Giulia Cavalcanti

Today I will tell you the anatomy and history of electric shavers from 1920 until today, or better known as Corona times.

Shavers came into the world for men. Designed by men for men. Black, robust, strong, fast, and with visible screws. That is how electric shavers for men were and still look like (van Oost, 2003: 198-9). As sociologists, we are all well aware that material goods are used to construct and perform one’s gendered identity (van Oost, 2003: 194). This electric shaver advert from the 1990s targeted to men says it all. Meanwhile the manly voice talks, the song sings “for the men inside”. These features – robust, strong, fast, technological competent – are the features that make men manly. Masculinity, however, was not built from scratch starting from electric shavers. Designers and adverts have simply reinforced the meaning of being a man through the symbolic features of electric shavers ‘for men’. For instance, the visible screws told men that they are technologically competent (van Oost, 2003: 198-9, 207).

Then, shavers for women came into the world. For women, but yet still designed by men. Pink, small, delicate, sensitive, gentle. That is how electric shavers for women were and still look like. This was the understanding that designers – male designers – had around femininity. Small, delicate, sensitive, gentle ‘electric shavers for women’ alongside their adverts — such as this – have reinforced the meaning of being a woman (van Oost, 2003: 200-7). Furthermore, the manly voice in the advert gives us a tip. He says: “made for women with men in mind”. Simply put, women ought to shave for the pleasure of men. And this is how women’s generation after generation dedicated their times to remove their body hair to avoid men from having the haunting sight of a hairy woman, meanwhile hairy men became sexier and sexier…

Eventually, millennials came into the world and rejected the gendered products, including shavers. Designers and adverts had to respond, and eventually, gender-neutral shavers came into the world. Shavers ‘for you’, shavers ‘for all’… But how neutral are they? If we take a closer look and compare those “revolutionary” (feel the sarcasm) shavers and compare them to the old-fashion ‘shavers for men’, it can be easily argued that gender-neutral shavers or any other “neutral” material good, are made having in mind as possible target men, exactly because designers are mostly male (van Oost, 2003: 196).

Products have changed, but not shaving practices, especially among women. Until finally, coronavirus or scientifically speaking COVID-19 came. Coronavirus has contributed to making the poor poorer, black deaths, working-class peoples’ deaths, increased housework and childcare labour for women…. But we, or at least I, cannot deny that coronavirus freed us all from few gendered social norms.

I haven’t worn a bra since lockdown.
I haven’t used make-up since lockdown.
I haven’t shaved since lockdown.

My neck, armpits, and legs are uncovered. It is summer. And yet I still have not shaved since lockdown. Has coronavirus revolutionised women’s shaving practices? The answer is no. I haven’t shaved since lockdown. Until I decided to go to Portobello beach to swim with my friends. Since then my body hair has grown, and I haven’t shaved since.

Yet, my neck, armpits, and legs continue to be uncovered. So, why have I shaved when I wore a bikini and not when I wear trousers that show my hairy legs? I wish I could say that the answer is laziness. Lazy to shave. Rather, one of the possible answers might be the fear of drawing attention. A female hairy body draws more attention than a shaved one. And drawing attention means having eyes at you. I shaved to not draw attention to my body, to limit the eyes of those who may look at my body. Because most than often drawing attention to a body ends in the sexualisation of it.

Let me tell you a story. I went to the Meadows and wore 80s trousers. For fashion lovers: black and white striped trousers. And a tight basic blacktop. I chose to wear those trousers despite my hairy legs, but I chose to wear a bra (remember: I haven’t worn a bra since lockdown, no matter if at home, or outside).I chose to show my hairy legs, but I chose to hide my nipples. Calves, in my heterosexual viewpoint, are not sexy. Calves are not sexual per se. Women’s nipples are.

This is when choosing what to wear for a simple walk at the meadows with a friend becomes a sociology class. So, what has led me to step outside the door of my house wearing a bra? I chose my outfit. I tried it on. And I saw my nipples. So far so good. But then, a body sensation filled my whole body. Anxiety. Fear. Of what? – you may ask. Fear of being sexualised. Fear of the eyes of those who may sexualise free nipples. This was the same fear and anxiety that led me to shave my legs before going for a swim at the beach.

The truth is that I shaved when I wore a bikini to protect myself. The truth is that I wore a bra to protect myself. The ugly truth is that women juggle between making themselves sexual beings and desexualise themselves to avoid over-sexualisation anytime, anywhere by anyone.

