Randall Collins was recently named the 2011 Rosenberg Lecturer at the University of Maryland, and I recently attended the talk he gave for the honor. I would bargain that most sociologists are aware that Collins is uncommonly prolific, and most are also aware of how widely cited he is. As the Rosenberg lecturer, it was one of those rare instances when it was entirely possible to sincerely introduce him as “a person for whom no introduction is necessary” without being accused of simply repeating a tired cliché. So rather than use this space to dote on him or list his accomplishments, in what follows, I’ll briefly recount his presentation and conclude with a couple thoughts I had about his project.

_In true sociological form, the title of Collins’ presentation left nothing to the imagination: “Informalization of Manners and Self Presentation and How to Explain It.” His argument went something like this: There has been an accelerated shift toward informalization since about the 1980s, and to piece together the driving force behind this process, Collins takes us through an attic shoe box full of still photos, which cross continents, social strata and span the last century. They appear to be his personal photos, not simply pasted into his study from a Google search, and they are clearly taken from a variety of different cameras, using a variety of different film speeds, under a variety of different light conditions.

Collins first examines informalization as it pertains to the garb of protesters throughout the last century, and he explains that even in the militant labor movement around the turn of the 20th century, protesters were dressed in formal attire, or what Charles Tilly referred to as a WUNC display. That is, in contrast to the Occupy Wall Street protesters of recent months, these striking industrial workers represented themselves in formal attire to telegraph their worthiness, unification, large numbers, and commitment. "Why," he asks, "has there been such a dramatic change in the protester's uniform?"

Whatever the answer, it was clear Collins wasn't giving it up yet. Instead, as he talked through the next series of photographs, it became clear that his analysis was drawing from Erving Goffman’s attention to both formal and informal rituals and the face-work these rituals imply. However, I think Collins is endeavoring to make sense of a process for which Goffman’s analytical tools are ill-equipped to provide answers. It is not what is happening in any particular photograph that interests Collins so much as what is behind the general drift toward informalization, which can only be discerned from a sea of photos. To this end, Collins serves up three theories to account for this drift. First, following Norbert Elias, he proposes that informalization is the result of a social democratization. Perhaps social outsiders have begun to increase their political participation, and second order manifestations of this increased participation are cropping up in language, customs, and behaviors. Second, Collins puts forth what he refers to as an antinomian elite theory, which describes the propagation of informalization as due to a shared reaction against a formal elite aesthetic. Here, “cool” prevails among persons determined not to be “square.” Finally, he suggests that there has been an emergence of a different kind of elitism, but one that we might recognize as a “leisure elite,” typified by the athletic fantasy figure. Here the impulse leading to greater informalization is a result of sport and prominent figures in sport becoming something like Durkheimian ritual objects.

Collins’ unassuming presentation style betrays the ambition of his project. To put it bluntly, he is attempting to explain why an image of men wearing hats in a diner during the 1950s should be considered alongside a contemporary image of an erect penis with piercings (oh, yes he did). Unfortunately, that much anticipated moment where all the pieces of Collins’ puzzle fall into place and this otherwise random barrage of still photos reveals something about why our contemporaries consistently eschew formalities never came. In my view—and I think Collins agrees—not one of the theories he proposed at the outset worked very well. Instead, he concluded with the provocative idea that class disparities are better disguised amidst this relatively undifferentiated field of informal garb and behaviors.

So Collins’ proverbial curtain was lifted to reveal an empty stage with only the sound of a whimpering trumpet, but I’m writing this post with a forgiving heart. As I said, Collins’ project is an ambitious one, and after all, I don’t think it was ever really possible for Randy Collins to live up to the reputation of "Dr. Randall Collins, Dorothy Swaine Thomas Professor of Sociology from the University of Pennsylvania."

I was left with several other concerns about his project, but in closing, I’ll mention just two. First, in addition to social class, I think Collins’ project would benefit from a more sustained analysis of other dimensions of inequality. After talking to others who attended, there is some agreement that he appeared to overlook the way the informalization process may be working differently for women. I would also be interested to know how informalization varies by race.

Finally, Collins’ project is global in scope, and it would be interesting for him to locate this drift toward informalization amidst other global processes. For example, it is tempting to draw connections between a global drift toward informalization and the growing income inequality often remarked upon by those interested in the outcomes of economic globalization. If informalization truly hides income disparities—which is an idea he proposed in his talk—then the fact that both processes began to quicken about 30 years ago seems to be a rather suspicious coincidence and one worth investigating.

Admittedly, I’ve never been very successful at persuading other sociologists to pursue questions that I personally find interesting or important, but one never knows. I'm definitely looking forward to seeing the next iteration of Dr. Collins’ analysis of informalization.

Lester Andrist

_Back in 2007, Dr. Oz stood on the set of The Oprah Winfrey Show and infamously promoted to an audience of 8 million viewers the idea that African Americans experience higher rates of hypertension because of the harsh conditions their ancestors endured on slave ships crossing the Atlantic. This so-called "slave hypothesis" has been roundly criticized for good reason, but I was struck that it was being promoted by such a highly educated medical professional.

_The episode got me thinking about the sociologists Omi and Winant's notion of a racial formation as resulting from historically situated racial projects wherein "racial categories are created, inhabited, transformed, and destroyed" (p. 55-56). These projects take multiple forms but in at least one version, there is an attempt to collapse race—a socially constructed concept—into biology. Such projects are similar insofar as they suggest that the socially constructed distinctiveness between people of different racial categories roughly approximates a meaningful biological distinctiveness. Scientists have been centrally involved in this effort to establish a biological basis for race. In the middle of the 19th century Dr. Samuel Morton attempted to show that average cranial capacities of people from different racial groups were significantly different. Today, many people scoff at the misguided racism of the past, but I think Dr. Oz's promotion of the slave hypothesis demonstrates that the search for a biological, and therefore "natural," basis for race continues.

_
So how do proponents of the slave hypothesis explain hypertension? In 1988 Dr. Clarence Grim first proposed the theory, which is the idea that the enslaved people who survived the Middle Passage were more likely to be carriers of a gene that allowed them to retain salt. Grim argued that this ability to retain salt, while necessary for a person to survive the harsh conditions of a slave ship, would ultimately lead to hypertension as the person aged. Thus Grim proposed that African Americans living in the United States today are the descendents of people who have this selected feature. As I mentioned above, this theory has been soundly refuted but reportedly still remains in many hypertension textbooks. Looking at the clip above, which is from January of this year, it seems that medical professionals like Dr. Oz may be still promoting it.

I think it is important to recognize that this particular racial project persists in many forms, and one final example is from 2005, when the FDA approved BiDil as a customized treatment of heart failure for African Americans. The approval was based on highly criticized research, but the approval also implicitly makes the case that a racial group might be so biologically distinct from others as to warrant its own customized medication. Much like the search for different cranial capacities, the propagation of the slave hypothesis, and the marketing of drugs designed for different racial groups, BiDil's emergence can be seen as an attempt to deploy racial categories as if they were immutable in nature (see Troy Duster's article in Science).

Criticizing this racial project is more than an academic exercise. As a social construct, race is already a central principal of social organization, which benefits whites at the expense of other racial groups. It is already a powerful basis upon which privileges are meted out and denied. In my view, the effort to loosen race from its moorings as a social construct and anchor it again as a biological fact of nature is an attempt to fundamentally alter the discussion on racial inequality. If this project prevails and race comes again to reflect a biological truth, then fewer people will acknowledge racial inequality as the result of a human-made history. It will instead be seen as the result of humans being made differently.

