The Sexual Politics of Meat

I'm pretty sure this book did not mention the 1972 movie "Prime Cut", in which Lee Marvin finds Sissy Spacek naked, in a pen full of hay, in a barn, about to be auctioned off to the highest bidder. But it sure should have.

Title: The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory (New York: Continuum, 1990)

Author: Carol J. Adams, who has a masters in divinity and an extensive career as an activist outside of her academic writings. She's not affiliated with an academic institution, so far as I can see, but guest-lectures at many, and seems to travel extensively, giving a slide show based on this book. Other books she's written include Help! My Child Stopped Eating Meat (2004); The Pornography of Meat (2004); and Living Among Meat Eaters (2003). Adams lives in Dallas, which is brave on many levels, considering her political commitments.

My review: Adams hopes to make the point that the act of eating meat has been persistently gendered male, and that the inherent assumptions of meat-eating are similiar to the assumptions of woman-oppressing. What are these assumptions? Adams argues that the "sexual politics of meat" include "the idea[s] that the end justifies the means...the objectification of other beings is a natural part of life...and that violence can and should be masked" (24). Adams uses the concept of the "absent referent" to anchor the various implications of these assumptions or ideas. For her, the act of eating meat obscures the life of the actual animal, just as the acts of objectification or violence or misogyny obscure the life of the actual female. Both the woman and the animal are unimportant in the greater system of meaning constructed by the patriarchy. (For this reason, Adams advocates inserting a "[sic]" after any sentence in which an animal is called "it", just as we would after a sentence in which "he" is used as a universal pronoun.) (See chapter "The Rape of Animals, the Butchering of Women", p 50.)

Adams wants to restore what she sees as a lost history of associations between feminism and vegetarianism, arguing that first-wave feminist activists in the nineteenth and early twentieth century recognized the connections between their own struggles for political recognition and the choice to be vegetarian. She also uses a wide array of literary sources, including utopic novels such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland (1915; see Bryson entry); Upton Sinclair's The Jungle (1906); and children's lit such as Charlotte's Web (1952). She recounts anecdotes from her experience as a domestic violence counselor. She also uses images collected from advertisements and (very interestingly) from publications internal to the meat industry.

"Truck Accident" (2004), by artist Sue Coe, whose Dead Meat is a book of paintings and writings about slaughterhouses.

This book can be difficult for one who lies on the other side of the divide between meat-chewing and meat-eschewing. To her credit, Adams seems to know that the conversion to her "side" can be one that is so absolute as to be almost mystical. But there are moments in this book that feel disingenous, as when she cites a description of a snuff film but neglects to write that the film in question was not actually a snuff film at all (see Snopes.com's debunking of the matter - thanks to Nick for telling me that this was an urban legend and rescuing me from many nightmares); or when she suggests that the school shooters of the 1990s may have shot kids because they were hunters so they were "used to it". Not only that, but the book, I think, assumes too much when it comes to correlation vs. causation. Just because, historically, men have been given more meat to eat even when women require the protein for breast-feeding, does that mean that meat is inherently patriarchal? Did English laborers of the nineteenth century really participate in patriarchy by giving the male members of the family more meat to eat? Should they have tried to find a nice mix of quinoa and kale to serve up instead? Is my skepticism or pickiness about this book derived from some deep guilt about or ambivalence about my meat-eating, which will some day be unearthed in a flood of veganism? Only time will tell.

Reviews of others: In Environmental Ethics, Deborah Slicer wrote that the book should have been written in clearer, easier-to-follow language (it didn't seem too bad to me!) and that Adams' analyses of race and class issues were unnecessarily truncated. (This is true - there was an interesting bit on Western imposition of meat diets on colonized cultures, but it was brief and undeveloped. There's plenty of room for further investigation in this area - and of the questions of diet imposition in general. The Inuit, for example, eat plenty of meat, but American and English explorers still found their diet disgusting.)

Apparently, in a later book Adams addresses the abhorrent PETA ad phenomenon.

Books to follow up on: Primary: Henry Salt, ed., Killing for Sport: Essays by Various Writers (1914); the Institute for the Advancement of Philosophy for Children.

Secondary: Linda Birke, Feminism, Animals and Science: The Naming of the Shrew (1994); Gena Corea, The Mother Machine: Reproductive Technologies from Artificial Insemination to Artificial Wombs (1985); Mary Douglas, "Deciphering a Meal", in Implicit Meanings: Essays in Anthropology (1975); Coral Lansbury, The Old Brown Dog: Women, Workers, and Vivisection in Edwardian England (1985); Carolyn Steedman, "Landscape for a Good Woman", in Truth, Dare or Promise: Girls Growing Up in the Fifties (1985).

Additionally, the book's bibliography is helpfully separated into subject areas, including "Vegetarian Writings", "Animal Concerns and Animal Defense", "Feminist Writings", "Sexual and Domestic Violence", "Literary Criticism", "History, Autobiography, Biography", "Fiction, Poetry, Drama", "Medical and Nutritional Writings", and "Other".

Shifting Gears

Charles Sheeler, "Ford Plant, River Rouge, Criss-Crossed Conveyors", 1927

Title: Shifting Gears: Technology, Literature, Culture in Modernist America (Chapel Hill: the UNC Press, 1987)

Author: Cecelia Tichi, of the English department at Vanderbilt. Her other books are numerous and have a broad range of subject matter: Exposes and Excess: Muckraking in America, 1900/2000 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003); Embodiment of a Nation: Human Form in American Spaces (Harvard UP, 2001); Reading Country Music: Steel Guitars, Opry Stars, and Konky-Tonk Bars (Duke University Press, 1998) (did she mean "honky-tonk bars"? I bet so); High Lonesome: The American Culture of Country Music (University of North Carolina Press, 1994); Electronic Hearth: Creating an American Television Culture (Oxford University Press, 1991); and New World: New Earth: Environmental Reform in American Literature from the Puritans through Whitman (Yale UP, 1979). Apparently she's also written three novels! Cool.

