Thursday, October 28, 2010

Sms For Friends Informing About New Born Baby

"girly" and the long struggle of women

yesterday held an event you may have missed: the day pink'n shoes. Launched by the blogger Thorn, it was for different designers es nurse bloggers / pig make a note of "girly" (there is a list of participants with link at the end of the note Thorn). But what a note "girly"? Look at it sociologically.

The term "girly" has come to mean in the little world of comics blogs, a special category: they are blogging identified as "feminine" and that focus around certain characteristics identified themselves as "feminine". There will necessarily be subject of shoes, clothes, balances, guys, cats, etc.. All with a bit of frivolity and stupidity. In any case, what emerges is the clearest possible terms the various drawings during this "special day".

So, girly, this is not really a compliment. It can even be rather heavy to carry. The blogger can evoke Kek that he reads this kind of blog for fun . Similarly, the designer can Boulet mock without much hesitation type blog. In the posts of the day, JiBe clearly expresses the feelings of hatred that can arise this style. In short, the "girly" is a stigma in Goffman's sense: a feature that allows you to mark the discredit which we seek at all costs to stand out. After Skyblogs is probably the genus that causes most certainly that kind of rejection by the critical scorn.

But where do the blogs girlies? The question is interesting. The term was imposed when the site blogbd.fr actually one of its categories of classification, since disappeared: it is probably at this point that the "style" was formalized and took in the spirit if not in practice, its final form. Generally, one can see two great "ancestors" (even if they are not so old as that): Penelope Bagieu and his blog " My life is quite fascinating " (signed first Penelope Jolicoeur) and Margaux Motin , an illustrator who has since published two collections of his notes. They are mentioned here as the "two queens of the genre" by a designer who just want to play on codes of it. Similarly, in this post Boulet, they are referred to as "starlets" of the blogosphere. This echoes a stigma typically female, attached to the early practice of the blog: the frivolity and the desire "to show" that one usually pays for starlets.

Yet these two blogs do they meet the hyper-feminine aspect which now returns the phrase "girly" - as it is to be seen in the parodies available at this pink'n day shoes? Not really. Certainly one will find stories about clothes and guys, of course Penelope Bagieu could talk about her cat, of course, they can raise issues quite feminine ... But not only. Instead, one as the other may also emphasize the distance some time they have with the feminine role that is theirs: Margaux Motin uses language not always very delicate ("then one is not quite the relaxed penis there?" or "did you see ? I managed to put 17 times the word dick "). Penelope Bagieu also stressed his coarse side, and can stage how it goes from one role to another . In short, the blog "girly" history was built on a remote traditional female role.

More specifically, these two blogs are very modern in their way. Certainly, the two young women start times on stage as "women" in search of the perfect shoe or attached to the music tearful when we suffer ... But they also refuse to be just that. They want well-being of women, and treated as such, but not all the time, not everyone, not matter how. It claims that Margaux Motin very clearly in his latest book theory contortion. It opens with a scene where she says she refuses to be enclosed in a box - and is contradicted by drawing each role we want him paste, "fiiiiiiiiille" to "fashinista godasses to acco", to "mother", "soldier" or "trendy Parisian." The next page shows the out of the box in which you want to lock him in the form of a multitude of themselves with clothes and attitudes related to everything she wants to be when she wants ( this design is now used to blindfold her website).

short put these blogs - and still are - the scene of women who play their role of women as "tongue in cheek" as saying the Anglo-Saxon with distance and humor, knowing that it is a role without too attached and even ostensibly showing that there is not fooled. Watermark with a claim: to be treated like a woman, yes, but in intimate relationships, also in industrial relations, we will not necessarily be considered as such. A beautiful and strong awareness of the nature of the genre in other words, even if this does not exclude the possibility of continuing to criticize the stereotypes so used.

