Category Archives: Sociology

Genetic testing, cancer risk, and Angelina Jolie’s choice

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Angelina Jolie’s New York Times op-ed announcing for the first time that she underwent a double mastectomy to reduce BRCA-related breast cancer risk was welcome news in several respects. She is very specific, for instance, regarding the exact estimation of her risk, the kind of detail you do not often see in news reports and other public testimony about BRCA.  (BRCA-related risk is highly variable: 45-90% for breast cancer, 10-60% for ovarian cancer.)

Jolie also mentions the high price-tag associated with just the test itself, a point that has been raised for some time, and a topic that will be addressed this summer as the Supreme Court decides whether to accept Myriad Genetics’ (the company that owns the patents to the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes) argument for patent protection. And finally, Jolie observes that BRCA mutations explain just a small percentage of breast and ovarian cancer cases. What she does not say, but is worth pointing out, is that more than half of all breast cancer cases remain unexplained. As the organization Breast Cancer Action has often noted, we need to fight for true “prevention” of breast cancer, which would include a radical shift in the way we regulate toxic chemicals.

Jolie understands herself to be acting not just as a mother but also as a role model for other women. This would make sense if BRCA testing were relatively new. However, it is anything but—BRCA tests have been around since the mid-nineties, and mastectomies much longer than that. In fact, women have been electing to receive prophylactic mastectomies due to familial risk well before the BRCA genes were described by researchers and a test for mutations was developed. Yet in 2013, the choices for high-risk women are the same: surveillance, surgery, or cancer drug therapy. Placed in this historical context, the question should not be “Why aren’t more women getting tested and acting on that knowledge?” but rather, “Why are the interventions the same almost twenty years after the genetic test became commercially available?”

Although new ways for reducing BRCA risk have failed to materialize (even if the plastic surgery methods associated with breast reconstruction have improved dramatically), what has occurred over the last twenty years has been a subtle yet indelible shift in what “risk” means. Indeed, BRCA mutations can hardly be said to infer “risk” at all, since the interventions women undergo are the same, or in the case of double mastectomy, even more extreme than what many women with breast cancer actually undergo.

“Risk,” then, really means “disease” in the post-BRCA age—marked as it is by an ethical obligation to act on cancer risk even if that action increases risk in other ways (as in the case of BRCA related ovary removal and subsequent fatal heart disease risk that early surgical menopause can entail). This, too, is an age of the successful feminist argument that there is nothing “natural” to femininity (thus enabling the claim that one is rejecting conventional notions of beauty and gender by undergoing mastectomy and oophorectomy), and the creation of an entirely new citizen-patient: the “previvor.”

With the development of better breast reconstruction techniques, the conceptual shift to “risk” being something you act on as if you actually had breast cancer, and the emergence of a new discourse of the empowered “previvor,” it is hard to imagine how any woman with a BRCA mutation will have a choice in any meaningful sense of the term. Can living with BRCA risk ever be thought of as an informed, empowered course of action? Will we see new ways of ameliorating BRCA risk that do not entail major and risky operations? Breast cancer is indeed an epidemic. Yet epidemics, as Paula Treichler wrote, too often close off critical, theoretical discussion that is often needed in order to properly evaluate and contextualize developments in medicine and in the broader culture. All the more important, then, that we continue to understand BRCA testing and mastectomy, and the choice to undergo one or both. After all, the choice is constrained as much by culture as it is by biology.

Kelly E. Happe is Assistant Professor of Communication Studies and Women’s Studies at the University of Georgia. She is the author of The Material Gene: Gender, Race, and Heredity after the Human Genome Project (NYU Press, 2013).

NYT Room for Debate: Sex education

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Over at the New York Times’ Room for Debate blog, a lively discussion on sex education—and at what age it should begin—is unfolding. We asked Sinikka Elliott, author of Not My Kid: What Parents Believe about the Sex Lives of Their Teenagers, to chime in on the topic. She shares her thoughts below.

I often heard during the course of my research into sex education that parents are ultimately responsible for teaching their children about sex. But I also heard from parents that sex is not an easy thing to talk about—their kids don’t want to hear it, parents themselves often don’t want to talk about it, and in having these conversations parents risk being labeled sexual deviants for their children’s knowledge about sex.

