An academic explores the performative social construction of masculinity among South Texas Hispanics by analyzing the size of their barbecues and spiciness of their condiments

January 13, 2018 • 8:47 am

If you looked at Heather Heying’s tw**t in this morning’s Hili dialogue, you’ll see this:

The “salsa accused of constructing masculinity” reference intrigued me, as it looked like one of those obscurantist po-mo pieces that keep academics and journals (predatory or not) busy without contributing anything to society. So I looked the article up, and, indeed, here it is (reference below, free access, pdf here; click on screenshot to see full article):

Molina is an assistant professor of sociology at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, specializing in “Social Demography, Critical Race Theory, Latina/a Issues, Immigration”.

I can summarize the paper in a space shorter than even the paper’s own abstract; here’s my summary:

Mexican-American men in Texas demonstrate their masculinity by barbecuing meat, having bigger grills, and eating spicier pico de gallo.

(Pico de gallo, meaning “beak of the rooster” in Spanish, is a Mexican condiment made of chopped tomatoes, onions, jalapeno peppers and cilantro. It’s used on foods like tacos or fajitas.)

That’s it, and it may well be true, but does it merit a paper? We all know that home barbecuing is one form of cooking largely monopolized by men, though I’m increasingly seeing women do it. But do Hispanic men pride themselves on having bigger grills, or on eating a pico de gallo with more hot peppers? That’s what Hilario Molina, writing in Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, concludes.

But how does he arrive at this conclusion? Does he take a survey or do a poll? No, he does what he calls “autoethnography,” which appears to be a fancy word for “anecdotal observation”. In Molina’s case, he (his students verify his sex and also have some pungent words about his teaching) went to 30 cookouts involving Mexican-Americans in South Texas. From these “field observations,” he simply chooses a number of observations and anecdotes to support his thesis, fleshing them out with tedious and obscure language that simply points to my conclusions above. That’s it—seriously.

I’ll present a few passages to show what this species of sociologist is up to. Note especially the pompous and bad writing meant to give an air of profundity to otherwise trite observations:

Although the physical environment sets the social space, the stage for manly performance, the pico de gallo  and the grill are direct identifiers of masculinity. This is not to say that men do not venture into the kitchen; however, they do so under an umbrella of gendered space immunity. The entry into feminine space is to comply with a gender role which takes precedence over gender– environment boundaries, such as needing the means to make the pico de gallo . As a result, negative social sanctions are non-existent because the trespass into feminised space is a requirement for the ‘ journey’ of macho or male  socialisation, as demonstrated in the passage below that took place at a participant’ s house:

A middle-aged man chops onions, cilantro, tomatoes, and jalapenos; then, placing these ingredients in a glass bowl, he squeezes lemon juice over it. ‘Vieja (Spanish slang for wife) come and try the pico de gallo’, he yells at the wall in front of him. A woman comes from another room. ‘It is too hot! I do not think we will be able to have any’, she protests after tasting it. ‘I will make two; one for us and one for you all’, he stated in a firm tone.

What a sexist pig!

Here’s another bit of “field work”:

Thus, grilling links ‘ man’ to both a present gender identity and one which has a historical and trans-generational recognition of dominance and mastery of the environment whereby ‘ nature’ has become the cognitive embodiment of the social and cultural factors of symbolic conquests. Within this stratum, grilling game (meat) is indicative of manliness and participant attempts to let those around him know his level of manliness, as shown in this passage, an interaction which directly drew my attention in this cookout:

A mature, aged man, surrounded by a myriad of young males, standing near a grill and holding a beer, said, ‘The smell of this mesquite burning reminds me of a time when I was about your age, and I was living in the campo (rural area)’. He then added, ‘Your father and I had to walk for miles to get to school. Today, you all sure have it easy’.

The grill is both a prerequisite for a boy seeking to form a gender identity and a signifier of economic stability and ability as a provider – important qualities of a macho . Thus, a public display unfolds in which a man shows himself enduring, surviving and eventually succeeding against ‘ nature’ – representative of life’ s challenges. By grilling for those within the subculture, he is publically [sic] committing to the group’ s norms and values as his ‘self’ becomes part of the structure.

