II. Happy Surprises
Any professor who says they aren’t terrified when walking in to meet students on their first day teaching a new class is either lying or tenured—probably both. Of course, I say this as someone who hasn’t been teaching very long and who isn’t exactly the revered, wizened sage of his English department (I’m only a graduate student, for starters). Nevertheless, I think this much is probably true: If you don’t feel some stake in what you’re teaching, then why on Earth would you drag impressionable minds (or at least minds belonging to people whose parents are paying a lot for their education) along for the ride?
At any rate, I was more than slightly nervous walking into a classroom last fall to teach a First-Year Writing Seminar at Cornell University. And, along with the usual beginning-of-the-semester uncertainties, I also found my mind wandering to far more imposing worries. After all, this wasn’t just any class; for the first time in my career it was wholly my course, from conception to execution. This wasn’t a Freshman Comp rubric I was handed three months before classes started, this was shit I cared about; this was queer studies; this was masculinity studies; this was English 1105.101: “Lesbians, Transmen, and Bears, Oh My!”
Incidentally, I know what you’re thinking: “They let graduate students teach my kids/siblings/ alma mater’s current students about bears? In college? What the hell is a bear, anyway?” Believe me: no one’s more surprised than I am. And really, from the second my course was approved last spring, I was gripped by a series of even more troubling questions about my course than simply how I got away with it.
Could I get students about whose gender, sexual, and political identifications I could, and should, make no assumptions—who might only be taking my class because it fit their schedule—interested in a masculinity studies course, much less one that was at heart a queer studies course? Could I find an armistice with my own misgivings about “men’s studies”—to say nothing of my conflicted relationship with my own masculinity, as well as everyone else’s—long enough to lead a group of 18-year-olds to make insights about masculinity that were as compassionate as they were critical, as ambivalent as they were insightful, as complicatedly considered as they were clearly worded?
Surprisingly? Well, yes. But I didn’t do it alone.
♦◊♦
As a group of seemingly wary, but otherwise friendly and attentive first-years gathered around the conference table on the first day of class, I tried to make my course’s aims clear. It’s worth highlighting that the corporate model of higher education—and its accompanying model of “customer service” measured by variously helpful or silly metrics—emphasizes and values only “positive” affects like enjoyment, engagement, and happiness. Thing is, courses on sexuality and gender—and plenty of other topics we humanities folks love to latch onto—are as likely to get students interested (or downright turned on) as they are to make them offended (or full-on disgusted). This is especially true when students are dealing with subjects of study, political landscapes, and fictional or theoretical language that don’t give themselves over to easy readings or conclusions, as they were in my class.
And so, I decided early on that I would need to tell my students that, yes, many of the course texts might make them uncomfortable, but that this might actually help them learn more about gender, and not less. Really, this was part of my larger effort to make my teaching methods as transparent as possible. Insofar as the course title already punned on The Wizard of Oz, why couldn’t I simply step out from behind the pedagogical curtain to let my students know why I had made the decisions I had in constructing the syllabus? Accordingly, my students’ first reading was the Robinson piece I discussed above, and throughout the semester we had open discussions about why students suspected I assigned the texts I did. Of course, students aren’t the only ones who experience feelings they don’t expect in the classroom. Throughout the semester that followed, what surprised me most was how open-minded, flexible, and simply generous my students were with both the texts and one another.
Thing is, for all of my careful planning, obsessive worrying, and frequent doubts, the course ultimately “worked”—according to my entirely subjective estimation, as well as those objective “metrics” I mentioned before—because I was tremendously lucky to have the students I did. Sure, I crafted a syllabus and did my best to create a classroom environment that would be conducive to thoughtful discussion, critical inquiry, and sympathetic identification—rather than just debate, which to my mind doesn’t seem to be lacking in every other venue for our country’s gender politics. But ultimately, I credit my students with the maturity, honesty, and sheer curiosity to keep that environment going. At no time during the course was this more apparent than when we dove into the middle section, which dealt primarily with transmen.