Instead, girly adjective has come to refer pejoratively blogs that depict women who have no distance to their role, who believe in "killing". What happened? How the term is already very respectful insofar infantilizes women ("girls" rather than "women "...), he might have become a trend? It is actually probably come into resonance with the sharp devaluation of everything that is labeled as feminine in our society ... Like any stigma, it has tended to come together to define the personality of the man or woman who wears it: we have learned from these blogs that the aspects that could be devalued, mainly frivolity. And it has eliminated, in representation, all they could have a modern and protest. A blog "girly" is girly / feminine before anything and everything that can be said or done will be interpreted according to the label.

What testify in this final category of blogs "girly"? Essentially that women's struggle is far from over. A man to do a blog where he talks about things "masculine" and no one criticized him: Mr. Dog, by taking to the extreme (and that's why we love it) all the male stereotypes (sex-obsessed, passionate football, games and role of comics, a little loser, etc..) is a simple blog, not a blog "boyish" or "manly." Instead, his humor and his way of playing with role is well understood. A woman makes a blog and it will have to fight against the stigma that it essaira affix Laurel as the blogger who was forced to protest from blogbd.fr because she thought her work could be labeled "girly" merely because she is a woman (she also plays with his roles as a mother for example) ... When try to play with his role as women, we will see this as a difficult game, and the risk will be stronger than she is taken at face value. In short, it will still take time to be a woman ceases to be a stigma.

Wednesday, October 13, 2010

School Stuff Unblocker

Young people are in the streets because they are at school

Young - understand Pupils and students - gradually join the protest movement against pension reform, and apparently so worried that the various media that the government . Maybe they did they read this old post stating that, more than the number of protesters is the variety of them which is their strength? Still, the accusations of "manipulation" of youth remake flourished. Yet it should look more seriously into the causes of recurrent mood among protesters students and students.

manifestations of pupils and students in France are a recurring phenomenon than I have myself beaten the pavement in my younger days (ah, you Have to be there as the French say that the English play), and it was already a long tradition. The various reforms of national education, that Whether Haby, Allegre, Darcos Châtel or other provisions relating to entry into working life as the CPE, or more general policy issues, from April 21, 2002 to the current pension reform: Youth fails no reason to take to the streets. As we can see, these are far from being confined to matters "affecting" young people directly, and these events pace for the French political life almost as surely as the presidential election.

The recurrence of this phenomenon involves the recurrence of explanations, which usually play the role of weapons of legitimation or delegitimization movements in question. Conventionally, the government accuses his opponents of "manipulating" the cool youth. Argument that continues to fascinate me because, generally, it is professed by those who lament that teachers no longer have any authority over the boys: Apparently, they are listening more, except when it comes to protest. On the other hand, these events are not only greeted with kindness because they support popular ideas, but also because we feel it "necessary that boys will be boys." The explanation by the "hormones" is never far, and condescension toward the young is always around the corner: "Ah, misspent youth ...".

One explanation is much more powerful to look at what living conditions and lives of young people can teach us about the origins of these movements. For this, it is interesting to watch how things go elsewhere, including in a country that knows no episodes of protesters at a rate as regular. In his book

Freaks, Geeks and Cool Kids (2004), Murray Milner Jr. seeks to understand the origins of what he calls the "caste system" of American high schools. These are indeed structured by groups of well-marked status and hierarchical: it is "cool" or you're a "geek" or a "freak", other statutes that lies between these extremes. In a word, as evidenced in many films and series euphémisent more or less symbolic violence inherent in this system (this video is quite interesting from this point of view), American youth are a particular society with its dominant and its dominated.

