Reflections on Declining Homophobia in Mayeda’s Declining Homophobia Among Male Athletes and McCormack’s The Declining Significance of Homophobia 22 October 2012 While McCormack’s main premise is that there is a decline in homophobia, I would clarify that it has only declined in specific areas due to their nature, be they be large cities with a strong progressive element such as San Francisco or New York or specific schools that he analysed first hand. However, and unfortunately,… Read More
Reflections on Readings In Inequality from Manza and Sauder’s Inequality and Society and McCormack’s The Declining Significance of Homophobia 15 October 2012 While segregation has been mostly and forcibly eradicated in education, categories of segregation (or queues) have not been eliminated in the work place (Manza, et al: 415). Primarily in the control of the employers’ and their representatives, they stereotypically categorize women and minorities in various rankings of lesser importance, visualizing the segregation and prejudice as… Read More
Ma Vie En Rose Analysis 15 October 2012 Ma Vie En Rose, directed by Alain Berliner, is a Belgium film produced in France. While this film is obviously in French, the surrounding set design embodies an “American” look and feel for most of the film. The characters also appear to be atypically “American” in their extreme negative reactions to Ludovic’s realization that he… Read More
Reflections on Bourdieu and Habitus 8 October 2012 Pierre Bourdieu’s desire to create a union of opposites, of the subjectivist and objectivist approaches in sociology, became what he called habitus. This is his attempt to overcome the dualism in what he saw as a problem in sociological theory. However, this attempt to generalize two opposing forces does not account for any individual’s desire… Read More
Brokeback Mountain Analysis 7 October 2012 Brokeback Mountain, directed by Ang Lee, is a simple and complex love story between two people. It is simple because it has also been called a straightforward gay love story as well as a bisexual love story. While those points of view are valid on some level, this is a complex love story, because labeling… Read More
Reflections on Inequality in Racism And Poverty in Omi’s The Changing Meaning Of Race and Wilson’s More Than Just Race 30 September 2012 Poverty can be explained with cold hard statistics. Racism, on the other hand, cannot be explained scientifically, but it is explained as an individual social construct. (Omi 2001: 243). Racism is derived from generalities that individuals use to separate the different from him/herself. (Hume 2007: 99-102). Unfortunately, little has changed in centuries. We are all… Read More
Reflections on the Influence of Classical Sociology on Marcuse 30 September 2012 Herbert Marcuse of the Frankfurt school analysed contemporary society using key elements of Sigmund Freud’s theories filtered through the classical social theory of Karl Marx as a jumping off point. However, he turned that on its head into three areas: the decline of the individual, the deranged logic of capitalism, and a promise of liberation. … Read More
Murderball Analysis 28 September 2012 The documentary Murderball, directed by Henry Alex Rubin and Dana Adam Shapiro, is raw, visceral, violent, and beautiful. It is a story of a multi-dimensional masculinity and humanity told from several points of view. It embodies the expression, “in your face,” in that neither the filmmakers nor the subjects feel inclined to leave most topics… Read More
Reflections on Barthes And Structuralism 24 September 2012 Structuralism is essentially the study of Saussure’s linguistics applied to the study of the underlying structure of a society’s means of communication(s) that give that society’s words contextual meaning.1 Roland Barthes may not have been the first to analyse Saussure, but he penetrated its implications more than anyone at the time. Barthes defined structuralism as… Read More