Let me tell you a final little story. The other day was the birthday of my friend, and we celebrated at the Meadows, once again. I wore a loose green shirt. I also chose to not wear a bra, despite being able to see my nipples and the shape of my breast at the mirror. I did it on purpose. Apart from a few drinks, I wanted to go back home with a sociological self-reflection. And I did. After all, I did not feel sexualised by anyone, including by the strangers that I encountered in the streets.

So, what was all the fuss about – you may ask? The ugly truth is that women and girls are taught that danger is everywhere, you must never let the guard down…

Covid-19, or corona as we informally call this killing virus, has not revolutionised women’s shaving practices. Women are simply standing against the gendered norms, as far as they, we, feel safe to do so. As far as rape culture will be round and about, hidden as coronavirus, around the streets and houses of the world, women’s revolution will not be completed.

Sources

van Oost, E. C. J. (2003). Materialized gender: how shavers configure the users’ feminity and masculinity. In N. E. J. Oudshoorn, & T. Pinch (Eds.), How users matter. The co-construction of users and technology (pp. 193-208). Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.

Aug 7, 2020

Angus Bancroft

What do you touch most everyday? Your face? Your hair? Someone else? Coffee cup? Door handle? Keyboard and screen?  A lot of our social, leisure and work lives were conducted digitally before lockdown and now it seems nearly all of it is.  Now imagine each digital element was tangible. How much does a click ‘weigh’? What’s the mass of a like? How much momentum does your tweet have? What’s the force of an insta? The calorific value of an email? 

The question I have been dicing with during lockdown is how the digital is tangible as a physical force. It has been estimated that the internet weighs between 6 micrograms 60 grams depending on how many electrons are factored into the calculation. Rather than being this literal – what energy does it consume – I think of it in reverse. How much of your energy does it consume. What physical properties does it imbue in the user? Marshal McLuhan noted that watching television was a physical experience. A person watching it has their metabolism change, their brain changes to devote more resources to the bright little square in the visual field. The digital also rearranges selves, demands devotion, shifts sleep cycles, changes appetite.

The question matters for how we apply digital methods. As we recognise the digital as material this helps us examine how it has effects as a set of social things. Digital systems stabilise some realities and destabilise others. The design of digital platforms makes the social tangible in ways that we can examine. In a way this just brings us back to the original questions of sociology – what is artificial, what is natural, what is social and how do real things have real effects. We have never been without technology, from the cooking pot to the lifestyle pharmaceutical. Technologies order life. Now we can examine how sociality incorporates computational effects, the touch of the algorithm.

We already deal with this materiality in many ways. A spreadsheet has material effects. Double entry bookkeeping brought us modern capitalism. Lotus 1-2-3 brought us predictive capitalism. Lenonardi identifies that as the effective production (‘the practical instantiation’) of theoretical ideas. Software creates capacities for action and constraints on it as any technology does.  One of the effects I have noticed in digital drug dealing is how it reworks the experience of waiting. Social time is a comprehensible, graspable form of sociality which is currently overwhelmed and articulated by machine time, by the nanoseconds of algorithmic calculation. Drug buyers’ discussion of waiting – waiting for a dealer to respond via the market system, waiting on the postal service to deliver the drugs they want – put social time back in. I noticed how often concepts of dopesickness – drug withdrawal – were showing up in the same discussions as references to time and waiting. The obdurate waiting times dictated by the delivery infrastructure, such as shipment times, and by the market infrastructure, such as the time for bitcoin payment to clear and an order to be confirmed, were endured. Waiting because the dealer keeps you waiting is not endurable. Users who perceive indifference on the dealers’ part then find time is experienced more harshly. Dopesickness becomes more painful, and anxiety grows. One reason for that is that the user is concerned that the drug may not arrive at all. That feature of the infrastructure then changes the texture of dope time for the user. It reminds them that the power in the relationship fundamentally lies with the dealer. The user worries that they may be thrown back on an unreliable face to face market, or have to go without. Time waiting becomes physical. The drug market system produces a physical response. System users experience the system as touching them.

The example I have used here shows how digital systems have matter. They are not only communicative but have force, weight on the world. It needn’t surprise us that the weight lies on those already marginalised (Noble, 2018). 

Leonardi PM (2010) Digital materiality? How artifacts without matter, matter. First Monday. DOI: 10.5210/fm.v15i6.3036.

Noble SU (2018) Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. NYU Press.

Jul 16, 2020

Aerin Lai

The global Covid-19 pandemic exacerbated the fractures in society and illuminated how deadly racial, gender, class inequalities can be – not that we needed a pandemic to reveal how deep-seated and endemic these oppressive social structures are (if only people listened to sociologists more). As we emerge out of lockdown into phase two, I contemplate on the experiential aspects of the pandemic and why it is important to connect embodiment with temporality and spatiality in understanding how we make sense of ourselves in our social worlds.

