We are quickly approaching the end of the 10-year plan the American Sociological Association (ASA) used to launch this operation back in 2000. We are happy to report that after the most recent ASA meetings, all indications are that the question is not whether Contexts will continue, but in what form and with what business model and publishing partner.

The chief threat, we believe, is complacency. Proud as we are of Contexts, our circulation pales in comparison to those of even marginal non-academic publications. (We know this because at a national journalism conference we attended last spring, editors introduced themselves by name and circulation. It was, suffice to say, a humbling experience.)

With the economy still in the doldrums and print publications competing with a whole range of new media outlets and technologies, the challenges are many. However, we feel very good about what our team—including our national editorial board, our graduate student editorial board here at Minnesota, and contributing editors Deborah Carr, David Grazian, Doug Harper, and Laura Miller—has accomplished so far. We’ve held the line on quality and circulation at a time when most magazines and journals are slipping. We’ve also had several big media hits from recent issues. And thanks to the popularity of blogs like Sociological Images, ThickCulture, and our own Contexts Crawler, Contexts.org now logs more than half a million views a month.

However, we won’t consider our tenure a success unless—or until—we get our material into the hands and heads of significantly more members of the public—regular folks as well as opinion leaders and policy-makers. It is time, in other words, to take Contexts to the next level.

We know from your emails and inquiries that you are eager to see our office and ASA take swift, decisive steps toward making that happen. We promise we’re doing everything we can, and ask your continued assistance—by purchasing gift subscriptions for your friends, visiting and linking to Contexts.org, and sending us your own good ideas and writing.

In the meantime, we hope this edition teaches you something you didn’t already know, be it about aging in America, sociology in a global world, the various considerations mothers and fathers must make to raise healthy kids, the war on terror, or an L.A. establishment that’s taking the taco truck to a new level. Most of all, we hope that after reading it you agree that Contexts is the most exciting way to bring sociology’s distinctive vision and voice to the lay public.

How we situate social issues in the larger context of society says a lot about our commitment to change.

As rhetorician Robert Asen has pointed out, the political framing of poverty—that is, how politicians formulate arguments about how we as a nation should talk about and address issues of poverty—in the New Deal era was quite different from today.

Back then, the emphasis was on structure—namely, the devastating impact of the economic crisis. Americans clearly recognized that hundreds of thousands of citizens were poor or unemployed, mainly because of a severe and prolonged job shortage. In the public arena today, poverty tends to be discussed in reference to individual initiative. This distinction, Asen says, reveals how larger shifts in society have influenced our understanding of the nature of poverty.

Therefore, we ought to consider the contingency of political frames at particular moments in time. These “deliberative frames” not only orient our debates on public policy, but they can also be shifted through debate. So, just because cultural explanations resonate with policy-makers and the public today doesn’t mean structural explanations can’t resonate with them tomorrow. Shifting political frames, however, and hopefully providing a more balanced discussion, requires parallel efforts among politicians, engaged citizens, and scholars.

In the past I’ve called for framing issues designed to appeal to broad segments of the population. Key to this, I argued, would be an emphasis on policies that directly benefit all groups, not just people of color. Given American views about poverty and race, I thought, a color-blind agenda would be the most realistic way to generate the broad political support­necessary to enact the required legislation. I no longer hold to this view.

The question isn’t whether the policy should be race-neutral or universal, the question is whether the policy is framed to facilitate a frank discussion of the problems that ought to be addressed and to generate political support to alleviate them.

In framing public policy, we shouldn’t shy away from an explicit discussion of the specific issues of race and poverty. Instead, we should highlight them in our attempt to convince the nation that these problems should be seriously confronted and that there is an urgent need to address them. These issues should be framed such that it generates not only a sense of fairness and justice to combat inequality, but also so people are convinced that our country would be better off if these problems were addressed and eradicated.

In considering this change of frame, I was drawn to Barack Obama’s March 18, 2008, speech on race. His oratory provides a model for the type of framing I have in mind.

Obama spoke to the issue of structure and culture, as well as their interaction. He drew attention to the disparities that exist between the “African-American community and the larger American community today”—disparities that “can be traced to inequalities passed on from an earlier generation that suffered under the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.” He also discussed the lack of economic opportunity among black men, and how “the shame and frustration that came from not being able to provide for one’s family contributed to the erosion of black families.”

However, Obama didn’t stop with structural inequities; he also focused on problematic cultural and behavioral responses to these inequities, including a cycle of violence among black men and a “legacy of defeat” that has been passed on to future generations.

By combining a powerful discussion of structural inequities with an emphasis on personal responsibility, Obama didn’t isolate the latter from the former. His speech gave an honest appraisal of structural racial inequality as he called for all Americans to support blacks in their struggle to help themselves. I think this speech could serve as a model for the careful political framing of race and poverty we need to move forward in this country.

“The criminal no longer seems a totally unsociable being, a sort of parasitic element, a strange and unassimilable body,” Emile Durkheim wrote.

And after nearly 10 hours with my Inside classmates, I’ve come to learn that he’s right.

My experience in prison was through a sociology class that was part of the national Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program. Fifteen “outside” students from Oregon State University spent a full quarter sharing class with fifteen inmates (“inside” students) in a medium-security state prison. I enrolled in this class at the recommendation of a few fellow students because it provided a unique chance to explore a world I would otherwise never experience and to challenge the stereotypes I held about people who commit crime.

One of our small group discussions revolved around the causes of criminal behavior in relation to our class readings on criminology theories. My group consisted of me, the only Outside student, and three inmates. They came from varied backgrounds and paths into crime, so it was the perfect opportunity to get a range of perspectives. I asked them what they thought of the theories we had read and whether they agreed with the causes of crime presented in the book. While there wasn’t a consensus among them, I found that their experiences related well to the theories about why people commit crime and taught me some things I hadn’t known.