Lester Andrist

Stand-up comedians exercise a curious privilege, which allows them to peddle controversial conclusions and uncomfortable insights without suffering the usual scorn and admonishment that comes with challenging systems of power. The comedian's stage seems to be a space that has been engineered for bringing indelicate knowledge about the world to the surface. For instance, the suggestion that Americans are deeply divided by race and class usually causes people to fidget, yet Chris Rock was greeted with laughter and applause when he unabashedly criticized the racialized wealth gap in the United States during one of his performances in Washington DC. Similarly, Louis C.K. received a rousing applause when he discussed his privilege as a white male, and Hari Kondabolu made an entire room burst into laughter by exposing the nonsensical logic underlying stereotypes aimed at Mexican immigrants.

Unfortunately, as with superheroes who use their powers for evil, not all comedians use the stage as a venue for delivering social criticisms aimed at exposing injustice. For instance, comedy is just as likely to reinforce stereotypes as it is to criticize them, or to put it differently, the comedian's stage is just as likely to be a place where knowledge is "indelicate" because it is racist as it to be a place where knowledge is indelicate because it is critical of racism.

Consider Jeff Dunham's ventriloquial act featuring his popular dummy, "Achmed the Dead Terrorist." In the clip below, which is taken from a 2007 performance in Washington DC, Dunham draws upon a number of stereotypes of Arabs and Muslims, many of which have been around since well before the attacks on September 11th, 2001. Dunham is not deploying social criticism, but is instead uncritically drawing on racist representations for laughs. He is also reasserting and promoting what is by now a worn panoply of orientalist associations. Arabs and Muslims, like the Achmed character, are typically portrayed as religious fanatics. They are often depicted as irrationally angry, and many are self-proclaimed terrorists. But if they are dangerous, they are dangerous buffoons and are often too incompetent to pull off their own deadly plots.

In this way, stand-up comedians can be understood as articulators of knowledge about the world. As I have argued, they contribute to the persistence of stereotypes at times, but they can also articulate convincing arguments against stereotypes. But what is true of stand-up comedy seems to hold for other types of comedic performance as well. Political cartoons, comedy sketches, and even situation comedies all peddle this indelicate knowledge about the racialized other. In "Ali-Baba Bound," a Looney Tunes cartoon from 1940, Porky Pig runs up against Ali-Baba and his "Dirty Sleeves." The humor is constructed around a basic scaffolding of the Arab as dirty and sneaky. Ali-Baba's Arab underlings in the cartoon are depicted as too primitive to competently use rockets and must must run as suicide bombers toward a colonial fort with explosives strapped to their heads.

The articulation and reinforcement of Arabs as buffoons or Muslims as extremists, the elevation of these images above others as iconic representations ironically limits the field of vision. But shortly after 1940, events would transpire so that for a time Arabs and Muslims occupied a relatively small sliver of American concern. The sneak attack on Pearl Harbor the following year ignited a discursive explosion surrounding the Japanese, both those living in American neighborhoods and abroad. It is striking how eerily similar representations of Japanese persons were to those claimed for Arabs and Muslims. However, fed by photographed destruction of Pearl Harbor and the tangible realities associated with the American war machine shifted back into high gear, dominant representations of the treacherous Japanese other went further and faster. Each representation of the "Jap" became more and more fanciful; each illustration seemingly emboldened by the last to push the caricature even further.

Celebrated children's author, Dr. Seuss, published a cartoon only weeks before the United States would forcibly relocate 120,000 ethnic Japanese persons living in the United States to internment camps. The cartoon depicts a buck-toothed, fifth column of Japanese Americans lining up from Washington to California for their very own box of TNT. A man with a monocular scales the rooftop of the explosives depot "waiting for the signal from home." Or consider a Looney Tunes cartoon from the period, which is named "Tokio Jokio" and similarly claims buck teeth and buffoonish behavior for all Japanese persons on the planet.

The cartoon elaborates upon many of the typical stereotypes associated with Japanese persons but unlike the Dr. Seuss cartoon, the attempt at humor is harder to miss. Whereas the Seuss cartoon reverberates extant fears about a treacherous Japanese enemy living among us, the Looney Tunes cartoon lampoons them as bumbling idiots. In the Seuss cartoon, their tribal-like loyalties to the Emperor mean they are capable of doing just about anything, but in the Looney Tunes cartoon they are too incompetent to prevent their own Fire Prevention Headquarters from burning to the ground. Such seemingly contradictory representations permeated the American imagination of the time, alternately stoking anxieties while assuring Americans of their national and even racial superiority.

These racist representations aimed at the Japanese were not buried by the detonation of two atomic bombs over Japanese cities. Just as before the Second World War, they have proven to be free-floating to a degree and transferable to our emergent enemies. Today, Arabs and Muslims are routinely depicted in popular cinema as incompetent. In our comedy, they are again the bumbling idiots, simultaneously too stupid to successfully perpetrate an attack against us and just stupid enough to commit truly heinous crimes. What was an imagined fifth column, has become the terrorist sleeper cell. In 1942 we feared Japanese Americans were blindly loyal to "their" Emperor. Today we are bombarded with ideas about the tribal loyalties of American Muslims. So powerful are these loyalties, it is often suggested, Muslims would happily kill themselves to bring about the demise of Western civilization. The fanatical Middle Eastern suicide bomber is the new banzai charger and Japanese Kamikazi pilot.

There is a joke that is now getting tossed around the internet, and it goes something like this, "A friend of mine has started a new business. He is manufacturing land mines that look like prayer mats. It's doing well. He says prophets are going through the roof." What this joke, Dunham's comedy sketch, and the Looney Tunes cartoon all share is that they mark historical moments when the racialized other became so thoroughly demonized and devalued in the public consciousness, our undifferentiated Arab "enemies" became so feared for their treachery and immorality that it became possible to make light of hypothetical and real violence perpetrated against them. What does it say about a people when they find it possible to laugh at a joke about a human detonating a bomb which is strapped to his body? One might speculate that it is strangely intoxicating to spot the boogieman tripping on his shoelaces, embarrassing himself, or dying by his own venom. The Achmed character's tired threat, "I kill you!" is funny, perhaps because his voice cracks like a thirteen-year-old boy, and we are entertained by the irony that someone so evil could appear so weak. "Look at the Muslim boogieman acting so foolishly!" we seem to be saying through our laughter.

Of course Arabs and Muslims are not born evil; the boogieman is a creature that gets created in the accounts of what might happen if the nation ceases being vigilant. But the larger point I am arguing is that comedy, which uncritically trades in the negative stereotypes aimed at Arabs and Muslims and is able to make an audience pop with laughter with references to suicide bombing, is only possible because Arabs and Muslims have been successfully demonized and devalued. Comedians write jokes to get laughs, but as I mentioned at the outset, they also operate from a space which grants them temporary license to openly discuss controversial ideas. Comedians contribute to the discourse, just as readily they respond to it, and their sets are just as capable of exposing hidden discrimination as reinforcing it. This is important to consider because what is at stake here is the differential valuing of human life, and the way representations are organized to aid in that horrific project.

Perhaps five hundred years from now, when historians are able to look back on this moment, freed from the myopic principles of vision and division that currently ensnare us, I wonder if they will find it ironic that during this zenith of global information flows, a time when information about the intimate lives of people in distant lands so easily zipped across the planet, Americans persisted in holding fast to such gross generalizations. And if those historians archive the media which depicts the moral panic of these decades, they would do well to note what made us laugh.

