People Watching: Bus Mannerisms

While riding the bus to and from the campus everyday, I have a habit of watching people. It only took a few rides to learn about the proper manners that one should have while riding the bus. These unspoken rules change dramatically depending on how full the bus is at a given time, and depending on what type of rider you are.

When one is riding on an empty bus, it is polite to sit as far away from other people as possible. Sitting down next to someone and introducing yourself is a big no-no. People will think you are a rapist trying to kill them and you will get strange looks from the other ridershoe however, I must admit, whenever someone sits down next to me and introduces themselves, I get very excited and strike up a conversation. People let you know not to sit by them by simple blocks. Like, for example, setting their bag on the seat next to them. They can move it and you can ask them to move it, but that would mean speaking to them and speaking to people is a no-no. Others will sit on the seat next to the isle, making their physical body the block to the other seat next to them.

The area that you sit in on the bus is greatly influenced by your status as a bus rider. If you are elderly and had difficulty getting on to the bus, you will sit in the first available seat near the door. If you are a nervous first-time newbie to the bus system, you will also sit right next to the door in the front and stare out the front window so you don't miss your stop. (oh the horror!) if you are a newbie but you have a little more experience, you always sit in the very first seat that faces forward on the right hand side. (this prediction never fails). If you are seasoned in bus riding due to economic issues, environmental issues, or other strange ideas you woke up with one morning, you tend to sit in the "belly" of the bus. With your own seat. And your groceries next to you. If you are too cool for anybody else on the bus and you walk in with your headphones blasting rap music for everyone to hear, you always head for the back. You always tend to go for your "favorite seat" on the bus if it's open. And when it is not you inwardly swear at the person who took it.

When the bus starts filling up suddenly, the manners of the bus change from cold and distant to available and uncaring. Bags are suddenly are moved out of the way and people move over to the window to leave room for someone else to sit. Most people still go sit in their usual comfort zones if available, but if they are not, any seat will do.

When the bus becomes crowded there are people standing in the isles and the vow of silence is broken in able to utter apologies for stepping on somebody's foot or for needing to get off at a specific spot and needing the red sea to part for them to be able to. Suddenly, the people who are polite make themselves known and give up their seats to the elderly who are getting on the bus and did not get a seat. Gentlemen will give up their seats to ladies with groceries, children, or a heavy burden. And chatter will start up between people who have never met each other before. Every so often a rude woman will take up two seats and refuse to move over for another person to sit, a nobody will ask her to move because of the polite attitude that one has while riding the bus.

These patterns always happen on the bus and are part of our society in how we are taught in interact with one another. Just like when we are children and told "not to speak to strangers" we still have this irrational fear of our other members of society. Body practice is displayed by how in interact with other members of the culture.

Anna Rexia and other Halloween Costumes

http://www.glamour.com/health-fitness/blogs/vitamin-g/2011/09/health-controversy-the-frighte.html

The above picture and link are from an article I found on Glamour.com today. I wanted to share it because it relates so much to what we have been talking about lately. This halloween costume, called Anna Rexia, was sold by a store called Ricky's until it was recently discontinued due to the controversy it caused. The costume is a skeleton dress with a tape measure around the waist.

We have been talking in class about how women are culturally pressured to have perfect, skinny bodies, and about all the problems and eating disorders this cultural pressure has caused. This costume pokes fun at that issue in a very disturbing and distasteful way.

This article also made me think about another common body practice of women dressing up in sexy halloween costumes. Our culture, in general, tends to see Halloween as the one 'free pass' day, where women can dress in the shortest, tightest, lowest-cut outfits imaginable, and not be thought any less of (at least in theory). Its very interesting how our culture completely shifts for just this one day each year.

Although some costumes, like the one above, might cross a line, I think it is perfectly ok for women to want to look their best on halloween. Many of us are 'docile bodies' in this halloween tradition. Many women (myself included) eagerly plan out their halloween costume a month or so ahead of time. Our culture loves October 31st, and as long as Halloween trick-or-treating is around, I think the body practice of sexy halloween costumes will probably be around too.