Why this system is there? Milner presented his thesis in the first pages of the book. It is quite simple but very interesting: it would be a logical consequence of how society ie adult, youth run. The latter have indeed power extremely limited: they do not decide their schedule because they require to participate in an activity - in school - without asking their opinion (even if "it is for their well ") in this context, they take courses they do not see the immediate interest and they do not necessarily perceive the reason, they are subjected to all sorts of tests, examinations up to the conditions to enter the labor market, over which they have virtually no ability to act. Their remains there as flexibility? Not much: cultural practices, the look, music, etc.. The development of a youth culture that breaks with the expectations "normal" vis-à-vis pupils and students, a phenomenon that Dominique Pasquier brilliantly studied in France, would be the result of the right-facing school them: this is a way for them to express their freedom and autonomy, to build its own identity and not imposed from outside. Reflected on the other side of the Atlantic, the illegitimacy of the most progressive "school" as the captain of the football team and the chief cheerleaders , And on this side, extension of popular culture in all strata of society .

But could we not think that in France, the same phenomenon - the influence of the school form on youth - has significantly different consequences? It is possible that the recurrence of events and high school students found this part of his explanation. Go beat the pavement is a way for young people to "regain control" over their own lives, to escape, a few hours, an institution where their power is extremely limited to demonstrate their independence, their freedom and autonomy. Some will say without doubt that some benefit to go hang out in cafes ... Exactly: they do not stay home they will occupy public spaces where they can feel "big", "adult", where they may, in other words, have some power. In other words, if young people are (regularly) in the street because they are (mostly) at school.

But why the same causes do not they the same effects as those studied by Milner? If a caste system is also present in the French high school students, and can manifest with similar violence (I am, unfortunately, regularly control), it seems a priori less deeply structuring what he may be in the United States. The temptation is therefore to look towards a culturalist explanation more or less (especially as it is fashionable at the moment): the "French culture" would be more willing to express protest and young people would only comply.

If this can not be excluded - and should especially focus on the transmission of "knowledge manifest" in families - it seems that we can deepen a little reflection on the social position of youth. Céline Van de Velde argues, following a solid survey, the position of French youth is characterized by the fact that they are in a society "in status", which studies and the first steps in working life greatly determines the entire future life of individuals (Become adult. Comparative Sociology of Youth in Europe 2008). Therefore, young people are told to "place himself", that is to say, to find as quickly as possible to take a place in society: the pressure on education is particularly strong, the choices made and successes achieved failures or being perceived as final and irreversible. For students middle class, more or less destabilized by economic developments in recent decades, a complete subversion of the educational nature is difficult to bear. But at the same time, Van de Velde said that the same young people are encouraged to seek "personal development", this, I think both the media and by their teachers (the refrain they serine fairly regularly). So here they are caught in a strong enough voltage between the need to invest and the desire to achieve, within the constraints of a structure and a summons to retrieve it. The regular events can be considered, causes beyond the "accidental" behind them - as the product of this structural position.

So an explanation of the trend "confrontational" part of French youth. The same framework may not be useless to try to understand other events juveniles, as no less recurring "suburban riots. Even if they have outstanding features, they share with other forms of juvenile protest the fact that they express a desire to take control from a group of private power, even if this takeover does or borrows the same way (the event "In order" vs. savage violence), nor the same objectives (vs. political agenda. territory). It is therefore not excluded that there is the conflict of generations in what is also regularly attends ...

Sunday, October 3, 2010

Bachelorette Party Bag Tylenol Candy

Contemporary Art and the Scottish kilt: about Murakami in Versailles

Visit the Musée d'Orsay: I meet a girl wearing one of these T-shirts bearing the image of Kurt Cobain who are so poorly made that Kundera in cover pages and pages on the kitsch. Meet the beginnings of abstraction and figurative that horror is almost a work of art in itself. Of course, I immediately think the controversy surrounding Murakami and Versailles. And the fact that a piece of fabric could also help us see more clearly: a Scottish kilt to be precise. In other words, the "invention of tradition".