Joshua¹ described growing up in a generally stable, middle-class home. His father had been an avid Hell’s Angel biker when Joshua was quite young, but otherwise he felt that his home environment was nurturing. While his home was in a solidly middle-class neighborhood, a group of public housing projects was right across the street. The allure of that neighborhood proved to be his entry into a life of crime. Joshua spoke about our reading by Jack Katz and how he personally identified with the theory that there are “often wonderful attractions within the lived experience of criminality.”

This was something I had never really considered before. My sociology classes have generally covered why certain neighborhoods have higher crime rates or why unequal access to resources leads certain groups of people to crime. It was profound to have a person in prison admit there had been no reason he needed or was compelled to become a criminal beyond his enjoyment of the illegal act. Joshua’s perspective gave me an appreciation for Katz’s seduction of crime theory and taught me that there can truly be a “genuine experiential creativity” within crime. Katz explains that individuals can be innovative in their deviant behavior and sometimes commit crime simply because the act itself is seductive and fun.

Sam, like Joshua, described his family as warm and nurturing. He was raised in a “well-off” neighborhood and never wanted for anything as a child. As a teenager, Sam found he lacked a motivation to conform, which is one of the things Travis Hirschi describes as being an important deterrent to deviant behavior. Hirschi’s theory states that a belief in the values of conformity and an investment in a conforming future generally keep people from committing crime. Without these values, Sam was easily drawn to deviance and he hooked up with other kids in his neighborhood who felt the same. They started doing drugs and getting into trouble together. Sam told me nothing about his neighborhood could have been different to keep him from becoming a delinquent. He thinks he chose to get involved in crime out of boredom.

His perspective was a real eye-opener for me. I’ve always believed there must be things we can do to prevent people from turning to crime, and it hadn’t really occurred to me there might be people who have every opportunity for success but choose to get involved in crime anyway. I have to admit, this realization was a bit disheartening. I so wanted to hear that an after-school program or a quality school or consistent, affirming adults would have made a difference in Sam’s life, but he told me he had access to those things and they simply didn’t matter. It seems Durkheim was right, crime is inevitable in any society.

William’s childhood was very much a confirmation of conflict theory—that structural inequality leaves those in the lower classes without the resources to protect themselves from life’s cruelties, so they are left with few choices beyond crime and deviance—and the inadequacies of our juvenile justice system. His dysfunctional family was poor and he suffered physical abuse at the hands of his step-father. William was removed from his family many times over the years and bounced around to various foster homes, most of which he described as no better than his parents’ house. He ran away at age 15 and began living on the streets, where his only means of survival was theft. The system (his community, his family, the government) had failed him so many times over the years he had no faith it would protect him, so he didn’t even try to conform at that point.

To me, William’s experience clearly shows how, as Robert Merton wrote, “some social structures exert a definite pressure upon certain persons in society to engage in nonconformist rather than conformist conduct.” I learned from William that all people, even those who’ve made enormous mistakes, have the potential to overcome incredible odds and turn their lives around. By being willing to truly examine his personal motivations for becoming involved in crime and actively working to alter any unhealthy patterns, he has done the hard work necessary to truly change the trajectory of his life. His is an example of a childhood lacking almost all the resources that help a person become successful followed by an adulthood spent in prison. Yet, despite (or because of) this, he has chosen to take responsibility for his personal failings and become a better person.

Of the inmates I’ve met in class, William is one of the most sincere in his desire to really examine his life and the choices he’s made. He is the reason this class has so inspired me to believe in the need for prison reform. I now understand that we as a society should be providing people like William the tools they need to become healthier during their imprisonment so they can come out and contribute positively to our society.

Another thing I’ve learned in this class is that any social group can label people in their midst as “deviant.” I had heard about the stigma attached to sex offenders in prison, but was interested to learn from the inmates first-hand whether or not this was true. In our very first class, Robert confirmed that he was told from the beginning of his prison term to avoid the sex offenders. He also admitted that although he has encountered a few inmates he considers “decent” among the sex offenders, he has a strong prejudice against them as a group.

In various small group discussions over the three weeks of our class this issue came up, and every time I was amazed at the vehemence of the inmates’ distaste for sex offenders. I find it interesting that a group that has been labeled “deviant” by conforming society, and consequently must know how it feels to carry that stigma, has gone on to stigmatize a group within their own prison society. When I first read Howard Becker’s theory about creating deviance in a society, it didn’t occur to me that the phenomenon he described could occur within a “deviant” group. All humans carry the potential to make someone else an “outsider,” it seems, even those thrown out of mainstream society themselves.

A year ago I would have said prison inmates are dangerous people who need to be locked up for the protection of the general public. I had never given a thought to whether my stereotype was accurate or representative of all inmates. This class has shattered my perception of people in prison and helped me see that I must be slower to judge others. I need to question the images of various kinds of people put forth by mainstream society and realize that within any group there are only individuals. My Inside classmates have shared their personal stories with me, and I find that I now see them as individual people with varied life experiences who happen to be incarcerated, instead of dangerous criminals who happen to have some life history.

1. All inmates’ names have been changed.

Next, Sangyoub Park looks at how Barack Obama’s presidency and changes in how the Census tracks race underline the importance of the social construction of race and ethnicity in the U.S. Changes in our racial landscape, including increases in interracial marriage and childbearing pose intriguing questions about how future generations will respond to the growth of multiracial identities.

In 2004, nearly one-quarter of Americans reported they couldn’t discuss personal issues with anyone in their lives. Or so the survey tells us.

Photo by Thomas Lieser

After examining the data himself, Fischer found many reasons to be skeptical. Other indicators of social connectedness, like evenings spent with friends, changed little over the same time period. And, an unusually high number of Americans typically considered to be well-connected didn’t report a single confidant, including more than 20 percent of married people. The discrepancy may be a result of fatigue among survey respondents, Fischer argues. Surveys can be especially taxing, and the question about confidants followed an unusually lengthy and “intrusive” set of questions about organization membership. Perhaps respondents “learned” that giving a list of close confidants would lead to even more probing.