The day Scotland entered lockdown, I traversed international borders on a flight so empty I woke up multiple times on the plane wondering where I was. There was no crying baby or scuttling crew along the aisle. Just the consistent humming of the plane gliding through clouds. These are ‘bits and bobs’ of our social-physical environment that we associate closely with particular spaces and emotions. The anticipation of arrival in a new place for example, accompanies travel (most of the time).

My return home was the most bizarre. I got out of the cab and was confronted by my dad, standing properly distanced from me at the door, yelling in short commands “leave your bags! Go shower! Quick! Disinfect!” this chaotic scene was the prelude to a week of heightened parental surveillance before a prompt relocation to a government funded hotel room out of my own volition. I was required to complete a two week Stay Home Notice (SHN), a state-mandated quarantine from the date of arrival into the country. For fourteen days, the Singapore government sent me periodic text messages asking me to declare my location through GPS.

The first week of my SHN was spent with my aged and at-risk parents. It was an unrelenting experience of paranoia, surveillance and exasperation. I received texts from my mom in a different part of a three-bedroom flat, asking me to “please mask up, your dad and I are old”. Every trip to the toilet had to be accompanied by frenzied disinfecting. Basically, I was the personification of a virulent Covid-19 organism and my parents’ interactions with me were guided by this understanding. In any circumstances, this would have been ludicrous and offensive. But, since I travelled from the UK, even the state was wary that I could cause a potential Covid-19 cluster. This experience culminated when my mom shrieked at me for touching a pizza slice meant for her and my dad. “YOU CAN’T TOUCH THAT THAT’S DADS AND MINE” This episode ended in tears and desperate pleading for me to “stick to the safety guidelines”.

Done with the unyielding scrutiny of my parents, I decided to relocate for the remaining seven days of my SHN to a hotel paid for by the state. This shift also meant a shift from hypervisibility in the house to complete isolation from people.  I was tucked away in a room with no recourse to fresh air, social interaction or any kind of noise from the outside. That room was a sensory vacuum. No smells, sterile, no noise nothing. The scene outside of other towering hotels and an empty pool was so still it might as well have been a printed photo stuck to the frames of my windows.

It dawned on me then the extent of our reliance on our physical surroundings in making sense of our reality. Jetlagged and isolated, the line between ‘Edinburgh’ and ‘Singapore started to blur. It was then that I began to notice that time was ‘felt’, in the smells of the outside, the sounds of traffic, of people, of the colour of the sun and the sky. The feeling of exhaustion from having a full day’s work at the office with the commute marking the ‘end of the workday’. Such are experiential moments that accompany and affix social meaning to the hands or digits of the clock. In this sense, in lockdown where my days are humdrum and consistent, I felt time in an absolutely different way. On days without scheduled zoom meetings, I experience time through a different modality, one that is more reliant on physical sensations like hunger.

My experience of melancholia and depressive bouts have been different during this pandemic. I can no longer distinguish between feelings of restlessness, emptiness, general despair and ‘normal’ days since there are no markers of norms anymore. The lack of demarcation between (social) space and time also translates to difficulties in making sense of my emotions and by extension, sense of being. Prior to March, when days were properly scheduled with regular changes to the physical / social landscape around me, the ebbs and flows of general depression and anxiety were more acute and jarring in relation to ‘good’ days. I could keep track of how I was doing emotionally based on how I was coping with my daily tasks, properly giving purpose to time and space. With the lockdown and upending of normalcy as we knew it, there was no meaning to time and space. In addition, the precarity of unfunded PhD life and the paranoia of racism towards Asians in this pandemic has become palpable. ‘Good’ and ‘bad’ days, what I like to call ‘being in the good, medium or bad place’, have begun bleeding into each other.

Time and space need to be seen as constituents in this embodied process of sense-making and identity-formation. Rather than abstract concepts that are studied as disparate pieces of a larger puzzle, we both make sense of time and space through our bodies, while also of our bodies and our realities through time and space. Sociology needs to grapple with bodies and bodily sensations, and the significance of bodily time and space, in its pursuit of understanding the social. Moving forward, with social distancing a preferred mode of interaction, I wonder how such embodied realities can be sociologically investigated from afar.

Aerin Lai is a PhD student in the Sociology Department at the University of Edinburgh.

Jul 2, 2020

Giulia Cavalcanti

I befriended a homeless man.

