Teaching culture beyond nationalist boundaries: national identities,stereotyping, and culture in language education

The authors take a critical language pedagogy approach to examining a 2011 controversy over disparaging comments towards Mexicans made by commentators of the British Broadcasting Corporation’s automotive show Top Gear. In particular, they focus on the characterization of groups and individuals according to their nationality and examine the ubiquity of nationalism and its ability to shape our conception of culture and in turn our understandings of others as members of ‘X national culture.’ The fact that humor is often a justification for national stereotyping and that these stereotypes are also connected to racist discourse are also explored. In the second part of the article, the implications of the stereotyping debate for language classrooms are considered. The authors argue that the controversy itself can be used as a tool for critical engagement that helps students deconstruct the underlying nationalist paradigm in L2 classrooms and build greater intercultural awareness.

Español: Los autores examinan, desde una perspectiva de la pedagogía crítica del lenguaje, la controversia que surgió en el 2011 debido a los comentarios nocivos hechos hacia los mexicanos por los locutores del show automotriz del BBC, Top Gear. En particular, se enfocan en la caracterización de los grupos e individuos de acuerdo a su nacionalidad, y examinan la ubiquidad del nacionalismo y su capacidad para darle forma a nuestra conceptualización de la cultura y, a su vez, nuestra forma de ver a otros como miembros de una ‘cultural nacional X’. Los autores también exploran el hecho de que a menudo se utiliza el humor como una justificación para los estereotipos nacionales, y que estos estereotipos también están conectados al discurso racista. En la segunda parte del artículo, se consideran las implicaciones para la enseñanza de idiomas del debate sobre los estereotipos. Argumentan los autores que la controversia en sí se puede utilizar como una herramienta para promover una postura crítica que ayude a los alumnos a deconstruir el paradigma subyacente del nacionalismo en el salón de lenguas extranjeras y fomente la conciencia intercultural.     

Division of Labor,Gender Ideology,and Marital Satisfaction in East Asia

Using data from the 2006 Family Module of the East Asian Social Survey (N = 3,096), this article examines associations of marital satisfaction with divisions of housework and gender ideology in four East Asian societies: urban China, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. Compared with Japanese and Korean married women and men, Chinese and Taiwanese spouses were more satisfied with their marriage and had more egalitarian divisions of housework, but simultaneously they held less egalitarian gender ideologies. Multivariate analyses showed that relative share of housework was negatively associated with marital satisfaction for Japanese and Korean men and for Korean and Taiwanese women. Egalitarian gender ideology was significantly associated with lower marital satisfaction only among Taiwanese women. In addition, the negative association between housework and marital satisfaction was more pronounced for Taiwanese women who espoused more egalitarian gender ideologies. The authors discuss how differences in macro‐level social contexts explain these cross‐society variations.     

Critical Realism and the Limits to Critical Social Science

The paper assesses the aims and arguments of critical social science and the reconstructions of it provided by critical realist philosophy. It argues that attempts to derive normative conclusions on the basis of explanatory critiques of social phenomena are flawed in several important respects. Accounts of critical social science standardly underestimate the problems of justifying critical standpoints and finding alternative social forms which generate fewer problems than those they replace, and hence lead to net improvement. By arguing that value positions can be derived from explanatory critiques, the philosophical reconstructions make light of the normative issues raised by proposals for social change. They also ignore the question of the feasibility of alternative systems and the prevalence of structures which generate both good and bad effects. While the reconstructions succeed in defending critiques centering on straightforward cases of false beliefs or the frustration of universal human needs, in others, where culturally-specific needs and issues of social responsibilities are involved, they fail to recognise the need to address prior normative questions. It is therefore argued that the aims and claims of critical social science need to be moderated and its dependence on normative discourse properly acknowledged.     

Under Pressure: Gender Differences in the Relationship Between Free Time and Feeling Rushed

Free time has the potential to reduce time pressures, yet previous studies paradoxically report increases in free time concurrent with increases in feeling rushed. Using U.S. time diary data from 708 individuals in 1975 and 964 individuals in 1998, we review the evidence on trends in free time and subjective perceptions of feeling rushed, and reexamine the relationship between free time and time pressure. We find that women's time pressure increased significantly between 1975 and 1998 but men's did not. In addition, the effects of objective time constraints vary by gender. Whereas more free time reduces men's perceptions of feeling rushed at both time points, among women, free time marginally reduced time pressure in 1975 but no longer reduced time pressure in 1998. Our findings suggest that persistent inequality in gendered time‐use patterns is paralleled by gendered experiences of time pressure.     

