“I'm wearing my favorite look from my Miun AW1415 collection. I like the casualness of it, the durable material, and the fact that I can layer it with a dress shirt, for example. I mostly wear my own designs; casual, sporty and simple ones. It's a great way to test measurements and materials.”
20 May 2015, Pre Helsinki
“I'm wearing a knit and jacket by Kenzo, Customellow shorts with Minna Parikka sneakers and bag. I just wear what ever feels right at the moment. The coming summer and it's colours inspire me if anything.”
20 May 2015, Pre Helsinki
Fergus NoodleI'm gonna make the hell out of this
Fergus NoodleI've wanted to go here for ages
Have I ever told you guys the story about how I never used to eat cheese? The parentals don’t like cheese so by association I never ate it as a kid. Do you know what a Maccas junior burger is? A cheeseburger minus the cheese. It was no wonder I hated Maccas and it was only at the end of primary did I realise the magical powers of cheese after finally trying a cheese toastie.
And that was my segue to my visit to Buffalo Dining Club, a mozzarella bar for all the cheese lovers out there! I’ve visited Buffalo several years ago but this time I’d managed to drag the boy along because look! Giant wheel of cheese!
The Cacio e Pepe ($20) catches the eye of everyone in the room when the wheel of Grano Padano is carried out to our table and the spaghetti with olive oil, salt and pepper is mixed right in front of us. As the spaghetti is mixed in the wheel, flakes of parmesan is scraped off and transforms this amazingly simple but oh so tasty pasta. I could eat this every single day!
From the cold meat options which runs from mortadella, salamis and Jamon, I choose the San Daniele Prosciutto (60g/$9) which are delicate, thinly sliced ribbons that just about melts in the mouth. I instantly regretted not upsizing to a larger portion.
I can never resist ordering Burrata ($20) whenever I see it (other cheeses offered were Scarmoza, Buffalo, Caprino, Ciambella al Tarfuto) and picked Tempura Cauliflower and Pecorino crusted eggplant as the accompanying sides, because well, deep fry = win. The cheese also comes with some bread and crostini and a dollop of spicy nduja paste.
OOOOZY!!! Oh how I love burrata, so creamy and so deeeeelicious!
We’re also brought a jar of Buffalo’s own Chilli sauce which is pretty darn addictive, with a good amount of heat balanced with a truckload of garlic and sweetness of capsicum.
I couldn’t resist ordering the Buffalo Ricotta Gnocchi ($20) and it did not disappoint, the gnocchi was like little fluffy pillows of happiness and the napoletana sauce was rich but not overpowering.
Aaaand I had to get the Tiramisu ($10) which while creamy, was surprisingly light though I did wish there was a tad more booze in it heh
Buffalo Dining Club is pretty cosy and gets absolutely packed for dinner so if you’re like me and have issues with people and small spaces, then rocking up for lunch on a Saturday is your best option :P
Buffalo Dining Club
116 Surrey St,
Darlinghurst
Trading Hours:
Weds – Sat: midday – 11pm
Recently we ran a graph showing the evolution of facial hair trends starting in 1842. It showed that about 90% of men wore facial hair in the late 1800s, but it was a trend that would slowly die. By 1972, when the research was published, almost as many were clean shaven.
So, why did facial hair fall out of fashion?
Sociologist Rebekah Herrick gives us a hypothesis. With Jeanette Mendez and Ben Pryor, she investigated the stereotypes associated with men’s facial hair and the consequences for U.S. politicians. Facial hair is rare among modern politicians. “Currently,” they noted, “fewer than five percent of the members of the U.S. Congress have beards or mustaches” and no president has sported facial hair since William Howard Taft left office in 1913, before women had the right to vote.
Using an experimental method, Herrick and her colleagues showed people photographs of similarly appearing politicians with and without facial hair, asking them how they felt about the men and their likely positions. They found that potential voters perceived men with facial hair to be more masculine and this was a double edged sword. Higher ratings of masculinity were correlated with perceptions of competence, but also concerns that the politicians were less friendly to women and their concerns.
In other words, the more facial hair, the more people worry that a politician might be sexist:
In reality, facial hair has no relationship to a male politician’s voting record. They checked. The research suggests, though, that men in politics — maybe even all men — would be smart to pay attention to the stereotypes if they want to influence how others see them.
Thanks to my friend, Dmitriy T.C., for use of his face!
Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College and the co-author of Gender: Ideas, Interactions, Institutions. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.(View original at http://thesocietypages.org/socimages)
Fergus NoodleI love Kanazawa
Fergus NoodleParramatta is cool now
Fergus NoodleSome very exciting soft serves
Fergus NoodleThey ate an insane amount of pizza
Fergus NoodleI really wanna go to Melbourne and have a donut time
Alright stop, JAFFLE TIME! So the boy and I were headed to The Meat Emporium to stock up on some steaks but needed sustenance before we braved the coldness of their storeroom and I vaguely remembered that Tartine (635 Gardeners Road, Mascot) was in the area. And yes before you say anything I know Tartine is known for their tartines (open faced sandwiches) but I was super keen to try a whole bunch of their jaffles because hey, jaffles reminds me of my childhood!
Chef Anthony Telford (ex Public Dining Room) opened Tartine in Feb this year and I’m kicking myself for not visiting sooner. The space is quirky with super comfy couches and reclaimed furniture, bread comes from Brasserie Bread, meat from Haverick Meats, but best of all, everything on the menu is under 10 smackeroonies!