It is interesting how I am choosing to write about this. This is not a ‘hero’ story. This is just a story about an ordinary human being. Me.
Yet, it is interesting how this act has remained etched in my mind.
In ‘normal’ times where we run late to work, class or to socialise with everyone apart ourselves and/or strangers, so focused on our routines and ourselves, this story is worth telling. Bear in mind, this is not a story about a homeless man, it is a story about myself…

I befriended a homeless man.

I am no hero. I am human. Coronavirus made me human. Coronavirus made us all humans. Once again.

I walk to the shop near my home and there he is. A man around his 40s, with grey short hair and beard. Always sitting with crossed legs, smiling and wishing everyone ‘a good day’. A British or Scottish version of George Clooney I must say. I am sure he was there many times before and during Coronavirus, before and after I noticed him. Always there. I must have seen him, smiled embarrassed and mumbled something like “I’m sorry”. But then one day – nothing like an epiphany – while I am walking to the shop from the safety of my home, I do wonder ‘how it is like to live under the skin of a homeless person?’. What is interesting is that only now with Coronavirus I asked myself such a question.

As now in light of the movement of Black Lives Matter, many people – including myself – ask themselves ‘how it is like to live under the skin of a black person?’. Only now, or only when some big media explodes.
Yet, Coronavirus did not cause homelessness. Coronavirus simply changed my relation towards homeless people. Homelessness has always been there, I was simply not looking directly at it. The reason most likely is that now the home is so filled with meaning and with a bit of intersectional lens we can become all aware that even the literal meaning of home is not as granted as we thought it was. It actually has never been granted!

My “epiphany” changed my attitude. I started smiling, with real intent of smiling, without embarrassment. I started looking and seeing this man’s face. I was no longer simply looking towards his face. I saw the man’s face, and notices: the short grey beard, his small eyes, small details…

I made soup and I brought it to him. I talked to him – What would you like?
And he said nothing. I was confused.
Sometimes I would ask, sometimes I would “surprise” him. Sometimes he would answer secure of what he wanted, sometimes he would not know.
Coffee.
Chocolate.
I did not buy him something every time. But he smiled at me every time. And I smiled and waved at him every time.

He was a kind man. Those people that give you the impression of calmness.

And then I realised something. I did not behave with all homeless people in the same way. That was not an epiphany moment at all. I still smiled embarrassed and mumble “I’m sorry” to other homeless people. I still did not look at every homeless people directly in the eyes. I would wait until he was there to buy something. I bought a coffee once to another homeless man. But that’s it.

So… Why him? It was not the George Clooney’s clone charm. Rather I choose to humanise that singular man. I choose to give him a face into my memory. I choose to interact with him. I choose to connect with him.
There is always something about humanising one homeless person. Usually a man. Homeless women do exist, you know. And yet again women are the one whose stories, whose existence do not change us rich white folks. I still wonder why we choose one person. And why did I choose him? And, after going over and over what I wrote I have my answer. I do not particularly like this ‘solution’. But here it is! I choose him because he does not look like the homeless person. He does not have the appearance of abusing substances of any sorts. He looks clean. He looks at you. He says: ‘have a good day’ before someone would mumble ‘I’m sorry’. He could be a male version of myself as homeless.
I choose him because our similarities allowed me to empathise with him.  I did not choose consciously, but I think my unconscious drove me to him for some reason…

Until our culture is ready to humanise everyone. Every single person. And not just the ones who look like us – Capitalism will win. And every time we walk to a shop and do not see the person who is sitting outside on the floor, capitalism will have won the battle.

I befriended a homeless man.
I humanised a homeless man.
I wish I had asked him more.
– What happened?
– What’s your name?
I still do not know his name.

So, after all, this is a short story about my failed attempt to befriend a homeless man. So, after all, this is a short story of how a virus humanised one woman and maybe all citizens overall.

Jun 24, 2020

Angus Bancroft

Young people sit out in the warm night, occupying the road, chatting and laughing until late on. The moon is bright, slightly yellow and clear. The air still. 

Like most of Edinburgh my area is car cluttered. An old photograph of my street from the 1900s shows it wide and spacious, before car parking hemmed everyone in. Looking at the teens using it now I glimpse another view, of road space made available for social life, of space to breathe and circulate. The road stops being a torrent of cars we have to scurry across. Pavements stop being narrow paths we teeter on. 

The cars haven’t vanished but the fear has. An empty parking space suddenly becomes part of the communal living room. Meadows live beneath tarmac. ‘Beneath the pavement, the beach!’ was a slogan of the 1968 Paris protests against the rigid social order of postwar Gaullist France. The city needs to breathe. The people using the street as if it was a public park are doing something new. It’s not a picnic space or a play space, it’s not a street party, it’s an extension of intimate domestic space into the street. This may be necessity. The typical domestic, public spaces we use – pubs and cafes – are closed, so new ones have to be found. 