Well, the statement is nothing more than the common claim that “we had it worse than you when we were kids”, something that’s hardly unique to Mexican-Americans—or to men. Remember the Four Yorkshiremen of Monty Python? There’s nothing in the statement above about constructing a gender identity, demonstrating that the author is simply using anything to reinforce his preordained conclusion.  This is not objective investigation but confirmation bias.

And here Molina explains the significance of his work:

This article contributes to the studies of gender roles and Latino issues by incorporating masculinity theory to present a sociological perspective on working-class Mexican American machos  in the RGV. As such, the purpose of this article is to explain how the behaviour of manliness comes from a traditional and ritualistic association to the natural world. Mexican American masculinity is measured against the gender formation of men’ s and women’ s roles in the RGV. Without the social construction of feminine space (indoors) and masculine space (outdoors), mild salsa for the women and children versus a spicy salsa for the men and the significance of the grill’ s size, the cultural meaning of masculinity (machismo) as representing the apex would not exist.

Within this perception of reality, masculine space serves to define ‘ his’ group position but also serves as a stage for gender role performances. Whereas the pico de gallo  and the barbeque grill are symbolic indicators of masculine discourse and social interaction, they rely on its gender opposite (marianismo) to clearly construct the macho  hierarchy. Therefore, we see how working-class Mexican American males pursue this apex status and also how they transmit these subcultural values of masculinity to the next generation of machitos (little men).

The significance of this project is twofold: (1) it explains gender formation of working-class Mexican Americans living in the RGV area; and (2) this group is, according to demographic scholars, such as Rodriguez and his colleagues (2008 ), the fastest and largest growing ethnic group in the United States. Within the Latinos/as community, Mexican and Mexican Americans account for more than 60% of this ethnic category; as a result, it is essential that studies begin to address structural issues of inequality endemic within this community. In addition, studies must also be conducted on other subcultures where subordinate groups encounter structural and cultural challenges.

This smacks of desperation and a search for tenure. The conclusions may be correct, but they are based on anecdotal observations, not any kind of systematic study. Plus they’re overblown by couching them in po-mo jargon like “gender role performances” and “construct the macho hierarchy.”  Finally, yes, the Hispanic community may be growing rapidly, but seriously, do studies of grill size and pico de gallo help us to either understand or interpret that phenomenon? Inequality of grill performance and the spiciness of pico de gallo is hardly the kind of “inequality” that American liberals need to address!

Now I’m not saying anything here about the quality of this journal, or of sociological work as a whole (yes, there’s good work in the field). What I’m saying is that when serious academics engage in this kind of work, something is wrong with the academic standards of the field. Increasingly, I see trivial and PREORDAINED conclusions tricked out in fancy-schmancy language designed to make them look profound. Further, we see anecdotes often used instead of systematic analysis. I think I could find exactly these conclusions if I went to a bunch of cookouts by white people: men would dominate the cooking and I would probably find—at least occasionally—some guy boasting about how hot he likes his hot sauce. So the conclusions, based as they are on anecdotes, aren’t even unique to Mexican-Americans. Or, if they are, it hasn’t been demonstrated here.

One thing Molina fails to note is the equation of grill size with penis size. Imagine what could be made of this:

__________________

Molina II, H. (2014) The construction of South Texas masculinity: masculine space, the pico de gallo and the barbeque grill. Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power. 21: 233-248, DOI: 10.1080/1070289X.2013.868352

Readers’ wildlife photos

January 13, 2018 • 7:45 am

Today we have a grab-bag of photos by Aussie Tony Eales, whose notes are indented.

Here’s a grab bag of odds and ends to keep the tank topped-up The first is a close-up of a Blowfly—I think from the family Calliphoridae. It’s interesting that there appear to be two distinctive types of compound eyes, the upper rows and the lower rows.

The next is a cute little Cymbacha ocellata Crab Spider (family Thomisidae) building its bell-shaped retreat from a fresh green leaf.

The next is one of my favourite terrestrial orchids, Dipodium variegatum. They have no leaves and are visible only when they put up their flower spikes.

Next is a new spider for me that I saw for the first time only yesterday: Euryopis superba. They are very small (~8mm) and live under eucalyptus bark.

Last, a lacewing larva carrying a pile of parts from its former victims as camouflage. [JAC: This is a new on one me!]