I'd love to hear what everyone thinks about this topic.

Posting Assignment #3 (due Sunday 10/2, 11:59 P.M.; comment by 11:59 Monday, 10/3) Body Practices in Everyday Life

Find an example of a body practice from your everyday life (things you do or people around you do, images of bodies and practices and so on). Describe it (if it's an image, post the image, if it's a video, link to it) and explain what it does and how it does it.  Think: 'rhetoric'—how culture 'argues' us into subjectivity. Write in terms of our work, of course; things like: intelligible bodies, body practices, docile bodies, choice / agency (Leppert, 212-13; 243), 'pursuit(s) without a terminus' (Bordo, 166), constitutive power, 'other-oriented emotional economy' (Bordo, 171), praxis, and so on. 

Dear Mom:

Mom,

We’ve been learning in Cultural Studies about how our views of the world are affected by culture. The most striking topic so far, in my opinion, has been about body image. We read an article written by Susan Bordo, which argues that women are being shaped by society to be visually pleasing to others. Basically, she claims that, if we did not live in a cultural, social world, but rather in a cave somewhere, we would have no conception of what the perfect or desired female body is. We would not know whether are own bodies were good or bad, and we would not have the many illnesses such as anorexia and bulimia that come from a bad body image.

In this sense, the objects are the images of women we see in the media and our day-to-day life. We are the subjects, we take in these images and identify and compare ourselves with them.

As someone who has a close friend with an eating-disorder, I was very interested by Susan Bordo’s article. From what I have experience with this friend, if she did not constantly compare herself to the women in magazines and the women around her, she would not have the negative body image that she has. She is beautiful, and yet can not see her own beauty because she is so wrapped up in the cultural images of beauty that we are all constantly bombarded with in our day-to-day lives.

-Kelly

Dear Mom..

Hey mom,

So you've been asking me what cultural studies is about and since that's a very broad question, I've decided to explain one aspect of the class so it makes better sense to you. Something I've learned in this class is how to properly smoke pot. Don't worry, they aren't teaching us about it and telling us to go do it, but we're learning from this one guy Howard Becker that you can't actually enjoy smoking pot until you've really learned "how" to smoke it. Basically what he's trying to say is that you can't use pot for pleasure until you actually know what you're doing with it. Think of it like a type of body practice, similar to working out. You can't really enjoy working out until your body learns to get used to it. Anyway Howard Becker also tells us that if a person smokes marijuana for the first time they may not necessarily get high because they didn't do it right. I know you're always saying that pot is bad and it leads to bad things, but personally I don't think it's as bad as you make it sound. Like I said before it's a type of practice, so it's kind of like a hobby for people. Like working out, you can't just learn to get it right, right away, but after a few tries you could become a pro. So what I'm trying to say is that you shouldn't always think negatively about pot. Sometimes it can be good because it gives the body new challenges to figure out and it can challenge our thinking as well. I mean if professors are teaching us about it, it can't be that bad right? That's what we're learning in cultural studies, right now anyway, I'm sure I'll have a lot more explaining to do down the road.

Did the kitchen come before the egg?

In other words, did our ideas of theory come before theory even existed?

For example, focus your lens on a writer in terms of theory. When dealing with a writer, theory will be a very different monster in comparison to the pot smoker pacifist or hard jawed feminist. The origin of the writer's theory will be dotted with examples from literature, media, and traits of popular culture. All three of these things are objects that produce positions on theory based on a writer's own subculture.

Now, to address my whole "did the kitchen come before the egg" idea? Why would a writer want to draw upon examples of theory from his own realm of knowledge and not some other form like an engineer or astronomer? Theory is the egg and those prevailing levels of knowledge is the kitchen; the writer is built just like this analogy.

Theory is an abstract term that can be applied to multiple objects in our culture or multiple sub-cultures in modern society. You may mumble the word "theory" at a dinner table and a musician will say one thing, a philosopher will say another, and heaven forbid, you offend the theologian. Basically if you're going to talk about theory, be prepared for an armada of random interpretations from different disciplines.

