feature article joshua gamson and pearl latteier do media monsters devour diversity? Photo by A. Pierce Bounds, Dickinson College Politicians and critics have long lamented that the rise of huge media conglomerates means the death of diversity in newspapers and on the airwaves. But research suggests that media conglomeration, however distasteful, does not necessarily reduce diversity. At the Philadelphia airport, local and network media reporters await the return of Song Yongyi, a librarian from Dickinson College who had been imprisoned in China while doing research on the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Their reports will be shaped in part by the kinds of news organizations they work for. Something odd is going on when Ted Turner, Trent Lott, Al Franken, the National Rifle Association, Jesse Jackson and Walter Cronkite agree. Opposition to media consolidation has turned these adversaries on most issues into bedfellows. When the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) prepared to further loosen restrictions on media ownership—a move approved by the FCC in June 2003 and then blocked by a circuit court three months later—the decision was met with a motley chorus of criticism. FCC commissioner Jonathan Adelstein called the problem “the McDonaldization of American media.” Former Senator Carol Moseley-Braun stated that “we have to ensure that there is a diversity of ownership, a diversity of voice.” And Cronkite, the veteran and widely-respected news anchor, declared concentration “an impediment to a free and independent press.” The new rules would “stifle debate, inhibit new ideas, and shut out smaller businesses trying to compete,” said Turner, whose vast holdings include CNN, TBS, and HannaBarbera cartoons, and who is a major shareholder in parent company Time Warner AOL. “There are really five companies that control 90 percent of what we read, see and hear. It’s not healthy,” Turner added. Critics and policymakers have long been troubled by consolidation among America’s mainstream media. Opponents of the Communications Act of 1934—which established the FCC and allocated the majority of the airwaves to commercial broadcasters—warned that commercial, network-dominated Contexts, Vol. 3, Issue 3, pp. 26-32, ISSN 1536-5042 electronic ISSN 153-6052© 2004 by the American Sociological Association. All rights reserved. Send requests for permission to reprint to: Rights and Permissions, University of California Press, Journals Division, 2000 Center Street, Suite 303, Berkeley, CA 94704-1223. 26 contexts summer 2004 needs and interests of America’s diverse population, and not just those of its elite. When a small group of “gatekeepers” controls how information circulates, the spectrum of available ideas, images and opinions narrows. Big media companies prefer programming and voices that conform to their own financial interests, and they make it nearly impossible for smaller, independent companies to offer alternatives. This frightening vision is intuitively reasonable. But a close look at decades of scholarship on the relationship between media ownership and content diversity uncovers a surprising story—one much more complicated than the vision of media monsters gobbling up diversity. Scholars have zeroed in on three broadly defined types of diversity in media: format diversity, demographic diversity and idea diversity. The research suggests that when it comes to “diversity,” media-consolidation critics are, if not barking up the wrong tree, at least in need of a more nuanced, sharper, more carefully directed bark. Indeed, effective opposition to media ownership consolidation may require, ironically, acknowledging the ways media giants sometimes promote diverse content. format diversity Offices in Berkeley, California for KPFA, the flagship radio station of the independent Pacifica Broadcasting Network. Consolidated ownership of many local radio stations, most notably by Clear Channel Communications, has dramatically decreased local programming while increasing the number of syndicated shows that air simultaneously in multiple markets. radio would squelch, as the ACLU director then put it, the few small stations that “voice critical or radical views.” And in 1978, the Supreme Court ruled “it is unrealistic to expect true diversity from a commonly owned station-newspaper combination.” Nonetheless, during the past two decades—and with a big boost from the Telecommunications Act of 1996—media ownership has become increasingly concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. Time and Warner Brothers merged into the world’s biggest media company in 1989. A decade later, Viacom and CBS set a new record for the largest corporate merger ever. And the 2000 AOL-TimeWarner merger was several times bigger than that. The critics’ logic is this: Citizens need access to diverse sources of news and opinions to make well-informed decisions about how to vote and live. Also, media should address the Suppose you turn on your TV after dinner, and every single channel is broadcasting either an American Idol spin-off or a makeover show. That would mean the after-dinner time slot in your area lacks “format diversity”—or variety in programming—turning everything into, as FCC commissioner Adelstein describes it, “Big Mac, fries and a Coke.” In particular, observers worry that consolidation undercuts local content. Most experts agree that this has happened to radio since the late 1990s, as Clear Channel Communications has gobbled up stations throughout the country. Programming that was once determined locally is now overseen by Clear Channel programmers headquartered elsewhere, and local disc jockeys have been replaced by a single show that plays simultaneously in multiple markets. Consolidation of radio ownership encourages this centralized, cost-cutting format. The same logic would be expected in newspapers and television; running wire service copy is cheaper than employing staff reporters, and standardized production is less expensive than hiring a team of local broadcasters. Of course, because different audiences are attracted to different content and format types, it also makes business sense for a conglomerate to maintain different sorts of programming—including locally produced content—just as General Motors produces lines of cars for different types of customers. This can actually promote format diversity. In a market with three competing stations, argues communications law expert summer 2004 contexts 27 A bank of television sets that are all tuned to the same station in an electronics store in Emeryville, California. Consolidation among media companies does not simply increase or decrease the diversity of media content and formats. Some large companies homogenize their offerings, but others diversify to attract different audiences. Edwin Baker, each station will try to attract the largest possible audience by providing fare that the majority prefers. The stations will wind up sounding pretty similar. In contrast, if all three stations are owned by the same company, ownership has no incentive to compete against itself, and will try to make the stations dissimilar in order to attract different audiences. Similarly, it makes sense for entertainment conglomerates to make their various holdings more rather than less distinct in format, and to build a “diverse portfolio” of media properties. Viacom does not want its UPN (“America’s Top Model,” “The Parkers,” “WWE Smackdown”) to be like its CBS (“CSI,” “Judging Amy,” “Late Show with David Letterman”), its Sundance Channel (documentaries on HIV/AIDS, the films of Patrice Chereau) to air the same kind of material as its Spike TV (“Sports Illustrated’s 40th Anniversary Swimsuit Special”), or its Downtown Press (“chick-lit” like Alexandra Potter’s Calling Romeo) to publish what its Atria Press does (“academic” titles like bell hooks’ The Will to Change). This multiple-brand logic promotes rather than reduces format diversity. Research suggests that media consolidation does not simply increase or decrease format diversity. Some studies compare the fate of local or public-affairs programming in independent versus conglomerated companies. Others look for shifts in content after a publication is bought by a bigger company. The results are tellingly mixed. Some find big differences between the offerings of independent and corporate- 28 contexts summer 2004 owned outlets, but ambiguous effects on format diversity. Others find little or no difference at all. For example, a 1995 study found that two years after Gannett—owner of USA Today, among many other papers—bought the Louisville Courier-Journal, the paper devoted almost 30 percent more space to news than it had before, and 7 percent less space to advertising. On the other hand, the average story became shorter, the percentage of hard-news stories smaller, and wire stories came to outnumber staff-written ones. Within the expanded news reporting, the proportions of local, national, and international news changed little. The paper became more like USA Today, but simultaneously the “news hole”— the amount of content consisting of news reporting— increased from when it was independently owned. Other studies of Gannett-bought papers—in Arkansas and Florida— found that international and national news decreased after the company took over. Local news, often in the form of crime or disaster stories, actually increased after consolidation. A recent large-scale, five-year study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism also found mixed results. The researchers asked who produces “higher quality” local television news, which they defined as news that “covers the whole community,” is “significant and informative,” demonstrates “enterprise and courage,” and is “fair, balanced, and accurate,” “authoritative” and “highly local.” Although they did not isolate “format diversity” in their study, they nonetheless offer some clues about the relationship between ownership and formats. On the one hand, just as anti-consolidation critics would predict, of 172 newscasts and 23,000 stories, researchers found the “best” programs overall tended to come from smaller station groups or from stations affiliated with but not owned by networks. On the other hand, they also found that “local ownership offered little protection against newscasts being very poor.” As an evening’s cursory viewing might confirm, local news is weak regardless of whether or not it is part of a conglomerate. Even more to the point, the researchers found that stations whose parent companies owned a newspaper in the same market—exactly the kind of “cross-ownership” that consolidation critics worry about— produced “higher-quality” newscasts, including more locally relevant content. They ran more stories on “important community issues” and fewer celebrity and human-interest stories. Cross-ownership shifted the types of programming provided, but in the direction most critics of cross-ownership seem to favor. Moreover, being owned by a small company, while an advantage when it came to “quality,” was certainly no guar- antee of a diverse mix of local and non-local content. For a glimpse of how big media corporations—aided by government deregulation—sometimes do reduce format diversity, look at the current state of commercial radio. In a series of scathing articles for Salon, Eric Boehlert exposed Clear Channel as “radio’s big bully,” known for “allowing animals to be killed live on the air, severing long-standing ties with community and charity events, laying off thousands of workers, homogenizing playlists, and a corporate culture in which dirty tricks are a way of life.” Concentrated, conglomerate ownership is certainly a prerequisite for being a big bully, and Clear Channel has used its power to undercut local programming and standardize rather than diversify both music and talk on radio. But radio’s striking homogeneity is not just the result of concentrated ownership. As Boehlert wrote in 2001, radio “sucks” (similarsounding songs, cookie-cutter stars) because record companies, through independent promoters, pay radio stations huge amounts to get their songs on playlists. With or without Clear Channel, material without money behind it—alternative styles of music, music by artists who do