I Can't Help It...Because I'm a Cracker

So part 2 of my musings about this conference is about my ambivalence …what am I doing at an academic conference? I left academia, demmit! I have no idea what I’m going to do for those 2 days, given that I no longer do sexuality research. I fear I’ll be sitting on my butt, zoned out and dreaming of a drink + cigarette, while everyone around me pontificates in fluent pomo. (Although I genuinely love the slashes, parentheses, and geographic metaphors… someone had better mention the interstices of fragmented identities of post/colonial wo(men)--right now! Go Talk amongst yourselves!)

What's wild is that there are at least 2 people attending whom I knew from grad school, and I didn’t even realize were SSRC fellows! They became fellows after I left. I only know something like 5 people in the entire world, so it's quite a coincidence. I hope I can connect with them this weekend…and I genuinely want to hear what T is working on…it’s very strange, I feel like a lot of people are coming back into my life suddenly…


There’s a ‘who’s who’ worth of famous sexuality researchers attending. Really big names, as far as that kind of thing goes. And I confess it does make me a little wistful about leaving academia. Frankly I don’t miss 99% of it, but I do kind of miss hanging out and jabbering about Big Ideas. All of it takes me back to my last Big Idea before I hung up my tassels. Graduation tassels of course, not stripper tassels—I will nevah hang up my stripper tassels! I started down that Big Idea path at my last SSRC conference, so it’s fitting to think about it again…

The Big Idea is how gender stereotypes are expressed in hetero romantic relationships. In social psychology, the current perception is that stereotypes are only useable when interacting with strangers. The idea being the more you know someone, the more you’ll be using that information to explain their behavior, rather than relying on broad stereotypes about them. From a certain perspective, this makes sense—several social psychologists have extensively studied the situational and cognitive factors that affect people’s reliance on stereotypes. And from this same perspective, psychologists don’t even use “stereotypes” in exactly the same way that most people use the phrase…it’s more like an assumption, or a belief about a group or people, or someone within that group, and the belief may or may not be factually true. But if you know someone (because you’re dating them), then you shouldn’t need to make assumptions, right?


But more recently there have been other lines of research trying to understand the social utility of stereotypes, not just the cognitive utility. So some folks look at how stereotypes serve to justify the current political system, and others look at how stereotypes contain information about the abilities or skills of different groups that can be used to “explain” ambiguous behavior. My friend T has done research on how the content of stereotypes match exactly on to the real social dynamics between different ethnic groups, sometimes causing people of differing ethnicities to have exactly opposite stereotypes about the same ethnic group (whites are smart vs. dumb, tall vs. short…).

The idea that stereotypes have social utility is not new—duh, stereotypes justify the system—but the new aspect is combining the cognitive part with the social part. And so there is a disconnect between the idea that stereotypes are used to explain the behavior of strangers and acquaintances, and the reality that gender stereotypes are used strategically in male-female relationships all the time. Gender stereotypes provide the rationale for traditional divisions of labor, and “explain” and constrain how sexuality is expressed in these relationships.

This other gal I went to grad school with looks at how stereotypes contain behavioral explanations. Such as “girls are bad at math,” (so if a girl flunks a math class, well, it’s not really her fault, right? She was born to be bad at math.) Apply that to your typical male-female relationship, and you have a “benign” explanation for all sorts of otherwise threatening behavior. Your man likes to look at girls? Eh, men…they’re dogs, what can you do? Your woman being a bitch? Must be her time of the month. Stereotypes provide a ‘get out of jail free’ pass for behavior that would otherwise threaten the relationship. Wouldn’t you rather your man be a dog (because all men are dogs), than be uninterested in you specifically, or just be an untrustworthy person? Wouldn’t you rather your woman be temporarily ill than a moody lunatic?


Actually, I started thinking about this at the last fellowship conference I went to, where I met this other fellow (can’t remember her name, argh!). We, as white girls, were both dating Asian American guys, and secretly giggled that sometimes, when our guys were acting incomprehensibly or with a strange set of priorities, we’d throw some random stereotype at them to test what was going on. (Actually, to be honest, mine was more like “Stop being so damn Korean!” And then he would call me a cracker.). It’s a strange mix of trying to make explicit some unexplored cultural difference, joking to defuse racial tensions, and actually subscribing to some ill-defined stereotype (which is more comforting than just thinking my partner is nuts).

Such a chunk of writing tonight! More on this later…