Lester Andrist

With the 83rd Academy Awards looming, the celebratory cries of Americans who love their cinema have reached a virtual fever pitch. As a site that celebrates movies, we thought it only appropriate to join in the revelry, albeit in an unconventional way. Rather than endless commentary about who is wearing who, and which star is most deserving of an Oscar, we at The Sociological Cinema would like to offer up a note about the kinds of stories Americans most often celebrate and value. We want to draw attention to the overwhelmingly male-centered narratives and representations emanating from the Hollywood film industry.

Lucky for us, feminist cultural critic, Anita Sarkeesian, offers a very succinct analysis on the topic in a five-minute clip. In it, she demonstrates that our most celebrated films in the United States tend to be stories about men. As she explains, one of the consequences of living in a patriarchal society is that stories about men and masculine representations--their trials and transformations, courage and heroism--tend to be valued more than stories about women and feminine representations. Drawing from Sarkeesian's analysis, one can think about the following questions as they pertain to the films being celebrated as cinematic triumphs on Sunday: 1. Who has the most screen time? 2. Whose perspective do we see the story from? 3. Whose story arc does the plot revolve around? 4. Who is depicted as making consequential decisions in the story? and 5. Who do we most identify with? More often than not, the award is given to a movie about a man, told from his perspective. In fact, As Sarkeesian shows, a sweeping majority of the last 50 films to win the Academy Award for Best Picture were films about men and masculinity.

For those fans of American film who have no patience for Sarkeesian's sound reasoning and...umm...systematic use of data, we submit a second short clip for your consideration. This clip comes from The Girls on Film (TGOF), who describe their film blog as "a commentary with the objective of stimulating thought around the art of storytelling through film." The creators of the blog seek to challenge the audience through their "exploration of archetypal energies that are typically portrayed by men." To this end, the blog features scenes from mainstream blockbuster films that were originally performed by men but recreates them with women actors. In my favorite clip of theirs, Ashleigh Harrington and Katerina Taxia (directed by Jeff Hammond) reenact the recruiting scene from J.J. Abrams' Star Trek (2009). While Harrington and Taxia do a superb acting job, I think many people are dumbstruck when they first encounter the recreated scene. The masculine repartee between these two women and Harrington's bloody nose challenge the idea that masculinity can only be enacted by men. Performances of female masculinity tend to be rare in Hollywood films and are therefore surprising, but more germane to Sarkeesian's point above, The Girls on Film scene might also be surprising because it uses a woman to play the kind of role we have come to expect a man to play. We have been primed to see such important and consequential dialogue between men, so when women do it, it feels somehow disorienting.

Hollywood didn't invent patriarchy, but that doesn't preclude it from being implicated in reproducing it. The cultural critic, Stuart Hall, once observed that the people who work in creating media stand in a different relationship to ideology than the rest of us. That is to say, those who produce, direct, and act in films have at their disposal a powerful tool, which can be used to transform how people come to understand the world in which they live. Movies--especially the ones the Academy deems worthy of its coveted Oscar--pose answers to questions many people never asked, such as, "whose story is likely to matter most?" or just, "who matters?" As evidenced from the list of nominated films this year, those who were hoping for a revolution in the kinds of stories Hollywood tells may be disappointed. For now, a critical awareness of the men and masculinity America is (also) celebrating on Sunday may have to suffice.

Lester Andrist

While on the National Mall yesterday at the "Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear," I walked past an unamused man holding a sign with the message, "More Jobs, more money, more compassion." Standing behind him, about 20 feet away, was Darth Vader grabbing the ass of a pale looking zombie. I think The Village People were playing in the background. "What the hell is Stewart's rally all about?" I kept asking myself. Was I missing the point? Sure —some allowance must be made for the carnival-like atmosphere on the day before Halloween. Darth Vader, for instance, can be permitted to coexist with Hobbits but what was the political purpose of this event, which seemed to stir up so much interest among liberal-leaning thinkers in recent weeks?

"Are you going to the rally?" I must have been asked this question a dozen times in recent days. In each case, there seemed to be real relief and enthusiasm behind in the question, presumably because finally someone would be articulating an explanation against the worldview offered by vocal conservatives.

People have been hurting for some time now in this recession and there is a collective mood that despite their hard work and vigilance, they've lost their savings or perhaps they've been stamped as delinquent on their mortgage. These are people with real grievances, who often view themselves as hard working, patriotic Americans, and it was the Tea Party, who effectively articulated an explanation for their woes.

As Tea Party activists have it, what is needed to rectify this grave indignation visited upon the American people was not first and foremost a movement to compel greater regulation against the practice of predatory lending in the housing sector; nor is there a call to regulate the kind of financial innovation that contributed to the crises. Instead the problem was somehow a United States that had turned horribly socialist—communist even—by suggesting a policy of universal healthcare. Rather than a discussion which seriously evaluates the role big business ought to play in ensuring the health and well being of the people it employs, those most hurt by the recession are encouraged by the Tea Party to fix their cross hairs on "Illegal aliens," and while the reason for this is often unmentioned, the image we're left with is that of a sieve which leaks into the Great American Desert an undifferentiated horde of brown folks. They seek our jobs, and mooch our dwindling pot of resources, and despite this imposition, they can't even be bothered to learn English. This has been the message from the likes of Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, and Rush Limbaugh, and it was implicitly tied up with Beck's call to "restore honor" in late August of this year.

For those who have been tracking the momentum of the Tea Party, this should all sound familiar, but I'll steal a page from Noam Chomsky and suggest that rather than smug ridicule aimed at Tea Party activists, critics should be asking why hasn't there been even a semblance of an opposition movement from the left?

When Colbert recently offered testimony before the House Judiciary Committee on Immigration, I thought I detected the beginnings of an alternative to the usual story about that invading horde from our southern border. His prepared testimony was pure satire, which is always a relatively sophisticated critique masquerading as mere levity, but just in case there was any doubt that he was leveling a criticism, he offered the following in response to Representative Judy Chu's question about why he is interested in the issue of immigration:

"They are migrant workers who come here and do our work but don't have any rights as a result, and yet we still invite them to come here, and at the same time, ask them to leave. And that's an interesting contradiction to me...and, you know, whatsoever you do for the least of my brothers, and these seem like the least of our brothers right now...migrant workers suffer and have no rights."

Colbert’s account of the immigrant stands in obvious relief to that offered by conservative pundits, and following his testimony came the meager signs of a momentum building toward something even more coherent. In response to Beck's "Rally to Restore Honor," came an announcement from Jon Stewart that there would be a similar "Rally to Restore Sanity," and Colbert joined in with his own "Rally to Keep Fear Alive." Both rallies were named with an eye toward satire, not merely intended to debase Beck's rally, but to draw attention to the way average folks are being manipulated by politicians and media personalities in general. Just like the call to restore honor, restoring sanity seemed clearly intended to poke fun at all vacuous political slogans that succeed in rallying support for political leaders and their movements without actually committing them to meaningful action. Who could disagree with honor? Who among us doesn't want more sanity?

So I was somewhat disappointed when I arrived to the Mall just before noon on the day of the rally and began hearing from people that the reason they were there was because they had a genuine interest in restoring sanity to America. What is meant by "insane" or what precisely "America" is doing that is so insane was largely left unarticulated, and when I pressed people to explain who the insane folk are, many pointed to conservative media personalities like Glenn Beck or Tea Party activists, commonly derided as Tea Baggers.