Or, the problem could be due to random error. Using a series of simulations, Fischer found the jump in isolation may be due to a technical error wherein up to one-fifth of respondents who likely would have given names were randomly recorded as giving none.

The authors of the original study stand by their results, concluding that “any plausible modeling of the data shows a decided trend downward in confidant network size from 1985 to 2004,” even when an inflated number of zeros are taken into account.

Fischer, who is the founding editor of Contexts, suggests a rise in isolated Americans may be possible, but it’s not likely. The continuing debate surrounding social ties also underscores the complexity of social scientific research—sometimes discoveries aren’t so easily made. W.L.

becoming real

People in race-based social movements typically nurture and develop close ties with members of their same race. But what about those who participate in movements dominated by people of other races?

Jill McCorkel and Jason Rodriguez (Social Problems, March 2009) used multi-year participant observation to study how white people become accepted in civil rights organizations dominated by African Americans.

They found that white people are rarely recruited into such organizations and, when a white person seeks membership, they’re often relegated to “supporter” roles rather than given full membership.

In one group the authors studied, members were vetted and then had to demonstrate a clear commitment to black politics while also recognizing their secondary position in the movement. In another, where white people couldn’t be vetted, they often worked hard to wear their politics on their sleeve, so to speak, by sporting political buttons and t-shirts.

In order to move into the core of the movement, white people had to prove their “realness”—their political commitment to the struggle. But regardless of their efforts to “fit-in,” white ­participants in black social movements never could become “brothers.” K.H.

god is my copilot…to mars

While belief in the supernatural aspects of the Christian faith is relatively mainstream in the United States, believing in the paranormal is often considered bizarre.

Photo by ClockworkGrue

Using a nationally representative survey, F. Carson Mencken, Christopher Bader, and Ye Jung Kim (Sociology of Religion, Spring 2009) compare Christian beliefs about God, Jesus, heaven, and hell to belief in fortune-telling, astrology, communication with the dead, haunting, the power of dreams, spaceships, Bigfoot, and Loch Ness. After accounting for a range of variables, they find Christians often believe in the paranormal.

Interestingly, this relationship isn’t constant for all Christians. Attending church, believing the Bible is literal truth, and being evangelical make people less likely to believe in the paranormal. On the other hand, those who have Christian beliefs but aren’t regular church-goers are more likely to take the arguably small step to believing in the paranormal.

Similarly, mainline Protestants and Catholics are more likely to believe in the paranormal—Catholic theology integrates many spiritual, supernatural elements and mainline Protestants tend to be more open to diversity of religious views. For these folks, it seems, Christianity swings open the door to a galaxy far, far away. S.G.

we’ll take (some) huddled masses

Photo by William Warby

But when Andy Rottman, Christopher Fariss, and Steven Poe (International Migration Review, Spring 2009) analyzed Department of Homeland Security cases, they found political context still matters.

Asylum officers have been more likely to deny claims since 2001, and having been subjected to torture or other cruel treatment is a less important determinant in being granted asylum. Instead, language and a home country’s negative relationship with the United States are significant deciding factors.

Perhaps this is the policy Americans want in a post-9/11 society—but it’s clearly not consistent with what our laws say. S.G.

performance paradox

African American students feel good about school—in fact they often report more positive attitudes about the merits of education than white students. However, we also know blacks don’t perform as well as whites, and they earn fewer degrees. As a result, past studies have suggested blacks’ pro-school attitudes are inconsequential for actual academic achievement. However, Douglas B. Downey, James W. Ainsworth, and Zhenchao Qian (Sociology of Education, January 2009) use survey data from the 2000 National Education Longitudinal Study to call this inference into question.

According to the authors, pro-school sentiments do indeed matter for blacks’ academic success and predict educational attainment among them nearly as well as it does for other minorities and whites. Social factors—blacks are more likely than whites to come from poorer and less-educated families and attend schools that possess fewer resources—may impede their ability to translate positive attitudes into achievement. The authors argue that this helps explain the achievement gap that persists between white and black students.

Despite historical disadvantage and discrimination, the authors say there’s reason for hope—the gap between the social conditions of blacks and whites has been narrowing. J.S.

free riders get no respect

Sometimes it makes more sense to let others clean up the local park if we can still enjoy it by sitting under a tree. Unless you care about what others think of you.

Photo by the Scottish Government

Willer developed a series of computer games in which participants had the option to contribute to the group or sit back and reap the rewards. Turns out high contributors were consistently seen as more honorable and generous by other players.

And having status was useful in later games. High-status players gave more to the group and were more likely to get partners to cooperate with them. 

Contributions to the group signal a willingness to sacrifice for the greater good. In turn, our concern for how others perceive us allows for more camaraderie and cooperation, Willer argues.

Status may mean more to a potential volunteer than a free t-shirt. After all, nobody likes a free rider—and everyone likes a pat on the back. W.L.

bite your native tongue

Immigrants to the United States who are fluent in both English and their native languages are thought to hold a­marketable advantage over immigrants fluent only in English.

However, a study by Hyoung-jin Shin and Richard Alba (Sociological Forum, June 2009) suggests Asian and Hispanic immigrants don’t see any economic benefit from bilingualism, and in some cases are even penalized for it.

Using 2000 U.S. Census data, the authors examined the income of immigrants who were born in or came to the United States in early childhood. When the incomes of bilingual immigrants were compared to those of English-only immigrants, the authors found bilingualism offered no wage benefits, and for Mexican, Chinese, and Filipino immigrants it even decreased wages. Even variables thought to boost the benefits of bilingualism like education, job experience, and a large nearby immigrant population couldn’t push the incomes of most bilingual Asian and Hispanic immigrants above those fluent only in English.