Stuart Davis, Percolator, 1927

My review: Tichi writes that although some writers, artists, and poets took an antimodern stance regarding the technological advances of the 1880-1930 period (there's gotta be a better name for that fifty years!), others of their contemporaries embraced not only the subject matter of the machine age, but also its methods of composition, adopting what Tichi calls a "gear and girder" approach to art-making.

On the ground, this engineering-style approach reflected itself in more pared-down prose (Hemingway, who cited his apprenticeship with a newspaper, during which he had to telegraph stories to his editor, as a motivator for his simple sentence construction); a materialist approach to poetry (William Carlos Williams - glad to see you again!); and a heightened sense of the motion and physicality of the "real world", taken from Taylorization's attention to detail (John Dos Passos).

Tichi's approach is at its most effective when she goes into deep textual analysis, but when she situates these writers in their cultural milieu, things feel more scattershot. The images chosen to illustrate this book exemplify the problems with this approach - many of them are postcards of major engineering projects, or advertisements mentioning "efficiency", "waste", or other Taylorizing keywords in a commercial context. But often the images are not analyzed in depth or situated within a larger analysis, serving mostly as window dressing for her larger points.

By far the most useful chapter for my purposes is the one on the "cult of the engineer" in American culture (p 97). Here, Tichi describes how the engineer became a heroic figure in children's lit, movies, advertisements, and fiction, taking the place of the cowboy in stories of Western settlement and becoming an aspirational figure. Tichi writes of his appeal: "He signified stability in a changing world...he was technology's human face, providing reassurance that the world of gears and girders combined rationality with humanity" (99). Here she cites Henry Adams, Rex Beach, and Herbert Hoover, among others.

Frank Lloyd Wright, Fallingwater, 1935

Reviews of others: Howard Segal wrote in the Journal of American History that the book was dispassionate and smart and steered clear of either hostility or worshipfulness, which were dangerous tendencies of other books about technology (this did come out in 1987, which was early in the "social-construction" game, I guess). He wished the book could have been more international. In American Literature, Christopher Nelson wrote that Tichi's method of analysis sometimes had trouble with matters of emphasis: why foreground one "cultural tendency" and background another as "latent"? This overstatement, Nelson wrote, led to occasional oversimplification, as when Tichi hit multiple times upon the "analogy of literary economy and engineering values". Nelson also wished that Tichi had included more material on the social realities of technology and its power relationships, such as the implications for labor or the structure of the working class.

Rube Goldberg device for cleaning shop windows; date of drawing unidentified on Rube Goldberg site. Goldberg's machines were parodies of labor-saving methods, exemplifying, like Chaplin's "Modern Times", the comic side of these obsessions with efficiency.

Books to follow up on: Primary: the Erector set for kids (1910s); The Book of Wonders (1916 kids' text); St. Nicholas magazine; journal: School and Society; Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward 2000-1887 (1888); William Book, The Intelligence of High School Seniors (1922); John Dos Passos, Manhattan Transfer (1925); Frank Norris, The Octopus (1901); John H Randall, Our Changing Civilization: How Science and the Machine are Reconstructing Modern Life (1931); Civilization in the United States (anthology of intellectual thought in early 1920s); childrens' lit about engineering listed on page 100.

Secondary: Roland Barthes, The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies (1979).

Homeward Bound

For May, bomb shelters exemplify the "containment" metaphor, showing how public fears intersected with (created?) domestic ideologies of the hothouse nuclear family.

Title: Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988)

Author: Elaine Tyler May, history, University of Minnesota (PhD, UCLA, 1975). She writes: "I am a historian of the United States in the twentieth century, with a particular interest in the intersections of politics and private life. My research and teaching focus on the areas of women's history and history of the family, exploring the ways in which gender and sexuality reflect and express American political, cultural and social values." Her other books include Great Expectations: Marriage and Divorce in Post-Victorian America (1980) and Barren in the Promised Land: Childless Americans and the Pursuit of Happiness (1997), which I really, really want to read.

Argument: Dominant historical and cultural narratives have normalized the 1950s way of marriage and family life, but in reality, the 50s paradigm (early marriage; rigid gender roles; nuclear family) was different from anything before or after - and, of course, the social relations of the time period were constructed, like those of any other. May asks why, after the Depression and WWII, when women worked outside of the home in large numbers, the pendulum swung so far toward the other, more traditional configuration during the 1950s. The larger theoretical point here has to do with the way that political ideology, or national political "direction", can be reflected/refracted in ideas of domestic relationships. Specifically, during the postwar years, ideas of "containment" (on the international level) manifested themselves in the domestic sphere.

Chapter-by-chapter:
1. Containment at Home: Cold War, Warm Hearth: Beginning with the story of the Nixon/Khruschev "kitchen debates", May describes what deeper meanings or usefulnesses the domesticity of the 1950s had for the society: "The appliance-laden ranch-style home epitomized the expansive, secure lifestyle that postwar Americans wanted. Within the protective walls of the modern home, worrisome developments like sexual liberalism, women's emancipation, and affluence would lead not to decadence but to a wholesome family life. Sex would enhance marriage, emancipated women would professionalize homemaking, and affluence would put an end to material deprivation..." (19-20) Also, this lifestyle, when available to (or idealized for!) many people, would make Communism look unattractive and unnecessary to the majority of Americans. Here, May also introduces the Kelly Longitudinal Study, the survey of married couples begun in the 1930s which will serve as an important part of her evidence for the book.


Nixon v. Khruschev, 1959 Kitchen Debates. But why did Moscow allow an exposition of American culture in the first place? Anybody know? (Also, Khruschev said, when Nixon showed him a TV, "This is probably always out of order...Don't you have a machine that puts food into the mouth and pushes it down? Many things you've shown us are interesting but they are not needed in life...they are merely gadgets" [quoted on page 163]. And then Nixon proceeded to go see about inventing that food-pusher...)

2. Depression: Hard Times at Home: Context for the 1950s model of domesticity includes the Depression years, during which many more women went to work, but which, May says, also "created nostalgia for a mythic past in which male breadwinners made a decent living, and homemakers were freed from outside employment" (38). May discusses Depression-era Hollywood depictions of working women, which always managed to emphasize flexibility and problem-solving in marriages strapped for cash, without proposing a fundamental shift in the way marriages worked.