One of the constant refrains of alcohol policy discussions over many decades now has been why can’t British/Scottish drinking culture be more like continental pavement culture. This is generally a vain hope. The image of shivering with a cold pint on a narrow, busy pavement, breathing in fumes and trying to avoid catching people’s eye was not wholly appealing. This bottom up extension of home space might be more viable and appealing model to start with should we try and learn lessons from the lockdown living.

Jun 3, 2020

Mikaela Springsteen

There is an old clock which sits now in my basement. It has collected dust there for years, corrosion building around a battery which ought to have been pried loose from its moorings after the clock was taken off the wall of a childhood bedroom over a decade ago. It is forever 2:52 in that basement room.

May has lasted for months in the rest of the house.

Here in the mountains, time tends to move slowly—even in an ordinary year, but the pandemic has changed this place too. It slows time for days until a flurry of activity accompanies the arrival of some new package, or a resupply run, or some other contact with the outside world. Pandemic time does not pass smoothly.

It has been often remarked that pandemic time passes oddly, too. Wednesdays are skipped and breakfast becomes lunch. The nights are getting shorter here, and the days are getting hotter, and each and every day seems to last for a week. Pandemic time is deceptive that way.

But time still does move on. The lake thawed months ago now, and loons can be heard each night. Great excitement accompanied the year’s first sighting of the local bald eagle—a sure sign of hotter days ahead.

Isolated here, time slowly marches on—but somehow little seems to change.

That is always the way of the world, it seems. In the midst of things it feels as though nothing will ever change. That the way it is is how it has always been, and how it will continue to be from here on out. Life simply goes on.

I have always understood sociology to be, in part, a study of this consistency.

This comforts me.

All of this has happened before.

History mocks predictions of systemic change in the wake of this pandemic. Systemic change is rare. Systems resist change. They are very good at doing exactly what they were designed to do, and very rarely is capacity for change written into the source code of a system.

The clock in my basement ran forwards, only and always. And now it has stopped.

Some systems are more flexible than others—the mind of a honeybee is changed more easily than the mind of a human—but I am myself evidence of the capacity for systems to change. Only a few generations ago I would not have been permitted to vote, to have been educated so, to travel so freely alone. Even then, millions were forced to wait for years more for systems to recognize their humanity. Millions more still wait.

But there is more to life—and to sociology—than stasis. Living systems require change.

Sociology tells us not that things never change, merely that any change is hard-won and rarely novel—what is new in one local context is rarely new in all contexts. There is nothing new under the sun. Sociology catalogues changes even as it marks down consistencies.

So how are we to understand change in a context where time seems almost to have stopped? Where we all relive our days as we wait for the world to spin back up to speed? What new world will greet us all when pandemic days come to an end?

I have expressed doubts about prognostication already, so I will refrain from any such pronouncements here. What I will do instead is return to the comfort of sociology.

Sociology speaks often of the ways in which individuals can be caught up in the gears of an inevitable system. But it speaks too of the parts which constitute those systems. Society, and the many smaller systems it relies on, is ultimately built up out of each individual.

In the places where a system sticks, like in my poor old clock, someone has to pry off the housing, clean out the corrosion, mend what can be mended, and make anew all that which will not.

That is the wellspring of change. The world which exists tomorrow is the one which we make today. That is the promise—both blessing and curse—of path-dependency. People work wonders, systems change, and life moves on.

The hummingbirds have returned to the lakeside now, and are making merry war over the feeder. Cherries are back in season, and it feels somehow a small miracle to find them in the shop up here. Kayakers paddle past the house now, fishers lose lures in the rocks, and I’ve been down to dig out the old clock from the basement.

Time slips strangely for us all, especially—as we all now say—‘in these times,’ and so it feels somehow right that I will lay out some tools which belong to my father, which came from his father, and from his before that. I will lay out some tools from a century ago and try to find the future in the ticking of a clock.

Jun 1, 2020

Liz Stanley

The tenth Thursday clap, on 28 May, is likely to be the UK’s last. There was that sense in the air, for the sound was louder and more varied and came from more parts of the village, from further up the hill, from the central village, to the houses at the edge, to us on Coach Road and Warton Crag. In addition to all the clapping there was a makeshift drum, many car horns, elaborate whoops and amazing whistling, and a wider variety of pots and pans used as tymphony. To the carers.

Jun 1, 2020