While assimilation into American society surely has its cultural cost, this study suggests losing fluency in one’s native tongue may actually pay. J.S.

this is your brain on opera

In a now classic sociological study from the 1950s, Howard Becker argued that becoming a marijuana smoker involved not only toking up, but an initiation process where novice users learned from others how to recognize and interpret the effects of “being high” as pleasurable.

More recently (Qualitative Sociology, June 2009), Claudio Benzecry took Becker’s model outside the drug subculture and into high culture, demonstrating how individuals learn to become passionate opera fans.

Spending 18 months conducting participant observation and interviewing opera fans in Buenos Aires, he found that to become a proper fan of opera, individuals had to learn how to interpret, direct, and control their intense feelings about the genre appropriately, thereby cultivating in them a refined taste.

According to Benzecry, novice opera fans learned how to “be moved” by parts of the performance that demand an emotional reaction, such as sadness or even crying, as well as how to react publicly to the opera in appropriate ways (through applauding, booing, and hissing).

Much like Becker’s marijuana users, Benzecry’s opera fans cultivated this seemingly individual taste for the operatic experience through social activities such as conversations at ticket and door lines, imitating more experienced fans, and more formal learning that included classes, lectures, and conferences about opera. 

By extending Becker’s model to the realm of high culture, Benzecry demonstrates the importance of attending not only to background factors like social class and education in explaining cultural consumption, but to “foreground” factors such as initiation and learning processes as well. D.W.

one step up, two back, another sideways

Some argue the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered rights movement suffered a setback after the Massachusetts Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage because a number of statutory bans on it followed. Indeed, unpopular judicial decisions often provoke political backlash that weakens their effectiveness. 

Photo by Nate Chongsiriwatana

While many states indeed passed statutory prohibitions on same-sex marriage in the wake of these rulings, and such bans were widely publicized, Keck found that several other states enacted some form of legally recognized partnerships. And, many states subsequently adopted hate crime regulations and anti-discrimination laws. 

Keck posits that judicial decisions and litigation lend power to several components important for advancing LGBT rights claims, including altering public opinion, changing activists’ perceptions of what’s actually achievable, and pushing transformations in lawmakers’ agendas.

States, according to the author, tend to follow a halting but similar path toward legal reform: decriminalizing sodomy, establishing protections against hate crimes, prohibiting workplace discrimination, establishing some minimal legal recognition for same-sex partnerships, and then expanding the scope of relationship recognition in steps toward marriage equality. T.O.

a hassan by any other name

What’s in a name? As it turns out, quite a bit. Like the degree of someone’s assimilation to a new country.

Jurgen Gerhards and Silke Hans (American Journal of Sociology, January 2009) used data from the German Socio-economic Panel Study and in-depth interviews to learn why some immigrant parents in Germany give their children traditional names of their home country and others give names from the country they now call home.

They found that immigrant parents from Romanic nations, who are typically either Catholic or Protestant and speak a similar language, gave their children German names at a higher rate than immigrants from the former Yugoslavia, who tend to be Eastern Orthodox. The group least likely to give their children German names were Turkish immigrants, who are predominantly Muslim and whose language has little in common with German.

The authors argue these choices can be explained by what scholars call “bright” and “blurry” boundaries between ethnicities. While some cultures have similar­religions or languages that can’t be easily separated, some have stark differences,­making the boundaries between them bright and distinct.

For example, because most traditional German names are those of Christian saints, it’s less of a stretch for those from predominantly Christian nations to give their children German names.

Similarly, other factors that blur inter-ethnic barriers, such as higher education levels or attaining German citizenship, were also associated with a greater likelihood of giving a child a German name.

So, it turns out, we can’t apply Shakespeare to cultural assimilation. J.S.G.W.

black boys more geek than gangsta

While white men on television are often depicted as paragons of heroic virtue, black males are overwhelmingly represented as violent thugs and over-sexualized brutes, sociological studies have found.

But tune in children’s programming and African American males are more likely to resemble inept nerds, or so found Jeffery P. Dennis in a recent study of television series aimed at teen and preteen audiences (Media, Culture & Society, March 2009).

Dennis analyzed 112 episodes of 26 series airing on Nickelodeon, the Disney Channel, and Cartoon Network. He discovered that white teen characters, much like their counterparts on adult-oriented shows, are generally competent, sexually desirable, and often heroic. Black teen characters, however, are overwhelmingly “brains” or nerds, inept sidekicks, or bumbling con-artists and pranksters. Furthermore, black male characters are very rarely the objects of feminine desire, and their romantic efforts almost always end in comic failure.

The troubling irony in all this, Dennis points out, is that while teen and preteen television shows reject the dominant stereotypes of black males, they’re replacing them with similarly unattractive depictions. D.W.

understandng condoms in malawi

AIDS is a devastating force in the African nation of Malawi, ranking as the leading cause of death for people ages 15 to 49. While condom use elsewhere has greatly reduced the spread of the disease, Malawians remain highly skeptical of them.

Iddo Tavory and Ann Swidler (American Sociological Review, April 2009) studied recordings of everyday conversations in Malawi and used them to argue that you can’t simply view the decision to use condoms as a choice between healthy rationality and needless risk. Rather, you must understand Malawians’ mutually re-enforcing cultural beliefs about condoms.

First, they fear Western governments are attempting to control their population by spreading cancer via infected condoms. As such, it isn’t a choice between healthy condom use and the risk of AIDS, but rather a balancing act between the risk of two lethal diseases. Second, Malawians place great emphasis on sharing bodily fluids in the act of sex, making sex with a condom not merely less pleasing, but not sex at all. Finally, using condoms signifies a lack of trust in one’s partner, making their use insulting in a loving relationship, even if the partner is suspected to be HIV positive.