The satire—that sophisticated critique of power—seemed to have been lost on many of those who attended. Instead it looked to be a big party among people who wanted to celebrate their healthy senses of humor and reasonableness. One guy's sign read, "My wife thinks I'm walking the Appalachian Trail," and just beyond it, another called to, "Stop Illegal Immigration," by keeping "Canadian geese from entering our country." But while so many attendees were patting themselves on the backs for the irony of creating a political sign without an overt political message, or for merely deriding the concerns many Tea Party activists have about whether illegal immigration will lead to ever more dwindling wages and delinquent mortgages, a few people showed up with signs and the audacity to ask the government for something.  Such attendees were relatively scarce though, and the man I mentioned earlier, who asked for "more jobs, more money, [and] more compassion," stood on the outskirts of the rally, near the Archives-Navy Memorial Metro station. He seemed to be contemplating a trip home just as the rally seemed to be heating up.

So what was the rally actually about? "What exactly was this?" Jon Stewart didn't know and didn't want to "control" what people thought the rally was. He began his closing remarks by explaining his intentions for it and telling us flatly that it wasn't intended as an effort to ridicule people of faith or activism. By striking a more serious tone, I wondered if he was seeking to provide some substance and coherence and attempting to make the rally something more than mere spectacle or an overzealous party where attendees habitually wink at each other in mutual assurance that they know crazy when they see it.

A few minutes later, just after a random crack about burning ants, Stewart at last specified what he believed to be real sanity, which he insisted most of us already had and was something in opposition to the hyperbole currently raging throughout the American media. Against the disingenuous politicos that saturate cable news, what is needed is the ability to make reasonable distinction, and he added, "the inability to distinguish terrorists from Muslims makes us less safe, not more."

"Excellent!" I thought. "Let's do something now!" Let's name political candidates who routinely render the terms 'Muslim' and 'terrorist' indistinct. Or perhaps Stewart will address the issue of unauthorized immigration because it is an issue often championed by conservatives and referenced in the rally's signage. Perhaps he'll hammer out at least the beginnings of an alternate narrative about how immigrants have been scapegoated as the ultimate cause for lost jobs and declining wages. Instead, Stewart offered a traffic analogy. We're reasonable folks, he seemed to say, because we routinely yield the right of way, so the mass of us can succeed in commuting to and from our jobs? Concession by concession, we all get along far better than what is typically depicted in the media.

I couldn't help but feel profoundly disappointed. Conservatives, least of all Glenn Beck and Tea Party activists, continue to articulate explanations that endeavor to account for the hurt people feel in this recession. They formulate powerful narratives about invasion from a foreign "Other." They draw from a rich pool of persistent stereotypes, which have remained lodged in the collective imagination of Americans far longer than most people realize. These articulators of the conservative worldview offer tangible scapegoats in the form of Muslims, immigrants, and socialists, and from their tangible narratives are prescriptions for tangible action. What is needed, they argue, is a sort of enclave society and one which demands vigilance against people dressed in Muslim garb. An ever taller, ever deeper fence must be constructed on our southern border. We must curtail socialist efforts by big government to redistribute resources to the less deserving "least of our brothers." It is a tightly woven narrative, but one that so often defies statistical facts. It especially defies textured understandings that refuse to uncritically trade in stereotypes, and it nearly always defies a political-economic perspective, such as that offered only last Thursday by Laura Sullivan, an NPR journalist who broke the story about how private prison companies who would benefit enormously from a growing population of detained immigrants actually had a role in drafting the Arizona bill that would ensure the growth of that population—Senate Bill 1070.

If, as Stewart claims, we're all still sane and capable of achieving (something) "every damn day" despite being immersed in a sensationalistic news environment, and all that is needed is persistent sanity, then there really is nothing to be done other than an occasional affirmation about remaining sane and possibly practicing patience during rush hour traffic. At its core, Stuart's message and those who claimed to be there to restore sanity seems to be about keeping faith in America and being patient with each other, and that's fine as far as it goes; however, without a competing explanation of why times are difficult and a proposal to do something about it, the rally sends a disturbing message of ambivalence, albeit a kind-hearted one. The rally, whatever Stewart wants to claim now, was responding to Beck's rally to restore honor, but rather than responding to Beck or even facilitating a space from which others could respond to Beck, we got Ozzy Osbourne and traffic analogies.

Lester Andrist

Back in early Fall of 2009, some fellow graduate students and I decided to build a sociological cinema. The idea came about as a response to our experiences teaching three different sociology classes. We found that when we screened a video clip in class to demonstrate a key concept, class discussion often became livelier, more students participated, and our students seemed better able to draw upon the key concept in their evaluation of subsequent ideas.

In one sense, then, the impetus for building what became known as The Sociological Cinema, stemmed from our own experiences in the classroom and the recognition that videos are effective tools of instruction. In fact, a growing body of evidence supports this conclusion and even expands on it. According to sociologist Michael Miller (2009), “their most critical function in terms of cognitive learning appears to lie in their capacity to serve as representational applications for key course ideas” (see also Champoux 1999).  For example, an excerpt from a CNN broadcast on the propagation of closed circuit television cameras (CCTVs) is very useful for demonstrating Foucault’s theories of surveillance and discipline. Videos can effectively convey concepts using examples from the feature films of popular culture or the so-called “realism” depicted in news reports and documentaries. They can vividly bring concepts and processes to life by weaving them into an emotionally charged narrative.

Recent scholarship also demonstrates that videos can improve student engagement in class material (Wynn 2009). This fits with our own experiences as sociology instructors. Using open-ended in-class evaluations of videos, we found that students believed videos were important in helping them draw connections to their own life experiences, that they connected class material to “real life” more generally, and that the videos met a need for a surprising number of students who believed themselves to be “visual learners.” Today’s undergraduates, dubbed the “net generation,” have only known life with online videos and other multimedia; they engage this media in their everyday lives and increasingly expect such media to be integrated within their classes (Oblinger and Oblinger 2005).

In addition to illustrating sociological concepts, videos can be used as a means of introducing analyses and commentaries which supplement traditional course content (Austin 2005). Videos can facilitate media literacy, and recent research even suggests that such visual technologies also facilitate civic engagement beyond the classroom (Bennet 2008).  More than rousing student engagement and enriching their understanding, videos offer the opportunity to introduce humor and levity into the classroom, which often has the effect of relieving student self-consciousness. Bingham and Hernandez (2009), for instance, find comedy, and comedy clips in particular, to be an effective tool in teaching sociological perspectives.  Instructors may, then, seek to integrate clips from the "Colbert Report" or "The Onion," encouraging students to analyze social expectations and why a failure to conform often makes us laugh.

While the benefits of bringing video clips into the classroom may be well-documented, instructors still face the task of finding good clips and then figuring out how to use them effectively. But the internet is an un-zoned metropole with a jumbled circuitry of narrow alleyways, and often the best cinemas are tucked away in strange corners. There are sites, such as YouTube, which serve as warehouses for searchable video clips, but such sites hold so much content coming from so many varied sources that instructors are generally unable to efficiently comb it for useful clips. On YouTube, an instructor who wants to find a clip depicting the bear subculture within the LGBTQ community is likely to find wildlife videos, and an instructor looking for clips on sexism will rarely be directed to the sexism found in recent car commercials. The search for such clips can be daunting and discouraging, and herein lies the second impetus for building The Sociological Cinema.