not fit the standard celebrity Mergers and acquisitions in the media industry changed ownership of the cables attached to this television set four times in the past 12 years. Each change involved the purchase of a smaller company by a larger one. Each change also increased the number of channels available to subscribers and the cost of monthly service. summer 2004 contexts 29 Photo by Mr. Kenn Even though critics worry about cross-ownership of news outlets, television stations whose parent companies own a newspaper in the same market may produce higher quality broadcasts. model, innovative and therefore risky formats—does not get airplay. It is not that ownership has no effect on format diversity, only that the impact is neither uniform nor inevitable. It is instead influenced by particular corporate strategies and the inner-workings of particular media industries. demographic diversity In everyday conversations, diversity usually refers to demographics: whether a workplace employs or a school enrolls people of various racial, ethnic, gender and economic categories. How the media represents and addresses the interests of America’s diverse populations—who gets seen and heard— is, appropriately, often in question. Studies routinely find that the individuals appearing in mass media are disproportionately white, middle-class men between the ages of 20 and 60. But they have not figured out how, if at all, concentrated corporate ownership affects representation. This should not be surprising. A gap between the diversity of the population and media images of that population existed long before the rise of the media giants. And it clearly cuts across commercial and non-commercial media: studies of public broadcasting’s guests show little demographic diversity, while daytime talk shows 30 contexts summer 2004 produced by for-profit conglomerates—however tawdry— offer some of the greatest demographic diversity on television. Both government agencies and scholars have assumed that the key to ensuring demographically diverse content is demographically diverse ownership. Until recently, the FCC and the courts attempted to promote this kind of diversity by giving licensing preferences to minority-owned (and sometimes female-owned) broadcast stations. The FCC halted the licensing preferences in 1995, and the rapid consolidation of deregulated media companies makes it even less likely that companies and stations will be minority-owned today. Although it might seem reasonable to think that fewer minority-owned companies will mean less demographically diverse content—in surveys, minority owners do report being more likely to produce “minority” programming—studies of content do not back up such claims. Two studies comparing minority-owned (African American and Latino) radio stations to white-owned stations in the 1980s found that owners’ ethnic backgrounds did not significantly affect demographic representation in their programming. There are many good reasons to pursue affirmative action in media ownership and employment, but ensuring diversity in media content is not one of them. If anything has promoted demographic diversity in media content, it is the rise of niche-marketing and narrow-casting, which target previously excluded demographic groups with images of themselves. Although minority owners often typically start that process—gay marketers tapping the gay niche, Latino publishers targeting Latino readers—it proceeds regardless of whether they remain owners. Indeed, niche marketing has become a media-giant staple: Time Warner AOL started the highly successful People en Español in 1996, NBC-owned Bravo produced the summer 2003 hit “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy,” Robert Johnson became the first AfricanAmerican billionaire when he sold Black Entertainment Television to Viacom in 2002, and the largest shareholder of radio’s Hispanic Broadcasting Corporation is Clear Channel. Multicultural content and oligopoly media ownership are clearly not incompatible. harder to discern. Generally speaking, one might observe that the American media environment has been an inhospitable place for radical, dissenting voices before, during and after the rise of media giants. More specifically, scholars have found that viewpoint diversity does not line up neatly with particular ownership structures. For example, the recent Project for Excellence in Journalism study of local television measured how many sources were cited in a story and how many points of view were represented in stories involving a dispute or controversy. Locally owned stations presented no more viewpoint diversity than non-locally idea diversity Almost everyone pays lip service to the notion that citizenship thrives when people are exposed to a variety of contending viewpoints. As the number of owners decreases, critics of media conglomeration argue, so does the number of voices contributing to the “marketplace of ideas.” Media conglomerates with holdings in all kinds of other media and nonmedia industries have the power to censor the news in accordance with their interests. There is plenty of anecdotal evidence that consolidation tips content against ideas critical of the corporate owners. The Los Angeles Times, for example, failed in 1980 to cover a taxpayer-funded $2 billion water project that stood to benefit the Times-Mirror Company. Likewise, NBC A newspaper stand offering both mainstream and alternative publications. remained silent on the 1990 boycott of their owner Studies of newspaper content suggest that independently owned papers are no more likely to include diverse ideas and perspectives than are papers GE. And CBS’s America Tonight show had a proowned by conglomerates. tobacco bias in the mid-1990s, when the Loews Corporation, owner of Lorillard Tobacco, held a conowned ones, and small companies no more than big ones. trolling interest in CBS. Disney-owned ABC News even canNetwork-owned-and-operated stations did better than smaller, celled an investigative report about sloppy background checks less well-funded affiliates. The weak connection between viewat Disneyworld. A recent study also found a “synergy bias” point diversity and monopoly ownership is actually old news. In among media giants, in which media companies slip unana classic 1985 study, Robert Entman examined the first page and nounced promotions of their other products and services into editorial section of 91 newspapers in three types of markets: newscasts—as when ABC devoted two hours of Good competitive local markets with multiple, separately owned Morning America to Disneyworld’s 25th Anniversary. In short, papers; monopolistic markets with only one local newspaper; media corporations act in their own special interests, promote and “quasi-monopolies,” where joint-owned or joint-operated ideas that suit those interests, and sometimes “spike” stories papers share a market. He measured diversity as the number of through self-censorship. people or organizations mentioned in each story, and the numBeyond these forms of direct self-interest, though, the conber of stories that presented conflicting opinions. The study nection between ownership concentration and idea diversity is summer 2004 contexts 31 found that on no measure did independent papers present more diversity than papers in monopoly or quasi-monopoly situations. In all of the papers, more than half the stories involved fewer than two actors, and less than one-tenth presented conflicting opinions. In other words, regardless of who owned them or how competitive their markets were, the papers were not exactly brimming with lively debate and diverse ideas. centrated, conglomerated media ownership facilitates diverse media formats, opinions and demographic representations. A genuine commitment to diverse media content may require an unsettling task: encouraging those conditions even while opposing the corporate domination of media, feeding the giants while trying to topple them. ■ recommended resources the challenge for media reformers The radical concentration of global media ownership has spawned at least one excellent, rebellious child: a vibrant, smart, broad-based media reform movement. Groups like Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting, the Media Alliance, the Center for Digital Democracy, Independent Media Centers, the People’s Communication Charter, and many others, are growing in strength, alliance and effectiveness. There are many reasons to object to media oligopolies that research on diversity does not speak to: the concentration of private power over a public resource in a democracy is wrong in principle; standardized media are part of a distasteful, branded, chainstore life of Barnes and Noble, Starbucks, and Disney; corporate, multinational media are increasingly unaccountable to the public; and a corporate press is probably a less adversarial press. But the research on media concentration should challenge this reform movement to relinquish at least one sacrosanct belief. If our goal is vibrant, diverse media content—what the People’s Communication Charter, an international activist group, refers to as the “plurality of opinions and the diversity of cultural expressions and languages necessary for democracy”— then research suggests that concentrated ownership is not equivalent to reduced diversity. Sometimes corporate media giants homogenize, and sometimes they do not. Sometimes they shut people up and stifle dissent, and sometimes they open up extra space for new people to be visible and vocal. That they do so not because they are committed to the public good but because diversity sometimes serves their interests does not negate the outcome. And, romantic notions notwithstanding, independently owned and noncommercial media hardly guarantee diverse content. Just as there are different kinds of diversity, there are also different kinds of ownership concentration. A single corporation might own all the major outlets in a single market, or a chain of newspapers, or a film production company and a theater chain, or music, television and book companies. These different kinds of concentration promote and inhibit different kinds of content diversity. Researchers, activists, and policymakers must identify the conditions under which con- 32 contexts summer 2004 Bagdikian, Ben H. The Media Monopoly (6th ed.). Boston: Beacon Press, 2000. In this new edition of a now classic book, Bagdikian presents an impassioned argument against media concentration. Baker, C. Edwin. Media, Markets, and Democracy. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Baker demonstrates that media products are not like other commodities, and he argues that market competition alone fails to give media audiences what they want. Columbia Journalism Review. “Who Owns What?” Online. http://www.cjr.org/tools/owners. This informative website lists the holdings of approximately 50 major media companies. Croteau, David, and William Hoynes. The Business of Media: Corporate Media and the Public Interest. Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press, 2001. This book contrasts two different views of media conglomeration: the market model, which regards people as consumers, and the public-interest model, which regards people as citizens. Compaine, Benjamin M., and Douglas Gomery. Who Owns the Media? Competition and Concentration in the Mass Media Industry. