Sociological Explorations: Stuff I’m Reading
For the Week of September 5th: The link between domestic violence, men and gun violence; evading productivity culture, challenging the classism and fat phobia of foodie culture, and on showing up as yourself.
The Sociological perspective asks us to think about how people are organized, and the consequences of these mechanisms of organization. Our larger goal is to be able to make sense of both social structures and our collective agency to bring about changes that bring us closer to collective well-being. As Durkheim urges us to do, it’s important that we see others’s needs through the lens of our own; we are only as health as the rest of us are.
There was another mass shooting — this one in Memphis, though I’m sure there were others I’m not aware of, that didn’t hit the headlines — and while details haven’t emerged about the perpetrator’s life, it’s common for people to link mental health illness with mass shootings. This New York Times article is an important step in de-linking the two. Mental health is stigmatized enough it needn’t get bogged down with further shame. What’s one of the most important connections that’s overlooked: the perpetrators are almost always men, quite often white and young, and in upwards of 70% of cases have been flagged for domestic violence. We should be talking about masculinity, domestic violence and guns more so than mental health.
We live in a productivity society. As Juliet Schor has argued, rather than bring us the life of leisure economics thought would come after WWII, late-modern capitalism has brought us perpetual productivity and a wellness industry that urges us to perfect ourselves in our downtime. Let’s resist and learn “how to embrace doing nothing.”
This is a good example of history impacting biography, as well as to how history is really about a process of social change, not a static moment from the past. How long people live — an aspect of individual biography — is rooted in the historical, cultural and structural dynamics of a region.
In case you were wondering, the “maternal instinct” is a social construct:
This excellent podcast explores Michael Pollan’s work and the major critiques of his framework of “personal responsibility” and “selling thinness back to us as virtue.”
On a final note, make your art, be creative, show up in the way that is you, not because it is the best, but because it is yours. I loved this essay. I will read it many times.
Taking care of yourself is a necessary component of a healthy society. Taking care of others is just as important. Let’s show what love can do for the world.
Be well,
Dr. Monica