♦◊♦
Our first foray into trans territory—before ending up in bear country, naturally—was Southern Comfort, Kate Davis’ intimate documentary of the final year in the life of Robert Eads, a transsexual man living in the very deep South along with his lover and affective (his term is “chosen”) family. As the film’s subjects get ready for the eponymous ‘Southern Comfort’—a popular conference and ball for transfolks in the Southeast US—and deal with the fallout of doctors’ refusal to treat Eads’ ovarian cancer, Davis’ camera constructs a striking sense of familiarity and hospitality as she takes us into the homes, photo albums, and hospital rooms of the film’s cast.
Part of the risk we run whenever we undertake the onerous task of finding and exposing the misogynistic, misandrist, or otherwise “bad” underpinnings of a cultural artifact is that what we end up finding—the “wrongness” of it—might be painfully obvious, and also might not be the whole story.
|
While the unit went on to consider a variety of more “formal” perspectives on transmasculinities (essays from Pat Califia, Kate Bornstein, and others), as well as a book of flash-fiction, Southern Comfort was the text that seemed to stick most with my students. Throughout our discussion of the film, students reflected on the tenderness they felt toward its subjects, and the surprising outrage they felt toward the medical establishment negligently responsible for Eads’ death. During the viewing, several students audibly swooned as Eads and his girlfriend Lola Cola selected Christmas cards together at a drugstore. More students laughed awkwardly when Eads’ related his bemusement at having been confused for a potential KKK member by some local “good ol’ boys” outside his local Walmart. Mostly, though, my students simply didn’t get why there should be any debate about the “validity” of Eads’ gender. So successful was the film at getting my students to engage with its subjects that we actually had to have a conversation about how it did so, in which I had to play reluctant devil’s advocate in order to point out that the intimacy of the film was artfully constructed in order to accomplish certain goals.
Let me be honest: this was not the reaction from students I was expecting. At all. Call me cynical, but I was expecting indignant resistance from students, angry calls from parents, and an entire barrage of those questions no young teacher quite feels ready to answer without the ultimately empty, but ever-ready comment “that may be slightly problematic.” To be sure, early discussions in the course often led my students to claims that texts were “biased”—and undoubtedly, they were (how couldn’t, and why shouldn’t, they be?). But at the same time, students never really saw such biases as reasons to throw a text out, or to take the claims of its author or subjects any less to heart. Yes, every now and then, a student said something to which another objected. Hell, every now and then I said something to which students objected. But these objections were never the end of the discussion. No one ever really got the final word, and my go-to comment for the course was always a request that students “say more,” not “say something else.” My students’ consistent ability to seriously consider and do justice to the desires, identifications, and self-representations of the course’s various texts, subjects, and subject groups—to the side of their own preconceptions and feelings coming into the course—was a humbling reminder that there are indeed happy surprises, if only we allow room for them to happen.
♦◊♦
Of course, one of the unsurprising elements of the course was that a majority of my students weren’t men. This is not, in itself, surprising for a gender studies course. But what was surprising was that my course was still one-third men, which is roughly the same ratio as the other courses I’ve taught (those were mostly on Dickens, not bears). And really, all of these gender ratios are beside the point. One of the central insights that my students seemed to happen upon as the course came to an end was that everyone has a claim to masculinities; a right to re-use and re-model existing styles of masculinity for their own purposes, and to forge entirely new styles as they might see fit.