In fact, some of the parents I interviewed were reported to Child Protective Services (CPS) because people thought their children knew too much about sex. (In the state where I reside, one of the signs of child abuse is “exhibits sexual knowledge that is inconsistent with their age.”)

One couple I spoke with who tried to be open and honest with their daughter about sex was investigated by CPS after a member of their church overheard a family conversation that implied their daughter—who was 11 at the time—understood what sperm was. The congregant reported the couple to CPS believing that the only way an eleven-year-old girl could know about sperm was if she was being sexually abused.

Denise, a nurse, proudly told me that her 6-year-old grandson already knows the proper names for genitalia. Denise’s face fell, however, when she described how a kindergarten teacher reported her daughter to CPS for possible sexual abuse because Denise’s grandson used the words “penis” and “vagina” in class.

“My grandson would actually tell the boys, ‘You can’t go in the bathroom. There’s a girl in there and that girl has a vagina, not a penis, so you can’t go in the bathroom with her.’”

CPS mounted a full investigation into Denise’s daughter, eventually exonerating her, but the accusation has left Denise feeling bruised and uncertain.  If parents can’t teach their kids about bodies and sex, who can?

As the parents’ stories reveal, a climate of fear, suspicion, and taboo surrounds parents as they have, or contemplate having, conversations with their children about sex. Sexual images and messages are now commonplace in our culture, yet there’s still a lot of shame attached to talking openly and knowledgably about sex. Teaching sex in schools as a commonplace fact of life—and starting these lessons early—would not only equip young people with valuable information about their bodies but would also make family conversations about sex easier. Parents may ultimately be responsible for teaching their children about sex but they should be able to do so without fear of being labeled sexually deviant.

Sinikka Elliott is Assistant Professor of Sociology at North Carolina State University,  and author of Not My Kid: What Parents Believe about the Sex Lives of Their Teenagers (NYU Press, 2012).

Outlawing abortion won’t help children with Down syndrome

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—Alison Piepmeier

My daughter, like all kids, is a delight and a lot of work. Now 4, she talks nonstop, although her speech isn’t always comprehensible. She reads. She performs class conversations for me: “What does a cow say? Moo. Great work, Maybelle!” This evening she sang me “I’m Just a Girl Who Can’t Say No” from “Oklahoma!” (a song that, in my daughter’s case, is clearly untrue because she excels at saying no).

Maybelle has Down syndrome, a condition I knew almost nothing about before she was born. During the four years she has been alive, I have been repeatedly surprised by her curiosity, her individual sense of humor and how much she has accomplished. She doesn’t fit the stereotypes at all. For this reason, it is troubling to me that rates of termination for pregnancies where Down syndrome is identified are extremely high. The most recent researchsuggests that for every child born with Down syndrome, another is terminated. With the increasing availability of noninvasive prenatal tests that can take place within the first few weeks of pregnancy, many in the Down syndrome and disability rights communities fear that abortion rates will skyrocket, that a process often identified as eugenic will escalate, and that Down syndrome will essentially be eliminated — at least among those with the resources for prenatal testing and the desire to terminate.

That is why some parents of children with Down syndrome are celebrating the news that North Dakota has become the first state to outlaw abortion for fetal conditions like Down syndrome. One parent wrote that “it felt like a small victory seeing that abortions based on Down syndrome were banned — like saying, see, individuals with Down syndrome are valued and protected.”

But outlawing abortion is not a reasonable response to this situation. A woman who does not want to be pregnant won’t stay pregnant if there are any mechanisms in place for her to have an abortion.

As part of my research for a book on prenatal testing and reproductive decision-making, I have talked with women who terminated their pregnancies when they learned that the fetus had Down syndrome. For most of these women, abortion was an incredibly painful decision. These were wanted pregnancies in which the fetus was already identified as a child, and often even named.

Repeatedly women told me that they ended the pregnancy not because they wanted a “perfect child” (as one woman said, “I don’t know what ‘perfect child’ even means”) but because they recognized that the world is a difficult place for people with intellectual disabilities.

One woman told me, “The thing is I could not, in good conscience, from the get-go, know that my child has these setbacks in life.” Another identified adulthood as the challenge: “There is no part of caring for an infant or school-aged child with Down syndrome that we didn’t think we could handle. We chose to terminate mostly on the basis of our understanding of the challenges and quality of life he and our family would face if/when he lived to be over age 21: his middle age, and end of life.”