These findings have significant policy implications for AIDS-reduction efforts in Malawi. They suggest the answer doesn’t lie simply in more education, but rather in changing how Malawians think about condoms and their sexuality. J.S.G.W.

baby, you’re crampin’ our style

Studies have suggested for years that living together before marriage leads to unhappiness and divorce, but according to Laura Tach and Sarah Halpern-Meekin (Journal of Marriage and Family, May 2009), these findings may have been overstated.

Cohabitation, birth, and marital happiness

Using data on women from the National Longitudinal Study of Youth, they found few differences in the quality of marriage between those who lived apart from their spouse prior to marriage and those who lived with their spouse and without children before marriage. In fact, most of the link between low marital quality and premarital cohabitation can be explained by the negative experiences of cohabiters who have children prior to marriage.

Notably, marital happiness declines for all three groups over time, and at relatively similar rates. 

Because previous researchers have found that marital quality declines after a child is born, the authors argue the same principle may apply to cohabiters, in that their relationship worsens after they have kids. T.O.

singapore demands make little difference in lives

Nearly 90 percent of Singaporeans live in publicly subsidized housing, where residents younger than 35 must form a “family nucleus” before they can buy a unit. The government demands ever-increasing labor productivity and full employment, but also explicitly admonishes women to bear children for the good of the nation.

Youyenn Teo (Signs, Spring 2009) asked 60 Singaporeans why, unlike other East Asians, they tolerated such intrusion by the state into their personal lives, especially when these policies could easily be seen as more harmful to women than men.

She found that Singaporeans recognized the direct intervention of government in their family life and the inequality of government policies that expect women to be the primary caregivers to both children and aging parents. Women often complained of the difficulty of­satisfying both the economic and child­rearing demands of the state.

What Teo didn’t find, however, was any particular anger about the state’s differential treatment. Instead of blaming the state, Singaporeans attributed the policies to the unavoidable result of a vague notion of a Confucian or “Asian” culture emphasizing filial piety.

They saw the role the state played in their personal lives, but they didn’t acknowledge that these policies changed the shape of their family lives or affected the personal decisions they made. Instead, many attributed the government’s actions to well-intentioned attempts to keep up with the needs of the country’s economy.

Teo argues that the state’s open acknowledgment of gendered policies actually leads to greater citizen acceptance. M.K.

Yet at the same time, the urban context is a token and a breeding ground for resistance, for loss of control, for renewal, for deliverance. These multiple intermeshing discourses—the historic, the political, the social, the multicultural, the commercial, the religious, among others—provide the city its unpredictable, multilayered, never fully graspable character. Therefore, cities constitute at once a battlefield for conflicting interests, a playground of ideas, and a theatre for our senses, arranged by different players at different times and with different audiences in mind.

Sociology and photography are clearly distinct ways of looking at society. But they’re both about making the familiar strange, about questioning the seemingly obvious and reframing it as social facts or processes or visual statements. Theories tend to work like looking glasses or lenses with their typical distortions and aberrations, and theory-driven observations and recordings may ultimately embody a true merger of the photographic with the sociological. This visual essay presents metonyms and metaphors for human interactions that have left their marks deliberately or inadvertently in the urban context.

Those risks were often communicated in provocative ways. One television ad, for example, showed a pregnant African American woman riding a mechanical bull, and then the message appears on the screen, “You wouldn’t take risks before your baby is born. Why start after?”

This campaign was the culmination of three decades of increasing consensus among medical and public health professionals that, as the saying goes, “breast is best”—that there is no better nutrition for the first year of an infant’s life than breastmilk. The endorsement of the medical establishment is echoed in advice books and parenting magazines that overwhelmingly recommend breastfeeding over formula. Communities have passed laws to support breastfeeding mothers in the workplace and to ensure public breastfeeding isn’t legally categorized as indecency.

And rates of breastfeeding in the United States have increased dramatically—nearly 75 percent of mothers now breastfeed newborns, up from 24 percent in 1971. Rates of breastfeeding are even higher among middle-class, educated mothers. For these mothers, breastfeeding has become less of a choice and more of an imperative—a way to protect their infant’s health and boost their IQ. Breastfeeding is a way to achieve so-called good mothering, the idealized notion of mothers as selfless and child-centered.

Taking a sociological look at the cultural imperative to breastfeed illustrates how mothering is shaped by discussions among scientists, doctors, and other experts, as well as policy recommendations that grow out of scientific findings. It also reveals that breastfeeding and infant feeding practices differ by culture, race, class, and ethnicity, and that the “breast is best” conventional wisdom doesn’t take these differences into account. Thus, this campaign leaves many mothers feeling inadequate—and perhaps unnecessarily so because the scientific evidence about the benefits of breastfeeding are less clear-cut than mothers have been led to believe.

Historical Trends in Breastfeeding

Cultural ideas about motherhood and family in the United States have changed significantly over time, thanks in part to science and technology.

Religious authorities, midwives, and physicians encouraged mothers in the 17th and 18th centuries to breastfeed their infants. The practice through the mid-1800s, in a primarily farm-based society, was to nurse infants through their “second summer” to avoid unrefrigerated and possibly spoiled food and milk.

Wet nursing—breastfeeding a child who is not a woman’s own—became necessary when a mother was severely ill or died during childbirth. Breastmilk was widely thought superior to “hand-feeding”—providing milk, tea, or “pap” (a mixture of flour, sugar, water, and milk)—in promoting infant health, but even so, according to historian Janet Golden in her study A Social History of Wet Nursing, families worried about having a wet nurse of “questionable” moral fitness, and these fears were exacerbated by race and class divisions. In the north, wet nurses were typically poor immigrant mothers; in the south, they tended to be African Americans, and it was common for female slaves to be wet nurses in the antebellum south. However, by the turn of the 20th century, the use of wet nurses had declined, in part because pasteurization made bottle-feeding a safe alternative to breastmilk. This was also the era in which children came to be seen as priceless, in need of protection, and worth extraordinary investment, sociologist Viviana Zelizer explained in Pricing the Priceless Child.