This sense of masculinity’s flexibility to re-fashioning finally clicked for my students, I think, when I asked them to write about the styles of masculinity at play in a music video of their own choosing. As the medium of the music video itself enters a mid-life crisis of sorts, my students’ overwhelmingly looked back to pop gender icons of earlier decades—Annie Lennox, Prince, Tupac, Grace Jones—and found ways to re-invigorate and re-situate the inevitable anachronism of past masculinities into startlingly vivid engagement with the present. Of course, one of the realizations of this time travel was that what looked very comfortably like femininity in 1982 might look a lot more like masculinity now, and vice versa. And while some of the examples they chose might not have been “transgressive” in their usual or original contexts, my students’ collective act of bringing masculinities forward nevertheless instilled even the most outmoded examples with a force that was somehow—often against all odds—viable. My students weren’t just against finger wagging, they were against forgetting. Their papers demonstrated admirably that like more literal fashions, styles of masculinity may fall out of favor, but often re-surface, only to be inflected with surprising differences. Already at home in remix and mash-up culture, my students were probably less startled by this insight than I was.
As queer theorist Eve Sedgwick pointed out in her last book, Touching Feeling,[3] part of the risk we run whenever we undertake the onerous task of finding and exposing the misogynistic, misandrist, homophobic, transphobic, racist, or otherwise “bad” underpinnings of a cultural artifact is that what we end up finding—the “wrongness” of it—might be painfully obvious, and also might not be the whole story. This is no less troublingly the case for progressive attempts to scrupulously mine the past for nothing but flatly “affirmative” confirmations of contemporary sexual ideas and ideals. Sedgwick’s point is that when we set our mental scanners to search for problems with a certain thing, we already limit ourselves to a field of myopic affective vision in which there can be only alarms, and no surprises—good or bad. Neither Sedgwick nor I would advocate that the solution to what she calls “paranoid reading” is a corollary “naïve reading” that would simply “look the other way” at representations and forms of masculinity that are reprehensible. Rather, what I think we need is simply to cultivate openness to being surprised by gender. We need to welcome the possibility of experiencing reactions to styles of gender that go against the grain. Although our relationships with these styles of gender could end up feeling marginal, wrong, or uncomfortable, they might also offer us some viable options for living a more honestly and richly textured life with our genders—and those of others, as an added bonus.
Once more, and without the academese, my point is this: If contemporary men’s studies courses, men’s movements, and gender politics in general are ever going to do any real good for anyone in the 21st century, then men are going to need to let go of the idea that all this “masculinity stuff”—its crises, its neuroses, its successes, its accidents, its problems, its promises—was ever for or about just us. At the same time, we need to acknowledge, finally, that “masculinity” as a cultural style was never properly even “ours” to begin with. Men, women, and the rest of us are going to need to move gender politics beyond the blame game it has been reduced to in some corners of popular discourse, and toward possibilities of surprising attractions toward, affiliations with, and incorporations of, styles of gender that are simply too damn complicated, compelling, and contingent to be shut down as either “good” or “bad.”
—Photo ξωαŋ ThΦt / Flickr
♦◊♦
A Primer on Doing Masculinity Studies From the Margins:
Butler, Judith. “Doing Justice to Someone: Sex Reassignment Surgery and Allegories of Transsexuality.” Undoing Gender. New York; London: Routledge, 2004. 57–74.
Califia, Patrick. “Manliness.” The Transgender Studies Reader. Eds. Stryker, Susan, and Stephen Whittle. London: Routledge, 2006. 434–438.
Faderman, Lillian. “Butches, Femmes, and Kikis: Creating Lesbian Subcultures in the 1950s and ’60s.” Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991. 159–187.
Green, Jamison. “Look! No, Don’t!” The Transgender Studies Reader. Eds. Stryker, Susan, and Stephen Whittle. London: Routledge, 2006. 499–508.
Halberstam, Judith. Female Masculinity. Durham: Duke University Press, 1998.
Nealon, Christopher. “The Secret Public of Physique Culture.” Foundlings: Lesbian and Gay Historical Emotion Before Stonewall. Durham: Duke University Press, 2001. 99–140.
Robinson, Sally. “Pedagogy of the Opaque: Teaching Masculinity Studies.” Masculinity Studies and Feminist Theory: New Directions. Ed. Gardiner, Judith K. New York: Columbia University Press. 2002. 141–160.
Sedgwick, Eve K. “Gosh, Boy George, You Must Be Awfully Secure in Your Masculinity!”