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2000. This book provides a detailed look at the current media industry and challenges common assumptions about the dangers of ownership concentration. Entman, Robert M. “Newspaper Competition and First Amendment Ideals: Does Monopoly Matter?” Journal of Communication 35, 2 (1985): 147-65. This study of newspapers in competitive and noncompetitive markets concludes that market competition does not guarantee content diversity. Horwitz, Robert. “On Media Concentration and the Diversity Question,” Department of Communication, University of California, San Diego, 2003. Online. http://communication.ucsd.edu/people/ ConcentrationpaperICA.htm. This is a careful discussion of the media ownership debate, empirical research and the virtues of a “mixed media system.” Napoli, Philip M. “Deconstructing the Diversity Principle.” Journal of Communication 49, 4 (1999): 7-34. Napoli argues that the FCC policies on media ownership have long been based on unproven assumptions about the relationship between ownership diversity and content diversity. ©2012 The Weinstein Company mediations Tarantino’s depiction of the Ku Klux Klan as a group of ill-equipped buffoons challenged dominant notions of white supremacy and masculinity. functions as the evil sidekick to his master’s nefariousness; both characters have access to capital and exercise obscene forms of power. But unlike DiCaprio’s Candie, Jackson’s character is comic: he is the passive, stupid, older black male figure who functions seamlessly within his own subordination. Black passivity, in the film, is funny and repellant. Or as Frantz Fanon, in his polemic Black Skin, White Masks, tells us, “For not only must the black man be black; he must black in relation to the white man.” At the very least, Tarantino’s depiction of a passive black population slanders the enslaved and misunderstands history. At the Sesquicentennial of Emancipation, we might productively remember that the enslaved walked away and became “contraband.” Their status as soldiers (that is, men with guns) came far, far later. On the contrary, white masculinity is the identity most associated with mastery, wisdom, and grand narrative. It is anything but passive. We see this in Tarantino’s cinematic attempt to spoof the KKK: in Django, this group of white men are buffoons, complaining that the eyeholes in their hoods are not sewn in the right place and it’s blocking their view of the black people they are trying to kill. The comedic scene displaying white masculinity as stupid, racist, and violent is, perhaps, meant to undercut or justify all of the violence yet to come. Or, maybe it is meant to lighten the mood, nothing more than a moment of irony? As we know, KKK costumes are symbolic of white power, and yet this scene turns them into clothes sown by women (who is the Betsy Ross behind the KKK?). In any case, the scene domesticates the violence of white men, rendering it dumb and ineffective, less repellant than its racialized counterpart. In the end, both colonial slavery and the contemporary context of the global war have economic roots, so maybe a high-budget, high grossing film is just the way to take them on. The former used dehumanized bodies as capital, the latter engages systematic brutality for politico-economic ends. The global war and the global prison complex rely on celling black and brown bodies, a process that emerges from the ideological sustenance of both black passivity and racialized violence. Can we even imagine a film that depicts Muslims successfully killing (white) Americans in a passionate, rageful way as a redemptive-glorified operation that reveals the white imperial state and nationalized racism? I suspect such a film will never be made. Historical and contemporary patterns of racialized punishment reveal Django’s absurdity rather easily. This film is not only a transparent attempt at moral elevation, but an act of bad conscience: a way to lick the wounds of the past by disarming contemporary black and brown rage through fictional vindication. Moon Charania is in the gender and sexuality studies department at Tulane University. She studies visual culture, transnational feminism, and the politics of postcolonialism. queasy questions about media effects by cynthia chris In February 2013, an online petition asking NBC to withdraw or recast an episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit (SVU) garnered thousands of electronic signatures. The episode, “Monster’s Legacy,” was slated to guest-star former boxer Mike Tyson and scheduled to air on the eve of One Billion Rising, a global event tied to Valentine’s Day and designed to raise awareness of sexual violence. NBC responded as though it had simply stumbled into bad timing, rescheduling the episode and capitalizing 60 contexts.org on the protest by advertising “Monster’s Legacy” as “The controversial episode you must see.” But the complaints went beyond the episode’s timing. Marcie Kaveney, a rape crisis counselor, launched a Change.org petition when she learned that Tyson would appear. She says SVU is a show that is seen by survivors as “their show because it is their stories.” Most of these stories involve sexual assault, incest, or the sexual abuse of children. Interviewed on CBC Radio’s show Q, Kaveney said that survivors find “comfort and solace” in SVU, since it assures them that someone will “stand up for them and see justice for them.” In this light, casting Tyson seemed unconscionably callous to many viewers, given that in 1992, when Tyson was already a deposed heavyweight champion, he was convicted of rape. He served half of a six-year sentence. On the show, Tyson played Reggie Rhodes, a character sentenced to death for murder. In the plot, prosecutors imitating art? The petition and the dedicated viewership it revealed reminds us that media consumers relate to the texts that they encounter in all kinds of ways. Pure imitation is perhaps the least of these responses, and there is a range of opinions about how much media influences its consumers. Among critical media studies scholars, there is near-consensus that proof of the old theories of “hypodermic” or “magic bullet” media effect is rare. Audiences, these scholars believe, are active and discerning, basing their choices and actions on multiple factors; the media plays an auxiliary role that is difficult to pin down. In landmark studies such as 1955’s Personal Influence, “Encoding and Decoding” by Stuart Hall, Janice ©2013 NBC Universal, Inc. represented the victim as a random victim, but, as Detective Olivia Benson (played by Mariska Hargitay) uncovers, he was once the leader of a childhood gang rape of Rhodes. Haunted by shame, Rhodes had never revealed his past as a victim of several predatory men, until Detective Benson was able to bring it out, leading to Rhodes’s exoneration and the imprisonment of another of his childhood abusers (played here by a cast-againsttype Ed Asner). The kind of fandom Marcie Kaveney describes, where victims watch to see other victims vindicated, suggests a twist on Seymour Feshbach’s “catharsis theory.” In his 1971 article on “Television and Aggression,” Feshbach observed decreased aggression among boys watching violent TV, suggesting that the media could provide a safe outlet for dangerous urges. Focusing on the victim rather than potential perpetrators of violence, Kaveney’s comments suggest a scenario in which disturbing content can be redemptive when it provides an alternative ending. Heroic rescue, punishment for the perpetrator, healing for the survivor—any of these more “happy endings” may have eluded real-life survivors but give them some solace now. The public’s reaction to Tyson’s role on Law & Order SVU reminds us that we interact with media in complex ways. Radway’s Reading the Romance, Henry Jenkins’s Textual Poachers and Nationwide Television Studies, Ellen Seiter’s The Internet Playground, and Mary Gray’s Out in the Country, media sociologists and audience researchers have discovered an array of surprising uses of popular culture. Virtually none involve “direct” effects. This is to say, critical media studies assert that a violent movie will not, on its own, make you violent. (From this perspective, it should follow that no cathartic television episode can heal all wounds.) interpretations of, say, heavy metal music or first-person shooter videogames, the story is that these media are causal factors in real-world violence. In 1990, the parents of two young Nevada men sued members of the band Judas Priest, claiming that subliminal messages in their songs had driven their sons to suicide. While the case was dismissed, media producers have since been regularly taken to court or excoriated by the press when crimes or accidents “copycatted” from their entertainment have taken Disturbing content might be redemptive if it provides an alternative ending. Psychologists studying media violence have come to some different conclusions. Many of their studies have suggested that exposure to violent media increases aggression on at least a shortterm basis, reaffirming Albert Bandura’s findings in the famous “Bobo doll” experiments at Stanford in the early 1960s. In the psychology literature, a clear picture of long-term effects still remains elusive. Neither Leonard Eron and Rowell Huesmann’s longitudinal studies, which began in the 1960s, nor subsequent work in the same vein, have unpacked the degree to which media influences behavior, or individuals prone to aggression self-select violent media. And when it comes to mainstream Contexts, Vol. 12, No. 3, pp. 60-62. ISSN 1536-5042, electronic ISSN 1537-6052. © 2013 American Sociological Association. http://contexts.sagepub.com. DOI:10.1177/1536504213499881 place. (Yes, we are talking about one form of media taking another to task.) For example, too much may have been made of the fact that the shooters in the Columbine High School massacre, which killed 13 in 1999, were fans of the games Wolfenstein 3D and Doom and loved the movie Natural Born Killers. Natural Born Killers made over $50 million at the box office, and thousands of people play the same video games without taking the action outside their living rooms. Interest in the effects of media violence on heavy consumers, especially children, abounds. On February 18, 2013, the Christian Science Monitor reported on a study from the journal Pediatrics, which, instead of assessing aggression SUMMER 2013 contexts 61 mediations following exposure to violent media, monitored apparent increases in empathy after exposure to media showing cooperation. The next day, the New York Times covered University of Illinois professor Carol L. Tilley’s examination of the interviews that had informed the influential 1954 takedown of comic books, Seduction of the Innocent by Frederic Wertham. Tilley found that Seduction’s author had manipulated data to serve his anti-comic agenda, blaming the medium for turning juveniles into delinquents and encouraging homosexuality. (Batman and Robin in tights? Kids might get ideas!) The same week these stories appeared and more than two months after Adam Lanza killed 8 adults (including himself and his mother) and 20 schoolchildren in Connecticut, CBS This Morning and PBS Newshour were apparently having déjà vu, reporting breathlessly about Lanza’s obsession with Call of Duty and other violent video games. To be fair, the man who took the lives of 77 and wounded over 300 in a violent 2011 spree in Norway, openly horse-backed, pistol-packing vengeance? All we can agree on is that Django raked in over $150 million at the box office and was rewarded with five Oscar nominations. The rest is an open debate fueled more by passion than science. what the watchdogs watch Serious conversation about the material effects of America’s gun-loving culture has long been shunted from politics. For example, since 1995 Congress, pressured by the National Rifle Association, had prevented the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from funding research on gun violence as a public health issue. In January 2013, President Barack Obama embraced increased gun control efforts and rescinded the ban with an executive order “directing the Centers for Disease Control to research the causes and prevention of gun violence.” Better late than never, thought many. A gruesome string of mass shootings had left 6 dead and 13 wounded in Tucson, Arizona; 12 dead and 58 injured in Aurora, Colorado; and the Sandy Hook murders. Tragically, these Critical media studies assert that a violent movie will not, on its own, make you violent. claims to have “trained” by playing Modern Warfare 2 and World of Warcraft (the same game famously played by outspoken marriage equality proponent and professional football player Chris Kluwe). The point is, we really don’t know why so many are drawn to these entertainments, nor to what effect. We don’t even have a firm grasp on the scope and received meanings of violence contained within popular entertainment products. Film critics scurried to parse distinctions between realistic and cartoonish scenes of mayhem in Django Unchained, many rendering it as both an educational look at