 

Saturday: Hili dialogue

January 13, 2018 • 6:30 am

Good morning on a chilly Saturday, January 13, 2018.  I see on my phone that it’s 8° F (- 13° C) outside, with a predicted high of only 16°F (-9° C), so it’s gonna be a cold one.  Nevertheless I must go out, as there are two cases of vino with my name on them waiting at the wine store, including the fruits of a Bordeaux future for which I’ve been waiting a long time. It’s also National Peach Melba Day, a dish invented by Escoffier in Paris in the early 1890s, named after Australia soprano Nellie Melba, and made from  peaches, raspberry sauce, and vanilla ice cream. I’ve never had it; have you? Here’s what it looks like:

There’s an animated Google Doodle today in honor of Zhou Youguang, born on January 13, 1906 (died 2017), a Chinese economist and polymath who developed a method for writing Chinese characters in Roman script, a method used by both the Chinese government and the United Nations. Despite his development of this system in the 1950s, the Cultural Revolution forced him work in a rice field for two years beginning in 1968.

On this day in 1879, and I’ll quote Wikipedia here,  “In Mozart Gardens Brooklyn Ada Anderson completed a great feat of pedestrianism – 2700 quarter miles in 2700 quarter hours, earning her $8000.” That was a lot of dosh in those times, but look up “pedestrianism”. In that particular event, it took Anderson 28 days to complete the 65-mile walk around a track, and she had no more than nine minutes of sleep at a time. Exactly nine years later, the National Geographic Society was established in Washington, D.C., and on January 13, 1898, Émile Zola published his famous article J’accuse…!, laying bare the the lies of the Dreyfus affair. On this day in 1953, Pravda published an article accusing prominent doctors, who were mostly Jewish, of a conspiracy to poison the Soviet leadership. Many doctors were jailed, but, fortunately, none were killed, and they were freed after Stalin’s death on March 5.  On this day in 1968, Johnny Cash performed his famous live concert at Folsom State Prison in California. It’s one of the highlights of the excellent movie about Cash, “I Walk the Line”, and the live album of the concert became one of the best selling records of all time. On this day in 1982,  Air Florida Flight 90 crashed into the 14th Street Bridge shortly after takeoff from Washington’s National Airport, killing 78 people, including four motorists. Among the dead was someone I knew: Bob Silberglied, a Smithsonian butterfly biologist who I met at Harvard when he was on the staff; he was a terrific guy. Finally, on this day in 1990, Douglas Wilder, the first elected African American governor in the U.S., took office in Virginia.

Those born on January 13 include Salmon P. Chase (1808, he used to appear on America’s largest circulated banknote, the $10,000 bill). Here’s that bill (I’ve never seen one, of course, and it’s no longer legal tender):

That’s not the biggest U. S. banknote ever printed, though, which is this one, used only for government transactions and printed only in 1934-1935:


Others born on January 13 include Horatio Alger, Jr. (1832), Chaim Soutine (1893), Jack London (1905), Paul Feyerabend (1924), geneticist Sydney Brenner (1927 and still with us; Matthew interviewed him in Singapore recently), and Jay McInerney (1955).  Here’s a nice Soutine, and I think it’s a cat. Kudos to the reader who finds out whether that’s true:
Notables who expired on this day include Charles the Fat (888), Jan Breughel the Elder (1625), Stephen Foster (1864), Wyatt Earp (1929), and Lyonel Feininger (1956, one of my favorite painters). Here’s a nice Feininger watercolor:
and a classic Feininger (“The Cathedral”, 1920):
112251G9
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is looking for food. I’m told that at this moment she’s on MY couch, curled up with Cyrus, who serves as a very large hot water bottle (cats are exploitative):
Hili: Do you think they could’ve hidden something here?
Cyrus: I think you are too suspicious.
In Polish:
Hili: Myślisz, że oni tam coś schowali?
Cyrus: Chyba jesteś zbyt podejrzliwa.

From Grania: a polite elephant deposits trash in the proper receptacle:

From Heather Heying, former (and once demonized) biology professor at Evergreen State. Check out the salsa link:

Matthew sent this tweet, showing how deeply New Zealand wants to save its keas (the world’s only alpine parrot):

This is near Milford Sound, where the birds delight in moving traffic cones:

 

The magnificent obsession: man takes over a decade to design and build a Boeing 777 model out of paper

January 12, 2018 • 2:30 pm

Yes, it’s made entirely out of paper: manila folders.