“Doing Fear”: The Influence of Hetero‐femininity on (Trans)women's Fears of Victimization

Through 26 in‐depth interviews with male‐to‐female transsexuals (transwomen), this study examines transwomen's perceptions of safety, pre‐ and post‐transition. The majority reported higher levels of fear and believed they would be unable to fight off an attacker post‐transition even though most were large statured and were socialized as males. Exposure to heterosexual practices and to cultural messages depicting women as physically weak and sexually vulnerable, and transwomen's embodiment of hetero‐femininity play a central role in increasing their fears. Their experiences as women are powerful enough to override decades of prior male experiences and expose the socially constructed nature of fear and bodily agency.     

Bourdieu, Smith and disinterested judgement

The paper presents a sympathetic critique of Bourdieu7rsquo;s work in terms of the tension between its critical intentions and its leanings towards sociological reductionism. Although Bourdieu argues against such reductionism in his methodological pronouncements, his empirical studies tend to reduce actors' putative disinterested judgements to functions of their habitus in relation to the social field and to unconscious strategies of distinction. Further, his concept of (non-monetary) forms of capital occludes the difference between use-value and exchange-value and the corresponding distinction between the pursuit of goods and the pursuit of distinction, which are vital for both explanation and critique. Moreover his suspicion of normative judgement on the part of social science and his concealment of his own normative standpoint subvert his critiques. Thus in relation to Bourdieu's analysis of the role of mis-recognition in social life I argue that this requires a delineation of the extent of justified recognition. In developing the argument I draw upon Adam Smith's analysis of moral sentiments and his critique of undeserved recognition and the pursuit of distinction. Where Bourdieu is dismissive about moral issues, Smith treats moral sentiments as irreducible to interest or instrumental action and as a significant element in the reproduction of social order. The paper concludes with some implications for the nature of critique in social theory.     

Racial-Ethnic Differences in U.S. Married Women’s and Men’s Housework

Married women continue to spend more time doing housework than men and economic resources influence women’s housework more strongly than men’s. To explain this, gender theorists point to how gender figures into identities, family interactions, and societal norms and opportunity structures. The extent of this configuration varies culturally and, in the United States, by race-ethnicity because of how race-ethnicity conditions access to resources and influences gender relations within marriages. Housework levels and gender differences may be lower in Black married couples compared to other couples because of Black women’s higher historical levels of employment and consequently long-standing need to balance work and family responsibilities. Race-ethnicity also likely conditions the symbolic meaning and thus association of economic resources and housework. We use pooled time diary data from the 2003 to 2007 American Time Use Study from 26,795 married women and men to investigate how and why race-ethnicity influences housework. Our results indicate Hispanic and Asian women do more cooking and cleaning compared with White and Black women and the inverse relationship between women’s earnings and housework is steeper for Hispanic women compared with other women. We find no evidence that married Black men devote more time to housework than White men, either core or occasional, unlike earlier studies.     

Essentialism, social constructionism, and beyond

Anti-essentialism has criticised a range of targets, from cultural essentialism and biological reductionism to causal explanation and foundationalism, and concerning topics ranging from markets to ‘race’, identity and sexuality. The paper assesses these diverse lines of critique. Some social phenomena, like identities, clearly do not have essences, but it does not follow from this that other phenomena we study do not have essences or something like them. While a strong, or deterministic essentialism is always wrong and often dangerously misleading, a moderate, non-deterministic essentialism is necessary for explanation and for a social science that claims to be critical and have emancipatory potential. The concept of essence is problematic, but not for some of the epistemological and ontological reasons put forward by anti-essentialism. Strong variants of social constructionism are liable to invert rather than resolve the problems of strong essentialism, including those of its biological reductionist guises. While it may be best to avoid concepts of essences which assume that the distinguishing and generative properties of objects must coincide, we still need to distinguish classes of objects and identify causal powers which enable and constrain what those objects can do.     

Educational differences in parents’ time with children: Cross‐national variations

We analyze time diary data from 24,546 married mothers and married fathers in Canada, Germany, Italy, and Norway to determine whether the effect of education on child‐care time varies cross‐nationally. Our results indicate that more educated mothers spend more time with children than less educated mothers in each country, despite substantial cross‐national variation in levels of economic support and services for families. This suggests that better educated mothers may have different parental values and behaviors than less educated mothers. Among fathers, however, education has no effect on child‐care time in Norway, and only weak effects in Germany. This suggests that family policies that provide economic support to families may reduce time constraints on fathers, thus ameliorating educational effects.