3. War and Peace: Fanning the Home Fires: Again, during WWII, women worked in greater numbers; however, this "emergency suspension" of gender roles (see Gail Collins, who probably got this idea from May) is revoked at the end of the war. May returns to Hollywood to show how women working in the film industry were depicted as domestic (and includes an awesomely memorable picture of Joan Crawford washing the floor in full eyebrowed splendor). The emphasis on domesticity during a time when many women worked was due to a desire to contain the female sexuality which was seen as being "on the loose" during the wild wartime years (see: paintings of bombshells on planes and, well, bombshells). May also writes about the real dilemmas of women who decided whether or not to work during this era, pointing out that opportunities for women - whether college-educated or not - were slim, and may have made domesticity seem like a more appetizing solution to the question "What do I do with my life?"

4. Explosive Issues: Sex, Women, and the Bomb: During the postwar years, women's sexuality was linked pervasively with the power of the bomb, "a symbolic connection that found widespread expression in professional writings, anticommunist campaigns, and the popular culture" (93). Many people in many levels of government sincerely believed that there was a "direct connection between communism and sexual depravity" (94). Male power needed to be exercised in the home as well as in the public sphere, so that the power of sex could be harnessed and channelled in positive directions: men would be fulfilled, and not subject to temptations of pornography, homosexuality, and prostitution; women would be fulfilled, and would raise healthy kids, like good republican mothers. Here May talks about the bomb shelter and its meanings for idealized family "togetherness" and insularity.

Marilyn Monroe, she of the totally uncontrollable sexuality, in Niagara (1953).

5. Brinkmanship: Sexual Containment on the Home Front: Following the paradigm set up in the previous chapter, May returns to the Kelly data, attempting to see how postwar couples were affected by ideologies of containment. Discussing ideas of the acceptability of premarital sex, she writes that many couples got married early to avoid the disasters that were supposed to happen when you did engage in intercourse before getting hitched. May outlines the paradox of expert advice on sex and marriage in this time period: the recommendation was for complete virginity before marriage, and then mutual bliss within - a combination which didn't really seem to work in the real world, or at least the real world as reported by Kelly. All in all, sexual containment had an "ambiguous legacy" (134) - it did not guarantee security or fulfillment, but the consequences of non-adherence (loss of status, stigma, "the economic hardship of divorce") were too great for many people to risk.

6. Baby Boom and Birth Control: The Reproductive Consensus: During the Cold War, having babies was a way to exercise civic values. Pronatalism, rampant during these years, held that having children was the number one way to be happy, and to contribute to the growth of the nation. To this end, ideas of maternity being the ultimate sexual fulfillment for women were widely held, but also (and this is interesting) people thought that men should be fathers - as May contends, fatherhood was seen as an antidote to an office life that might be overwhelmingly depersonalized. For the first time, the family was supposed to fulfill all human emotional needs - a microcosm unto itself. Again, May returns to H'wood to describe how these ideas grew in movie-world.

Still from the pronatal film "Penny Serenade", starring Cary Grant and Irene Dunne (1941)

7. The Commodity Gap: Consumerism and the Modern Home: Returning to the kitchen debates, May shows how consumerism was tied with stability and anti-Communism, and how investing in the home became the best way of "planning for the future" (even if it put financial burdens on the family in the present). May writes that part of the way Americans, still adhering to a Puritan model of pragmatism and guilt, justified spending as much as they started spending was that if it was the home they were investing in, consumerism was seen as unselfish (it's for the kids, not for me!) Good point.

8. Hanging Together: For Better or for Worse: Returning to the Kelly couples, May goes straight to the heart of some bad marriages, asking why the couples in question stayed together, and finding that the answer was usually status, stability, and security.

9. Epilogue: The Baby Boom Comes of Age: Starting with Friedan's The Feminine Mystique (1963), May writes about responses to the domestic ideal, beginning with those who lived it (women who wrote to Friedan after the publication of the book) and moving into the responses of their children. She eventually concludes that domestic containment moved out of fashion after the Cold War political conditions changed, and that there was, after the 1950s, no "consensus" idea of how family life would be lived - at least, not the way there was back then.

Reviews: Joseph Hawes, writing in the Journal of American History, wrote that May used the "perfect" data set provided in the form of the Kelly survey to great effect, comparing her work to that of Nancy Cott in Bonds of Womanhood (1977). Hawes also liked May's use of the Civil Defense images in chapter 4. The only possible quibble: May seemed to focus on unhappy couples, but, Hawes wrote, "the 60s rebirth of feminism fully justifies her emphasis". In Signs, Susan Ware wrote that the use of the Kelly data was the strength and the weakness of the book - the data's concentration in the white middle class, for example, was a drawback (but one of which, as Ware admits, May is fully aware). More important, Ware wrote that the somewhat imperfect chronology of the Kelly survey - which began in the late 30s - meant that many of the 50s ideologies described in the book could not be said to apply directly to the experiences of these couples. Overall, though, Ware appreciated May's interest in placing these 50s experiences in a chronology which included the 30s and 40s.

Sources to follow up on: Primary: Movies: "The Atomic Cafe"; "Niagara".

Secondary: Linda Gordon, Woman's Body, Woman's Right: A Social History of Birth Control in America (1976); Robert J. Lifton, The Broken Connection: On Death and the Continuity of Life (1979); Lary May, Screening Out the Past: The Birth of Mass Culture and the Motion Picture Industry (1983); Ellen Peck and Judith Senderowitz, Pronatalism: The Myth of Mom and Apple Pie (1974); Ellen Rothman, Hands and Hearts: A History of Courtship in America (1984); Leila Rupp, Mobilizing Women for War: German and American Propaganda, 1939-1945 (1978); Viviana Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children (1985).

Waste and Want

Fresh Kills 3, by the photographer Susan Wides (2000).

Title: Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash (New York: Henry Holt, 1999).