Technological advancements led to the development of mass-marketed infant formula in the 1950s. Doctors then began to recommend formula, saying a scientifically developed substance was at least equivalent to, and possibly better than, breastmilk. By the early 1970s, breastfeeding rates in hospitals were at a low of approximately 24 percent, with only 5 percent of mothers nursing for several months following birth.

It was in this era that some feminist women’s health groups and Christian women’s groups such as La Leche League began challenging the medical model by promoting “natural” childbirth and breastfeeding. These groups promoted the benefits of breastfeeding and also raised public awareness about the activities of formula companies.

For example, some feminist health groups helped organize a boycott of Nestle in the late 1970s for promoting formula in developing countries. These groups claimed that Nestle’s formula marketing tactics in Africa had led to 1 million infant deaths (from mixing powered formula with contaminated water, or feeding infants diluted formula because of the expense). The success of these small groups in challenging the corporate marketing of formula led to increasing consensus that breastfeeding was better than bottlefeeding. Soon, the medical establishment was embracing breastfeeding, based on scientific studies that confirmed the benefits La Leche League and other feminist health groups had been talking about for years. In 1978, the American Academy of Pediatricians (AAP) recommended breastfeeding over formula, marking the beginning of the shift in mainstream medical advice to mothers. Since then, scientific evidence and the medical establishment have continued to reaffirm the benefits of breastmilk.

Trends over the last 40 years gathered from a survey of mothers show how experts’ recommendations and public discussions about breastfeeding have influenced breastfeeding rates. The graph above shows the sharp increase in breast feeding in the 1970s. In the 1980s, there is a slight decrease and plateau in breastfeeding initiation rates, and then, in the 1990s, the rate steadily rises to nearly 70 percent. The rates of breastfeeding until six months of age follow a very similar pattern, although overall the rates are quite lower than breastfeeding initiation; currently, only about one-third of mothers report breastfeeding at six months. This recent rise in breastfeeding rates can be explained, at least in part, by the ideology of intensive mothering.

Breastfeeding as Intensive Mothering

Childrearing advice books, pediatricians, parenting magazines, and even formula companies themselves now universally recommend breastmilk over formula. The consensus that “breast is best” is embedded in cultural ideals of motherhood.

In her book The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood, sociologist Sharon Hays identifies an ideology of intensive mothering and describes how it’s at work in the United States: Mothers—not fathers—serve as the primary caregivers of children; mothering practices are time-intensive, expensive, supported by expert advice, child-centered, and emotionally absorbing; and children are viewed as priceless, and the work that must be done to raise them can’t be compared to paid work because it’s infinitely more important.

The ideology of intensive mothering helps explain why we hear so much playground chatter and read so many magazine articles about getting children into the “best” school, the idea that natural childbirth is better than one assisted by medication or other medical interventions, and the recent discussion of “opt-out” mothers who leave high-powered jobs to stay home with their children. Hays contends the strength of the intensive mothering ideology is the result of an “ambivalence about a society based solely on the competitive pursuit of self-interest.”

This may be one reason, for example, journalist Judith Warner, in her book Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety, felt such a difference when she was mothering in France compared to when she returned with her children to the United States. In France the state offers practical support to mothers, including subsidized childcare, universal healthcare, and excellent public education beginning at age 3. Furthermore, Warner explained that, as a new mother there, she found herself in the middle of an extensive and sympathetic support network that attended to her needs as a mother as much as they attended to the needs of her child. “It was a bad thing [for mothers] to go it alone,” she wrote. In contrast, upon her return to the United States Warner felt isolated and anxious. She linked this directly to what she called the “American culture of rugged individualism.” Mothers in the United States were under extraordinary pressure to be a “good mother”—otherwise, who else would protect their child from an individualistic, self-interested society?

The cultural imperative to breastfeed is part of the ideology of intensive mothering—it requires the mother be the central caregiver, because only she produces milk; breastfeeding is in line with expert advice and takes a great deal of time and commitment; and finally, the act of breastfeeding is a way to demonstrate that the child is priceless, and that whatever the cost, be it a loss of productivity at work or staying at home, children come first.

Since Hays links the intensive motherhood ideology to American individualistic sensibilities, it would seem to suggest that breastfeeding rates in the United States would be higher than other countries. To return to the example of France, only 50 percent of French mothers breastfeed their newborns, compared to 75 percent of American mothers. However, upon closer examination of statistics compiled by Le Leche League International, U.S. breastfeeding rates lag far behind many other countries, including European countries other than France (Germany, Italy, Spain, and the Scandinavian countries all have breastfeeding initiation rates around 90 percent). Most countries in Asia, Africa, and South America report breastfeeding initiation rates higher than the United States, as do New Zealand and Australia.

Clearly the cultural imperative to breastfeed in the United States has met some resistance. This resistance may be reflected in public debates about breastfeeding, which quickly dissolve into mud-slinging, judgmental arguments that pit mothers against mothers. Not “the mommy wars” in the traditional sense—working moms versus stay-at-home moms—but instead bottlefeeding versus breastfeeding moms.

Breastfeeding mothers, and a subset of those mothers who are deeply committed to breastfeeding promotion (sometimes referred to as “lactivists”), point to a continuing undercurrent of resistance to breastfeeding. Despite the fact that scientists and doctors recommend breastfeeding, and that these recommendations have been disseminated through a public health ad campaign and parenting magazines, breastfeeding remains controversial. While society wants mothers to breastfeed to protect and promote infant health, it wants them to do so behind closed doors. Indeed mothers are often asked to cover themselves while nursing in restaurants.