the brutality of slavery and a cathartic revenge fantasy. Others (myself included) found it a nauseating, narcissistic bore (see the related essay elsewhere in this issue). But has it led anyone to exact 62 contexts.org were just the most spectacular of the over 30,000 gun-related deaths in the United States in 2012. If research on gun violence withered during the federal funding moratorium, rigorous studies on the relationships among media and other kinds of violence have been even less supported, and their industries are just as vocal about keeping scrutiny off their products. For instance, videogame industry representatives have talked a good game about keeping sexual violence out of their releases, while criticism has still dogged the eroticized violence and implied threats of sexual assault in Hitman, Tomb Raider, and Grand Theft Auto. At the same time, consumers like Marcie Kaveney have proclaimed they’d stop watching SVU— or the whole of NBC—because of its offensive episode, but audiences were down for all programming the night “Monster’s Legacy” aired. Even powerhouses like Modern Family and American Idol (neither a hotbed of non-verbal violence) went unwatched, too. Maybe everyone was catching up on Downton Abbey, preparing tax returns, or finally slogging through Fifty Shades of Grey? In another, more important question, for survivors who were fans of SVU, at least until this “slap in the face” (Kaveney’s characterization of the casting stunt), isn’t it retraumatizing to watch scenarios similar to their own victimization, again and again? Wouldn’t they have spurned SVU long before this episode? For my own part, I had long included the Law & Order franchise in my TV diet, until a harrowing 2008 episode in which Hargitay-as-Benson, undercover in a women’s prison, was cornered by a gun-wielding male guard. No amount of stolid narrative closure—one pleasure of SVU has always been that bad guys get caught—could temper the graphic fear contained in those scenes, and I never went back. I wouldn’t call the effect precisely hypodermic, but there was something sticky and toxic at work in the show, and I could not overlook it ever again. So what makes one person’s nightmare trigger another person’s electronic therapy session and a third person’s harmless entertainment? Are some provoked to aggression by exposure to violent media? Are individuals prone to violence for other reasons drawn to—and perhaps even provided a harmless outlet in—violent media? Are the rest of us unscathed, or even benefitted in surprising ways? We have little to go on but gut feelings, and for now, mine is telling me to reach for the remote control. Cynthia Chris is in the media culture department at the College of Staten Island. She is the author of Watching Wildlife and co-editor of Cable Visions: Television Beyond Broadcasting and Media Authorship. pedagogies teaching and learning beyond bullying Early one Monday morning in December of last year, we arrived tired and excited at West High School (all names are pseudonyms) wearing T-shirts and carrying a banner—all with The Beyond Bullying Project logo. The storytelling booth, a wooden box measuring 7 by 3 feet, had been installed the previous week, complete with recording equipment, lighting, foam to dampen the sound and ensure privacy, and a folding chair. Student advisors to the project had decorated the booth with construction paper rainbows, feather boas, and posters. “Tell Your Story” flyers hung throughout the hallways. For the next two weeks, our team of researchers and students was stationed at a table next to the booth, handing out chocolate, granola bars, raffle tickets, and business cards that encouraged people to “Follow Us” on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. As students, teachers, and staff walked by, we invited them to enter the booth and tell a story about lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) sexuality: they were invited to talk about themselves, someone else, a rumor, a joke, a question, or a political opinion; it could feel big and important or silly, ordinary, or even boring; it could be true, we said, but it did not have to be. Any story about LGBTQ sexuality was welcome, and no one from the school would hear their story or know what story they told. We were intentionally non-directive. “Any story,” we cajoled. The invitations left space for students and adults to think, reflect, enter the booth individually or in groups, and, often, return over and over again. 80 contexts.org The first morning, Evan, our main school contact, was chatting with us when Randee, a queer girl in her first year at West High, approached the booth—one of only a few students who had spoken to us. Evan had been working closely with us from the start of our project. He often described himself as gay and worked closely with queer students. Randee described herself as queer. She was of mixed race, round-bodied, with acne, long brown hair, braces, and an easy smile. On this day, she wore long, slouched shorts and sneakers. The school campus was quiet as most students were in class, so we asked where Randee was supposed to be. The two laughed as Evan pointed to Randee. “This,” he said, “is what truancy looks like.” Randee smiled and explained that her teacher had kicked her out of class, so she had nowhere to be. Randee wanted to tell a story about losing friends after she came out in eighth grade. Initially, Randee asked one of the team members to go into the booth with her—she was unsure she could tell a story without prompting—but after a few minutes chatting, Randee decided to tell the story on her own. When she exited a few minutes later, Randee seemed quite pleased with herself. Later that morning, Randee returned. She did not have a story to tell this time, but she preferred hanging out at the booth to attending geometry class. Randee spent a lot of time around the storytelling booth during our two weeks at West High. She encouraged friends to tell their stories, ate her lunch with us, and played basketball © Beyond Bullying Project by jessica fields, laura mamo, jen gilbert, and nancy lesko The booth where high school students shared their stories of LGBTQ sexuality. one afternoon with one of the research assistants. But not everyone was happy to see us. We encountered students, teachers, and administrators who kept their distance from the booth, their eyes down as they walked by, and ignored the team’s coaxing to get involved. The booth changed the patterned uses of school spaces. Inside the booth, students, teachers, and staff told their stories about LGBTQ crushes, families, friendships, break-ups, coming out, ambivalence, bravery, and aspirations that go well beyond the framework of bullying. Outside the booth, students, teachers, and staff figured out where they stood—literally and figuratively—in relation to a booth devoted to LGBTQ sexuality. re-framing bullying Evan, Randee, and The Beyond Bullying Project team live in a surprising and © Beyond Bullying Project The storytelling booth affords participants the chance to think, reflect, and speak out about bullying. welcome moment—one in which people generally agree that anti-gay bullying constitutes a social problem to which policies, communities, and schools must respond. Increasingly, pedagogy, policymaking, and public conversations about LGBTQ youth in the United States focus— almost exclusively—on preventing antiLGBTQ bullying. Schools aim to minimize the risk of depression and suicide among LGBTQ youth and punish those who fail to practice sexual tolerance. While The Beyond Bullying Project advocates for the right of LGBTQ students, teachers, and families to live free from harassment in schools, we also worry that framing conversations about LGBTQ sexuality as a problem of bullying narrowly links LGBTQ sexuality to risk and danger. Within the terms of this logic, stories of LGBTQ sexuality can reliably enter schools only under the cover of risk prevention and health campaigns—to be gay in school, this story goes, is to be, at best, in need of tolerance and, at worst, at risk of anti-gay violence, mental illness, and suicide. But for Randee, LGBTQ sexuality means more than that in her school day: it is a source of pleasure in a boring day, a way to connect with adults, and something she speaks freely about—even if it has meant losing some friends. LGBTQ sexuality and gender exist in all parts of the school day, intersecting with other social identities, and leading to many ends. LGBTQ sexuality moves through the school, is subject to routine policing, calls out for recognition, offers students a way to interrupt their teachers’ lessons, and bumps up against not only concerns about bullying and harassment but also ideas about race, class, gender, and religion. Too often, the dominance of discourses of bullying threatened to obscure these scenes of sexuality. present our findings during the school’s anti-bullying week. In a similar vein, one teacher favored the project because it supported LGBTQ students and discouraged self-harm and suicide. Students acting as project advisors were excited to tell their stories, but worried their peers might avoid the booth for fear of being labeled and harassed as gay. These interactions point not only to how difficult it is to get beyond bullying to stories of discomfort, hope, and ambivalence surrounding LGBTQ sexuality and gender, but also to how particular ways of knowing about LGBTQ sexuality have become institutionalized in schools. studying schools, uncovering stories When we designed The Beyond Bullying Project, we anticipated neither all the obstacles we would face nor the ways those obstacles would come to re-shape the project. The obstacles were varied— from getting approval from three universities and three public school systems to conduct the research to finding ways to construct booths in three high schools, from designing efficient consent processes The Beyond Bullying Project aims to solicit and share stories beyond victimization and bullying and to provoke new ways of understanding LGBTQ sexualities in schools. For example, while principals, teachers, administrators, and students have been enthusiastic about The Beyond Bullying Project, they have also had difficulty getting “beyond bullying.” Early on, a school administrator who spent hours helping us bring the Beyond Bullying Project to his high school referred to the storytelling booth as a “kiss and tell” booth and said he hoped we would Contexts, Vol. 13, No. 4, pp. 80-83. ISSN 1536-5042, electronic ISSN 1537-6052. © 2014 American Sociological Association. http://contexts.sagepub.com. DOI 10.1177/1536504214558226 to helping nervous teachers talk about LGBTQ sexuality with their students and colleagues. These obstacles demanded methodological shifts, but they also opened us up to pedagogical questions. Ultimately, a research project became an occasion for teachers and students to rethink experiences of teaching and learning. The project, as a storytelling installation and a series of events, provided FA L L 2 0 1 4 contexts 81 © Beyond Bullying Project pedagogies The Beyond Bullying Project helps high schools imagine a broader range of sexual and gender possibilities. opportunities for students and teachers to question and challenge popular or commonsense ideas about schools. In creating a two-week long storytelling event, we disrupted business as usual. In soliciting and sharing stories beyond victimization and bullying, we offered times and spaces for something “other” to occur. The Beyond Bullying Project aims to capture these times, spaces, scenes, and stories—from participants who identify as straight and as LGBTQ—suggests they offer ordinary and extraordinary narratives of LGBTQ sexuality. Young people talk about how they want to support their gay friends even though those once familiar friendships now feel strange. Others talk about feeling bullied and wonder if it was because of their perceived race, gender, or sexuality. Some Schools are full of stories about LGBTQ sexuality that go beyond bullying, but these stories circulate outside of the official discourses of school curriculum, programs, and policies. movements and to provoke new ways of understanding LGBTQ sexualities in schools. In 2013-14, across three