Another woman talked quite a bit about rape. She was assaulted as a child, she knew that the statistics for sexual abuse were high for people with intellectual disabilities, and she was determined that her daughter would not experience that, so that was one of the reasons she terminated her pregnancy. She referred to her abortion several times as “the protective choice.”

All these women grieved, but did not regret, their abortions. A state law banning abortion would not have stopped them from terminating their pregnancies, it would just have made an incredibly difficult process even more difficult for them. Indeed, more than one mother I spoke with traveled out of state for her abortion because the pregnancy was too advanced for her to have an abortion in her home state.

If North Dakota really does want it to be “a great day for babies in North Dakota” and wants to prove that “a civil society does not discriminate against people … for their sex or for disability,” it should make the state a welcoming place for people with disabilities. The state could take the cash reserves it has put aside for legal challenges to its laws and use those funds to train public schools to be meaningfully inclusive (as all the best research shows is the way to go). It could provide easily accessible medical care and early intervention. The state could develop independent — but supported — housing for adults with intellectual disabilities so that there are not waiting lists years long. It could improve criminal justice responses to rape — indeed, North Dakota could become a state that works to prevent rape by training men not to be rapists.

Let women have abortions for whatever reason they choose, but make it a world they would like to bring a child into — even a child with an intellectual disability.

Alison Piepmeier is the director of the women’s and gender studies program at the College of Charleston in South Carolina and the author of Girl Zines (NYU Press, 2009).

[This article originally appeared on the New York Times Motherlode blog. Read it here.]

Celebrating women of color, one girl at a time

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—Andreana Clay

Last month, when The Onion magazine posted a tweet calling nine year old Quvenzhané Wallis the c-word, I tweeted a reply, “No Black girl is safe.”  And that’s how I felt, and often do feel, even though it’s a bit bleak. But, let’s think about this: in addition to the ways that adult women are denigrated in society, it has become acceptable to make jokes about a (Black) girl. The safety of young girls from sexism is something that I became familiar with as a researcher/working with teenagers in Oakland, CA. Half of the youth activists I worked closely with in The Hip-Hop Generation Fights Back were young women, many of whom led the efforts.

This Women’s History Month, I think it’s important to turn our attention to young women, particularly young women of color. The Onion comment aside, young women of color are simultaneously heavily scrutinized and ignored. Take, for instance, the dual experience of some of the young Black and Latina women I worked with who were singled out for being presumed to be on the road to (teenage) pregnancy, so they were not taken seriously as students. Literally, one teacher commented that “I don’t really call on Latina or African American females. . . They’re gonna get pregnant and drop out anyways, so what’s the point?”

This discourse, as NYU author Lorena Garcia has pointed out, exists both in and outside of the classroom and has significant impacts on young women of color. This is something I urge us to think about during Women’s History Month: the ways that “women” as a universal term continues to privilege white, heterosexual, cis women; a long-standing feminist critique. However, the discourse around women primarily and solely focuses on adult women. The women we celebrate during this month, the women’s issues we collectively organize around, and the laws we pass are targeted at and specifically benefit adult women.

For example, the recent passage of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) was celebrated because of its inclusion of Native American, lesbian, queer, and transgender women. However, a notable absence and hard-fought exclusion was the protection and decriminalization of human trafficking subjects—many of whom are minors and young women of color. More specifically, this group often includes women who are runaways, homeless, or thrown out of their homes as teenagers for their emerging sexuality.

And these young women are no different than the young women in my book: a young queer Latina who was routinely thrown out of her home and once boarded a bus to New York for a week, just so she’d have a place to stay; another queer Chicana, who was often threatened by boys for “looking like a white boy” when she was out with her African American girlfriend; still another young, African American woman, who had to take out a restraining order against her boyfriend for beating her up, a restraint he often ignored.

And these are the young women that we think are “protected” or “safe” because they are involved in organizing activities, ones specifically addressing the surveillance they experience as it relates to racism, sexism, and homophobia. However, we need to step into this battle with these young women in order to make our lives, as women, better. We must fight for the Quvenzhané Wallis’ of the world, the young women we have in our lives and know, but also, and perhaps more importantly, the ones that we don’t. And while we may want to think of these women as “our future,” let’s make this Women’s History Month about contributing to the history they—and we—are making now.