The YouTube notes:

Over the last decade, designer Luca Iaconi-Stewart has been building an incredibly detailed model of a Boeing 777, right down to the tiny seats and moving landing gear, using only paper folders and glue.

End-of-the-week wildlife: a real Moby-Dick!

January 12, 2018 • 1:30 pm

You probably don’t know that Melville’s classic novel Moby-Dick, featuring a white sperm whale, was based in part on a real whale: another white sperm whale named Mocha Dick who lived in the Pacific and was named after a Chilean island.  Whalers vied to catch him, and he’s supposed to have survived over 100 killing attempts before he was finally taken down in 1838 or thereabouts.  But there’s now an albino whale who’s protected, and portrayed in this tweet I got from Matthew:

As Wikipedia notes, Migaloo is

. . .an albino humpback whale (Megaptera novaeangliae) that travels up and down the east coast of Australia [and who] became famous in local media because of its rare, all-white appearance. Migaloo is the only known all-white specimen and is a true albino. First sighted in 1991, the whale was named for an indigenous Australian word for “white fella”. To prevent sightseers approaching dangerously close, the Queensland government decreed a 500-m (1600-ft) exclusion zone around him.

The Pacific Whale Foundation has a site devoted solely to Migaloo.  There’s a scientific paper about him that concludes he’s probably a real albino, not just a leucistic whale or some other hypo-pigmented cetacean. He’s now estimated at between 35-39 years old, so he’s getting up there (humpbacks can live 80 years or so, but the average is about 50).

But genetics apparently has told us not only that Migaloo is not only a true albino (it’s always the same gene in mammals that mutates, so it should be easy to tell with a small tissue sample), but also that he’s a male:

Scientists were initially skeptical to state Migaloo has albinism because his eyes are brown, rather than the typical red or pink. In the past he has been called the more conservative terms “all-white”, or “hypo-pigmented”. However, a 2011 study of his DNA by researchers at the Australian Marine Mammal Centre found a genetic variation leading to albinism.

Genetic testing confirmed another fact about Migaloo: he is a male. Scientists already knew this to be the case because of his song. While both male and female humpback whales can produce sounds, only the males sing songs. In 1998 researchers first recorded Migaloo singing, thus indicating he is a male. This was confirmed by genetic testing in 2004.

Now I’m not sure what “a genetic variation leading to albinism” is, because all albino mammals I know of have pink eyes, so I’ll reserve judgment for the time being. Other white whales—humpbacks and other species—are known to exist, and you can read about them on the Pacific Whale Foundation site.  Meanwhile, enjoy these videos of Migaloo. In this first one, he comes very close, but since they didn’t approach him, there was no violation of the law:

And another. That whale is whiter than white!

E. O. Wilson: confused about free will

January 12, 2018 • 11:45 am

An article in the September 14 Harper’s, “On Free Will (and How the Brain is like a Colony of Ants”), gives an excerpt from Wilson’s book released that year, The Meaning of Human Existence.  In the piece and the passage below, Wilson appears to be a sort of compatibilist, but I find his discussion so confusing that I’m not quite sure what he’s trying to say. But his message is pretty clear: we can act as if we have a kind of free will, and those who deny it are doomed to insanity and a “deteriorating mind”.  The main bits:

The power to explain consciousness, however, will always be limited. Suppose neuroscientists somehow successfully learned all of the processes of one person’s brain in detail. Could they then explain the mind of that individual? No, not even close.

. . . Then there is the element of chance. The body and brain are made up of legions of communicating cells, which shift in discordant patterns that cannot even be imagined by the conscious minds they compose. The cells are bombarded every instant by outside stimuli unpredictable by human intelligence. Any one of these events can entrain a cascade of changes in local neural patterns, and scenarios of individual minds changed by them are all but infinite in detail. The content is dynamic, changing instant to instant in accordance with the unique history and physiology of the individual.

Because the individual mind cannot be fully described by itself or by any separate researcher, the self — celebrated star player in the scenarios of consciousness — can go on passionately believing in its independence and free will. And that is a very fortunate Darwinian circumstance. Confidence in free will is biologically adaptive. Without it, the conscious mind, at best a fragile, dark window on the real world, would be cursed by fatalism. Like a prisoner serving a life sentence in solitary confinement, deprived of any freedom to explore and starving for surprise, it would deteriorate.