Contemporary art has great sociological virtues. Firstly, because breaking radically with the most common designs of what the Art, perpetually playing with these definitions and putting them in every way possible to the test, he reminds us they have arbitrary, fragile, and historical. He shows us, in fact, how the aesthetic sense, trial, is no quality personal, but remains a social skill, learned and internalized. After all, if we find a classical picture more "beautiful" a urinal, is it really related to a quality of objects or the way we react? The art lies more in the look in the thing, that's how sociology can take it.

That's why the contemporary art tends to annoy. While he dedicates a week of its issuance The new paths of knowledge there some time, Raphael Enthoven could not hide his irritation over an art which, he said, needed to be understood and explained it possible to feel "spontaneously" an aesthetic emotion. That is precisely the virtue of sociological contemporary art: to feel moved by a work of art must be, to paraphrase Howard Becker , participate in the "art world" correspondent. Each world of art is characterized by certain conventions that allow different actors to coordinate their activities for a symphony is possible, it is necessary that the composers and performers share the same codes for music notation and playing instruments, it is also that there is an audience willing to stay sat quietly all the time of the performance - if he wants to try a pogo, things will simply no longer possible. Similarly, to be touched by an object, must still have the codes to enter it. In terms of contemporary art, these conventions have learned mostly in adulthood. For more conventional arts, there is also a learning experience, but it is more discreet: it begins, for example, all reproductions of painting in our history books that make us understand, from an early age, it is art and it is beautiful ...

Therefore, we can better illuminate the battle fought around Murakami (and before him Koons Veilhan) at Versailles. As always, this is a battle of paper, where different opponents to compete Loved text justification and criticism (see for example the different forums in the World). This is neither the first nor the last battles of contemporary art, much less art in general. With an eye Becker, one can see through these clashes reflected a fundamental aspect of artistic activity, taken as that of all the players in a world of art and not the only artists. The prior art is all a matter of discourse, discourse which is justified by works. At certain periods, these justifications were taken for granted just because they were enrolled in the same operating principles of the Academy. Contemporary art plays here once again unveiling its role in bringing sociological rationale of this activity in the foreground.

Third unveiling contemporary art exhibitions and more specifically to Versailles to uncover the building traditions. Today, it seems clear that wearing a kilt is a very ancient and respectable tradition in Scotland, and many Scots themselves convinced that this piece of cloth has been worn by their ancestors since time immemorial. It is however known to anyone who has a little rubbing to contemporary social sciences it is a fairly recent invention when a Scottish merchant would sell a large inventory of fabric. The classic representation of the origin of traditions must be revised: it is not necessarily old practices that are perpetuated in the present, but more recent practices often that you invent as ancient.

Today, with Murakami and Jean-Jacques Aillagon is invoked seniority Versailles and tradition. Contemporary art is here we can see that there is not a reference to a pre-existing tradition, but inventing it as a defense of a world of art against another. One might as well remember that the castle of Versailles had long intended to accommodate what was the contemporary art of the time and be a showcase for European elites who flocked. In this perspective, giving the cream of contemporary art, he would only continue this "tradition". As discussed in Weber, the tradition is primarily here as a form of legitimacy mobilize actors including Murakami in the text published by the World. Opposite the charismatic legitimacy of exceptionality of works and artists, she is one of two positions that compete in any artistic activity. If contemporary art does, by these exposures, to gain the force of tradition, he will probably finally won the battle.

Enlightened sociological in that light, the "controversy" going around Versailles and contemporary artists is therefore one day very special: the last battle before the victory of contemporary art. It is indeed reached at least by then to enter a much larger number of actors in his own world: institutional players such as administration of the famous castle, but also public works will be on site or on television in many reports devoted to "the affair", and especially opponents who, on entering the game, give it a publicity. These are at last behind an agenda set by those against whom they fight. An art that relies on continual transgression of the rules requires such guardians of the temple to live. The current protests are part of the world of contemporary art, helping to give gestures to the works and their subversive and innovative qualities. We know from Simmel: the conflict is a positive social relationship to the extent that it creates links. That's what that feeds the world of contemporary art.