Andreana Clay is Associate Professor of Sociology at San Francisco State University and author of The Hip-Hop Generation Fights Back: Youth, Activism, and Post-Civil Rights Politics (NYU Press, 2012).

Which women’s histories? Feminism, race, and Women’s History Month

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—Alison Piepmeier

To tell you the truth, I’m a bit skeptical of Women’s History Month. I’m skeptical of all the themed months. In part, I’m skeptical because they encourage us to see things in terms of stereotypes. During Black History Month, folks are often focused on the standard heroic figures—many of whom are black men and the women who gain prominence because of their connection with them. And during Women’s History Month, we’re often focused on white women, with the occasional woman of color thrown in to mix things up.

This kind of segmented thinking affects our understanding of history more broadly. White feminists often say that women started speaking out about and against rape in the 1970s—but have a look at the writings of nineteenth-century journalist (and African American woman) Ida B. Wells. Wells documented rapes like that of a white man raping an eight-year-old black girl: “The outrage upon helpless childhood needed no avenging in this case; she was black,” and in another case, “a white man…inflicted such injuries upon another Afro-American child that she died. He was not punished.” As Wells’ work demonstrates, black women had been speaking out against rape for over a hundred years before white feminist activism took on this issue.

As Danielle McGuire points out in her excellent book At the Dark End of the Street, the familiar understanding of the Civil Rights movement is that Martin Luther King, Jr., was the person who initiated it—but in fact, ass-kicking investigator and activist Rosa Parks was initiating resistance while King was still in high school. She wasn’t an elderly woman who happened to sit on the bus: she was a radical activist who saw what needed to be done, and then kept her mouth shut so that she could become a strategic symbol.

We need the same kinds of sensitivity as McGuire when we’re examining more recent history. In my book Girl Zines, I discuss the ways women of color use zines to offer scathing critiques of their erasure from discussions of feminism, as when Chandra Ray writes in the zine Evolution of a Race Riot,

Many white girls talk about sisterhood.  They really mean:  you’re my sister as long as you don’t confront me on my bigotry.  You’re my sister as long as you know your place.  (Which usually means underneath or behind you, hidden from view or maybe as a token to show how diverse your movement is.)  I don’t give a shit about how many meetings you’ve been to or how many unlearning racism workshops you’ve undergone….Until you stop expecting women of color to conform to the white-girl ideal of feminism, I don’t want anything to do with you.

If we’re going to celebrate Women’s History Month, let’s celebrate a truly diverse, intersectional, complex history, full of identities that don’t fit into the neat narratives we’ve been told.

Alison Piepmeier is the author of Girl Zines: Making Media, Doing Feminism (NYU Press, 2009).

Women on the home front:
Debate over work-life balance continues

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—Bernie D. Jones

It has been fifty years since Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique in 1963—and twenty years since the Family Medical Leave Act was signed into law by President Clinton in 1993. Thus, the month of February saw several notable events in the world of work-family balance: those two anniversaries, plus the announcement by Marissa Mayer, a mother and the CEO of Yahoo, Inc., of a new ban against employees working from home. This policy change only reinforced the significance of the two anniversaries.

The Feminine Mystique has been credited with spearheading the modern feminist movement that pushed more women to seek highly paid jobs and professional careers, where before they had been forced by traditional conventions to remain at home. Articulating “the problem that had no name,” Friedan explained that highly educated wives were consumed by the drudgery of housework while their skills remained unused.

Yet, the question remained, once women went into the workplace, either because of personal preference or because of economic necessity, how would they manage their responsibilities at home? The answer came twenty years later in the form of unpaid family medical leave that would become available to working parents, men and women who gained up to twelve months unpaid leave for the birth of a child.

Mayer’s comments are important because they seem to reinforce certain aspects of the women’s rights movement that have always been controversial—not only the traditionalist criticism that mothers belong in the home, but the perceptions of those who argued that elite women were tone-deaf to the experiences of other women not as privileged as they. Mayer took only two weeks off when she gave birth to her son; in addition, she set up a nursery in her office for him. The uproar that followed the announcement was not a surprise. Mayer doesn’t experience work-family challenges because she has the resources to manage a demanding job and raise a child.