Author: Susan Strasser, of the history department at the University of Delaware. She calls herself a "historian of American consumer culture" and is currently a Senior Resident Scholar at the Hagley Museum and Library’s Center for the History of Business, Technology, and Society (at Delaware). Her other books include Never Done: A History of American Housework (1982); Satisfaction Guaranteed: The Making of the American Mass Market (1989); Getting and Spending: European and American Consumer Societies in the Twentieth Century (1998); and Commodifying Everything: Relationships of the Market (2003).

Argument: Trash, which is a culturally defined category, has meant wildly different things to Americans from colonial times through today. Before about 1900, American households were "closed" systems: domestic objects were used and reused and split up into parts and used again, reflecting the scarcity of...everything...in the pre-industrial era. Strasser adopts Levi-Strauss' idea of "bricolage", writing that Americans who re-worked dresses and made soap out of fat and fed chickens with food waste were bricoleurs, playing with available materials in order to serve their needs. After the turn-of-the-century tipping point, however, Americans, aided by advertisers and marketers eager to sell products, became more and more accustomed to the convenience of disposal, beginning to see it as their right (convenience equalling freedom which equalled the American way). Trash disposal became the province of experts, and bricolage became the province of the poor. (There are a lot of small details in this book, which is rich in description, so the chapter summaries below may be shorter.)

Chapter-by-chapter:
Toward a History of Trashmaking: Here Strasser introduces the basic elements of her argument (see above), using anthropologists Mary Douglas, Claude Levi-Strauss, and Sidney Mintz.

One: The Stewardship of Objects: Nineteenth-century uses of old clothing, food waste, worn-out sheets, and packaging material, as recommended by household advice manuals such as Catherine Beecher's.

Two: Any Rags, Any Bones: Nineteenth-century "recycling" practices facilitated the "return of household wastes to manufacturers for use as raw materials" and were "inherent to production in some industries, central to the distribution of consumer goods, and an important habit of daily life" (72). Using the example of the rag industry, which gathered rags from householders to make paper, Strasser shows how one type of waste that we would now call "trash" formed a link in the early industrial economy. She also describes the relationships between rural households and peddlers, who would gather their rags in return for goods, and talks about the "recycling" trades in iron and bones.

Jacob Riis, Home of an Italian Ragpicker (1894): Ragpickers in the cities, especially when juvenile, were considered dangerous and corrupt (Strasser cites Charles Loring Brace on child ragpickers as an example).

Three: Trash and Reuse Transformed: During the transition period at the turn of the century between a culture of bricolage and one of consumerism, "new ways coexisted with old": people in the cities and those with money adopted packaged goods before poor country cousins; young people changed habits before old. Some cities began to take charge of refuse disposal, and with this separation came new class anxieties: middle-class people who were horrified by the idea of being "like" Riis' "Italian ragpickers" "learned to toss things in the trash" instead of reusing (113). Meanwhile, the Salvation Army and Goodwill began to take advantage of the new trends, offering to take the job of reusing trash off the hands of the individual householders (and do some good in the meantime). The first World War momentarily reversed upward trends in disposal, but the curve resumed at the cessation of hostilities.

Rather than being a radical requirement, Strasser argues, recycling is just a new version of the old "sorting" that people used to do with household waste.

Four: Having and Disposing in the New Consumer Culture: Strasser uses the evolution of the use of Kotex disposal "sanitary napkins" as an example of what advertisers had to deal with when attempting to persuade people to abandon old ways of reuse (she cites Roland Marchand's idea of the advertising man as the "town crier" of modernity). In the 1920s, she writes, attitudes attendant to the development of products such as Kotex "equated handy new inventions with ease and prosperity" (170). "Cleanliness" was a major selling point for paper products, and the idea of "technological obsolesence" came into play as part of a new "ethos of disposability" (173). Convenience in household products came associated with freedom and assurance - "an amalgam of luxury, comfort, and emancipation from worry" (184). Often, household products were advertised as being like "servants", harkening back to 19th-century ideals of genteel householdery.

Five: Making Do and Buying New in Hard Times: Depression-era attitudes toward disposal and consumerism were altered, but Strasser argues that although people tried to cut down on their buying, they were still inextricably intertwined in a culture of consumption: "few people made soap anymore; most bought clothing, and sewing was becoming a hobby...when hard times came, most younger people, at least, were thoroughly consumerist. Their versions of 'making do'...were framed by consumer concerns and consumer possibilities" (204). Two major consumer items - autos and refrigerators - even ceased being considered luxuries during this time period. (This chapter also cites several quilt patterns incorporating technological themes, like airplanes and electric fans...p 218.)

Six: Use It Up! Wear It Out! Get in the Scrap!: WWII-era scrap drives, though often considered exemplars of patriotic recycling, were actually, Strasser argues, not so much of a sacrifice for homeowners, and the industrial donations were actually far more cost-effective. Although some homefront rhetorics emphasized sacrifice, they also promised that when the war was over, good ol' consumer days would return again (as they did!) Roosevelt's Four Freedoms included "Freedom from Want", which promised that after the war, everybody would have a turkey in a refrigerator. Meanwhile, women's household activities were seen as another "front" in the war - by participating in scrap drives and rationing, women could be seen to be "supporting" their soldiers.

The awesome movie "Idiocracy" (2006), in which one of the signs of societal collapse is that humans are regularly buried in huge trash avalanches.

Seven: Good Riddance: Strasser wraps up the book with perhaps the most familiar part of the story: the expansion of waste in the postwar era. "New materials, especially plastics of all kinds, became the basis for a relationship to the material world that required consumers to buy things rather than make them and to throw things out rather than fix them...nobody made plastic at home, hardly anybody understood how it was made, and it usually could not be repaired" (267). Strasser sees Vance Packard's The Waste Makers (1960) as a harbinger of the environmental movement, one of the first social critiques of the waste culture. She ends the book with a discussion of "garbage" art (see below) and some ideas for future change in how Americans see waste: "We are not likely to revive the stewardship of objects and materials, formed in a bygone culture of handiwork. But perhaps new ideas of morality, utility, common sense, and the value of labor - based on the stewardship of the earth and of natural resources - can replace it" (293). Artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles, the unsalaried "artist in residence" of the NYC sanitation department, in one phase of her "Touch Sanitation" project (1978-80), which involved shaking hands with every member of the department.