racially diverse high schools (one each in San Francisco, Minneapolis, and New York City), we collected over 400 stories ranging in length from one to thirty minutes about friendship, family, love, culture and the ordinary trials of living your life in school. As researchers, we now listen to the stories and the ways they push against the equation of LGBTQ sexuality and bullying. Our initial listening to the collected 82 contexts.org discuss how their own experiences of victimization have helped them understand how it might feel to be different in high school; some talk about their own or another’s homophobia and how they make sense of the intolerance. Other young people describe navigating relationships with their parents and their cultural and religious communities, charting the intersections of sexuality, race, and religion. Students talk about reading a gay novel, admiring a gay athlete, or watching TV shows with LGBTQ characters. Many people describe having lesbian and gay parents, uncles, aunts, neighbors, cousins, and grandmothers. Some youth tentatively question their own sexual or gender identities, risking the use of a term—“bisexual,” for instance—perhaps for the first time. Others buoyantly claim their right to be genderqueer or gay or trans. Teachers and principals discuss their relationships with LGBTQ students, remember their own experiences in high school, or admit confusion about how to introduce LGBTQ issues into the curriculum. What surprises us across these 400 narratives is how multiple and varied these stories are; every storyteller has a relationship to LGBTQ sexualities and communities that stretches far beyond the limited rhetoric of bullying. The space of the booth allows students, teachers, and staff to tell stories of experiences or opinions they may not have voiced before. The stories we have heard tell us not only that schools are full of stories about LGBTQ sexuality that go beyond bullying, but also that these stories circulate outside of the official discourses of school curriculum, programs, and policies. When you make room for conversations about LGBTQ sexuality beyond bullying, you also create other pedagogical spaces that expand the intimate possibilities available in schools. storytelling and belonging in school communities Beyond anti-bullying interventions and the language of risk, vulnerability, and tolerance lay struggles for belonging and recognition. Drawing on the work of sociologist Evelyn Nakano Glenn, our team understands young people’s membership and participation in school communities—indeed, in all communities—as “a matter of belonging, which requires recognition by other members of the community.” Recognition occurs through local, national, and life histories, in policy debates and school cultures, and in the negotiation of student statuses and hierarchies. In Beyond Bullying, we move away from LGBTQ sexualities and youth as problems for education and health and toward recognizing LGBTQ youth like Randee—and LGBTQ sexuality more broadly—as vital to the cultures and practices of school communities. To achieve meaningful recognition, educators and administrators must notice the many ways LGBTQ sexuality circulates through schools—as a set of identities, desires, and behaviors; as a site of curiosity and connection as well as harassment; as a future left unconsidered and unimagined; and as a concern taken up, neglected, celebrated, and demonized by adults, peers, families, and communities in students’ and teachers’ lives. Teachers and students will have to tell and hear the ordinary narratives of LGBTQ lives—of, for example, families, friendships, breakups, and aspirations—as part of what can count and be valued as human. They will also have to recognize that these narratives vary and shift as they travel across regional, racial, gender, socioeconomic, and other boundaries. Our time at West High suggests that telling and listening to these stories will be challenging and generative. This is a pedagogical challenge—what innovations are necessary for schools to welcome stories that move beyond bullying and imagine other possibilities of LGBTQ sexuality and gender and LGBTQ people to belong in schools? How will teachers need to rethink Randee’s truancy, recognize her complicated friendships, and welcome her multi-faceted queerness? preliminary lessons The Beyond Bullying Project aims to provoke new ways of understanding, allowing, and imagining sexualities to flourish in our schools. We do not yet know if the stories collected will offer radical imaginaries of LGBTQ sexualities in schools. But so far, our experience in the schools tells us that strange and unexpected things can happen when a school devotes two weeks and a hallway, auditorium, or courtyard to an LGBTQ storytelling installation. Teachers can confront the limits of their own imaginations, students can dream of dancing on stage, pizza par- stories about LGBTQ sexualities and lives, we have crafted research methodologies that push boundaries of teaching, learning, questioning, participation, and that expand our sense of what it means to “intervene.” These methodologies reflect our belief that stories, both told and heard, have the potential to create new and expanded possibilities for LGBTQ and straight youth alike. Social science Teachers and students need to tell and hear the ordinary narratives of LGBTQ lives—of, for example, families, friendships, break-ups, and aspirations—as part of what can count and be valued as human. ties can shift into conversations about the meanings of “bisexual” for young women, and a school’s outsiders, students like Randee, can find a new, if temporary, place to hang out during lunch. With this research project, we have collected data on how diverse school communities receive conversations about LGBTQ sexualities, but we have also witnessed how schools can be transformed, however fleetingly, by the arrival of a giant wooden box and a commitment to talking and thinking about LGBTQ sexualities and lives. The preliminary lessons we are taking from this project are that sometimes LGBTQ sexualities and lives link with formal school curriculum, but not always; sometimes school climates continue to obfuscate the language and existence of queerness in their halls; and, sometimes, making a space for conversations about LGBTQ sexuality opens up ancillary space for all sorts of other things to occur. In our attempts to ask schools to hear and recognize a wider range of research tells us that stories can do things that straightforward instruction and lessons cannot accomplish. Stories can help extend our sense of LGBTQ lives across generations, place, race, religion and gender categories, to recognize and include diverse experiences and communities. And, perhaps most significant for our study of schools, and as sociologist Ken Plummer informs us, “Stories can be heard when a community has been fattened up, rendered ripe and willing to hear such stories…. they gain momentum from an interpretive community of support.” Schools can aspire to be such communities. Jessica Fields and Laura Mamo are at San Francisco State University in sociology and sexuality studies, and health education, respectively. Nancy Lesko is in education at Columbia University; and Jen Gilbert is in education at York University. The team and the Beyond Bullying Project can be followed at beyondbullyingproject.com; on Facebook, www.facebook.com/BeyondBullyingProject; and on Twitter @bbproject2014. Their study was funded by the Ford Foundation Supporting Sexuality Research, 2012-2014. FA L L 2 0 1 4 contexts 83 cultivating S-P-E-L-L-E-R-S by pawan dhingra 26 contexts.org “Shrewdness,” says the announcer to a young boy whose turn it is at the microphone to spell correctly. The boy stares at the pronouncer. Wearing a red t-shirt and blue shorts, with dark hair that covers most of his forehead, the boy rocks back and forth on his feet. Does he know the word? Is this going to be the one that sends him home? Will he make it to the next round? He tentatively asks a set of questions: “Can I have the definition of the word?” “Can you repeat the word?” “Can I please have the part of speech?” His arms are down and hands clasped over his waist, with his fingers rolling over one another. His eyes are open wide with a sense of fear. He tentatively Mark Taylor, Flickr CC starts, “Shrewdness. S-H-R-E-W-D-N-E-S-S. Shrewdness.” A speller pauses at the 2012 Rockville South Asian Spelling Bee. Contexts, Vol. 14, No. 4, pp. 26-31. ISSN 1536-5042, electronic ISSN 1537-60521. © 2015 American Sociological Association. http://contexts.sagepub.com. DOI 10.1177/1536504215614000 FA L L 2 0 1 5 contexts 27 Scripps National Spelling Bee, Flickr CC A spellers’ photobooth at the 2011 Scripps National Spelling Bee. It is a long two seconds. “That is correct,” the judge says dispassionately, in effect adding to the tension that had been building up for the past minute. The boy’s eyes roll, equal parts relief and disbelief. As he takes his seat, another competitor steps up to the microphone, and the suspense starts again. This is not the Scripps National Spelling Bee. It is a spelling bee organized by and mostly for Asian Indian Americans. Despite the heavily ethnic presence, a passerby could be excused for bees aren’t even the only competition that Indian Americans dominate: they have won the past three National Geography Bees, with seven of the 10 finalists in 2015 being of Indian origin. Most Indian American youth do not engage in competitive spelling, and about a quarter of Indian Americans have limited proficiency in English. Still, it is safe to say that spelling bees have a special resonance for many in this ethnic group. In fact, there are two major competitions designed by and for Indian Americans, each of which hosts regional competitions in about twelve cities and a finals competition for the top competitors in each city. Families drive for hours to reach these matches. Indian Americans’ excellence in spelling bees has caught the attention of mainstream media and the general public, and not always favorably. News articles covering the trend often compare the parents of winners to “Tiger Moms and Dads,” meaning that the families push the children into the competitions and over-emphasize academics at the expense of children’s other interests—even happiness. Attention is placed on the long hours of study involved. As Sameer Pandya wrote in The Atlantic, Indian Americans at the Scripps Bee have become “America’s great racial freaks-and-geeks show,” a spectacle that is as much gawked at as applauded by the general audience. On top of this, racist social media responses to Indian Americans’ spate of victories are now commonplace, even expected. Rather than ask why Indian Americans keep winning the bee, I have a different, more fundamental question: Why are so many committed to spelling bees in the first place? What motivates these families to spend so much time on bees? To understand this group dynamic, I have interviewed over 100 persons, including parents and children, from across the country, with a concentration in the Boston area. Families are mostly Indian Americans, but include many non-Indians, engaged in some version of extracurricular education like the spelling bee. I have conducted ethnographic observations at eleven spelling bee competitions, in people’s homes, and other related settings. This article draws from my interviews and observations with Indian American participants and their families. As Sameer Pandya wrote in The Atlantic, Indian Americans at the Scripps Bee have become “America’s great racial freaks-and-geeks show,” a spectacle that is as much gawked at as applauded by the general audience. mistaking this for the Scripps National Spelling Bee, broadcast annually on ESPN. As of 2015, Indian Americans make up 15 of the past 19 champions (including co-champions) of the Scripps Bee, and, at the 2014 Bee, half of the 12 finalists were of Indian origin. At the 2015 Bee, out of the top 49 spellers to make to the finals, 25 were Indian American. The Scripps winner receives $30,000, does the television talk show and news program circuit, and becomes a hero to tens of thousands of children. Spelling 28 contexts.org the push beyond educational excellence For