Not all working parents are as fortunate as Mayer. Working from home has been a hallmark of work-family balance, because parents crave the flexibility it offers.  Thus, it seemed a betrayal that a female manager with a child of her own would deny this important opportunity to workers under her, all in the name of a misguided sense of efficiency.

Fifty years after The Feminine Mystique and twenty years after passage of the FMLA, questions remain. How is the ability of highly successful women to be in the workplace fulfilled through their abilities to negotiate flexibility? How is the ability of less elite women to work compromised by policies that deny them this? The answers all tie into questions of class and status. The book I edited, Women Who Opt Out, addresses these points and more; the authors, all experts in their fields of work-family balance, address the class-based issues inherent in these discussions. This Women’s History Month is an ideal time to propel these discussions further, as we reflect on the history of our struggles with work-life balance.

Bernie D. Jones is Associate Professor of Law at the Suffolk University Law School and editor of Women Who Opt Out: The Debate over Working Mothers and Work-Family Balance (NYU Press, 2013).

Black History Month: “Wrong Complexion for Protection” when disasters strike

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—Robert D. Bullard and Beverly Wright

In thinking about Black History Month and the great strides that have been made in the arenas of civil rights and racial equality, an immense body of work about the glaring racial disparities in employment, education, income and wealth, housing and health care comes to mind. However, far less has been written or publicized about the glaring inequities that exist in government response to natural and human-induced disasters. Decades before Hurricane Katrina drowned New Orleans and devastated the U.S. Gulf Coast, millions of African Americans learned the hard way that waiting for the government can be hazardous to their health and health of their community.

In Race, Place and Environmental Justice After Hurricane Katrina: Struggles to Reclaim, Rebuild, and Revitalize New Orleans and the Gulf Coast (Westview Press, 2009), we documented that racial disparities exist in disaster response, cleanup, rebuilding, reconstruction, and recovery. The lethargic and inept emergency response that followed Katrina exposed institutional flaws, poor planning, and false assumptions that are built into the emergency response and homeland security plans and programs.

We expanded this analysis and focus in The Wrong Complexion for Protection (NYU Press, 2012), a book that places the government response to natural and man-made disasters in historical context over the past eight decades—from the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 to the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010.  Here, we compare and contrast how the government responded to emergencies, including environmental and public health emergencies, toxic contamination, industrial accidents, bioterrorism threats, and natural and human-induced disasters that disproportionately affect African Americans.

Our analysis chronicles history lessons not learned, government failures, and inadequate and inequitable government response to natural and human-induced disasters and emergencies.  Our goal is to shed new light on issues of health equity, environmental and climate justice, spatial and racial vulnerability, and the government’s role in providing equal protection under the law for all Americans, without regard to race, color, national origin, or income.

Too often, African Americans have experienced slow, unequal or no response from various local, state, and federal government agencies on a range of emergencies.  This scenario has often been the rule—not the exception—as in the case of the USDA and the discriminatory treatment of black farmers and the slow and inept response by the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation (TDEC) to protect black landowners in Dickson, Tennessee, tagged the “poster child” for environmental racism.

The simple but urgent message of this book is equity, justice and fairness. Centuries of black exploitation, experimentation, drug testing, and forced surgeries have engendered mistrust of government, medical establishment, and biomedical research. Fairness is essential to building trust and reaching any meaningful solution to natural and human-induced disasters and for achieving sustainability and homeland security.  Fairness matters. It matters how we design and plan strategies for addressing public health emergencies, toxic contamination, industrial accidents and spills, earthquakes, extreme weather events such as hurricanes, floods, tornados, droughts, heat waves, and bioterrorism threats. Making disaster response equitable is a matter of civil and human rights, and in the spirit of Black History Month, we must strive for equality in the sectors which have historically excluded or otherwise exploited African Americans.

Robert D. Bullard (Dean of the Barbara Jordan-Mickey Leland School of Public Affairs at Texas Southern University in Houston) and Beverly Wright (founding director of the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice at Dillard University, New Orleans) co-authored The Wrong Complexion for Protection: How the Government Response to Disaster Endangers African Americans (NYU Press, 2012).