While Wilson admits earlier in this short piece that the conscious mind “cannot be taken away from the mind’s physical neurobiological system”, he’s not as firm about the physical/deterministic nature of free will as he is about consciousness.

Note in the second paragraph that Wilson cites “chance” in support of free will. If by “chance” he means “things that are determined but we can’t predict”, then that’s no support for the classic notion of free will: the “you could have chosen otherwise” sort.  If he’s referring instead to pure quantum indeterminacy, well, that just confers unpredictability on our decisions, not agency. We don’t choose to make an electron jump in our brain.

From what I make of the third paragraph, his message is that because we are a long way from figuring out how we make behavioral decisions, we might as well act as if we have free will, especially because “confidence in free will is biologically adaptive.” Yet there are powerful arguments that at bottom our decisions are based on physical circumstances. We don’t understand the complete physics of a billiard game, either, but we don’t pretend that the balls have free will in where they roll.

As for free will and confidence in it being biologically adaptive, well, that’s an assertion without evidence. I often ponder where our feeling of agency comes from, and have come up with three or four evolutionary scenarios in which our feeling of being agents who can make free choices could have given our ancestors a reproductive advantage. But these are all pure speculations, and none are testable. Wilson is simply wrong in asserting with confidence that our feeling of agency is known to be an adaptation.

Finally, I have no confidence in free will, even though, like all people, I feel as if I have agency. But if I think about it for a millisecond, I know that I could not do otherwise than what I do—nor can anybody else. Has that made me fatalistic, subject to a deteriorating mind? I don’t think so!  This is just the old argument, one made by Dennett and other compatibilists, that we need to believe in free will because without such a belief, society will fall apart. Well, that’s what they said about religion, too, but they were wrong. (Look at Scandinavia.)

I don’t deny for a minute that all of us feel that we make real choices, and could have made different choices. But feeling that and believing that it’s true are different matters. We can still feel that we have agency, but at the same time realize that we don’t—and society will survive.  It’s members will be like me, and though you may say that’s not such a good thing, I contend that a nation of determinists is not a nation doomed.

And now physics has decreed that I walk over to the South Indian Studies department to give a professor a book to take to my friends in India. The real Moby-Dick in a few hours!

h/t: Greg Mayer

PinkerGate: The last word

January 12, 2018 • 10:00 am

Two days ago I wrote about how some social-media folks had distorted an eight-minute remark by Steve Pinker made at the Spiked event at Harvard: “Is political correctness why Trump won?” Pinker spoke about how certain facts have been censored or deemed by the Left taboo to discuss, and how the suppression of truth in that manner simply drives people into the arms of the Right or the “alt-right” (whatever the “alt-right” is). If you listened to Pinker’s whole set of remarks, it was clear that he was against the alt-right and was calling for a degree of honesty by progressives that would not drive people rightward.

In my post, I showed how many people willfully distorted Pinker’s remarks to make him seem a fan of the alt-right, something that anybody with a few neurons could have discerned had they listened to the whole eight-minute talk. But people kept excerpting just the first part of the remarks, where Pinker adumbrates the truths and also remarked—unfortunately, in my view—that there are “highly literate and highly intelligent people” who gravitate to the alt-right. While that statement was unfortunate, I think it came from Pinker’s seeing the “alt-right” (as I used to) as meaning “the far right”. But that didn’t matter. His point was that the Left has to deal with the facts about society, and then put them in their proper context, showing, for instance, that even if on average different sexes or ethnic groups differ in behavior or interests, that doesn’t mean they should be treated unequally or discriminated against. When the Left fails to do that, it could indeed turn people towards the other pole of politics.

As if that wasn’t enough, I pointed out that Pinker was one of the Harvard faculty’s biggest donors to the Democratic Party, something that hardly comports with him being on the “alt-right.”