parents, spelling is a form of hyper-education—a voluntary educational pursuit for their children outside of school. Extra education is a response, in part, to an anxiety over children’s college admission prospects. Contemporary parents of many backgrounds sense angst around college placement. Middle-class parents practice “concerted cultivation”, including organized extracurricular activities meant to foster life skills, with their young children with college admissions in mind. As Hilary Friedman argues, this cultivation can take the form of competitive activities. Families Scripps National Spelling Bee, Flickr CC feel that the sooner a child specializes in an activity, the more likely the child will excel in it, thereby earning credentials to put on their eventual college applications. Amit, an Indian immigrant father, told me and a group of parents over lunch at a bee about the need to specialize when young: “You cannot be jack of all things, and that way gain nothing. So when you are focusing on something, focus. Then they will love that, okay. ‘If I focus, I will excel in this one thing, or if I focus on that [other] one, I will excel in that, too.’” Children must specialize or “gain nothing” in life. For these Indian American parents, the notion of competition is not a hypothetical problem awaiting their children in late high school. Competition pervaded their own upbringings in India. Raju, a father of a speller in a bee finals competition, explained the “scarcity mentality” and its impact on his parenting: “Every resource in India is scarce. You have to be cream of the crop to get anything into it. Ok, so museum trips [for example]. I come from a very suburban school [in India]. Twenty kids from school are chosen to go on the museum trip, so you’ve got to be good at something [to be chosen]. … We have this scarcity mentality built in, that we need to be there first to get some resource. Otherwise it’ll be gone. So we have the competitive thing built into us, so we are pushing our kids to it.” While sports present a common avenue for gaining competitive credentials for youth, these Indian immigrant families put more attention into education. The model minority stereotype contends that Asian immigrants “overachieve” in school because they are culturally drawn to education, but the reality is more complicated. These families prioritize education as a way to stand out within a competitive field, for one thing, because they did not think that their child could excel in sports. As one Indian American father explained while a group of fellow immigrant parents nodded in agreement, “Some of my [Indian] friends with whom I spoke said, ‘Well, our kids cannot compete with the other kids in swimming, they get tired out very easily.’ … So those physical aspects and also other issues come into play. That’s why you scale down at sports and look at other activities which bring you to the top.” I should note that many of these Indian American kids still participated in sports— though they weren’t expected to be champions. According to parents, sports were a way to make children “well-rounded.” Academics resonated with the parents as an alternative competitive venue in part due to their own upbringing and immigration patterns. They had immigrated to the United States mostly through work visas, achieving upward mobility through education. As Jennifer Lee and Min Zhou argue, Asians who immigrated as professionals to the U.S. are a highly selected bunch, with higher levels of education not only compared to other Americans but especially so compared to those in their homeland. Well over two-thirds of Indian Americans (age 25 and above) have a college degree or higher—more than double the national average. While about one in ten Indian Americans has less than a high school degree, these tend not to be the parents of children involved in the bees. The parents of spellers are predominantly college-educated and often work in STEM fields. Families feel that the sooner a child specializes in an activity, the more likely the child will excel in it, thereby earning credentials to put on their eventual college applications. why spelling? Given its commitment to education, why has the Indian American community chosen spelling bees? Parents find the preparation for the bee reminiscent of their study patterns in India, with an emphasis on logic and memorization. These parents are fluent or at least proficient in English, which gives them a significant advantage in not only training their children but also, more generally, in being comfortable with exploring English in greater depth. Similarly, parents and children appreciate that spelling and academic pursuits make them more knowledgeable about American culture. Families bond while studying. But, a crucial part of the answer to “why spelling” involves FA L L 2 0 1 5 contexts 29 Scripps National Spelling Bee, Flickr CC 2011 Scripps National Spelling Bee champ Sukanya Roy prepares for her CNN interview. She placed in the top 20 at the Bee in the prior two years. co-ethnic role models. Spelling caught on as Indian Americans saw their co-ethnics achieve in this arena. It became a selfperpetuating cycle. When Nupur Lala won in the Scripps National Spelling Bee in 1999 and was profiled in in the Oscar-nominated film, Spellbound, she became a household name. Champions serve as role models and provide a crucial spark to get the trend going, for a community to identify with an activity. When I asked a mother why more families did not pursue chess, for example, as an extracurricular academic option, she told me to wait until the first Indian American chess champion prevails—then we’d see a flood of young Indian American players. Even before Lala won Scripps, spelling bees had been a nascent interest among Indian Americans. The North South “When you’re in a community—if everybody in your family is a doctor, you want to become one, right? If everybody is an engineer in your community you want to become one, right? … Other kids are doing, you’ll do it.” the youth Like with many other extracurricular pursuits, these kids first became interested in bees often through a friend. Hema, a former speller, explained her progression: “I initially started spelling bees because my oldest friends are Indian, and they would do spelling bees and stuff, and I hung out with them. So, um, then they, either aged out or stopped doing them, and I just continued to do them because I was winning, at least like little bees here and there.” Having competitions designed for your own ethnic group made it more likely that you would have friends participating in it, and that made you more likely to participate. Friendships also serve as a continuing motivation at the highest levels of competition. Youth form friendships at the bees. At the Scripps bees, for instance, I have seen kids literally run around together in the hotel. They go up to each other’s hotel rooms to chat. They enjoy organized field trips together. Spellers want to repeat the bees in part to reconnect with past spellers. They keep in touch through social media. While friendships provide an incentive to start and continue participating in bees, these children also embraced the competitive element. Naresh started spelling at age five and said, “I saw Champions serve as role models and provide a crucial spark to get the trend going, for a co-ethnic community to identify with an activity. Foundation, one of the Indian American bee competitions, started its competition in the mid-1990s as a way to boost Indian Americans’ verbal SAT scores and support its charity efforts toward education in India. Since then, another South Asian American national spelling bee started, and local bees targeted Indian Americans. The rise of these spaces created not just opportunities to spell competitively but also the expectation to do so. A father, Mihir sat up in his chair, as the two of us spoke, to explain the impact of his peers on his parenting decisions, 30 contexts.org Scripps National Spelling Bee, Flickr CC Speller Rohat Goyal poses with his family at the 2011 Scripps National Spelling Bee. somebody in the paper holding up a trophy, and it was that year’s champion who, you know, seemed like was having a lot of fun. So I told my mom that I wanted to win the spelling bee and get that trophy.” Many of the young people I interviewed compared the competitive dimension to traditional sports. One youth aptly called spelling “a brain sport.” Sonu told me, as we sat in his family’s home in Dallas, TX, “It’s like golf in a way, in that you’re really only competing against yourself. You have no control over the success or failure of others, so at the end of the day, if you don’t win, it’s something you could have done better. I took that to heart and used it as a measuring stick for myself, improving each year I did it.” On top of these motivations to engage in bees, youth refer to what’s at the heart of spelling: a love of words. This is particularly the case for kids who show a penchant for spelling and stick with the bee for years. A common trait among competitive spellers is they were voracious readers when young. As Hari and I spoke during a lunch break at a bee, he reflected upon his pre-elementary and lower-elementary years, saying, “I probably read so many science fiction and fantasy books… I would get 20 books from the library, and I remember the librarians would always raise their eyebrow, ‘Can this kid really read all these books in three weeks?’ And I would be able to, because that’s what I wanted to do.” This is a child whose commitment to reading surprised even librarians. Spellers quickly develop favorite words. They appreciate words that derive from certain languages. They develop rituals to study. And they are prepared for the pressure on stage when spelling. that promotes their children’s mobility. It makes sense to them, given their own histories with education and immigration and their sense of disadvantage in other competitive venues. Indian Americans participate not as individuals nor even just as families, but as community members inspired by co-ethnics. I do not foresee asking my elementary-aged children to join a spelling bee, primarily because they do not show an interest in it, nor does my family feel any social pressure to get them involved. That said, I understand what families in the bees are trying to accomplish, much like I see worth in Little League baseball and gymnastic competitions. To each group (and subgroup), their own. And I await the day when the spelling bee champion is also the starting pitcher for her or his Little League softball or baseball team. Given the number of hours required to excel in both kinds of activities, I might be waiting a long time. recommended readings Hilary Levey Friedman. 2013. Playing to Win: Raising Children in a Competitive Culture. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. This book covers middle class families’ growing use of extracurricular activities, namely sports, dance, and chess, as a means to instill a competitive spirit in children. Annette Lareau. 2003. Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Explores the philosophies and practices of “how to raise children” among middle- and working-class families, both Black and White, including their views on after-school activities. Jennifer Lee and Min Zhou. 2014. “The Success Frame and I await the day when the spelling bee champion is also the starting pitcher for her or his Little League softball or baseball team. Achievement Paradox: The Costs and Consequences for Asian Americans,” Race and Social Problems 6(1):38-55. This article speaks to the drive for education by Asian Americans, including references to their use of extracurricular education. Kathryn M. Neckerman, Prudence Carter, and Jennifer Lee. 1999. “Segmented Assimilation and Minority Cultures of Mobility,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 22(6): 945-965. How minority groups might achieve mobility through strategies either unavailable to or uninteresting to White, middle-class Americans, demonstrating that assimilation is not always the best means for success. Tony Wagner. 