We built The Sociological Cinema, in part, as a practical means of spending less time finding clips. After cataloguing a number of the videos we used, it became apparent that it was possible to break them up into types. While we have taken some of our clips from documentaries and lectures, the majority come from popular culture, including television shows, movies, and video remixes or mashups. In some cases, it is relatively obvious how a particular clip would be helpful in a sociology classroom. For instance, excerpts from Jackson Katz’s documentary, “Tough Guise,” are unmistakably useful in a class on the sociology of gender because the clips explicitly demonstrate how hegemonic masculinity hurts men as well as women. On the other hand, the utility of a good number of other clips is only apparent because of the intellectual content or teaching suggestions we attach to those clips. For instance, The Sociological Cinema links to an eight-minute documentary designed to laud the efforts of fair trade coffee producers, but we have posted this clip and suggested it be used as an effective way to teach students about Marx’s concept of commodity fetishism (here). A third example is a clip from the popular television show The Bachelorette, which features a scene where contestants discuss “Man Code” and the presumed obligations of other men to abide by its rules (here). The teaching suggestion that accompanies this clip recommends using it as a means of spurring discussion on Connell's concept of hegemonic masculinity and Kimmel's concept of masculinity as homophobia.

As we have continued to add content to The Sociological Cinema, we have come to appreciate an additional function of our site. That is, in addition to helping instructors find resources that will provide students with a firm foundation of sociological concepts and theories while also developing their sociological imaginations and critical thinking skills, The Sociological Cinema works as a resource that refuses to consume culture at face value. We are an important voice because we pose important questions to students, such as, “How does this idea of “Man Code” gain momentum, and what are the consequences of it for people?” Our brief analyses of clips, coupled with the teaching suggestions we offer, are challenges to the usual meanings, which already bombard students on a daily basis, both inside and outside the classroom.

Drop by the site for a visit and spread the word. And help us build the cinema by contributing a video of your own.


Lester Andrist, Valerie Chepp, and Paul Dean

There's a French McDonald's ad circulating the blogosphere, which seems to be creating a stir. The ad features a young man having lunch with his father at McDonald's. While his dad orders, he sits in a booth and looks down onto a class photo. Five seconds into the clip we hear the young man's cell phone, and at eight seconds, he's telling the caller with unambiguous affection that he was just "thinking about you too." Then a hasty goodbye as his father returns, and if we hadn't already guessed it, the ensuing conversation leaves little doubt that the young man is hiding his relationship with a classmate from his father. “Too bad your class is all boys,” the father tells his son, and we know at last his son is gay and in the closet. This is the subtext of the chat, which is ostensibly about love lost, namely the father’s memories of himself as a ladies’ man.
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I suspect the moment between the father and his son is familiar to many men, like "watching a memory-in-process" [1]. As I said, the conversation, the commercial, is about love lost, but put in less charitable terms, is also about love that that cannot exist openly for one man juxtaposed against the nostalgia of heterosexual conquests of another. It’s true that the ad recounts for many a familiar and sacred moment, but in the remaining seconds the familiarity is interrupted as the audience is reminded that heterosexuality isn't nearly as certain as the setting of the sun. The audience must reconcile their own affection for the loving father character and the son who feels unable to tell him he isn’t interested in being a ladies’ man. It is, then, nostalgia with a twist.

A song plays in the background. "I'm going down my road" comes the final lyric, and a closing tagline embraces the viewer to "come as you are." The ad isn't about sex; it's about sexuality, but given the tendency to see sex when talking about gays and lesbians, it is worth mentioning that the message to "come as you are" is an English translation tacked beneath the original French, "venez comme vous êtes," so we can assume the rather vulgar, double entendre was not intended. This isn’t to say that McDonald's is above sexually suggestive advertising. The folks at Queerty emphatically made this point when they posted a shot of a McDonald's billboard pitching to passersby an "Ogre-load" of creamy white McFlurry.
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While I respectfully disagree with Queerty that McDonald's is necessarily "going after the gays" in their sexually provocative Shrek ad (ejaculation figures into heterosexual fantasies as well), the larger point that Queerty has fingered is that multi-million dollar ads are not designed in haste, and we can rest assured that every square inch of that billboard, just as every millisecond of the French television spot, has been endlessly scrutinized and discussed by many people working across many levels. There is no question in my mind as to whether McDonald's is aware of the meanings, articulations and associations its ads both reflect and produce. While they may not discuss it in the terms given in this post, I would argue that McDonald’s and the marketing firms that work with McDonald’s understand their role in the production of ideology.

So I view this recent hubbub about the ad as an extension of what McDonald’s execs and their team of underlings have already been doing. Blog entries like this one are attempting to deconstruct or reverse engineer, if you like, the cultural logic which accounts for why this ad went viral, receiving more than 600,000 views after the first week of its May release on YouTube and nearly 2 million views by the end of June. Why, in other words, was it important enough for Bill O’Reilly to subject it to his so-called no-spin zone? (here). Miriam at Feministing, suggested the question in its most succinct terms when she wrote, “I can't decide if this is progressive..or smugly portraying a kid who has to be closeted with his father.” What follows is my answer to this question.

First, as Miriam seems to allude to, there is a fundamental tension between an explicit message of openness and acceptance, or that you "come as you are," and an implicit one about the calculated wisdom of remaining in the closet. In fact, I would argue that the very success of the ad depends on this tension, because we are able to appreciate the chain's openness especially when reminded how truly difficult it still is for a son to be openly gay. The tension, then, is ultimately the means by which we are enticed to associate good feelings with McDonald’s hamburgers.

In an interview with the independent LGBT news website, Yagg.com, the brand director at McDonald’s France, Nathalie Legarlantezecs, boasted that “We wanted to take a look at how French society is today” and “There's obviously no problem with homosexuality in France today." While it feels appropriate here to point out that gays and lesbians are still unable to legally marry in France, one need not look beyond what is given in the commercial to evaluate Legarlantezecs’ remarks. Strictly speaking, the spot is not depicting broad acceptance of gay and lesbian relationships in France. Judged on its own terms, the commercial is not even promoting such an acceptance, which is a point most bloggers seem to have missed. On the contrary, French society is depicted as deeply ambivalent about gay relationships, and what the commercial promotes is the fantasy that McDonald's is an oasis of liberal acceptance in a world that is often very nervous about such relationships—perhaps especially when they involve youth.

So at the risk of stating the obvious, the McDonald's ad is a self-conscious positioning of a brand within a taken-for-granted and much broader system of ideas about the appropriateness of gay and lesbian relationships, what such relationships represent, and to what extent they are permissible. McDonald’s depends on this ideology or “common sense” about sexuality in order to successfully tug at our heartstrings and position its brand. And they do this task of positioning well. There is nothing outlandish about the spot because on some level it makes perfect sense to us that the young man must not confess to his father that he is in love with another man. We get it. We understand all too well that he will soon abandon the oasis and return to the ambivalent society, and we understand there are often consequences for such confessions. The young man is silent because his society is ambivalent, and this is such a basic truth, it need not be explained to us. In fact, exposition would only be an awkward distraction. In French society, as in the US, prolonging the secrecy might still be the safest choice. All of this is to say that the spot’s verisimilitude and nuance, lauded by so many commentators, is a rather tragic indictment of our prejudice.

So at this juncture, my criticism is not (yet) aimed at McDonald’s, but the system of ideas afloat today that have allowed this thirty-second spot to resonate with so many people. I hate that I live in a time and place where this ad works for McDonald’s. I despise the fact that McDonald’s is able to position it’s brand as an oasis, and amidst all the controversy stirred up about this ad, no one questions for a moment whether McDonald’s has invented a petulant society, which is hostile to gays and lesbians. That part of the spot feels so true to so many as to be unremarkable.