For example, in 2007 a nursing mother was asked by an Applebee’s employee to cover herself while nursing or leave the restaurant. After repeated calls by enraged nursing mothers to the corporate headquarters, executives there insisted it was reasonable to ask the nursing mother to leave, despite a state law that extended mothers the right to nurse in public spaces. This incident resulted in “nurse-ins” at Applebee’s locations all over the United States in protest. The social networking site Facebook found itself in a similar firestorm of controversy at the beginning of 2009 when it removed photos of breastfeeding mothers because they violated the site’s decency standards. The resistance to nursing-in-public arises from the link between breasts and sexuality, including the idea that breasts are indecent.

Note that these public debates about breastfeeding and mothering in the United States emerge primarily from discussions by and about middle class mothers. The ideal of intensive mothering is much easier for these women to achieve. Even so, studies have explored the extensive labor middle class mothers must engage in just to meet current breastfeeding recommendations.

Sociologist Orit Avishai demonstrates through interviews of white, middle class mothers that they treat breastfeeding not as a natural, pleasurable, connective act with their infant but instead as a disembodied project to be researched and managed. They take classes about breastfeeding, have home visits from lactation consultants post-partum, and view their bodies as feeding machines. When returning to work, they set up elaborate systems to pump breastmilk and store it. These middle-class women were accustomed to setting goals and achieving them—so when they decided to breastfeed for the one year the AAP recommends, they set out to do just that despite the physical and mental drawbacks. Although it’s easier for middle class mothers to meet the recommended breastfeeding standards than it is for less privileged mothers, they’re at the same time controlled by a culture that equates good mothering with breastfeeding.

Variations in Class and Culture

In At the Breast, sociologist Linda Blum examined how mothers of different classes aspired to or rejected the intensive mothering ideology and mainstream cultural imperative to breastfeed. Through interviews with white middle-class mothers who were members of La Leche League, as well as with a sample of both white and black working-class mothers, Blum’s study was the first (and is also the most extensive) to expose how the meaning of breastfeeding varies by class and race.

Her interviews with the La Leche mothers revealed the organization’s emphasis on an intimate, relational bond between mother and child created through breastfeeding. They rejected medical, scheduled, and mechanized infant feeding and emphasized how important it is for mothers to read their babies’ cues and be near them all the time. As such, a mother’s care is seen as irreplaceable. One mother told Blum, “Only a mother can give what a child needs, nobody else can, not even a father. A father can give almost as close, but only a mother can give what they really need.” Some of these mothers were also very critical of working mothers. “I’m pretty negative to people who just want to dump their kids off and go to work eight hours a day,” one said. Ultimately, Blum contends La Leche League is a self-help group largely created by and for white, middle-class women.

In contrast, interviews with white working-class mothers revealed they understood the health benefits of breastfeeding and embraced the ideal of intensive mothering, but that they often didn’t breastfeed because of constraints with jobs, lack of social support, inadequate nutrition, and limited access to medical advice. Working-class mothers were less likely to have jobs that allowed time and privacy to pump breastmilk and were less likely to have access to (paid or unpaid) maternity leave. Some felt it was embarrassing or restrictive. Yet, they still aspired to the middle class ideal of intensive mothering, so they were left feeling guilty and inadequate. Many reported feeling like their bodies had failed them. One mother, for example, said, “At first [breastfeeding] was great. I can’t explain the feeling, but at first it was really great. [But then,] I felt … useless, if I couldn’t nurse my baby, I was a flop as a mother.”

Ethnic and racial differences were even more unique and revealing. Black working-class mothers in Blum’s study were similar to white working-class mothers in understanding the health benefits of breastmilk. However, their discussions about not breastfeeding were, for the most part, remarkably free of guilt. In short, black mothers rejected the dominant cultural ideal of intensive mothering, and had a more broadly construed definition of what it meant to be a good mother. Many African American women, for example, talked about the importance of involving older children and extended family in caring for the child, and insisted one way this could be accomplished was through bottlefeeding. Some black mothers reacted negatively to breastfeeding because they believed it reinforced long-standing racist stereotypes about the black female body as threatening or even animalistic. By rejecting medical advice about breastfeeding, black mothers asserted some control over their own bodies. “The doctors said that breastmilk was the best, but I told them I didn’t want to. They tried to talk me into it, but they couldn’t,” one interviewee told Blum.

These cultural differences in the meaning of breastfeeding to white and African American mothers are reflected in breastfeeding initiation statistics. White, Asian, and Hispanic mothers have roughly similar rates of breastfeeding initiation, while African American and American Indian mothers have lower rates (above).

The importance of cultural differences and how they play out in breastfeeding practices has also been explored in studies of immigration. A study by public policy professor Christina Gibson-Davis and Jeanne Brooks-Gunn, co-director of the Columbia University Institute on Child and Family Policy, found that breastfeeding rates among Hispanics were related to the mother’s country of birth. If the mother was born outside the United States and immigrated, she was more likely to breastfeed. Furthermore, for each additional year the mother had lived in the United States, her odds of breastfeeding decreased by 4 percent. These patterns suggest that the more acculturated the mother is in U.S. society, the less likely she is to breastfeed.

However, another study examining Vietnamese immigrant mothers in Quebec contradicts that model. Medical anthropologist Danielle Groleau and colleagues interviewed 19 Vietnamese mothers who immigrated to Quebec. They argue that geography and culture combine to create a context in which mothers decide not to breastfeed. In the Vietnamese traditional understanding of post-partum medicine and breastfeeding, women are said to suffer from excessive cold, which leads to fatigue, and the production of breastmilk that isn’t fresh. In Vietnam, new mothers are cared for by extended family for several months post-partum in order to balance their health and allow them to produce “fresh” breastmilk. However, Vietnamese immigrants in Quebec had low rates of breastfeeding primarily because the lack of social support and caregiving that would have been offered in Vietnam wasn’t available in Canada. They saw bottlefeeding as optimal for their babies because their breastmilk wasn’t fresh. These mothers weren’t adopting the dominant Canadian cultural model and had retained their own cultural ideals about breastfeeding.