2010. The Global Achievement Gap: Why Even Our Best Schools Don’t Teach the New Survival Skills Our Children Need—And What We Can Do About It. New York: Basic Books. Interviews with parents and scholars’ reveal concerns about the state of U.S. education in the world. Pawan Dhingra is in the department of sociology at Tufts University. He was a curator of the Smithsonian Institution’s “Beyond Bollywood: Indian Americans Shape the Nation.” Indian Americans’ commitment to bees is not that different from other communities’ commitments to specific extracurricular practices. The Indian immigrants see bees as an activity FA L L 2 0 1 5 contexts 31 the challenge of diverse public Dean Hochman, Flickr CC schools by toby l. parcel, joshua a. hendrix, and andrew j. taylor 42 contexts.org Wake County, N.C. citizens are divided. Some believe that school integration—by race and social class—is important for the wellbeing of all children. One citizen told us of the dangers of the opposite: “It is not OK to segregate our schools. It is not OK to deliberately create high-poverty schools and claim that you are going to have all these fixes, whether it is funding or innovative programs, etc. It is just wrong, and that is why I am in this debate.” the district’s diversity policy in favor of one that placed more emphasis on neighborhood schools. These events garnered attention because they threatened to roll back decades of successful school integration, a policy vehicle for promoting positive race relations and facilitating upward mobility. Integration had also been associated with county growth and prosperity. Would these trends now be reversed and mean the end of Wake County’s economic and social progress? Would Wake become more like other large school districts characterized by strong school re-segregation, with negative educational and social consequences? Ed Uthman, Flickr CC Another parent’s concerns reflected the costs of implementing a “diversity” policy: “I see young children standing out there in the cold and dark at 6:30 in the morning, and it is totally obnoxious that any polite society would do this to the children. It is not safe, it is not fair, and it certainly is not fostering any good educational system; people generally want good schools close to home.” Heated debates around these issues culminated in a watershed Wake County school board election in October 2009 that switched the board from majority Democratic and liberal to majority Republican and conservative, which resulted in consequences. By early 2010, this new board voted to discard School classrooms are often homogeneous by race and class. Contexts, Vol. 15, No. 1, pp. 42-47. ISSN 1536-5042, electronic ISSN 1537-60521. © 2016 American Sociological Association. http://contexts.sagepub.com. DOI 10.1177/1536504216628843. WINTER 2016 contexts 43 consensus and its dissolution Wake’s history shows that a large southern county comprised of urban, suburban, and rural populations could sustain successful school desegregation over many years. In 1976, after federal pressure, Wake County and the city of Raleigh merged their school districts to create one countywide system of 55,000 students. Innovative superintendents used magnet schools located in central Raleigh to entice White and middle-class families to enroll their children, thus promoting voluntary school integration through school choice. This worked: there were rising test scores, decreased racial gaps in student achievement, and strong satisfaction with schools among parents. Wake County’s population rose, but the county was able to educate this growing numbers of students, many of them from families migrating to Raleigh from other parts of the country. To promote desegregation in the early 1990s, up to 1,000 African-American and White children were bused across the county each year, with minority children more likely to be bused than Whites. This strategy meant that some children were Younger children could not be assured they would attend the same schools as older siblings. Parents could not be guaranteed that relationships they formed with teachers, administrators and other parents would pay off in the future. Population growth was also increasing commute times for both parents and children, who might be traveling many miles from home. Complaints about annual reassignments increased. A second school board strategy proved even more controversial. To make good use of fixed resources, the board created year-round schools, which had some elementary and middle-school children on three out of four nine-week tracks, but rotated one group of students out at all times. Although year-round schools required more personnel, this strategy cut costs by slowing down the need for school construction. Some parents liked year-round schools and sought them out. Board policy eventually mandated large groups of families to enter the year-round system or face unattractive alternatives. For example, opting out of a year-round school could saddle some kids with a longer bus ride and earlier pickup times. Families with a child in a year-round magnet school who also had a child in a public high school automatically had kids on two different school calendars, because all county high schools remained on traditional calendars. By 2009, these conditions were politically unsustainable. We wondered, what is the price of diverse schools? Had adherence to the diversity policy come at too high a cost? We began our study by reviewing media reports, and continued by interviewing 24 locals who were either pro-diversity or favored neighborhood schools. We conducted two focus groups, and used those discussions to help us develop a telephone survey for more than 1,700 Wake County adults. We asked questions about learning benefits for children when they experience economic and racial diversity in schools and in classrooms; learning benefits from neighborhood schools; opinions on the length of bus rides; implementation of student assignment policy, general thoughts about the school board, and a variety of social and background characteristics. Heated debates around integration in Wake County’s October 2009 school board election threatened to roll back decades of successful policy promoting positive race relations and facilitating upward mobility. transferred to new schools for reasons beyond graduating to middle or high school. Children were often re-assigned in groups, which preserved social ties but parental relationships with schools and teachers were inevitably disrupted. Still, at this time, complaints were few, especially compared to other communities in the South. The county prospered both socially and economically, but prosperity had its price. By 2000, suburban communities such as Cary and Apex had acquired the reputation of some of the “best places” to live. Population growth in these areas exceeded school capacity, while parts of central Raleigh were decreasing in population. The county was now responsible for educating close to 100,000 children. By 2000, court rulings had largely disallowed race as a basis for school assignments, so Wake began using social class and achievement data instead. Estimates varied regarding how many children were bused for purposes of achieving diversity along economic and achievement lines, with the board arguing it was always less than 5% of children each year. But county growth appeared to increase this proportion and board reliance on reassignment increased over time. By 2008, the board proposed that more than 25,000 children be reassigned over the next three years. Some children from kindergarten through high school had already been moved multiple times. 44 contexts.org diversity vs. neighborhood schools Wake’s debate seemed to originate with two different views of how children should be assigned to public schools. One promoted a county-wide perspective in which the school board would assign children so that no schools were disproportionately poor or low-achieving. This would disrupt any connection between residential segregation and school segregation. Proponents of this policy feared the county’s economic future would be threatened if public schools were viewed unfavorably by firms and middle-class employees considering re-locating to Raleigh. Since the county’s assignment policy was associated with rising test scores and decreased achievement gaps, they viewed diverse USDA Year-round schools, similar to this one in West Virginia, offer Wake County a good cost-cutting option that would slow new school construction. schools as an investment in county well-being. The other side championed proximity of home and school, so that children’s school attendance reinforced neighborhood social ties and vice versa. Under these conditions, however, schools would replicate residential segregation, a familiar condition in many American communities. Such realities would intensify inequality across generations, a situation that diversity advocates disliked. Media reports, interviews and focus groups reflect either pro-diversity sentiments or worries about the disadvantages of diversity policy implementation. However, our findings showed other sentiments as well. First, disrupting the proximity of home and school was clearly a challenge for families. As a former superintendent noted in an interview, “I was having a forum over at Moore Square Middle School and it was about 200… predominantly African-American parents… and I will not forget the parent who stood up and said, ‘Well, we do not understand why we have to put our five-year-old on that bus and ride for an hour and twenty minutes to a school that is a [significant] distance from the house’.” Others suggested that having children attend school far from home affected their capacity to meet parental responsibilities. It meant challenges for parents who were often juggling the demands of multiple jobs and commuting to work, as well as managing children’s school assignments and their changes. One African-American interviewee recalled a storm when half an inch of snow accumulated, causing icy roads, early dismissals, and long traffic delays. Some students ended up spending the night at their schools. She said, “But that assignment [plan], how far is [too far]? For the parent, how quickly can I get to my child? That was exhibited when we had that freak storm. How quickly can I get to my child in an emergency, from [my] workplace or home?” By 2000, court rulings had largely disallowed race as a basis for school assignments, so Wake began using social class and achievement data instead. Second, citizens worried that children’s academic well-being would be harmed by reassignments to distant schools. As one interviewee stated: “Really, if you think about elementary school, you know a lot of it is creating a love for school and so if you are putting a heavy burden on a child and… they are having to get up extra early… you would think (this situation) would WINTER 2016 contexts 45 Donald Lee Pardue, Flickr CC children ran high. One involved parent stated, “The discontent that I was hearing was the unbelievable inconsistency in feeder patterns. People would not know from one year to the next where their kid was going to school, and not only would they not know where they were going to go this year, they did not even have a sense of, OK, well, you will go to this elementary school, this middle school, and then this high school. It switched with no rhyme or reason.” This uncertainty meant parents felt unsure about how to protect child wellbeing, clearly at the heart of the conflict, but seemingly beyond A school bus makes its daily trek on North Salem Street in Wake County. the debate between preferences for diversity and neighborhood schools. From our survey we also learned that preferences for diverpotentially, in some students, create more of a negative taste for sity and neighborhood schools were not even diametrically education and send them down the wrong road.” opposed. Citizens who favored diversity were less likely to favor Similarly, one African-American community leader sugneighborhood schools and vice versa, but the relationship was gested: “I just don’t think diversity, shipping kids around, really far from perfect. We found that nearly everyone favors neighmatters as much as them getting a good education, and at the borhood schools. They are well ingrained in American life and end of the day, there is a job.” Nor