The marketing genius behind the ad then can be said to be fluently trading in the system of ideas that most of us already use to make sense of the world, but I think it is fruitful to press this metaphor of trading further and add that while McDonald’s may be adept in working this system of ideas, it does not trade like the rest of us. Cultural theorist, Stuart Hall, makes just this point (here) that “people who work in the media are producing, reproducing and transforming the field of ideological representation itself. They stand in a different relationship to ideology in general from others...” (p. 104; italics added) [2]. How so? To put it bluntly, such people stand in an influential position to articulate or re-fix meaning. Their tools are different than those of regular folk and they generally have a larger audience.

The ad, then, in its capacity to produce, reproduce, and transform a system of ideas which work to render the exclusion of gays and lesbians as unremarkable, is where one must ultimately look to answer Miriam’s question. If as I’m arguing that a progressive ad is one which contests the reproduction of social relations and the ideology that undergirds them, then is this ad really all that progressive? I don’t think so. Despite being encouraged to come as we are, McDonald’s dared not depict itself as a truly liberatory space. At best, it is a temporary shelter, masquerading as a liberatory space. A more accurate tagline, albeit less catchy, would read, “come as you are, but don’t necessarily come out to your family.” The ad is not progressive because there is no cultural innovation here. We aren’t shown by example how a young gay man might find a way to speak honestly about his new love, which is very likely the most consuming topic on his mind. There are no new articulations here, no innovative connections drawn to the relationship between gay men and their often loving fathers. Instead, there is a story that unfolds in a subtle way, but is ultimately revealed as utterly predictable.

As I remarked above, rearticulating and fixing new meanings are choices and do not simply happen by accident. Nowhere is this more apparent than when reading a recent reflection about the ad by its creative director. He remarks that "Among the ideas [pitched], I immediately loved this one. Originally we were going to have him come out to his father, but we thought the teen telling his father he's gay, in front of a burger and fries, that would have been ... unsubtle." Whether the ad was to be progressive may have hinged on that very decision, and I think it is important to interrogate why remaining in the closet, or in the creative director’s terms remaining “subtle,” consistently feels like the right choice.

Lester Andrist

[1] Emerson, Jim. 2010. Jim Emerson's Scanners: Blog. "Once I had a Secret Love... (Royale with Cheese)" Chicago Sun-Times. Retrieved June 17, 2010. (http://blogs.suntimes.com/scanners/2010/06/once_i_had_a_secret_love.html).

[2] Hall, Stuart. 1985. "Signification, Representation, Ideology: Althusser and the Post-Structuralist Debates." Critical Studies in Mass Communication. 2:91-114.

For two semesters now, about 60 students have registered for my class on the sociology of gender. They've arrived, some of them with their jitters quite visible and others with what appears to be a cultivated indifference. Hand over hand, my syllabus skates through the rows, and they eagerly thumb through the pages—even the indifferent ones. I imagine many of them are contemplating whether to drop my class and take their chances on the waiting list of another section, so I encourage them to take their time. Perfunctory introductions, then a deep a breath, and at last we launch headlong into the sociological study of gender.

Teaching sociology is akin to playing Morpheus to a group of students who haven't yet seen how deep the rabbit hole goes, and I am convinced that fewer classes are more challenging to teach than gender. I approach the topic most identifiably from a culturalist perspective and draw most notably from material many would identify as falling within the jurisdiction of the sociology of knowledge. Time and again we return to the social and historical processes behind the construction of values, beliefs, and other intellectual structures. How are they built, sustained, recreated, and manipulated? I set as my first task excavating a level of deep culture by asking them to consider how gender is socially constructed.

Students are of course more than capable of parroting such constructivist sentiments as Simone de Beauvoir's remark that “One is not born but rather becomes, a woman.” What is needed to transform students’ thinking is to dislodge their foundational assumptions—the premises upon which they begin to think. It is necessary, then, to begin by cultivating uncertainty, or by forcing them to interrogate and articulate their own common sense understandings of the world.

A recent discussion from the class stands as a good example. In it, students took aim at unequal beauty standards and exaggerated swaggers as the constructed implements of a gender stratified society. Not surprisingly, most students were at ease with rejecting any natural affinity between women and domesticity; however, the timeless truth that homo sapiens are naturally divided into two distinct types—men and women—remained unscathed.

Cultivating uncertainty, I pressed them, "So what do we make of the fact that some societies count three genders?"

"There are always exceptions," came one response.

"By this logic, your schema renders exceptions. Why not modify it?" The student conceded that he believed his model was based on what was most clearly given by biology. Thus at last the premise underlying so much of his certainty was exposed. This student and others couldn’t disagree more with de Beauvoir’s assertion. For them, one is born a man or a woman and does not become one—not really.

Having identified this premise, I marked it on a placard and propped it up on the table at the front of the classroom like a life-sized, pop-out book. Biology—if we're being honest—is not given as a clear binary but exists as a spectrum. Women and men cannot just be identified by disrobing and neither will a snapshot of a person’s chromosomes yield a definitive answer. As Cary Costello asserts in his comments regarding the spectacle surrounding athlete Caster Semenya in 2009, "Dyadic sex is a myth—sex is a spectrum. Hormones, chromosomes, genitals, gonads—they are all arranged in many complex ways, and imposing a binary onto them is arbitrary. It's as arbitrary as saying all fruit is either sweet or sour."

Class discussion desperately moved from the macro to the micro, from the genitals to the genome; each student in turn attempting to retrace what they once believed was an impenetrable basis upon which they invested so much of their thinking. But they were on a threshold, for they were wrestling with something very unsettling: our dyadic gender claims to be based on biological sex, but in fact, dyadic sex is itself a myth. This moment of dislodging a foundational premise is not simply akin to that feeling of disorientation when awakening in an unfamiliar place; rather, it threatens to be more permanent and irresolvable. It is something like being unable to discern whether you were just now a person dreaming you were a fish, or all along a fish dreaming you were a person.

Coaxing students into this uncertainty, this zone of indistinction, is the beginning of the teaching moment. However, collective uncertainty is no place to dwell for an entire semester. If my claim is that they can no longer uncritically draw upon their usual common sense to evaluate the world—if that way of knowing is to be cast in suspicion—then what am I proposing as a replacement? What will they use to evaluate their common sense?

Beginning photographers are often told they must learn again how to “see” light, which is really a process of paying attention to the way light paints their subject matter. Student photographers must all come to terms with the fact that they were never able to truly “see” the objects which populate their world, only the light reflected from those objects. This is more than elaborate explanation because learning to “see” is really learning to see through illusions. It is about (re)learning that sugar, dove soap, and snow are not necessarily white. Where these objects fall on a grey scale is contingent on how much light they are reflecting back in a given composition. To learn to “see,” photography students are shown photographs and they are shown how to reproduce such photographs. This process is not dissimilar to the one sociology students of gender must confront.

Having coaxed students to suspend their common sense and having plunged them into a pit of indistinction, a fleeting moment arrives where they are more open to a critical alternative. It is at this juncture that the pitchman (in my case) must finally demonstrate his product, lest the crowd disperse. Like the photography students who were shown that snow is sometimes black, I must demonstrate by example how gender is socially constructed.