Nevertheless, many people, hungry to demolish Pinker for reasons that are multifarious and often obscure, simply ignored the totality of his remarks so they could demonize him.  This attempt to smear Pinker, a well-known liberal, is one of the most blatant examples of dishonesty I’ve seen coming from people who describe themselves as Lefties. Here are some of the first tweets from people recognizing and calling out the unwarranted demonization of Pinker:

The last tweet includes a number of other tweets, some by people we know, smearing Pinker. I’ll put in those screenshots:

 

One of the first people to call out these distortions was writer Jesse Singal, who describes himself as “a Brooklyn-based journalist. I’m currently writing a book about social science, social justice, and the replication crisis for Farrar, Straus and Giroux (it’s due out…. not sure). I’m also a contributing writer at New York Magazine.  ” Here’s a tweet where Singal compares what Pinker actually said with how blogger P. Z. Myers characterized it:

Well, Singal wasn’t satisfied with responding on Twitter, and so he’s written a longer piece for today’s New York Times (link below), using Pinkergate as a symbol of the Internet’s inanity. (I’m not sure if it’s “making us dumber,” but it’s giving us the chance to show our true personalities: smart, dumb, honest, or duplicitous.)

You can read it for yourself (it’s not long), and I’ll just post a few excerpts:

The clip [of Pinker’s remarks] went viral. The right celebrated; the left fumed. The neo-Nazi Daily Stormer website ran an article headlined, in part, “Harvard Jew Professor Admits the Alt-Right Is Right About Everything.” A tweet of the video published by the self-described “Right-Wing Rabble-Rouser” Alex Witoslawski got hundreds of retweets, including one from the white-nationalist leader Richard Spencer.

“Steven Pinker has long been a darling of the white supremacist ‘alt-right,’” noted the lefty journalist Ben Norton. “And he returns the favor.” Others reacted to the rumor with simple exasperation: “Christ on a crutch,” said the liberal commentator and biologist PZ Myers, who also wrote a blog post denouncing Mr. Pinker for this supposed alliance.

The idea that Mr. Pinker, a liberal, Jewish psychology professor, is a fan of a racist, anti-Semitic online movement is absurd on its face, so it might be tempting to roll your eyes and dismiss this blowup as just another instance of social media doing what it does best: generating outrage.

But it’s actually a worthwhile episode to unpack, because it highlights a disturbing, worsening tendency in social media in which tribal allegiances are replacing shared empirical understandings of the world.

And here are some of Singal’s conclusions:

That’s because the pernicious social dynamics of these online spaces [JAC: Why have the dynamics of these spaces become so pernicious?] hammer home the idea that anyone who disagrees with you on any controversial subject, even a little bit, is incorrigibly dumb or evil or suspect. On a wide and expanding range of issues, there’s no such thing as good-faith disagreement.

The online anger aimed at Mr. Pinker provides a perfect case study.

. . . It’s getting harder and harder to talk about anything controversial online without every single utterance of an opinion immediately being caricatured by opportunistic outrage-mongers, at which point everyone, afraid to be caught exposed in the skirmish that’s about to break out, rushes for the safety of their ideological battlements, where they can safely scream out their righteousness in unison. In this case: “Steven Pinker said the alt-right is good! But the alt-right is bad! We must defend this principle!”

This is making us dumber.

As I said, I don’t agree that this is making us dumber. People like Myers are not dumb, and are no dumber than they were before they began engaging in such outrage-mongering. What social media is doing is making them more recalcitrant in their views, more tribalistic, less willing to listen to opposing views, and less willing to admit they were wrong. I’m not exactly sure why this is so, and perhaps readers can weigh in here. I suppose if you take a very strong and public stand, it’s a lot harder to back off or apologize if you are a public figure than if you’re simply someone talking personally to someone else. With social media, everyone is to some extent a public figure, which wasn’t true in the days when controversial figures like Mencken held the stage. But I’m still not satisfied with that explanation.

Even after realizing that these outrage mongers had been played by others—or by themselves—they continue to occupy their Faulty Towers, arguing for example, that Pinker is still a “useful idiot” to the alt-right or is “liked” by the alt-right. In this way they pretend to revise their views without really having done so. Here are a few examples of that:

https://twitter.com/MisterJRocker/status/951663344452362240

Sacha Saeen, who was previously unknown to me, appears to be the person who started the fracas by posting a truncated video of Pinker’s remarks:

https://twitter.com/S_Saeen/status/951773545960542209

I’d comment further, but this is a family friendly site.