was this concern confined likely reflect the type of school arrangement many of today’s to those skeptical of diversity’s benefits. An African-American, adults experienced when they were young. However, a signifipro-diversity parent at a focus group said: “I will use the word cant subset of Wake County citizens who favor neighborhood ‘repulsive,’ and the reason I say it is repulsive is because I am schools also strongly support diversity as a basis for children’s tired of all of this sitting on the backs of the children. …It is school assignments. the children that you are busing; it is the children that you are Finally, our survey also showed that attitudes among manipulating. …It is not on their back to take the long bus ride African Americans in Raleigh were complex. They were more or be pulled out of your class.” supportive of diversity-based school assignments than Whites, and less supportive of neighborhood schools. But social class also mattered. Affluent African Americans favored diversity more than their lower income counterparts, who were managing both work and family with fewer resources. For them, having children assigned to schools far from their homes, even in the name of diversity, was less attractive. More highly educated African Americans worried less about the challenges, dangers, and uncertainties inherThird, the process of changing student assignments created ent in assignment policy implementation than those with less uncertainty for families and for children. Each winter the school education. board identified groups of children they were proposing to move to keep up with uneven population growth and to avoid schools becoming disproportionately low income. Hearings with the board is wake typical? followed. Sometimes parents were granted exemptions from We wondered how unique Raleigh was. Wake’s history proposed moves. Others applied for magnet schools, preferring lacked examples of “massive resistance” to desegregation charthose placements, and their certainty, to the possibility of future acteristic of other southern communities during the 1960s and reassignments. Board decisions came out in May, which meant 1970s. The district was never under a court order to desegregate; that some families were unsure about school placement for it had done so voluntarily (although within the context of federal several months during each year. Emotions of both parents and pressure). Wake’s public education system had improved for Wake’s debate had two camps: one that viewed diverse schools as an investment in county wellbeing and favored school “balancing,” the other that championed proximity of home and school. 46 contexts.org O Palsson, Flickr CC. “Gyre,” Thomas Sayre, NC Museum of Art. challenges, dangers and uncertainties previously associated with mandatory reassignments and year-round school attendance. This also meant that school re-segregation based on socioeconomic status increased. Magnet schools remain popular, while parents now also have an increased number of charter school options. The impact of greater school choice on the traditionally strong middle-class character of Wake public schools is still unclear. Demographics remain important. Currently the district enrolls more than 155,000 students, making it the 16th largest school district in the country, and managing district growth continues to be challenging. Wake’s public school-aged population has now become majority-minority, largely because of Latino immigration. Given the association between race and family income, in the future Wake will find creating schools mixed by family income to be more complicated. More than ever, it will need to rely on its strong traditions of maintaining diverse schools to promote both equal opportunity and encourage county prosperity. recommended resources The debate over school diversity in Wake County means balancing competing, if both laudable, goals and perspectives. more than thirty years after its creation in 1976. These factors, we reasoned, made it at least somewhat unique, and had created a social and political climate supportive of diverse schools. In addition, the county began creating diverse schools before significant amounts of White flight and “bright flight” occurred. While the diversity policy was in effect, middle-class residents had less incentive to locate in just a few neighborhoods because street address did not strictly dictate which schools children would attend, thus discouraging residential segregation. We concluded that compared to other large school districts, Wake is relatively unique in the longevity of its school diversity policy, which we see as based both on the demographic capacity to create diverse schools as well as the collective political will to make that happen. For example, it sustained diverse school assignments longer than Charlotte, and it avoided the substantial segregation of schools experienced in places like Richmond. Despite the challenges involved in implementing economically diverse schools, Wake persevered longer than many other school districts. This means Wake was an exemplar for other large school districts that had the demographic capacity and political will to create diverse schools. what does the future hold? The 2011 and 2013 elections returned the school board to firm Democratic majorities, likely because of citizen concerns with a lack of transparency by the Republican board. However, this new board chose to maintain past reassignments, not initiate new ones. This approach responded to concerns regarding the Annette Lareau and Kimberly A. Goyette, eds. 2014. Choosing Homes, Choosing Schools. Thousand Oaks, CA: Russell Sage Foundation. Explores the reality that for many families, choosing homes and choosing schools happens simultaneously. Toby L. Parcel, Joshua A. Hendrix, and Andrew J. Taylor. 2015. “Race, Politics, and School Assignment Policies in CharlotteMecklenburg and Wake County, North Carolina.” In R. A. Mickelson, S. S. Smith, and A. Hawn Nelson, eds., Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow: School Desegregation and Resegregation in Charlotte. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press. A comparison of Charlotte and Raleigh history, demographics, and school characteristics suggests why Raleigh sustained school desegregation longer than Charlotte. Toby L. Parcel and Andrew J. Taylor. 2015. The End of Consensus: Diversity, Neighborhoods, and the Politics of Public Schools Assignments. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press. A mixed-methods study of the creation of the Wake County Public School System, the evolution of consensus surrounding diverse schools, and why this consensus dissolved, with comparisons to other school districts. James E. Ryan. 2010. Five Miles Away, A World Apart: One City, Two Schools, and the Story of Educational Opportunity in Modern America. New York: Oxford University Press. The story of two racially segregated high schools, one in urban Richmond and the other in Henrico County, Virginia. Toby L. Parcel is in the sociology and anthropology department at North Carolina State University. Her current work focuses on families, schools and children. She is replicating the Wake survey in other cities. Joshua A. Hendrix is a research criminologist at RTI International. He studies policing and adolescent development, including why some adolescents abstain from delinquency. Andrew J. Taylor is in the political science department in the school of public and international affairs at North Carolina State University. His current work focuses on Congress, elections and political attitudes. WINTER 2016 contexts 47 d e c s r e n es o c tio tat c d on s s e n an n s ed . robi d a it an h e c re un and jo r fo esa he orris c t resa m in y the b “I feel so sad about it,” she remembers. In her dreams, “I’m begging the doctor, ‘Don’t do it.’” In 2011, doctors performed a cesarean section on Rinat Dray, a 32-year-old, religious mother of two without her consent. Dray adamantly refused a cesarean throughout her labor, she told us in an interview, but “The [hospital] manager said, ‘Take her... to C-section. We got permission. ...Take her to the room for the C-section.’” Doctors wheeled her into the operating room, told her to be quiet, and performed a cesarean. The baby was healthy, but during the surgery the physician lacerated Dray’s bladder, requiring extensive surgical repair. Dray’s malpractice lawsuit is ongoing. 24 contexts.org To study forced and coerced cesareans, we searched for cases like Dray’s in LexisNexis and the National Advocates for Pregnant Women’s (NAPW) online case file. We found ten between 1990 and 2014 and were able to interview Dray and Jennifer Goodall, as well as two of the attorneys, Michael Bast (Dray’s attorney) and Colleen Connell (Tabita Bricci’s attorney), involved in forced C-section cases. We also interviewed three attorneys with Birth Rights Bar Association (BRBA), Deborah Fisch, Susan Jenkins, and Indra Lusero; NAPW senior staff attorney Farah Diaz-Tello; and President of Improving Birth Dawn Thompson. The low number of published cases is partly a result of an exceptionally small fraction of court cases being published and thus accessible on LexisNexis, but it also reflects the high bar to entry into the legal system for these types of cases. Even so, we were surprised at how few cases we found: advocates and attorneys we’d interviewed had told us that instances of coerced and forced cesareans were common. For example, when we asked Dawn Thompson how often she receives calls from women in such situations, she answered, “Oh, every day.” Similarly, Michael Bast told us, “We’ve heard many times where women have said, ‘I was forced to have a C-section.’” Although statistics are unavailable and neither Bast nor Thompson can indicate the exact frequency with which they receive requests for help with lawsuits, we believe we’re just exposing the tip of the iceberg. Forced and coerced cesareans are situated within a larger trend: an overuse of cesareans in the U.S., a trend coauthor Theresa Morris wrote about in her book Cut It Out. The procedures accounted for 32% of U.S. births in 2015. The technique is associated with higher rates of maternal and fetal morbidity (injury) and mortality (death) than vaginal deliveries—that is, it doesn’t lead to better maternal or fetal outcomes. Instead, the rise of the C-section is tied to organizational and legal imperatives. Specifically, physicians cannot know for certain whether a cesarean will lead to better outcomes than a vaginal birth, but they have learned through medical-legal conferences and court proceedings that they are less likely to be sued for malpractice if the baby is born by cesarean. This lowers doctors’ thresholds in choosing a cesarean. Although typically a woman’s “right to choose” is associated with abortion, not childbirth, it is instructive to think of both situations in a broader context of women’s bodily integrity. Choice is hard won in childbirth because the cultural context dictates that pregnant women should sacrifice everything for The rise of the C-section is tied to organizational and legal imperatives, not maternal and fetal outcomes. Courtesy Michael Bast Courtesy Rinat Dray Rinat Dray, forced into having a cesarean. Courtesy Colleen Connell the fetus. Thus, a pregnant woman who makes a decision that authorities deem is not in the fetus’s best interest—for example refusing a cesarean section—may be deemed incapable of making decisions about the birth. Her “choice” never really existed. Our research reveals that a woman’s right to bodily integrity and decision-making, seemingly sacrosanct in the letter of the law, is frequently challenged by medical providers when it comes to childbirth. Women’s right to refuse unwanted surgery buckles under the weight of cultural pressures and legal and organizational processes. Michael Bast, Attorney, Silverstein & Bast, represents Rinat Dray. Contexts, Vol. 16, No. 2, pp. 24-29. ISSN 1536-5042, electronic ISSN 1537-60521. © 2017 American Sociological Association. http://contexts.sagepub.com. DOI 10.1177/1536504217714259. Colleen Connell, Executive Director, American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois, re...
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