Reviews: In Technology and Culture, JD Lindeberg wrote that while it's interesting to think about changing attitudes toward personal waste, industrial waste continues to outpace household waste at huge margins. Thus, he wrote, Strasser's analysis would appeal to both academics and those in the political world with the power to shift policy and therefore industrial practice: "Academics may focus on the detailed analyses of changing sociocultural attitudes toward waste. But professionals and policymakers will be struck by how current behaviors are clearly the outcome of the economic policies of the middle twentieth century. Successfully creating change in those behaviors will require economic policies no less profound in their effects." In the Business History Review, Timothy Spears particularly liked Strasser's discussion of bricolage, but wishes she'd extended it beyond the world of women's work into the more masculine realms (mending farm equipment, etc).

Vocab words: "nahptha".

Books to follow up on: Primary: Kevin Lynch, Wasting Away: An Exploration of Waste—What It Is, How It Happens, Why We Fear It, How to Do It Well (1990); Mary Lillian Patterson, How to Teach Thrift: A Manual for Teachers and Parents (1927).

Secondary: Jane Becker, Selling Tradition: Appalachia and the Construction of an American Folk, 1930-1940 (1998); Simon J. Bronner, ed., Consuming Visions: Accumulation and Display of Goods in America, 1880-1920 (1989); Faye Dudden, Serving Women: Household Service in Nineteenth-Century America (1983); Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South (1988); Stephen Gelber, "Do-it-Yourself: Constructing, Repairing, and Maintaining Domestic Masculinity", American Quarterly 49 (March 1997); Robert H. Haddow, Pavilions of Plenty: Exhibiting American Cultulre Abroad in the 1950s (1997); Suellen Hoy, Chasing Dirt: The American Pursuit of Cleanliness (1995); Claudia B Kidwell and Margaret C Christman, Suiting Everyone: The Democratization of Clothing in America (1974); Karal Ann Marling, As Seen on TV: The Visual Culture of Everyday Life in the 1950s (1994); Carl Husemoller Nightingale, On The Edge: A History of Poor Black Children and Their American Dreams (1993); Michiel Schwarz and Michael Thompson, Divided We Stand: Redefining Politics, Technology, and Social Choice (1990); Michael Thompson, Rubbish Theory: The Creation and Destruction of Value (1979); Nancy Tomes, The Gospel of Germs: Men, Women, and the Microbe in American Life (1998); William Tuttle, "Daddy's Gone to War": The Second World War in the Lives of America's Children (1993).

Trash art by German artist H.A. Schult (late 90s) gets displayed in traditionally exalted locales, such as this cathedral in Cologne, the Matterhorn, and the Great Wall of China.

War Without Mercy

View of the Hiroshima bombing.

Title: War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986)

Author: John W. Dower, professor of Japanese history at MIT. Holds a PhD in history and Far Eastern languages (Harvard). His other books include Empire and Aftermath (1979) ("a study of the life and times of the diplomat and prime minister Yoshida Shigeru"); Japan in War and Peace: Selected Essays (1999); and most recently Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (1999), which won the Pulitzer, the Natl Book Award, and the Bancroft Award. He's also executive-produced a doc called "Hellfire: A Journey from Hiroshima", which was nominated for an Academy Award in 1988.

Argument: During the Pacific War, racism on the part of both the Americans and Japanese made it easier to prosecute a conflict which was notable for its bloodiness and severity. The reason why the Japanese and Americans were able to slip into a friendly postwar relationship even after such carnage is that the stereotypes employed on both sides were multifaceted, mutable, and almost universal in their historical experience. Thus, rather than believing that the postwar years spoke to the possibility of elimination of past historical racism, Dower proposes that the most frightening thing about these kinds of racist ideologies is that they can be stowed away and applied to whatever conflict comes up next, even if the enemy is not of the same race or nationality.

Chapter-by-chapter:

Part One: Enemies
1. Patterns of a Race War: An overview of the racist ideologies at play in the American and Japanese understanding of each other. Dower points out that these ideologies must have made it easier for each side to commit atrocities and carry out full scale war; he also writes that racisms of this kind are mutable and constant conditions of human interaction. The fact that stereotypes and ideologies of the war era were easily adapted to peacetime conditions (instead of being a menacing, base simian, the Japanese were seen as pets; instead of incubating xenophobia, the Japanese ideology of purity led to a desire to purge the nation of the recently failed regime).

2. "Know Your Enemy": An analysis of Frank Capra's "Why We Fight" installment on Japan serves as the centerpiece for an explication of American stereotypes about Japan, as well as background material for an understanding of why the Allies treated Japan as they did in the postwar era. Meanwhile, a parallel description of the pamphlets and manifestos read by Japanese soldiers and citizens shows that inside Japan, America and the West were viewed as aggressors possessed of a traitorous history of empire - aggressors whose downfall was essential to the health of the world. Dower uses these two sources to show how stereotype worked on either side: these types "followed patterns of contrariness", in which the type was seen as the opposite of the favorable national ideal; "the positive self images of one side were singled out for ridicule and condemnation by the other"; both sides espoused surprisingly similar ideologies of "liberation, morality, and peace"; images of the enemy as "incorrigibly evil, base, or mad" led to genocidal policies or practices; and finally, "there was a free-floating quality to portrayals of the enemy - a pattern of stereotyping particular to enemies and 'others' in general, rather than to the Japanese foe or Western foe in particular" (29) (see Richard Drinnon).

3. War Hates and War Crimes: Dower begins with two questions: why were Japanese seen in the US as being so much worse than the Germans in the atrocity department? And why did Japanese propaganda portray the Allies as "the real barbarians of the modern age" (34)? Answers to the first include the idea that the Japanese, unlike the Germans, were "suicidal" or irrational; that the incomplete defeat of the Japanese would only, in the history of such a long-standing nation, mean that the Japanese would begin to build up forces for a revenge blow; and finally, the idea that Japan required a "psychological purge" to free it of its "madness" - we should inflict pain and suffering on all of the citizens, this argument went, as a necessary method of ridding the Japanese of their abnormal psychology (56). Meanwhile, the Japanese saw us as having had a long-term ambition to gain supremacy over Asia; having interfered militarily in Japanese affairs in the past; and having a current plan to commit atrocity in order to send Japan back into the class of "slave state" (58).