It is theory that allows the writer to create stories. It is literature and writing that validates the existence of theory. It gives the writer a basic form of knowledge to conduct any action.

All in all, theory is a subconscious road sign. Theory makes a chicken think like a chicken.

Hey mom, Im gonna tell you about my CSCL 1001

Dear Mom:

After 3 weeks of study in culture study, I started to realize that culture is all the things that around us. I mean, is everywhere! For example, the cloths we wearing, the car we driving, everything is culture. Maybe is not very clear when I said it like this, let me explain to you more specifically.

There is an article called" The Body and the Reproduction of Femininity" is written by Susan Bordo. In the article, Susan talked about the idea that our behavior, our thought is influenced by the things around us. She gave us the example that how girls was always affected by the information around us which gave them the idea of how girls should look like and how they should react.

In my opinion, the idea Susan talked about is actually vey true. Because we are affected by the things around us. In my culture study course, we talked about object and subject. I think that subject and object are affected of each other all the time. Subject will affect object, and object will reflex subject and also affect subject.

Such as Internet! People invented internet because they found out that computer users sometimes need to communicate with each other in order to gather the of each others. So they invented internet! Internet this object was created by the subject us for our needs. However internet complete changed our ways of living, our ways of communication. In the old days, if we want to talk to a friend at a far place, we could write letters, we could make phone calls, but today we just need to login to Facebook! No matter where is that friend, as along he/she has a computer with internet connection, you could talk to him/her all the time! Even video chat!

This is a very great example for how subject and object affect each other! Of course, culture study is much more than this, but I can't explain all of them to you yet, because I'm still studying it. Well, at least this prove I learned something already. talk to you later!

Culture is Everything.

As we all have learned in the past three weeks, culture is basically beyond difficult to explain, and even harder to understand, but not impossible. What is impossible though, is escaping culture. Every aspect of our daily lives revolves around culture. What are you going to wear today? Should you eat the tasty Captain Crunch or settle for your healthy Special K? Culture answers your questions. It tells you what you should look like, how you should act, and if you should tell your best friend that you hate her shirt today. All of the objects surrounding us on a daily basis are signs. These signs around us are “read” differently by every individual. It’s how we interpret these “signs” that directs our living existence.

Susan Bordo brings out many interesting points about today’s culture in her article “The Body and Reproduction of Femininity.” I think we are all quite aware of how much influence advertisements have on our lives, considering you can’t walk two feet without running into one. The positions we take on these debates is what defines our culture. Every ad nowadays centers around the idea of improvement. Bordo even emphasizes this idea by stating that “female bodies become docile bodies” (166). I found it very interesting that she pointed out that the more we focus on our bodies, the greater our conviction of never being good enough becomes. Self-modification becomes our main priority, and basically takes over our lives. The products revolving around this idea are supposed to make whomever’s using them feel better about themselves. Enhancement is key in today’s world, and “having it all” is where it’s at. What I found to most interesting, and most true of all, is that female bodies pursuing these perfect ideals, seem to be just as depressed, just as distracted, and just as physically ill as any other plain Jane. This led me to believe that self modification isn’t really about making you feel good about yourself, but rather be accepted by the rest of the population.

All in all, I believe culture in today’s society will never be fully understood. Who are we to judge what’s socially acceptable and what’s not? All we can do is read everything that’s around us, take a position, and define culture.

Please Mom, can you just understand?