Problematic Science

The understanding that “breast is best” is based on scientific studies linking breastfeeding to a variety of health benefits. The breastfeeding recommendations issued by AAP, the World Health Organization, and other public health organizations state that breastfeeding increases IQ and lowers the likelihood of ear infections, diabetes, respiratory and gastrointestinal illnesses, and obesity. These benefits are transmitted to the public as unambiguous scientific findings. But upon closer examination, the science behind these claims is problematic.

Political scientist Joan Wolf, in the Journal of Health Politics, Policy, and Law, argues that the benefits of breastfeeding have been vastly overstated. Perhaps the largest problem is that it’s impossible to conduct a controlled experiment—by asking some mothers to breastfeed and others to formula-feed—so all studies are observational. In other words, researchers have to tease out the characteristics of those who decide to breastfeed from the benefits of breastmilk itself. Mothers who choose to breastfeed may also promote a host of other health-protective and IQ-promoting behaviors in their children that go unmeasured in observational studies. The problem becomes even more pronounced when trying to examine the long-term health benefits of breastfeeding because there are even more potential unmeasured factors between infancy and adolescence that contribute to overall health.

Some researchers have attempted to control for potential unmeasured factors by studying the health of siblings who were fed differently as infants. Although these studies can’t discern why the mother breastfed one child but not the other, they do control for parenting factors that go unmeasured in other studies. For example, a recent sibling study by economists Eirik Evenhouse and Siobhan Reilly, based on data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, suggests correlations between breastfeeding and a variety health benefits, including diabetes, asthma, allergies, and obesity, disappear when studying siblings within families. Only one outcome remains significant—that the breastfed sibling had a slightly higher IQ score (siblings who were ever breastfed scored 1.68 percentile points higher than siblings who were never breastfed).

Most of these studies can be critiqued for exaggerating the importance of small and weak associations; however, although these correlations are weak, they are consistently found. Furthermore, despite weak correlations, biomedical researchers have in some cases been able to identify the biological mechanisms that offer infants health protection. For example, one very consistent finding seems to be that breastmilk lowers the incidence, length, and severity of gastrointestinal illness because gut-protective antibodies, including IgA and lactoferrin, are passed from mother to child through breastmilk.

To be sure, not all biomedical research on breastmilk identifies beneficial biological mechanisms. Medical researchers have found breastmilk to contain HIV, alcohol, drugs, and environmental toxins. How these findings are used by public health officials varies. To take the case of HIV, in parts of the world with high rates of infection, public health officials debate whether to recommend breastfeeding or not. Even if the mother is HIV positive, some argue the infant may gain other protective health benefits from breastmilk, especially in resource-poor countries plagued by inadequate water supply, limited refrigeration, and poor sanitary conditions. In the United States, however, mothers are now routinely advised to bottlefeed if they have HIV. Mothers in the United States are also advised to stop nursing if, for medical reasons, they have to take medication that passes through breastmilk and may be harmful to the baby. Nevertheless, the overwhelming public health message continues to be “breast is best.”

Breastfeeding for Public Health

The “Babies Were Born to be Breastfed” public health ad campaign was designed to educate the public about the benefits of breastfeeding and the risks of not doing so. The campaign hoped to achieve goals established by the Department of Health and Human Services “Blueprint for Action on Breastfeeding”—75 percent of mothers initiating breastfeeding and 50 percent breastfeeding their babies until five months by 2010.

But the campaign, along with doctors’ advice and parenting publications, treat the decision to breastfeed as an individual choice without attending to the social and cultural situations in which this choice is made. The decision to breastfeed is shaped by a variety of social and cultural factors, including doctor-patient interaction, social support networks, labor force participation, child care arrangements, race and ethnicity, class, income, and education. Treating breastfeeding and other parenting practices as individual, decontextualized choices holds mothers solely responsible for their children’s health.

In an analysis of discussions about mothering, bioethics professor Rebecca Kukla argues that we hold mothers accountable for all kinds of childhood health problems, including obesity, malnutrition, birth defects, and behavioral disorders. The fact that many of these health problems are disproportionately overrepresented among the lower class further demonizes poor, working-class mothers. Furthermore, by focusing on mothers’ individual responsibility for child health and well-being, we aren’t attending to other, more egregious societal issues that negatively affect children, such as pollution or lack of adequate health care.

Scientific research on infant health is incredibly important. However, as these findings are reported to the public, shaped into recommendations, and developed into public policy, it’s important to view them with a critical eye. We need to consider the unintended consequences of breastfeeding promotion and other recommended parenting practices. These recommendations and policy based upon this science may inspire stress and guilt in mothers, especially poor and non-white mothers, when they don’t measure up.

Recommended Resources

Orit Avishai. “Managing the Lactating Body: The Breast-Feeding Project and Privileged Motherhood,” Qualitative Sociology (2007) 30: 135–152. Challenges the notion that breastfeeding is empowering and pleasurable through interviews with middle class mothers.

Linda M. Blum 1999. At the Breast: Ideologies of Breastfeeding and Motherhood in the Contemporary United States (Beacon Press, 1999). Uses in-depth interviews with mothers and analyses of popular advice literature to explore how mothering and breastfeeding vary by race and class.

Eirik Evenhouse and Siobhan Reilly. 2005. “Improved Estimates of the Benefits of Breastfeeding Using Sibling Comparisons to Reduce Selection Bias,” Health Sciences Research (2005) 40: 1781–1802. This quantitative analysis of sibling pairs suggests observational studies may have overstated the long-term benefits of breastfeeding.

La Leche League International. Breastfeeding Statistics (La Leche League International Center for Breastfeeding Information, 2003). Summary of cross-national breastfeeding initiation and duration rates.

Joan B. Wolf. “Is Breast Really Best? Risk and Total Motherhood in the National Breastfeeding Awareness Campaign,” Journal of Health Politics, Policy, and Law (2007) 32: 595–636. A forceful critique of the public health campaign to promote breastfeeding, as well as the science behind it.