Part Two: The War in Western Eyes
4. Apes and Others: Representation of Japanese people as subhuman or inhuman took several forms: representation as animals (monkeys, bees, snakes); representation as madmen; representation as children. Dower uses cartoons, official propaganda, etc., as examplars. These attached representations, Dower writes, "blocked seeing the foe as rational or even human, and facilitated mass killing" (89). Dower points out that while these stereotypes remained somewhat constant and translated from earlier eras, the United States became availed of stronger and stronger technological methods of extermination, resulting in a deadly combination (93).

5. Lesser Men and Supermen: Even ethnographers and anthropologists who were supposedly more sympathetic to the Japanese ended up reinforcing these ideologies of supremacy by espousing condescending or ethnocentric views about Japanese "national character". Before the war, Japanese were seen on the whole as "lesser men", incapable of achieving Western levels of technological dominance; as they began to achieve victories, not the least of which was their strike on Pearl Harbor, their status slid into that of "superman", which was nonetheless not necessarily an upgrade ("subhuman and superhuman were not mutually exclusive...but complementary" [116]).

6. Primitives, Children, Madmen: More coverage of social-science's contributions to Japanology during the war, which often consisted in diagnosing the "problem" of the Japanese character (one theory: they were toilet trained too early and too strictly, which meant that they were control freaks who could not compromise or surrender). The diagnoses generally separated into three categories of primitive, childlike (or adolescent - often the Japanese were compared to teenage gangsters), or mentally ill.

7. Yellow, Red, and Black Men: Dower associates racism against the Japanese with that against the Indians and African-Americans of the United States, specifying that this racism saw the Japanese (or Asians in general) as "the yellow horde", set to invade American shores. The "Yellow Peril" was made all the more perilous by the mass' growing adoption of American and Western technology (Dower uses Fu Manchu novels starring a mad Asian scientist to make this point). Here Dower also includes information about black American sympathies for the Asian nations beset by US racism.



Bugs Bunny cartoon satirizing Japanese culture, using many race stereotypes described by Dower.

Part Three: The War in Japanese Eyes
8. The Pure Self: A major component of Japanese racism against Westerners was situated in the "impurity" of the Westerner or the foreigner, as opposed to the superiority of the Japanese "stock". Dower points out that the concept of Japanese "purity" was rooted in religious practice and mythohistory. The Yamato race, Japanese ideology held, could be traced back to a celestial origin. Purification as an active prescription, Dower writes, "was understood to mean: 1. expunging foreign influences 2. living austerely and 3. fighting, and if need be, dying for the emperor" (228). Late-war developments such as the training of kamikaze pilots were associated with this fundamental idea. The flip side of this iconicity of purity was the essential corruption of the Westerners in opposition to Japan - Japanese belief in this corruption/egotism/weakness, Dower writes, led the Japanese to misread American commitment to the Pacific War, in the early years of the conflict (260).

9. The Demonic Other: Here Dower explicates the role of the "stranger" in Japanese culture, which is an ambiguous and sometimes threatening one. During the war, Westerners were seen as the dark side of the stranger, which would manifest itself in beastly or atrocious behavior. (Dower cites multiple examples of Japanese stories about American war atrocities.) Dower also tells the story of Momotaro, a Japanese folk hero who, as an exceptionally bright and strong young lad, exorcises multiple demons. This story influenced many Japanese ideas about heroism and military service (see: the kamikaze pilot). Dower points out that although Japanese cartoons did depict Japan as Momotaro and the Allies as the demons to be defeated, the fact that specific Allies (Churchill, Roosevelt) were identified as enemies gave them a human identity that was denied the Japanese in the analogous position (256).

10. "Global Policy with the Yamato Race as Nucleus": The story of the idea of the Co-Prosperity Sphere, an entity intended to establish Asia as an imperial holding of Japan. Examining an official report which survived the purge of such paperwork after V-J Day, Dower writes that the racism which saw Japan at the middle of this Pan-Asiatic world "reflected Western intellectual influences as well as Western pressures", and that the "patterns of supremacism" embedded in Japanese writing about other Asian races was "analogous" to Western racisms (265).

The USS Saratoga after hits by a series of kamikaze pilots, February 21, 1945.

Kamikaze pilots.

Part Four: Epilogue
11. From War to Peace: Transformation of racist ideas about the Other happened surprisingly rapidly on both sides of the Japanese/American divide. Japanese people employed the alternate vision of "the stranger" - the more positive permutation - in order to facilitate increased acceptance of the American occupying forces. Americans re-cast their "simian" enemies as pets, or saw themselves as "parents" or "doctors" to the Japanese "children" or "patients". However, in later years, Japanese business ascendency has been seen in the West as another indication of Japanese "superhumanity" - shades of old stereotypes continue.

Reviews: In the Pacific Historical Review, D. Clayton James wrote that Mercy was one of the standout books on the Pacific War, called it relevant and provocative, but wished that Dower had not been so obsessed with linking happenings of the Pacific War to later foreign policy interactions: "his thesis might have been more closely reasoned" if he had not tried to do so. In Reviews in American History, Robert Rosenstone called the thesis of racism-as-motivating- factor "simple", but then writes that the inclusion of the Japanese intellectual history complicates what could have been a well-worn argument. Rosenstone also believed that a pile of evidence about racism, such as Dower presents, cannot attach an attitude to a deed - a fault which he attaches not just to this book, but to any so-called "attitudinal history". Moreover, he pointed out, no matter how many historians write books about racism, racist stereotypes still retain a frightening power over human events.

Vocab words: "shibboleth" (a cultural marker of some sort, as "a custom, habit, mode of dress, or the like, which distinguishes a particular class or set of persons"); "ratiocination" ("the process of reasoning").

The burned back of a victim of the Hiroshima bombing.