February theme of the month: Unconventional love

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Has Valentine’s Day and its sappy accounts of saccharine romance got you down? Don’t worry–the folks at NYU Press are here to offer alternative accounts of love and relationships!

Michael Cobb takes on the idea of the relationship itself in his work Single, which examines the discourses surrounding “singleness” in film, art, theory, literature, and, through his analysis of HBO’s Big Love, even television. His provocative argument challenges the notion that being in a couple is required (or even desirable) for engaging with society, and offers an alternative perspective on being without a partner. Being single, it appears, might not be so bad after all.

But if you still have relationships on your mind, then you may want to check out David Shumway’s Modern Love, which traces the development of a new language of “intimacy” over the course of the twentieth century. Shumway theorizes that when marriage lost its institutional powers of controlling and distributing property, new conceptions of and ways of talking about love had to be attached to it–all of which can be squarely located in just about every Woody Allen film ever made. Tracing the shift in emphasis (but not mere replacement) from “romance” to “intimacy” through advice columns, self-help books, Hollywood screwball comedies, and a variety of other texts, Shumway offers a meditation on what it means to love in the modern age.

While Shumway offers an account for twentieth-century love, we might wonder: what does love in the twenty-first century look like? In Love and Empire, Felicity Amaya Schaeffer examines the oddities of cybermarriage and internet romance, particularly their roles in the relationship between Latin America and the United States. Tracking the global trajectory of the twenty-first-century commercialization of intimacy, Schaeffer finds Latin American women fashion themselves through the lens of the erotic to transform themselves into ideal citizens of both their home countries and the United States. These stories not only offer us glimpses into the relationships between contemporary individuals, but also a look at the convoluted relationship between Latin America and the United States.

Offering an alternative look at marriage and traditional concepts of love and intimacy is José Esteban Muñoz, who argues in Cruising Utopia that pragmatic, assimilationist concerns such as marriage only put a halt to the radical and future-bound agenda of the LGBTQ community. Through looking to the past and examining works in queer (and not so queer) archives, Muñoz paves a way to the radical and hopeful future, one where the newly-invigorated LGBTQ community can stop being stifled by pragmatic concerns of the present and instead continue on its radically future-bound course.

These works offer a starting point for books, events and articles we will highlight throughout the month. Look forward to updates here on our blog and our Tumblr!

Gay rights, a gay mayor, and the tiny town of Vicco, Kentucky

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—Bernadette Barton

Last November, I was a guest on a radio call-in show based in Baltimore, Maryland. We were discussing my book Pray the Gay Away: The Extraordinary Lives of Bible Belt Gays and the host asked me how close Kentuckians were to marriage equality. Maryland, of course, had just approved same-sex marriage, and residents were abuzz with their victory, or disturbed and grouchy, depending on their perspective. Regardless, same-sex marriage was in the air.

Headphones on, piped in from an NPR studio in Kentucky, I had a full moment of feeling flummoxed. We are, in fact, nowhere on marriage equality in Kentucky. We do not even have a statewide Fairness ordinance that protects gay people and those who are perceived to be gay from being fired from their workplaces, or denied public accommodations and housing. Indeed, activists are extremely careful about the language they use when discussing gay rights. Kentucky passed a statewide anti-gay marriage amendment in 2004 that lawmakers frequently reference when people lobby for gay rights. For example, the state university where I work finally approved domestic partner benefits for employees two years ago. But, if I choose to put my partner Anna on my plan, she would not be referred to as my “partner,” but rather officially called my “sponsored dependent,” a term that conjures up a foster child to me.

Johnny Cummings, the mayor of Vicco, runs a hair salon three doors down from City Hall.

So it was all the more delightful when Vicco (pronounced with a short “i” like “thick”), a tiny municipality in Kentucky with 334 residents passed a fairness ordinance this January. Vicco joins Lexington, Louisville and Covington as regions of Kentucky with a public commitment to gay rights. A young gay male student of mine, “Michael” stopped by my office last week to share the news.

“Dr. Barton,” he exclaimed, “Did you see the New York Times article on Vicco?”