Hey Mom,

Sorry you haven't heard from me in awhile, I'm up to my ears in homework and never seem to get out of work early enough for you to be awake. I know you think that drugs are bad and addictive, and that you aren't very opened minded about things but I hoped that I could share some interesting observations with you. Yeah yeah yeah, you always say all my college professors are liberals and that they want marijuana legalized, but this is from a different perspective. A cultural perspective, not factual perspective. Smoking Marijuana is NOT addictive no matter how much you think it is, it has been scientifically proven, and I have learned how users become users and why non users remain non users. I know you have tried it before, Dad told me once when we were out by the bon fire when I was in High School, but it may just have been that you just didn't know how to use it effectively. In order to 'be high' you have to learn how to smoke Marijuana correctly by inhaling enough and holding it in long enough. You also may be surprised, but you mentally have to learn how to be high. Your body has to know that it is high and if you have never been high before, how should your body know the difference? This is what is so difficult for new users to understand because CLEARLY if a drug was going to get you high you wouldn't have to know when you're high. Our bodies have to learn this different state from others who are familiar with it, and what gives us satisfaction is when we can pick out those differences. I know when you think 'pot smoker' some of the signs are hippies, teenagers who don't shower, and rappers but I think you would be surprised by the following Marijuana has with the working middle class, such as yourself. So, PLEASE, if you could try and just understand for once?

Love you.

What does Smoking Pot and Sporting Events Have in Common?

Most of what is enjoyable in modern society is not always enjoyable at the start. It has to be learned to be enjoyable. This entire idea is explained in the context of smoking marijuana by Howard Becker. The basis of Becker’s argument is the appeal to smoking marijuana has to be learned. He shows how the user needs to first learn how to smoke it, and then learn to recognize what is considered getting high. The same thing needs to be learned for almost any activity, however, to a lesser degree. When first attending a sporting event, one has to learn the points of the game to know what is going on. Next an attendee needs to know what team to cheer for. Spectators at events need to learn the cheers and protocol of the game also. With all this learned the event can be enjoyable. Without knowing what is going on, a sporting event would just be a bunch of loud and obnoxious people yelling at people playing a pointless game for no reason. This weighs in on the cultural discussion of nature vs. nurture. Actives that have a learning prerequisite to be enjoyable fall solely on the nurture side of the debate. The nature of smoking marijuana is that you light a plant on fire and then breath in burning hot gas. That doesn’t sound too appealing. The physical effects such as feeling high might be part of the nature of the activity, but it can be known that anything that needs conditioning to enjoy falls on the nurture side. But when learned to be enjoyed, the act of smoking marijuana a can be an enjoyable activity for recreational pot users.

My College Experience

Mom!

As you well know, all of my college courses are very different from what I learned in high school. One class in particular is a challenge to grasp the main idea of the class because it is about culture. Culture seems so basic. Like all the different races, colors, genders, and sexual identity that makes up humans. It gives the society culture. But just 3 weeks into this course I am realizing it is way more than that. It's not just the people who make up culture. It is all the objects that make culture and we (the subjects) that interpret what they mean to us. The way that I started off college added to the culture here. I was scared without you. The things I was seeing just wasn't what I wanted it to be. I saw all the people and the gopher wear as a new world to me. They were all signs to me. Everything I saw around me was just so different. I didn't want to be here, as you well know, but it was because of the way I was seeing and viewing the new world. This was my position. I only looked at it as being torture. However, after being in this class for just one day I realized I just needed to open my eyes and start being more accepting of the new culture. So as you can see, culture is not just the people. It is the gopher sweatshirts, the gold, the maroon, the mascot and that is what I was seeing when I wanted to be seeing red and white. But I'm over it now :) Every new situation that I am put through just makes the culture here seem so different. Every person is unique and different. It isn't just the cookie cutter world of suburbia life. It's the real world now.

We're just a bunch of tools.

We are each living representations of our own culture - tools used to project our norms onto others and prolong a sense of normalcy. The influences of culture reach beyond what one may think. Our preferences and perceptions have all been shaped by the great entity that is our culture. Take for example, how some of us cringe at the scent of a nearby farm, whereas others may feel a great sense of nostalgia or longing to get back onto the farm where they grew up, or, as is explained in Becker's essay on pot users, some learn to love smoking marijuana, and others are driven away.

With the birth of each individual, the social construction begins. Family and friends project their influences on the new-comer, in an attempt to build another tool to spread their unique set of beliefs and preferences. From the moment we were born, we began learning about how the world works according to those teaching us.