Books to follow up on: Secondary: Winthrop Jordan, White Over Black: American Attitudes Towards the Negro, 1550-1812 (1968); David Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust, 1941-45 (1984).

The Circus Age

Title: The Circus Age: Culture and Society Under the American Big Top (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002)

Author: Our own Janet Davis!

Argument: "This book argues that the turn of the century railroad circus was a powerful cultural icon of a new, modern nation-state" (10) - that the circus took shape in the way it did, where it did, because of the particular society in which it flourished. The circus represented the diversity and pleasure of the spectacle of a multitudinous America, but often in a way which reiterated cultural norms.

Chapter-by-chapter:

Circus Day: Rich descriptions of the public spectacle that was a circus coming into town in "railroad circus" days, followed by a basic overview of the historical currents which fed into the phenomenon (immigration, "the search for order", racism, empire, expanding overseas markets, incorporation - see Alan Trachtenberg). Davis then describes the three largest railroad circuses upon which the book will focus (Barnum & Bailey, the Ringling Bros, and Adam Forepaugh & Sells Brothers), making a case for them as the three largest, most widely-traveled, and most influential of the circuses, and differentiating them from Wild West Shows (the circus was less historically minded, more eclectic in subject matter, and employed the definitive "big top" canvas covering).

This photo of Barnum & Bailey camels on a main street parade was found on a website called camelphotos.com. Cue the "I love the Internet" theme song.

The Circus as Historical and Cultural Process: This chapter dips back in time to the 1790s, describing the evolution of the circus during the 1800s as "a metonym for national expansion and infrastructural development" (12). (In other words, the railroad, Western expansion, and the circus were intimately linked.) This chapter also discusses, using cultural theory of Stuart Hall, Edward Said, and Judith Butler, how the different groups involved in the production of the circus came together to produce its "ideological content" (25). NB: On p 35, Davis discusses children's circus culture, including a circus toy set which modeled itself after TR's African safari of 1909.

These men were supposed to be "pearl divers from the Sandwich Islands" - an instance of American imperialism's absorption into circus-world.

Spectacular Labor: This chapter "illuminates the thick, physical framework in which the circus produced its ideological content" (39) - in other words, how did it all get done, and how does this "how" help us understand what workers, supervisors, and spectators expected? Spectators who watched the circus were not only intrigued with the parts of the show specifically designated as performance. They also congregated to watch the set-up and strike of the tent, and were fascinated/repelled by the lives of circus performers. Davis argues that these performers created a social world apart from "regular life", and also that the tightly wound methods and processes of the circus (they had to be tight, to fit onto the railroad schedule) brought the industrial order of organization to small towns far away from factories.

Respectable Female Nudity: Women were becoming more and more visible in the public sphere (see the "New Woman"), and the people who ran these circuses faced an interesting gender conundrum: what to do about their very visible female performers? In general, they tried to "reconfigure strong Euroamerican circus women into dainty, domestic ladies, and women of color into educational artifacts" (12). They did so with an eye to a subtle titillation of the viewer, playing with transgression, referring to sex obliquely, through "emphasis on female performers' lives, loves, and body-hugging tights" (85). Here is also a discussion of presentation of "untouched" tribes or "savages" in the circus context.

From the King of Beasts to Clowns in Drag: Masculinity in the circus and its contrasting meanings is the subject of this chapter, which holds that "performances...were sites of gender play that could provide audiences with liberating alternatives to disciplined lives of manly capital accumulation" (12). Although circus men were seen as exemplars of the athletic, "strenuous" ideal, they were also sometimes androgynous or dressed in drag - or, they were actually animals, dressed up as men. Here are examples of the animals' roles in particular tableaux, as well as the integration of evolutionary theory (chimpanzees used as examples of "Man, Previous to His Degeneration" [153]) and the emphasis placed on "ideal" or "alpha" specimens of megafauna (just like Carl Akeley and his Giant of Karisimbi). Men of color, even African-Americans, were often used as examples of apes or savages (182). Do hippos really have teeth that look like that?

Instruct the Minds of All Classes: Through the circus (and the Wild West show), American involvement in foreign countries was processed, naturalized, and contained. Episodes of foreign entanglement were re-broadcast in circus format, reenacted or dramatized. The overriding philosophy behind these representations was that circuses were "moral cheerleaders of expansionism" (194). Meanwhile, on a material level, animals and labor from overseas were used in performance, dramatizing the advantages of selective American extraction of talent and labor from foreign countries - however, Davis points out, the freakiness of these performers may have served to subtly uphold an anti-imperialist racial logic of exclusion (see Eric Love).

Looks like kind of a scary dream for a kid to have.

Legacies: From Las Vegas to the Bridges of Madison County: Contemporary analogues of circus culture, and some speculation as to what forms of culture may have taken its place.

Reviews: In the Journal of American History, Don Wilmeth lauded the book for being "clearly written, persuasively argued, exhaustively documented", and wrote that it did an admirable job of completing its project of connecting the circus to the cultural history of the time. The book was also well-reviewed in non-scholarly pubs, including the NYT and the Times Literary Supplement.

Books to follow up on: Primary: Peter Harkness, Andy the Acrobat; or, Out with the Greatest Show on Earth (1907); William Hornaday, The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals (1922); Harvey Root, Tommy with the Big Tents (1924).

Secondary: Harvey Green, Fit for America: Health, Fitness, Sport, and American Society (1986); Elizabeth Haiken, Venus Envy: A History of Cosmetic Surgery (1997); RJ Hoage and William A Deiss, New Worlds, New Animals: From Menagerie to Zoological Park in the Nineteenth Century (1996); Michael Kammen, American Culture, American Tastes: Social Change and the Twentieth Century (1999); Robert Kanigel, The One Best Way: Frederick Winslow Taylor and the Engima of Efficiency (1997); Charles Musser, The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907 (1990); Patricia Vertinsky, The Eternally Wounded Woman: Women, Doctors, and Exercise in the Late Nineteenth Century (1990).