Michael grew up 20 minutes from Vicco on the Kentucky-Tennessee-Virginia border and had experienced much homophobic bullying growing up in the region. Michael remembered Vicco primarily as the place people made alcohol runs since it had a liquor store. We laughed, appreciating tiny Vicco, with its gay mayor/hair stylist, the tight web of relationships characterizing small communities, and the eccentricity of the Bible Belt. While we may be far from marriage equality in Kentucky, Vicco’s bold stand for gay rights is a step forward.

Bernadette Barton is Professor of Sociology and Women’s Studies at Morehead State University in Morehead, Kentucky. She is the author of Stripped: Inside the Lives of Exotic Dancers (NYU Press, 2006) and Pray the Gay Away: The Extraordinary Lives of Bible Belt Gays, (NYU Press, 2012).

Dads are parents, too

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—Gayle Kaufman

In a recent Atlantic piece, Alexis Coe writes about different expectations of and reactions to mothers and fathers. On the one hand, people expect “very involved” fathers to do less than “very involved” mothers. On the other hand, when fathers do the same thing as mothers they are praised, while mothers remain invisible. Coe argues for people to react to involved fathers in a way that “is not judgmental or evaluative, but still positive.”

“Look! There in the playground, with the stroller and diaper bag! It’s Superdad!”

While I agree that fathers should be as involved as mothers and engage in all aspects of parenting, I don’t have a problem with praising the actions of involved dads. Being evaluative means considering the value or worth of something. In this case, fathers who take care of their children are engaging in a very worthwhile activity. To be fair, mothers do much of the valuable work of caregiving. In an ideal world, we might not speak of “mothers” and “fathers” but of “parents”—and we might praise all parents for the important work they do. But we are not quite there yet.

Coe suggests that when people react in the wrong way (perhaps in the form of misguided praise), gender differences, rather than equity, will be encouraged. She gives the example of parents avoiding calling their daughters “pretty” or “dolls.” But the other side of this is that parents instead call their daughters “smart.” While we might not want to flip it completely by calling sons “dolls,” we should encourage more nurturing behaviors in boys and men.

Consider how much we praise women who succeed in business and politics. Think Madeleine Albright, Sandra Day O’Connor, and Sheryl Sandberg. Men in similar positions don’t receive as much attention. My point is that we want more women in business and politics and we react (mostly) favorably when they get there. I think it’s okay if we do the same for men.

I don’t want to overblow this issue. I’m sure Coe and I would agree on a lot. I just think there’s room for superdads.

Gayle Kaufman is Professor of Sociology at Davidson College and a 2012-13 Fulbright Scholar. She is author of Superdads: How Fathers Balance Work and Family in the 21st Century (NYU Press, June 2013).

5 NYU Press books named Choice Outstanding Academic Titles for 2012

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We are *thrilled* to announce five (yep, count ‘em—FIVE) NYU Press books have been named Choice Outstanding Academic Titles for 2012.

Honoring “the best of the best” in scholarly publishing, Choice’s Outstanding Academic Titles list contains just over 9 percent of some 7,000 works reviewed in Choice during the past year (and less than 3 percent of more than 25,000 titles submitted during this same period). You can find the entire list in the January 2013 issue of Choice.

In celebration, NYU Press is offering 20 percent off each title. Enter promo code CHOICE13 at check out to save on all five award-winners, including The Tender Cut; Planned Obsolescence; Highway under the Hudson; A Troubled Marriage; and The Bully Society. Offer expires February 15, 2013.

Congratulations to our authors, editors, and to everyone who worked on these books!

Announcing our Spring 2013 Catalog…

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NYU Press Spring 2013 Catalog is now online, featuring an exciting range of new books in history, media studies, law, and more!

Highlights include:
TWO PRESIDENTS ARE BETTER THAN ONE: Making the case for a two-party, two-person presidency, this “pipe dream of a book” presents a “novel and provocative thesis worth hearing out” (Kirkus Reviews).

A DEATH AT CROOKED CREEK: Marion Wesson, author of best-selling and prize-winning legal novels including Render up the Body, combines drama and intrigue  with cutting-edge forensic investigation techniques and legal theory in this superbly imagined historical novel.

CAPITAL OF THE WORLD: Charlene Mires tells the dramatic, surprising, and at times comic story of hometown promoters in an extraordinary race to host the U.N. headquarters at a pivotal moment in history.

(You can also click here to access this catalog via our website, or find our catalogs available on Edelweiss.)