But who is right? When comparing our culture to that of terrorist cultures from the middle east, who is to say what ideas are right and wrong? Can we blame suicide bombers for being terrible human beings, when they were raised to accept the culture thrust upon them by their peers, just as we were? We have learned to treat martyrs of our own cause differently from those of other causes.

When studying the reasons for why things are the way they are, the goal isn't to solve the world's problems, but to get a better grasp of why there is so much diversity in beliefs, perceptions and preferences around the globe. When Becker set out to discover how people learned to smoke marijuana, he wasn't looking for a solution to end or spread the use of marijuana, but rather sought to understand how we can learn to accept or reject new perceptions.

Our Body

Dear mom,

After my first few weeks of being completely lost in my cultural studies class I read an essay by Susan Bordo that really captured my interest. Her writing was on women’s body and femininity and she started off the essay by stating that our body is a medium of culture. Susan wrote, “..the body is a powerful symbolic form, a surface on which the central rules, hierarchies, and even metaphysical commitments of culture are inscribed and thus reinforced through the concrete language of the body.” These first few statements in the beginning of my reading really drew me in. First, I would like to state that culture surrounds us everyday of our lives, and we read culture by examining the signs of it that are all around us. A women’s perfect body image is a sign we look at to resemble. From the magazines of Victoria Secret, Vogue, Shape, to the actresses we see in movies, its all signs of culture. The body is a social construction, the body is a means of culture. How did the “perfect” body image become what it is today? How did a simple image gain so much power in the world and in individuals lives? Women all over the world are striving for that perfect petite body, some to the point they develop diseases like anorexia or bulimia. But, once again I ask how did a women’s “perfect” body image become what it is today? Without even consciously realizing it, women strive for that perfect body image because it’s all around us, that petite fit body is shown everywhere as what we should all look like. But, quite frankly its unrealistic to think everyone can have that perfect image. We are all individuals, we all look different, and we are not all built to be 100 pounds. The social construction the perfect feminine body was not destined to be what it is today, in fact we created it this way, and we believe it to be what it is.

So, I guess I haven’t been completely lost in class. After writing this I realized I have learned some things in class so far. In fact, the concept of culture is very interesting, and it is something that I will continue to learn about and grasp for my entire life.

Makeup

So Mom, have you ever wondered why women buy makeup? You and I don’t wear that much, but when I was paging through my Teen Vogue, I wondered why some people spend so much money just to look a little bit younger or a bit less splotchy. As women have gained rights within society, we have also become more constrained by expectations of how we should look. Susan Bordo believes women’s bodies become ‘docile bodies’; we become numbed by regulations and concentrate purely on trying to perfect our bodies. Women lose social power when they become more self-oriented. Admittedly, even knowing this, I find myself wanting to try out the charcoal eye shadow in Harper’s Bazaar, shown above. It’s just so darn pretty! And that’s how they get us, I think. We as the subjects maintain the makeup industry because their ads work. I do want to look like a model with perfect makeup and hair, even if it isn’t a huge deal and totally is not worth the amount of time lost trying.

What position do you take on the feminism-feminine culture debate? Every makeup section of target and tv advertisement asks us to take a position: whether or not we will choose to believe our inferiority and buy the product, or whether we believe our bodies are just fine the way they are now. Self-consciousness sells extremely well in every culture to women of every age.

Makeup says a lot about what a culture considers important, actually. America sells a lot more bronzer than a country which values pale skin, such as China or Japan. Why do we always want to become what we can’t? Some of it can probably be blamed on the businesses selling women makeup products. Inter-textual themes in makeup advertising always, always include self-improvement. If your eyes are too small, you can make them look bigger! You can grow longer lashes, cover up an oily complexion, look ten years younger, and even whiten the color of your skin. Even ads which claim to embrace the natural female beauty have underlying themes which suggest women need their product specifically to feel naturally beautiful (ahem Dove).

My stance is for everything in moderation. I’m not particularly concerned with the way I look, but I do like to put on some eyeliner or lipstick for fun once in a while. Maybe once women can accept that we all look differently and celebrate that fact, advertisements may change their inter-textual themes to something a bit more positive.