Constructing Masculinity. Eds. Berger, Maurice, Brian Wallis, Simon Watson, and Carrie M. Weems. New York: Routledge, 1995. 11–20.
Wright, Les K. The Bear Book: Readings in the History and Evolution of a Gay Male Subculture. New York: Harrington Park Press, 1997.
♦◊♦
Meet the Men’s Rights Movement
Hugo Schwyzer: How Men’s Rights Activists Get Feminism Wrong
Paul Elam: On Misandry: What’s Wrong With Men?
Tom Matlack: Adultery’s Double Standard
Amanda Marcotte: The Solution to MRA Problems? More Feminism
Zeta Male: The Top 10 Issues of Men’s Rights
Pelle Billing: Unlocking the Men’s Rights Movement
David Futrelle: Dismantling the Men’s Rights Movement
Dan Moore of Menz: The MRA Perspective
Ron Mattocks: When Men Are the Victims of Abuse
Tom Matlack: Do Divorced Dads Get a Raw Deal?
Blixa Scott: Why Do We Forgive Adulterous Women?
Joseph Caputo: Can We Degenderize Domestic Violence?
[1] For the full discussion, see Sally Robinson “Pedagogy of the Opaque” in Judith K. Gardiner’s volume Masculinity Studies and Feminist Theory: New Directions (Columbia University Press, 2002).
[2] For a similar treatment of masculinity, see Judith Halberstam, Female Masculinity (Duke University Press, 1998).
[3] For clarification, see Eve Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, Or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You” in Touching Feeling (Duke University Press, 2003).
Wow, you find this article complicated and hard to read…?
@Thaddeus Gregory Blanchette,
It all hinges on whether you treat life as a lived experience or as an abstract intellectual exercise.
I thought you were being sarcastic … until I read your previous comments.
It’s obviously both. And, just as obviously, the author realizes that. Kaelin’s pretty clear about how this experience effects him, personally, as lived.
“It’s obviously both” really? Life is a lived experience, abstract intellectual exercises are activities we do while living, they are not life itself.
There was little clear in that article, it reads like stream-of-consciousness post modern drivel. I would really like a translation, maybe using concise and accessible language would help? Seriously, Kaelin probably has something worthwhile to say, he just didn’t deliver in this article.
Dude, Kaelin’s talking about how trying to teach modern gender theory in even a supposedly liberal institution such as the university makes him piss his pants in fear of being called a “preeeeeevert” and “sexshual maniac”. It doesn’t get more “lived experience” than that, my man. And it’s unworthy of you to belittle another man’s lived experience just because it doesn’t personally connect to yours. As for the article’s “inaccessible language”, what esoteric words are tripping you up, exactly? “Trailblazers” and “demonize”? How about this: point to a direct quote of Kaelin’s that you find impenetrable. Just because you are… Read more »
Thaddeus G. Blanchette
You said,
“Kaelin’s talking about how trying to teach modern gender theory in even a supposedly liberal institution such as the university makes him piss his pants in fear of being called a “preeeeeevert” and “sexshual maniac”.”
So that’s why he wrote in code? Seriously, I understood all the words, but the writing is unnecessarily complicated.
Thanks for the translation.
“Any professor who says they aren’t terrified when walking in to meet students on their first day teaching a new class is either lying or tenured—probably both… At any rate, I was more than slightly nervous walking into a classroom last fall to teach a First-Year Writing Seminar at Cornell University. And, along with the usual beginning-of-the-semester uncertainties, I also found my mind wandering to far more imposing worries. After all, this wasn’t just any class; for the first time in my career it was wholly my course, from conception to execution. This wasn’t a Freshman Comp rubric I was… Read more »
Or possibly I’m a tired, busy person reading a lot disappointing articles on a crap website that keeps refreshing and came across an article completely out of place. Now if I had the time and was reading that piece, sitting in a comfortable lounge chair in a library somewhere or possibly in a study with a glass of sherry handy, I would have given it time. Yes, the second page is more readable than the first, yes he makes some good points and to be fair, he probably didn’t write it for this publication. I agree, his ideas are good… Read more »
Omigosh, this is one of those pieces that just screams, “I’m so very smart that I can spend a whole bunch of time writing about something of which I know little, with parametrical remarks to obfuscate the subject matter, so I an impress those that don’t understand what I’m writing.”
