Deviance and Social Control ~ Sociology 250

January 25th, 2016

Lecture Notes ~ Begin
Conversation on Kinsey Film
Film demonstrates a complex narrative about how we orient to our
bodies/sex
What is sex?
o The silence around the question tells us something where we do
not usually have conversations about it unless it is packaged up
and a board has approved a certain way of talking about it
There are many debates about what type of info is legitimate/should
be given to youth
o Whether topic of homosexuality should be introduced, where the
debate is around the stigma of it
o The belief is that if we start talking about these topics with our
youth then they think that it may encourage people to become
o Therefore there is this fear that if they learn about it then they will
do that
Are young people somehow unaffected by this fact?
These narratives are endorsed as legitimate because they express a
hetero-normative sexual information
o Therefore when we look at these stories of princesses and princes
meeting finally = not seen as a way of endorsing, however we are
establishing from a young age the dominance of one way of being
over another and therefore establishing deviance, where many
people exist on a continuum of sexuality
o As much as this cultural ideal is reproduced of the heteronormative influence, it does not express what we desire or do
o Therefore it is an interesting way of looking at it: what if princess
began relationship with princess? = Outrage due to weight on
heterosexuality
Therefore cultural scripts produce ways of being that are endorsed and
sanctioned
o Film gets at this idea of the significant means that we layer on
sex/sexuality
o One of the propositions made throughout the film was that sex
was simply discourse/socially constructed
o It is suggestive of the idea that if we can understand that sex is
simply stories that we attribute to certain ways of being is this
correct?

 This was deeply upsetting though, so is it just sets of

meanings that we must recognize as pre-produced? Can we
just see it as friction?
Is that all it is or is it more than this? Can we strip away this
structural narrative and say that it does not matter?
Because people place an incredible amount of meaning on
sex, so is it just friction?
What about love/betrayal/identity? Is this all just a story?
Discourse?
What about sexual assault and rape? Is this just friction?
Animals do not have sexual assault/rape = but this
concept is not there = socially constructed
o More sex because: change from religion to science, contraception,
less risk, media, birth control
Therefore there is an opening up of what is accepted
Has there been a massive change? Were people just not talking about
it? Are people just more willing to engage in conversation?
o More accepted for upper middle class than working class
o More accepted for men and women
o Therefore there are these resources/cultural capital that bring
about certain responses, but there will always be this way of
being measured
IMPORTANT
Kinsey discovered that despite the fact that when you speak to people
about whether they are gay/straight, most will choose one of them, yet
the vast majority of us exist somewhere else on this continuum
o People that believe themselves to be 100% gay or straight are
actually in the minority, and this frightens people
o Makes understanding confusing for people
Fact that we can change over our lifetimes and we can float along that
continuum, where what is being claimed is that we are diverse, we are
alive, and the fact that we change
o These things are all inherent and fundamentally true, yet when
we tell people this they retreat to these categories
o Problem with this is that these binaries are constituted in
opposition
Latin women = of men and there is within this terminology a
history that shows that M and F are opposite and attributed
through science/religious discourse certain sorts of attributes
We see how our society/culture has organized our lives in
these ways

o Straight/gay opposites too

Must always come back to this question of power: how is sex power?
o Must recognize that hetero-normativity is a form of power, where
we see how people that have not met this idea have been
marginalized/excluded from housing/not considered equal/etc.
because they do not meet that ideal
We create a metaphor for a type of ideal in terms of
sex/pregnancy = sperm swims to find the egg
o Also a form of power in desire, where submission/passivity is
power in showing this demonstration of masculinity
There are huge industries that reproduce these images of
desire
o Taking someones virginity = seen as a big deal, where the body
is an object (F body) and very much consumer discourse
Wealth comes into this
o History of Valentines Day = corporations produced this idea of a
union between men and women
o Before 20s love had nothing to do with it = economics/some type
of practical arrangement = love was not the determining factor as
it is today
o We put a lot of emphasis on love, so it is a new thing that we are
supposed to have this emotional connection
o Even the language of partnership is a bit confusing
It may not express what is actually happening
Something progressive about using the language of partner
and trouble this term only to describe gay couples
Language often fails, ignoring the details of our everyday life
Ball and chain = women holding you back/restricting you
Therefore must consider the many ways that they explore human
sexuality as a rich set of meanings some contradictory, other
repressive, and others socially constructed but still with a lot of
cultural weight
o Ex: talking to pedophile in movie/forms of assault and violence
and therefore a form of power = used as a way of harming people
and just because we can recognize it as a socially constructed
category with medicine does not in any way reduce the fact that it
is a significant form of violence
Must consider the ways that age/gender/sexual orientation/class/race
= all of these things are relevant to how sex is understood and the
meanings that we have attributed to it = it is never just friction
o Only way that we could say that it is just friction would be to
scrape away all of this around it and that is almost impossible

Samantha Quans Article:

The way in which conversations about obesity are prevalent/epidemic
o However no indicators that obesity is bad for ones health
o The idea of the obesity epidemic and fat phobia is bad for your
health and the very claim that obesity is bad for your health is
bad for your health
Dominant medical message = obesity leads to health consequences
o Increased risk of stroke
o Hypertension
o Mobility difficulties
o High blood pressure
o Heart attack
o Diabetes
o Cancer
Why do people go to the gym?
o Feel better
o Reduce stress
o Look more sexually attractive
o There are 2 discourses: Health and wellness VS. vanity
More culturally acceptable to make meaning grounded in
health discourse, but the fitness industry must recognize
that the POV is actually about looking good
Qualify things
o We are well connected to this idea that being overweight is bad
for our health
Direct people towards lifestyle changes = therefore communicated in a
way **
o Literature that challenges these ways, and the medical model,
however dont really look at them
o The medicalization of obesity and fatness is one way that they
exert control over the body using a form of authoritative
knowledge
o But intertwined with the way that we understand and condemn
the body as a health problem, it is also a beauty problem
o We often conflate these things/see them as referencing each
other

o Therefore when we condemn the body/fatness/etc. and weight

ourselves/look at these measures of BMI these are the ways that
we conflate these ideas
o We constantly pair ideas of beauty with success and along these
lines conflate beauty with happiness/status/etc. all to shape our
beliefs about beautiful people
Can ask children who is the happiest/good/most talented = beautiful
people
o Therefore attractiveness translates to rewards (things like
jobs/marriage/friendships/etc.) all on the basis of attractiveness
o Thinness signifies health in this culture (what medicine often tells
us) and also provokes a view of the individual as having valued
restraint/social rewards
Vs. fat bodies are stigmatized and thought of as an
uncontrolled/ugly/chaos/etc.
o Therefore starting to see how we hold a very strong belief that
bodies are moral models/texts and we read moral things into the
body
o These models state that fat is bad and significant pressure for
them to lose weight/focus on better work ethics with self control
and restraint
o Notable here is the assumption that the body is controllable/that
we can manipulate it and transform