Richard Ofshe & “The West Memphis Three”

In the final minutes of today’s movie, sociologist Richard Ofshe testified on behalf of Jessie Misskelley, one of the teens accused of murdering the three boys. Misskelley’s defense team hired Richard Ofshe to examine the interrogation transcript and, drawing on his considerable expertise in false memory syndrome and false confession, he testified that Jessie Misskelley offered a false confession resulting from a manipulative interrogation. Ofshe suggested that a psychologically coercive interrogation led Misskelley to confess to something he didn’t do. On the stand, he pointed to inconsistencies in Misskelley testimony and areas where the police were feeding him the answers that they wanted to hear.

If you’re enrolled in our Blackboard site, you can access an excerpt from his testimony as the top item in our Course Documents folder, or you can read his full testimony here:

http://www.wm3.org/live/trialshearings/documents.php?docid=103

Your GTA will show the final 40 minutes of the film focusing on the joint trial of Jason Baldwin and Damien Echols. There’s a lot left out, but you should be able to get the main outlines of the case and the central defense and prosecution strategies. Like the McMartin preschool case, the story of the West Memphis Three brings together some of the sociological themes and ideas we’ve covered so far: class inequality, cultural capital, labeling, media hegemony, and moral panic. Just as there are some people who insist that McMartin was a hotbed of santanism, some still insist on the guilt of Misskelley, Baldwin, and Echols. It’s safe to say that a consensus has grown over the last 15 years that they’re innocent, and most of the web resources will reflect that view. For an update on the case, you can read the article from the Economist (April 19, 2008) located in our Course Documents folder. There are plenty of online resources as well:

http://www.wm3.org/live/faq/faq.php

http://www.crimelibrary.com/notorious_murders/famous/memphis/index_1.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Memphis_3

-- Brian

“Sociologist in Chief?” Where Do I Vote?

The President-Elect of the American Sociological Association is Patricia Hill Collins, social theorist extraordinaire and author of the now-classic Black Feminist Thought. Attaining presidency of the ASA places one atop of the sociology hierarchy, but “Sociologist in Chief” sounds much more important, much weightier.

On “Meet the Press,” political consultant Bob Shrum gave voice to the idea of a “Sociologist in Chief,” but suggested that presidential hopefuls should avoid running for that particular post. In a discussion about Barack Obama’s controversial comment about “bitter” working-class Pennsylvanians who embrace religion and guns, James Carville opined: “I have eight guns myself. I’m hardly bitter about things.” Bob Shrum responded, “Well, he’s not running for sociologist in chief, he’s running for president. So I think he wishes he hadn’t said it quite this way.” Later Shrum said “People go with sociology, and he shouldn’t be a sociologist. . . . sociology says that when people are in distress, when they’re economically deprived, they, they hold onto the things in their lives that give them some sense of security and identity. That’s faith, that can be hunting, that can be all of those things.”

(“Meet the Press,” NBC News Transcripts, April 13, 2008, via Lexis/Nexis)

Obviously, there are better places in the blogosphere to debate and discuss the presidential race. Here, I only want to point to Shrum’s perception of sociology and its social role. On a show like this, it’s impossible to explore ideas with any serious depth, so I shouldn’t have been surprised by a phrase like “sociology says that . . .” but it was still a little bit jarring to hear on a Sunday morning. But Shrum’s overbroad statement might be correct to the extent that sociologists universally believe (based on research from multiple angles) that economic deprivation does something. More importantly, I would expect most sociologists think that poverty and income inequality are important things to study and understand. We can all agree on that simple proposition, even if the line “sociology says that” generally suggests a false uniformity of thought amongst sociologists.

Personally, I’d love for more politicians to don their sociology cap and address the major fault lines of inequality in the US and (where appropriate) around the globe. Maybe we don’t need a Sociologist in Chief; maybe we need more “chiefs” who are sociologists. But I’ll be the first one at the voting booth if we do, indeed, decide to elect a Sociologist in Chief.

-- Brian

PoMo and Talk Show: The Jerry Springer Opera

The last time I was in Britain (January 2005) the BBC was set to televise the latest smash hit from London's famous West End theatre district. No, it wasn't another adaptation of Noel Coward or Ibsen, nor was it an updated twist on a Shakespearean classic. It was, in fact, Jerry Springer: The Opera.

You may be scratching your head at the seemingly odd juxtaposition of "high brow" opera with the lowest of "low brow" talk shows, but I urge you to keep in mind the characteristics of postmodern art we have been discussing the past couple of weeks. Art forms in the postmodern vein blur the lines between high and low subject matter, they display as sense of playfulness, they mix genres, and seemingly everyday items are elevated to artistic subject matter. In this way, I argue Jerry Springer: The Opera represents a quintessentially postmodern approach to artistic performance.