Give it a rest buddy.
Masculinity is much like sausage, you just don’t wanna know what it is, but you know it when you see it and most likely will like it when you do.
Kaelin’s piece gets my vote for best article published re: MRAs in this issue of the GMP.
It’s a very good piece.
my, what a lot of invective for a piece that was trying to do some good along the lines of gender, masculinity, neo-feminism. what a lot of people forgetting this course was offered and played out within the context of cornell university’s critical community, where queer studies are already established, and where people who disagreed with kaelin’s approaches and theoretical groundwork were perfectly free to . . . drop the course. for my part, i’m glad you’re fighting the good fight, kaelin, getting people to see the performance aspects of gender, to realize it’s narrow either-or’s that oppress us and… Read more »
Although erudite in execution, there are gremlins lurking in the flowerbed and hiding behind the flowers. “Part of the risk we run whenever we undertake the onerous task of finding and exposing the misogynistic, misandrist, or otherwise “bad” underpinnings of a cultural artifact is that what we end up finding—the “wrongness” of it—might be painfully obvious, and also might not be the whole story.” There is no risk whatsoever, when our sensibilities are contained and reside in consumerism. We simply migrate the inventory for a better fit. As is the case in this culture and particularly with the shopping class.Well… Read more »
I never had a problem with feminine men being feminine and masculine women being women. If that is their nature then go for it, but what feminism tries to do is make men to be feminine and women to be masculine. It’s just as bad for a naturally masculine men, which is the majority of males biologically, to be castrated, which is what feminism does, it pulls them back, tells them they are wrong to have urges and makes parents think they need to be on drugs for ADD. And tells women that they should not be nurses or stay… Read more »
I don’t like the words masculine and feminine anyway because there really are no definitions for what they are. Plus, they imply a type of superiority and inferiority complex as well. Masculine has always been seen as superior , and femininity has always been seen as inferior. For example: if a guy acts feminine, whatever that is, he’s construed as gay, a pussy (which is a degrading term, not only to men, but to women as well, and most people don’t even realize it), a wimp, a sissy boy. Yet, if a woman acts masculine, she is often seen as… Read more »
Have you considered dropping the “Y” from your name? What’s great about masculine women is for allot of men it means one less person to take care of. I think it’s great if you realize that femininity limits your potential hey, get rid of it. Many men are just sick and tired of women back seat driving their masculinity. Get your own car or walk. Unfortunately feminism for many means surrendering your individuality to some homogenized expression of equality that you don’t get to define. Which is like being walked on.
“what feminism tries to do is make men to be feminine and women to be masculine” Indeed. I truly believe feminism started because some women were jealous of men and wanted to be them, but they could never take men’s place unless they destroyed men as masculine first. Feminists are angry because they were not born men and they believe femininity is inferior. That’s why they tell women that a career is more important than a family. This hurts men and women alike. Feminism is pure hate. Feminists hate men, they hate women, they hate themselves, and they damn well… Read more »
Keith: “What’s great about masculine women is for allot of men it means one less person to take care of. ” I always looked at relationships as a means that you support and take care of each other, possibly in different ways. I ideally know my best relationships are with men that are different from me because we each have our hidden talents we bring to the table. THis doesn’t make me less of a person or woman. Keith: “I think it’s great if you realize that femininity limits your potential hey, get rid of it. ” Does your masculinity… Read more »
Erin: interestingly, so do I, unfortunately I never found it to be reciprocal, it is a nice ideal and at times less than ideal is disappointing but not disheartening. Having a partner or friend for that matter that can appreciate your uniqueness regardless of gender, but in context to your sensitivity to a relationship is a gift to enjoy. I have learned a great deal from women, in fact in my younger years I made it a strong focus to learn from women. I spent three years of my life as an apprentice to women. I worked as a housekeeper… Read more »
The example of Angelina and Johnny Depp is another example of how the pay gap is more about performance than discrimination. Another example, a couple of years ago I had a couple of spare tickets to the Men’s and Women’s Australian Open Tennis finals. The men’s tickets were sold out months before and I could give them back, after several hour effort I sold the womens tickets for just over half price. I watched both finals, the womens final was good, the mens was better. The top women just can’t play tennis at the same standard as the top men.… Read more »
You’ve completely mischaracterized feminism and thus attack a straw man.