The process of social construction has been theorized in a number of ways, but focusing on the way it happens through media representation and signification works well as a particularly vivid example. To this end, Jean Kilbourne's 1999 documentary, Killing Us Softly, continues to have an impact on students. The film chronicles pervasive representations of men and women in the media. The problem here is that many of my students were ten years old when the movie was made, leading to the oft heard dismissal, “Thank God that doesn’t happen anymore!” There is also the more sophisticated critique that many of the examples deployed are “one-sided,” or that the evidence was hand-picked by Kilbourne to invent a story about objectification. Students presumably dismiss the film's objectification thesis once they have identified that plenty of images exist where women are not objectified.

Thus the problem confronting teachers is that students of sociology need to be shown how gendered messages are continually asserted through popular representation, and this needs to be demonstrated in a way that cannot be easily dismissed as an artifact of a regrettable past or a biased simplification. So there could be no question as to how current the information was, I drew upon an advertisement for the new iPad from Steve Jobs and company. The ad pretends to be a casual chat with four of the creative tech geeks at Apple, who just love what they do and are gushing to talk about this cool thing they invented.

Women are conspicuously missing from this eight-minute clip; yet I would argue that even among women the ad is largely successful for Apple. While questions have surfaced about how truly innovative the iPad is, fewer have questioned the natural affinity depicted in this commercial between male logic and technological innovation. Hearing the epithet "computer geek," we in the U.S. mostly think of men, and that is precisely who we want designing our high tech gadgets because we associate men with logical integrity. Perhaps Apple intuitively understands that if they featured an exuberant woman in the ad, it would suggest that the iPad’s programming is logically flawed.

This analysis baits controversy among my students, and almost immediately hands are raised. A flurry of remarks ensue, each insisting on counterexamples which demonstrate that women are definitely also represented in our society as having technological prowess. Plenty of visual representations suggest that they too belong to the symbolic universe of high technology. “This is true,” I tell them, “but consider the technology women are typically paired with.”

Here I turn to play a second short clip, this time taken from TED Talks, a non-profit which hosts presentations related to ideas of technology, entertainment, and design. Jane Chen, the CEO of a company called Embrace, recently gave a  presentation for them which caught my attention. In it, she promotes a life-saving and inexpensive incubation technology for premature infants, which her company invented.

While this spot is about a high technology, it is presented exclusively by a woman, and therefore begs a corrective to my earlier claim that technology is the privileged domain of men. It's not that women have no place in high technology; they clearly do. Rather, this clip demonstrates that we want women involved with technologies related to nurturing and saving the lives of newborns.

The take-away for my students is really twofold and recalls the idea that a lot of popular thinking about gender is informed by a common sense which continually attempts to link gender to biology. This affinity between woman and incubator  works because it conforms to the pervasive assumption that nature produces two distinct types of people, and one is naturally more nurturing than the other. We are primed, in a sense, so that certain messages resonate with us, while others seem odd or inappropriate. By that same token, these clips and the institutions that built them are implicated in continuing to replicate distinct pairings of gender and technology. Noteably, commercials which claim to be exclusively about technology, make significant contributions to people's common sense about gender.  

I mentioned above that collective uncertainty is no place to dwell and that if teachers ask their students to be suspicious of their common sense, they are obliged to offer their students an alternative. I don't know if an alternative can be cut from whole cloth, but modifications are certainly possible. To this end, I try to conclude my class by encouraging students to discuss the way their assumptions about nature and biology have informed their own thinking. I encourage them to reflect on the way these regimes of representation have invaded their own evaluations of the people in their lives. Ideally, this particular teaching moment concludes with students comprehending the way their common sense is always informed by a larger culture which envelopes them.

Lester Andrist

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I once heard a story of an encounter between a young outdoorsman and a grizzly bear in the wilderness.  As the story goes, the young man was out hunting and trapping, and while kneeling down to set one of his traps, he neglected to notice the gargantuan animal’s surprisingly stealthy approach.  As the young hunter looked up, he virtually looked straight into the rheumy eyes of a 1000 pound bear, with a head as big as that of a sociologist who’s been published in ASR, and paws the size of pizza boxes (I’m talking Papa John’s extra large….and that’s pretty big!)  Instinctively, the hunter froze, inwardly cursing himself for having left his rifle leaning against a rock some yards away.  Suddenly, the monstrous bear reared up on its hind legs with a roar, sniffing the air as it extended itself to a height of over 8 feet.  Our young hunter remained calm however, realizing that death was imminent should he make one wrong move.  He eyed a sapling tree a short distance away, but realized that even with his incredible athletic ability he might not be able to outrun the bear, and even if he did, the tree was so small that the bear would simply pluck him from it like a ripe fruit.  There was no escape.  He would have to meet the bear’s challenge head-on if he were to survive.  Drawing on all his outdoor know-how (Whoever said folk-wisdom wasn’t valuable?) and every shred of courage, the hunter jumped up and lunged toward the colossal bear, shouting and waving his arms wildly.  For a moment it seemed as if the bear would simply swat him out of existence with one gigantic paw….but then, with a grunt, the bear retreated and simply meandered away.  As the bear walked off, it paused, turned its head, and looked at the hunter; their eyes locked briefly and a tacit understanding passed between them; they were kindred spirits, born to live wild and free.

Who was this young outdoorsman in our story? He was none other than our own dearly beloved colleague, Lester Andrist. Who is Lester Andrist? Many have asked, few have known. You might think you know Lester Andrist, but you don't. Did you know that he had aspirations to play professional basketball? Did you know that he's an accomplished martial artist and cyclist? Did you know that he speaks fluent Mandarin? Did you know that his favorite movies are "Shall We Dance" and "Mad Hot Ballroom"? Did you know that he's a remarkably skilled quantitative methodologist? Chances are you didn't know any of these things, and that's why you should keep reading. Through my friendship with Les (as he's known to his friends), I've gained a unique insight into what makes this complex man tick, and with this biographical sketch I'm going to introduce you to the real Lester Andrist; the man behind the enigma.

Les and his identical twin, Ryan, were born to a large family in the small town of Menominie, Wisconsin.  His father, Eddie, was a high school basketball coach, and his mom, Kerry-Sue, was a part-time nurse and stay-at-home mom.  The Andrist children were always athletic, particularly the twins, Les and Ryan, who – with the encouragement of their father – both excelled at basketball from an early age.  Les’s younger sister, April, proved to be a talented track star, and she would later go on to become a personal trainer to various Hollywood celebrities.  The Andrist boys were very competitive, particularly on the basketball court, and their initial rivalry would set the tone of their relationship for the rest of their lives.  While very capable on the court, Ryan could never quite match Les’s natural talent, and Les started to distinguish himself from his twin with extraordinary displays of skill and athleticism.  Their father, Eddie, soon noticed that Les held some real promise, perhaps even enough to one day embark on a professional sports career, and he consequently started to personally hone the boy’s abilities.  Soon young Les found himself traveling various high school basketball circuits around Wisconsin and neighboring Montana with his father, putting on instructional displays of highly technical movements and strategies during coach Eddie’s training sessions.  (Years later, Les would attribute a host of physical ailments to the rigors he had to endure during those long, merciless training sessions.)  By the time he reached high school, Les was set on pursuing a professional basketball career, but then, during a match against a rival school, disaster struck!  While hovering near the basket with his arms raised, waiting to execute his signature move (known as the “Menomonie Sinkhole”) upon receiving the ball, Les’s attention strayed momentarily and he didn’t see the ball traveling toward him at high speed.  A split-second later the ball smashed into his upraised left arm, dislocating his shoulder, tearing muscle, and shearing tendons.  He crumpled to the floor, barely conscious.  Upon subsequent examination, the doctors determined that his shoulder was so badly damaged that it necessitated rather extensive surgery, and hence Les’s dreams of a basketball career evaporated forever.  The next few years following this catastrophe were tumultuous, and Les freely admits that his life briefly descended into near chaos because of his own anger and bitterness.  The remainder of his time in high school included bouts of depression, excessive drinking, and several run-ins with local law enforcement.  One such unfortunate encounter culminated in a late-night pursuit that saw Les fleeing into the darkness at high speed on a motorcycle, and later barely escaping with his life after having crashed into a roadside swamp.  It seemed to him that he had yet again cheated death, and this sobering realization gave him pause to reconsider the trajectory of his life.  As if awakening from a bad dream, Les understood that he needed to leave Wisconsin with all its childhood disappointments behind, and that he had to venture out into the world to discover (or perhaps to make) his own destiny.

