuating white codes of dress and desirability. Their construction of women’s sexuality is both historical and social. The question that I continue to ponder in the midst of this discussion is how do we as a society consume the performance of sexuality?

Adele

The performance of sexuality has a long history in society in terms of delineating identity. The performance of sexuality, and how it is consumed, is part of our understandings of morality and social order. Consequently, the performance of sexuality becomes something to be policed and monitored. Part of this process involves the gaze. This has given way to the notion that some of us are sexy and as such should be viewed while those not deemed sexy should be covered up.

What fascinates me about this process is how as a society sexiness comes to be measured by the amount of skin that’s revealed. Why can’t we consider “being covered up” as sexy? Yet, if some individuals go to far and reveal too much skin they are considered “sluts”. So what is sexy and who determines what sexy looks like?

This brings me to Foucault and his concept of the “disciplinary society”. Discipline, as a mechanism of power, is used to regulate individual and collective behaviors. Regulation takes place in multiple forms and places—such as via architecture and our activities—including how we move and interact with each other. Discipline requires surveillance—the gaze, in part.

These magazine covers, and their content, are part of the cultural texts that simultaneously promote and perpetuate capitalism while defining the contours of femininity and its related understandings of sexiness. So Elle in choosing whose skin is sexy and therefore should be gazed at reveals the underlying mechanism of a very powerful system that does not require the disciplinarian, as we are all involved in the disciplining of the female body. Elle is part of the discipline—it is part of the mechanism of power that enforces and reinforces our understandings of what sexy means and who can be sexy. We, as a society contribute to this capitalist understanding by consuming these images often with little thought.

Gabourey Sidibe 

Consequently, I think that we need to pose a different set of questions, or maybe an additional set of questions, in response to the Elle cover. Instead of asking why isn’t McCarthy as scantily clad as the other women, we should ask, why must women bear skin in order to be considered sexy? While there are many more questions to be asked, this one seems key to me. 

This is the tenth post of my 31-day blogging challenge. You can tweet me at Dr_JZ using hash tag #31dbc to share your thoughts and share your stories. 

My Pink Chair, the Beach, and me: Being as Resistance

 "Within complex and ever shifting realms of power relations, do we position ourselves on the side of colonizing mentality? Or do we continue to stand in political resistance with the oppressed, ready to offer our ways of seeing and theorizing of making culture, towards the revolutionary effort which seeks to create space where there is unlimited access to the pleasure and power of knowing, where transformation is possible? This choice is crucial. It shapes and determines our response to existing cultural practice and our capacity to envision new, alternative, oppositional aesthetic acts. It informs the way we speak about these issues, the language we choose. Language is also a place of struggle.” (bell hooks “Choosing the margin as a space of radical openness” from Yearnings: Race, Gender and Cultural Politics.

October 9, 2013 found me sitting on the beach. Just me and my pink chair. Sitting and being.

How do we begin to engage in radical acts? How does going to the beach become a part of my radical acts? At first glance, the image of me siting on the beach does not seem to rise to the level of an act of resistance. However, for me it was and continues to be.

Often we don’t think of the language of busyness, necessitated for a “late” capitalist state, as part of the oppression we as Black women face.  The language of busyness exists as the contrast for the language of idleness/laziness. In deed, there is a politics involved in these narratives. Consequently, there exist space for resistance.

Busyness can be used to mask so much—insecurity, or need to feel needed, our fears that to not appear busy is to not fit the mold of success. So we stay busy, we keep our children busy—we are busy just for the sake of being busy.

Have you tried to get together with anyone recently? We now have to schedule a simple get together weeks in advance. There is very little opportunity for spontaneity in building friendships. Why? Because we are all so busy.

Some of us believe that we have to be constantly writing, researching, grading and the list goes on in order to achieve tenure. The model we are often given, real or fictitious, is to be constantly in motion. Motion because equated with success and subsequently self-worth.

This I argue contributes to our oppression. We have bought into, to sound somewhat Marxist, capitalist exploitation of its workers. We know that we can’t maintain the busyness of life; we know that we need human interactions, on a substantive level; we know we need to take a moment to simply sit and enjoy the beach. Yet we resist. We resist because we believe that to exist in the academy is to follow the capitalist model of constantly doing. After all we are fighting against the myth that we don’t belong. Thus, not only must we perform the expectations of capitalist academe, we must go above and beyond.

So, I resisted and went to the beach. I was tired—emotionally and physically. I could not and more importantly I didn’t want to perform the expected norms of what it means to be a professor. I found a different model. One that allowed me an opportunity to (co)exist with nature and to simply just be.

It is in my act of simply just being that I resisted positioning myself “on the side of [the] colonizing mentality.”  I do believe that we can have success without constantly being busy. In part, we have to recognize how this model and the accompanying language—which is often couched in praise—actually oppress us. It oppresses us on various levels, including, but not limited to making us into someone we don’t recognize. The haggard look and the stress we consistently endure take us away from our true beings.

So-called idleness is not necessarily bad. We need rest. We need to rejuvenate. Thus we must resist the language of busyness and create other narratives of care.

This is the ninth post of my 31-day blogging challenge. You can tweet me at Dr_JZ using hash tag #31dbc to share your thoughts and share your stories.