Feminism does not force women to have careers. It defends the unpaid labor of being a stay at home mom if that is what woman wants to do… and it works to make the world more accepting of stay at home dads by peeling away these strict gender rules.
Henry, the gender gap feminists say that women should be in equal numbers in top jobs. If women choose to stay at home and look after children they are ineligible for top jobs. Quotas for politicians, boards and top executives assume that women will participate in the workforce at roughly the same rate as men. By implication it is saying that women should get out and be equal in the workforce and it is prescribing quotas. Housework is NOT unpaid. It is untaxed. My wife is currently a stay at home housewife. She drives a Mercedes-Benz, plays tennis 3 times… Read more »
At the same time, we need to acknowledge, finally, that “masculinity” as a cultural style was never properly even “ours” to begin with. I think that depends on how one defines masculinity. I think masculinity belongs to men in the same way that Japanese culture belongs to the Japanese. It is defined by the attributes of the people to created and largely perpetuate it. Is it possible for someone outside of a culture to adopt the mannerisms and seemingly become a part of it? Yes, but that would not make American otaku Japanese anymore than it makes Japanese kids obsessed… Read more »
First of all, culture is not property in the same way that language is not property. Culture and language are forms of symbol manipulation, not objects which can be owned. So nothing cultural “belongs” to anyone in particular. Either you know French and speak it or you don’t. You don’t have to get the French government’s permission to speak it and you don’t have to pay royalties to do so. Likewise, masculinity is a series of styles and attitudes, behaviors and positionings. It doesn’t “belong” to men. Anyone who can pull it off is masculine. I know some incredibly masculine… Read more »
Knowing French would not make one French. Behaving in manners that are common in French society would not make one French either. That is what I meant by culture belonging to a group. It is the same a person’s style or manner of speaking. Most of the pop musicians imitate Michael Jackson’s style and music, but they are not him, even those doing their best to literally sound like him. The issue is not whether women can engage in the same behaviors that men do. Of course they can. The point is about how we distinguish masculinity from femininity. If… Read more »
Actually, and I say this reluctantly, the liberal position on masculinity is mainly incorrect. The sociobiological constraints on gender behavior are fairly compelling, although I admit there’s culture variation that’s epiphenomenal. NB I’m not the other Henry on here, if anyone’s confused.
I read this article three times in an effort to translate it into English. Near as I can tell, the author is saying there are many stories of manhood. Yes?
Wrong. The author is saying there are many storis of manhood, and he is the only one who can tell them.
Isn’t that really the mandate of this site, to tell you and me what our stories are.
Why don’t you leave the site then?
Oooo… someone stepped on a nerve.
most of the articles go above my head too, and I thought this was a site for men, plain simple, not convoluted insane rubbish. I think I read an article about a woman wanting the guy to have a sex change and then dying in a tent, or something, insane shit… this whole site is full of weird people writing their insanity and having it being published
I kinda think if someone’s going to accuse a piece of being a “hate-rant,” he should at least support that accusation with arguments and evidence.
Or, hey, maybe he thinks everyone will just take his word for it.
Color me unimpressed with some of these MRAs who are showing up to defend their movement.
Are you serious?