A few months after graduating high school, Les hitchhiked from Wisconsin to the west coast, ending up in San Francisco, where he immediately boarded the first merchant vessel that would give him a job as a deckhand.  After several months of cruising the Pacific on the fishing ship Ning-Po (meaning “calm waves”), Les set ashore in Hong Kong, and proceeded to explore this vibrant and bustling city.  After having been entirely candid about his childhood, Les seemed strangely pensive and recalcitrant when our interview turned to the topic of his experiences in the Far East.  Even to his close friends, these few years seem inexplicably secretive and shrouded in mystery.  The following exchange between us, while researching this biographical sketch, illustrates the point:

Theo: “So, Les, in a previous conversation you mentioned that you actually briefly trained with the martial artist and actor Steven Seagal in Hong Kong?”

Les: “Yes.  That’s true.  He was my sensei for some time.”

Theo: “I heard a rumor that you and Seagal were once involved in a brawl with some gang members in Hong Kong.  Can you confirm this?”

Les: “Err….I can neither confirm nor deny.”

Theo: “I see. . . cryptic.  You don’t deny however that you once raced against Gary Fisher, the inventor of the mountain bike, in Hong Kong?”

Les: “No, that I won’t deny.  He was one tough old dude.  Exceptionally spry for a man of his age.”

Theo: “I also heard a rumor that you supported yourself in Hong Kong by working as a male underwear model?  Is this true?”

Les: “It is true, sadly.  Enough said.”

Theo: “Is it also true that, while living in Hong Kong, you were – for a short time – the proud owner of a mogwai?

Les: “That’s not true at all.  Never happened.  Don’t believe everything you hear.”

Theo: “OK, whatever.  I’m just asking.”

After his time in Hong Kong, Les journeyed onward to Taipei, where he would later meet his future wife, Julie Chang.  After the mayhem of Hong Kong, Les was hoping to find some relative tranquility in Taiwan, but, as always, trouble would invariably cross his path, and, as he had done with that grizzly so many years ago, he would meet it unflinchingly.  Running low on funds, Les had to resort to staying at various low-rent, fleabag hotels in some of Taipei’s seedier neighborhoods.  One late night, while wandering the city streets deep in thought, Les found himself in front of a tavern, and he decided to go inside for a drink.  He took a seat at the bar next to a woman and started up a conversation with her, and within a few minutes it became clear that this was in fact no ordinary drinking establishment, but a front for a brothel.  Sensing trouble, Les proceeded to get up and leave, only to find his way blocked by the establishment’s irate proprietor, who claimed that he now owed her money after having taken up the time of one of her employees (presumably the woman with whom he had innocently spoken at the bar).  Naturally, Les refused to pay, realizing that he had fallen victim to a local scam designed to extort money from unsuspecting tourists by forcing them to buy a preposterously priced $60 “ladies drink.”  Upon his refusal, the owner became even more incensed and promptly summoned two muscle-bound characters who appeared to be the establishment’s bouncers.  Faced with no possibility of escape, Les acquitted himself efficiently and effectively in the scuffle that followed, making good use of some of the more unusual techniques imparted to him by his erstwhile teacher, Steven Seagal.  Needless to say, he left the place without having to pay anything.  Although he was enjoying his sojourn in Asia, Les felt restive and unsatisfied, as if his life was somehow undirected and empty, and he therefore decided to return to the States, in the hopes of finding some worthwhile pursuit.

After making it back to America, Les decided to return to Wisconsin, but he eventually ended up in Montana, where he would work as a waiter, a gas station attendant, a donut fryer, and an assistant in a photography studio.  Not satisfied with the tedium of service sector work, Les subsequently decided to try his luck on the Montana rodeo circuit, but not before completing a brief stint in the notorious Montana militia, where he was instrumental in drawing up their secessionist constitution.  (Ultimately he found secessionist politics to be a dead-end though, and he departed the militia as swiftly as he had joined.)  He achieved moderate success on the rodeo circuit, even earning the nickname of “Ponyboy” among his peers, but real success eluded him because he was constantly plagued by his old shoulder injury.  After having experimented with a range of potential vocations – and finding them all equally unfulfilling – Les concluded that he needed to go back to school, and he proceeded to enroll in Montana State University’s prestigious film school. (Incidentally, while at film school, Les was contacted by a talent agent who offered him an audition for a small part in “The Horse Whisperer.”)  He had always loved the cinema, and he felt confident that a career in film, particularly in directing, would give voice to his creativity.  Unluckily, however, this plan would also not come to fruition because, at the end of his first year, Les directed a controversial student production (too explicit to discuss here) that caused him to fall afoul of the narrow-minded institutional authorities.  He wasn’t kicked out of the film program, but it became apparent to him that his unique vision would not be accommodated within stale institutional boundaries, and he consequently decided to move on.

Once again searching for something to give meaning to his life, Les’s first encounter with sociology would happen entirely by chance, in a small public library in rural Montana.  While casually browsing the stacks one morning, Les happened upon a dusty volume called “The Social System,” by one Talcott Parsons.  Intrigued, he checked out the book and took it home, where he read it voraciously. “I immediately loved Parsons’ concise and clear style. . .” he said, “. . .and I found his structural way of thinking quite liberating.”  Newly motivated by his discovery of sociology, via Parsons, Les enrolled at the University of Minnesota – Twin Cities the next semester and declared sociology as his major. The next four years would be relatively uneventful, and in addition to successfully completing his BA in sociology, Les would get married during this time.  After graduation, Les and his wife Julie would move to the DC-area in search of jobs, and Les would ultimately be hired by Westat, a contract research organization based in Rockville, Maryland.  At Westat, Les’s amazing mathematical mind would stand him in good stead, and he quickly made a reputation for himself as a precise and meticulous analyst.  However, he would soon tire of the mechanistic routine of statistical analysis and he found himself yet again looking toward intellectually greener pastures. Always a man of action, Les applied to the PhD program in sociology at the University of Maryland, and then promptly quit his job at Westat upon receiving notice of acceptance into the program.  That very next semester our cohort met for the first time during orientation, we all became fast friends, and the rest is history, as the saying goes.  During his time here at UMD, Les has impressed faculty and peers with his quick wit, keen intellect, and incisive commentary.  Initially Les worked as a TA for Dr. Smith, teaching one of the undergraduate statistics courses. It is rumored that after observing Les’ statistical acumen for two semesters, Dr. Smith quipped approvingly that “. . .the student has now become the teacher.”

It seems that Les has found his place in the world at last, and in the process has become quite an interesting person. If you pass him on the street or return to this blog, pause for a moment and say hello. Get to know him; I’m sure you’ll be amazed at what you find.

Theo DeJager