This is not to say it was aired without protest. In fact, the BBC received its highest number of complaints ever even BEFORE the show was broadcast. While extremely foul language and sexually explicit content were the main objections given in complaints, as a sociologist I have to wonder what else might have been going on. After all, the BBC regularly airs full nudity in mainstream shows and is very accommodating of foul language, and the British tabloid media is world-renowned for the "trashiness" of its content. What else then was going on? Did the blending of high and low, the stretching of comfortable divisions between what was art and what was trash, the blurring of boundaries, touch a raw nerve with the British public? What differences might there have been between those who embraced talk show opera and those who dismissed it? Did they have different levels of education, different class backgrounds, different levels of cultural capital?

For those of you who are curious, Jerry Springer: The Opera made its debut State-side in Chicago in 2007. It played last January at New York's Carnegie Hall with the esteemed actor Harvey Keitel in the lead role, and is currently in production in numerous cities across the US. As an opera, it was fair, but I wish I'd seen Bat Boy: The Musical instead...
--Gabriella Smith

Talk Show Lost at Sea!!!

Since we've all been reading Gamson's "Freaks Talk Back," we've seen numerous examples of talk show formulas, how they're created, and arguments about both their exploitative and democratic qualities. On a lighter note, I've posted a link to a clip from the HBO sketch comedy show "Mr. Show" that parodies the Springer-esque talk show style. Although it's intended as humor, it hyperbolizes some of the content of these shows that some would argue are already endeavors in hyperbole. Enjoy the clip, and try to make the connection between the parody and your reading this week.
--Brian Meier

Boys Beware!

Some of you have asked me about where I found the “Boys Beware” video, the 1960s instructional movie warning boys about the supposed dangers of predatory homosexuals. Boys Beware is archived at the Internet Archive in the Prelinger Collection. It’s available in multiple downloading formats, or you can watch on the website. Also look for “Girls Beware!” and “What About School Spirit?” (filmed at Lawrence High in the 1950s). I posted a version of the Monday’s video material on youtube:

Here’s the description: This video offers snapshots of three sexual regimes in US history pertaining to male-male intimacy and gay identity. The first two clips show a stereotype of men who have sex with other men as "pansies" and "fairies," but it's not necessarily a demeaning one. The crowd is laughing with them as much as they're laughing at them. The fairies' performance receives giant applause from the hip Greenwich Village crowd. Jay (Tony Jowitt) and Nasa (the irrepressible Clara Bow) enter the night club because they're fascinated by the edgy scene, not because they hate gays (in fact, "gay" is not a commonly used term to describe men who have sex with other men at this point in history). As George Chauncey explains in Gay New York (1994), the public fascination with "gay" men (the so-called "pansy craze") turned to hostility during the 1930s. The second clip represents the solidification of anti-gay hostility after World War II, including the medicalization of same-sex desire, the conflation of pederasty and homosexuality, and other closet-constructing public opinions. The final clip represents the post-Stonewall celebration of gay pride. Chauncey's research suggests that the first and last clips have more in common despite their historical distance. The history of gay liberation in the US is not a linear one, and this history shows that fascination and public acceptance can turn to intolerance and hostility if we're not careful.
-- Brian

Brian’s Reflections on Exam #1

In a giant class like ours, it’s difficult for me to give personalized feedback on your exam. I don’t want to spend too much of tomorrow’s session talking about the last exam, so I thought that I’d talk about a few of the questions that gave people problems. In this discussion, please recognize that I’m sharing some of the blame. I’m not going to change the grading scale or give credit for incorrect answers to the difficult questions, but if a large percentage of the class misses a question I’m more than willing to admit that the question should have been clearer and/or my instruction should match the exam question more closely. With that said, let’s look at a few of the questions:

Question 43: In the lecture on Structure and Agency, I described the relationship between these two forces as “dialectic.” You know it’s not “doxic” or “paradoxic.” If you got this wrong, odds are you answered “oppositional.” I can see why there’s confusion. A dialectic relationship is oppositional to a point (in its original Hegelian formulation: thesis + antithesis = synthesis). The reason why it’s better to think of structure/agency as dialectical rather than oppositional is because the capacity for agency depends on social structural arrangements. Likewise, through the exercise of human agency, we can alter social structures. There’s a back and forth quality to this (admittedly abstract) relationship. The quotes from William Sewell Jr. suggest how an agent’s “schema” (or worldview) depends on resources (a specific social structural relationship in the economy, law, etc.). I’ll admit that the question was a bit unfair given the close semantic relationship between “dialectic” and “oppositional,” but good job to those who answered “dialectic.”