Spectacular Nature

Title: Spectacular Nature: Corporate Culture and the Sea World Experience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997)

Author: Susan G. Davis, professor of communications at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her PhD is in "folklore and folklife," from UPenn. Her first book was Parades and Power: Street Theatre in Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia (1986). She lists her interests as "politics of contemporary public and commercial space; nature and its relation to mass commercial culture; history and memory on the landscape; the contemporary history of tourism, southern California and San Diego history and culture." She doesn't seem to have written another book since this one.

Argument: Davis takes a holistic look at the production of the Sea World experience, seeking to outline the park's positioning as public and as educational space. To this end, she describes the park's interaction with the community; analyzes the corporation's advertising and packaging, both in print media and within the exhibits and the park itself; conducts ethnographic research within the population of those who work at the park and within the population of visitors; and parses the physical space of the park. Through all of this work, Davis hopes to understand how Sea World, and other examples of what she calls "spectacular nature", are "corporate culture's philanthropic answer to a world of environmental emergencies," through which "the possibility of alternatives" (to environmental destruction, especially species extirpation) "collapses into the consumption of images" (237-8). Theoretically, she draws from Raymond Williams' concept of nature's ability to obscure hidden social relationships of power, as well as Donna Haraway's work on museum exhibits.

This picture was attached to a blog post about an article about applying Sea World's animal-training techniques to husbands. Human husbands, that is.

Chapter-by-Chapter:

One: Another World: Theme Parks and Nature: Davis sets up the framework for understanding theme-park nature as a product, and the theme park industry as the producer. This chapter is a cultural history of theme parks, concentrating on the ways in which theme parks produce multiple streams of income for corporations (through licensing, tie-ins, concessions). Davis sees Sea World, owned by Anheuser-Busch, as a powerful way for a company to associate itself with neutral and pristine white-washed ideals of nature.

Two: The Park and the City: Here, Davis does a site-specific historical analysis of Sea World's location in San Diego, concentrating on the ways in which the park must appeal "both to an audience of locals and tourists," situating itself in San Diego but responding to a national corporation and trying to attract national and international tourists as part of SD's tourism juggernaut (41). In early permutations, Sea World had a more cheesy, sideshow visual language - dolphins wore bikinis, etc - but later on it sought to reposition itself as an Educational Institution.

Sea World mascot.

Three: Producing the Sea World Experience: Landscape and Labor: Sea World's landscape, Davis points out, is a space constructed out of "human work, time, space, dirt, plants, and animals" (77). Here, using interviews with managers, she tells us about the way in which the corporation uses numbers to drive the park's physical workings, constantly recalibrating based on statistics derived from market research in order to achieve a "good length of stay" which will provide the maximum visitor utilization of concessions and other money-making components (extra shows, rides, etc) (87). She also unpacks the visual rhetoric of the exhibits, examining interactivity, levels of educational specificity, showcasing of certain animals, etc.

Four: Entertainment Lite: The Theme Park Classroom: Davis examines Sea World's actual functioning as an educational institution, questioning Sea World's claim to "make enlightenment available in a variety of ways" (117). Davis' stance is that "the theme park education that works its way into the life of the school and the family is so carefully crafted to meet Sea World's marketing and publicity needs that the union between spectacle and education is a lopsided one" (118). In heartbreaking ethnographic sequences, Davis writes about the experiences of disadvantaged schoolchildren with and at the park, pointing out that although Sea World claims to serve "San Diego's schoolchildren", the ones who actually come on a regular basis are the ones whose families own annual passes, and who come in casual fashion with their parents, while poorer schools may barely afford one official trip a year. On these trips, Davis writes, the children seem to learn very little on an unscripted, truly engaged basis.

Still from a Sea World X-Box game. Spiked purple floating globe unheard of in nature.

Five: Routine Surprises: Producing Entertainment: Here Davis strips Sea World's animal shows (which, she points out, take a lot of time to structure and revise) down to their elements, trying to understand what they say about SW's mass culture of nature. Davis interviews trainers, producers, and others involved in the making of these shows, finding that the behavioral possibilities of the animals, the desires of the corporation, and audience feedback all come together in the objectives of the show. In the end, Davis argues, the show's elements are carefully scripted, leaving the animal performer to provide all of the novelty and possibility of surprise within the performative space.

Six: Dreaming of Whales: The Shamu Show: Continuing with her analysis of the performances themselves, Davis writes of the Shamu-based show that it carries "an enormous weight", one which is "devilishly complex to analyze" (197). "Triangulating" between "performance, institutional context, and a larger cultural context", Davis finds that the Shamu show is a "kind of routinized magic", one which plays with expectations about nature and culture (198-9). The show contains and normalizes Shamu's dangerous nature as a "killer" whale. It reminds the audience of the ecological fragility of Shamu's habitat, then reconstitutes the corporation and related actors as those who are in Shamu's corner, trying to preserve his nature.

Shamu Southwest Airlines jet.

Reviews: In AQ, Brian Black wrote that Davis' analysis, situated as it was within corporate culture of the contemporary world, rather than in historical context, missed an opportunity to take what he sees as American Studies' "next step" into an understanding of "the role and nature and the environment in American life." However, in general Black found Davis' project compelling and superbly executed, pointing to her folkloric training as an definite advantage in this project. The Pacific Historical Review ran a piece by John Findlay which took issue with the book's attempt to link the politics of Sea World's space with what Findlay saw as a "free-floating academic malaise" about the state of modernity and specifically the conservative brand of capitalism flourishing in Southern California. (Findlay thought this part of the book was shallowly executed, comparing it to Sea World itself with its empty gestures toward greater meaning. What's with these reviews of books about edutainment that compare the books themselves to edutainment? Weird.)


Books to follow up on: Secondary: Lynn Barber, The Heyday of Natural History, 1820-1870 (1980); Warren J. Belasco, Appetite for Change: How the Counterculture Took On the Food Industry, 1966-1988 (1989); John Berger, "Why Look at Animals?" in About Looking (1980); Henry Giroux, Disturbing Pleasures: Learning Popular Culture (1994); Henry Giroux, et al, ed, Popular Culture, Schooling, and Everyday Life (1989); Peter Schmitt, Back to Nature: The Arcadian Myth in Urban America (1990); Michael Sorkin, ed., Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the End of Public Space (1992).