The author rants for two pages about how male characteristics are evil, wrong, twisted, yada yada yada. Then he proposes that all men adopt a new identity based on what he says. The English major and ultimate authority on who men should be. Of course, he did not come up with any of it. Both his “malignant man” diagnosis and his”benevolent woman” cure are straight from the feminist play book.
At first Antz, I didn’t feel right with your position, rereading the last paragraph it became clear and I have to agree with you. I simply replaced the view from masculine to feminine and realized that it’s bullshit. Femininity and it’s definition now belongs to women, Feminism has removed the discussion of cultural style of the feminine. Apparently masculinity (me) should be available to every estrogen contortion imaginable. Screw that!
Antz, did you even bother to read the piece? Where does Kaelin situate masculinity as “malignant” and women as “benevolent”? The entire thrust of his argument is that this sort of simplistic and reductionist dichotmoy should be rejected.
My point exactly, it’s too hard to understand. Life is too short.
What about those of us who only bathe in their blood because we’re kinda bored on a Tuesday night? If only they programmed something good on TV then for me…
I’m a sociologist who has made his peace with biological takes on sex/gender. Yes, there’s huge variation, but gender more or less centers itself on sex. I get a kick out of reading postmodern approaches at times, but I think that they unfortunately lead us away from truths we don’t want to face. I read Judith Butler, and believe that she mainly writes drivel, however. What should make us suspicious is that it’s English departments coming up with this stuff. They have no commitment to anything empirical, and no relationship these days to any cogent theory.
I agree with what you are saying, and I apologize in advance BUT … When it comes to “empirical” reasoning, why is peer review failing in Sociology? I avoid Humanities research as much as I can. However, I recently had unavoidable contact with two very deeply flawed papers, both in a journal called “Sex Roles”. Here is one of them. The paper attempts to establish hiring bias by white males using a sample size of 80. The authors had to include 5 self-selected “non-earnest” participants in order to reach a ridiculously thin X2 certainty of 96% (why even have a… Read more »
Sociology can very frequently be called the “Church of Sociology,” because journals are procrustrian in what they publish, and ideological. (By the way, I’m not going to be impressed by your field unless I know what it is, and maybe not then…) You’re generalizing, which you know of course. The study you cite, even if true, is not generalizable in any way, so it’s not science in any way. It MIGHT be program evaluation, which isn’t science but does tell programs what they’re doing. By the way, I don’t know of any sociologists who leave questionaries out by the cafeteria.… Read more »
“I’m not going to be impressed by your field unless I know what it is” I am not impressed by my field either. Biology. Usual publication limit is 99.99% or better certainty, which is far from adequate. Better than Sociology though. “The study you cite, even if true, is not generalizable in any way, so it’s not science in any way.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2004, Vol. 87, No. 6, 817–831. I agree, it is not science, it is junk. But they think it is science. “I don’t know of any sociologists who leave questionaries out by the… Read more »
Sociology is more stochastic, probabalistic. When done well. When not done well, it’s bs, of course. Snowball sampling isn’t scientific, at all.
I’m a jerk at times too.
Ha! Has to be the same Henry Vandenberg: “Snowball sampling is meaningless…”
I remember that well from discussion group.
Henry, snowball sampling is meaningless IF one presumes to build a statistical argument. If one intends to build a descriptive picture, a Weberian ideal type, it’s not a horribly unscientific methdology
And I’d be more impressed with YOU if you spelled my named right. I doubt if Weber would have snowball sampled. Not his thing. What discussion group?
Just a quick personal question: are you the same Henry Vandenberg who was a grad student in the UW Madison sociology department back in the mid 1980s?
No, I’m a 66 year old University of Texas PhD (1996). Got it late in life. I have a masters from UC Irvine from 1982.
Men’s studies follows ideological feminism and is a sub-group of women’s studies.
Hopefully, male studies will correct this ideological bias.
Wonderful piece. I minored in Queer Studies and it was the best choice I ever made!