Question 33: “A convenience store clerk who suddenly wins $23 million dollars in the lottery. Where would Bourdieu place this person on the following map of social space?” I thought this would be an easy one. Upon reflection, I think students over-thought it, or it relied on (unshared) assumptions about occupations. Convenience store clerks (like Apu from The Simpsons) start with low cultural and economic capital, but the lottery winning will increase the individual’s economic capital (but not necessarily their cultural capital). The correct answer was B – low cultural capital / high economic capital.

Question 48: “All of following emerged as opponents of the People Temple EXCEPT” This question was definitely detail-oriented and (arguably) nit-picky. The correct answer is Annie Moore, the nurse who stayed with Jones until the very end. Phil Tracy and Lester Kinsolving were journalists trying to expose Jim Jones. Grace Stoen was a high-level defector who helped start “the Concerned Relatives,” and whose child was at the center of the Jonestown custody battle.

-- Brian

The Washington Post Printed It So It Must Be True...Women Are Biologically Inferior

Charlotte Allen, from The Washington Post, should start looking for another job. Or maybe she should start writing her own obituary. On March 2, Allen catalyzes a blogosphere backlash to her infamous article “We Scream, We Swoon, How Dumb Can We Get?” In it, she argues that women are the weaker sex, the stupid sex, the dim half of our population, citing such “convincing” evidence as Obama rallying, Hillary’s presidential campaign, recent bestselling chick lit, Grey’s Anatomy, bad driving, oh…and the female ability to score lower on standardized visuospatial tests (i.e., the ground for math, science, and philosophy). So I guess that proves it—The Washington Post printed it, so it must be true!

Too bad Allen didn’t do any research or even utilize the internet to find at least one study to disprove her outlandish observations. But I guess we shouldn’t really criticize Allen anyway, since she is one of the many dim-witted women out there (strange, seeing that she graduated from both Stanford and Harvard). She herself admits to being a “classic case of female mental deficiencies,” claiming, “I can’t add two and two (well, I can, but then what?). I don’t even know how many pairs of shoes I own. I have coasted through life and academia on the basis of an excellent memory and superior verbal skills, two areas where researchers agree, women consistently outpace men.” What’s more, all of the brilliant women throughout history, according to Allen, must be outliers. Sure, they can do their jobs well, but they’re just the exception, not the norm. And the rest of us…well, Allen lays it out plainly. We should just “relax, enjoy the innate abilities most of us possess (as well as the ones fewer of us possess) and revel in the things most important to life at which nearly all of us excel: tenderness toward children and men and the weak and the ability to make a house a home…Then we could shriek and swoon and gossip and read chick lit to our hearts’ content and not mind the fact that way deep down, we are…kind of dim.”

It’s no surprise that the backlash happened (and is still going strong). Apparently women (and men) took offense to females being portrayed as vaginas that were really just brain cell black holes (The Washington Post: Bitches Ain’t Shit). Bloggers were quick to note that Allen supports the right-wing anti-feminist Independent Women’s Forum (who, according to Sara Gwin on Silence is Betrayal: A Feminist Blog, want women to be more like the virginal, less intelligent 1950s housewife). That earlier in her career she claimed that to solve women’s financial problems, women just need to get some husbands and all will be fine. So, knowing some of her biases, why did Allen write this? Was it a joke? An attempt to be loud and proud about the innate inferiority of being a woman? No. Allen claims it was to give an accurate picture of how stupid females really can be.

Let’s imagine for a minute that everything Allen says about women is true—that actual research has confirmed it. Now, imagine if instead of writing about women, we wrote about another group like blacks, gays, or Jews. Maybe we could write an article about how Africa is doomed because it’s full of black people trying to rule themselves, how the Jews deserved a genocide, or how gay people really don’t merit rights because such and such study proves that they are psychologically deranged beyond the help of medication and intervention. These would be too offensive to print, too costly to imagine the lawsuit or drop in credibility and readership. But write an offensive article about women and it’s okay. Why? Katha Pollitt, whose response to Allen was published in the Washington Post March 7, claims that “misogyny is the last acceptable prejudice.” And worse, The Washington Post—overwhelmingly dominated by white males—allowed it to be published. The editorial board probably didn’t even think twice about how it feeds into the sexism of our culture, how it unfairly condemns women to nothing more than the sex destined to relegate themselves to childcare, assisting men, and home decorating. Or maybe they did think twice about it and still said, “Okay, we’ll publish this article because we really need women to give in to the virginal mothering image, patriarchal authority, and accept that this is the greatest aspiration women will ever have.”

Makes you kind of sick, doesn't it.

Ada Van Roekel-Hughes