Jaffle stuffed with lasagne ($9.90). Wait, what? Nah your eyes did not deceive you, you read that correctly- it’s a jaffle stuffed with a whole chunk of lasagne!
Mmm lasagne innards! The textures and flavours in this baby is pretty cray, there’s the toasted white bread, the folds of soft lasagne sheets, the layer of creamy bechamel sauce and the rich tomato sauce studded with shredded beef. Gotta love me some carb on carb action!
I’ve been craving pizza all week so I just had to order the Pizza Jaffle ($9.90) which was stuffed with slices of hot salami, cheese and pizza sauce. I would’ve loved more cheese in this one but that’s because there can never been too much cheese on a pizza for me :P
I had high hopes for the Bacon and egg Jaffle ($8) but sadly the egg wasn’t oozy and gooey as I had envisioned. No matter, there was dessert to be had!
There’s 3 sweet jaffles on the menu (strawberries, ricotta, maple syrup and pear, ricotta, honey) but how could I not order the Nutella, bananas & marshmallow ($9.90)?! WOAHHH baby!!!
Innards shot! You know what’s perfect inside a jaffle? Nutella. Nutella is already awesome but when it’s all toasty warm and melty? Sublime. A river of hazelnut goodness surrounds slices of banana and gooey marshmallow and ohhh man this one is definitely one for the sweet tooths!
I’ll definitely be back to try the tartines and will definitely have to fit in another lasagne jaffle or two :P
Tartine
635 Gardeners Road,
Mascot NSW
Trading Hours:
Mon – Sat: 8am – 3pm
Sun: 9am – 3pm
Meet Representative Scott DesJarlais of Tennessee, who is a poster child for that particular set of anti-choicers who oppose abortion with four exceptions: “rape, incest, the life of the mother, and me.”
Rep. Scott DesJarlais (R-TN) publicly opposes abortion and has repeatedly run for office as a pro-life candidate. Last week, he was one of 242 House members to vote for a proposed 20-week abortion ban that has become one of the top priorities for the current GOP-controlled Congress.
An anti-abortion Republican casting a vote in favor of an abortion restriction is not typically newsworthy. However, DesJarlais’ positions on the subject are particularly controversial, thanks to evidence that emerged in 2012 that revealed he has advocated for at least three legal abortions in his personal life.
Three years ago, transcripts related to the congressman’s divorce trial showed that DesJarlais supported his ex-wife’s decision to legally end two pregnancies. He also had several extramarital affairs, and once pressured a 24-year-old woman to have an abortion after she told him she was pregnant with his child. “You told me you’d have an abortion, and now we’re getting too far along without one,” DesJarlais told the woman in a recorded phone conversation. “If we need to go to Atlanta, or whatever, to get this solved and get it over with so we can get on with our lives, then let’s do it.”
As Tara notes at ThinkProgress, DesJarlais’s “the only moral abortion is my abortion” stance is not atypical. Lots of people who identify as pro-life find their opposition to abortion is suddenly slightly less absolute when they themselves (or their partner or daughter) become unexpectedly pregnant.
But as the media again questions him after his most recent anti-choice vote, DesJarlais’s camp is insisting that he has a “100 percent pro-life voting record” and has “always advocated for pro-life values.” In reality, the publicly available evidence suggests he supported one woman in her choice to have abortions (pro-choice), pressured another woman to have one (anti-choice), and is using his legislative power to prevent the rest of us from having the freedom to make the same decision he’s benefited from in his personal life (hypocrite).
Header image credit: AP/Mark Humphrey
By Guest Contributor Anna Cabe
Like many feminist-cum-superhero fanatics, I eagerly awaited the Marvel Cinematic Universe mini-series, Agent Carter, the company’s first real attempt at a female hero-driven property. In many ways, it delivers. The show makes good use of its 1940’s setting with strong costume and set design and snappy period music. The cast are mostly wonderful and show great chemistry—with the standout, of course, being Hayley Atwell, the titular Strategic Scientific Reserve (S.S.R.) Agent Peggy Carter.
Agent Carter Premiere Poster, via Marvel Cinematic Universe Wikia.
As Agent Carter, Atwell kicks multiple men’s (and one equally badass woman’s) asses, wrings tears from viewers’ eyes, makes us laugh with an archly delivered quip, and looks smashing in an evening gown and red lipstick. She flips the script of the superhero’s girlfriend—She doesn’t die! She isn’t always being rescued!—and has her own adventures after her boyfriend, Captain America, “dies.” When I finally finished the season (I live overseas with sketchy Internet so I’m slow to catch up to broadcast shows), I sang its praises all over Twitter and Facebook.
That said, Agent Carter has not escaped criticism for limitations when it comes to both race and gender, namely a painfully white and very male cast. Defenders of the casting have deflected this criticism in the name of “historical accuracy,” as though American history is exclusively white unless the subject is slavery, immigration, and the Civil Rights Movement. And of course, this is a show set in an alternate timeline in which superhuman Captain America is the United States’ first line of defense against a Nazi supervillain named Red Skull. A few substantial brown characters hardly seems a stretch of credibility or a distortion of history by comparison.
Indeed, Agent Carter’s roster represents a lost opportunity to cast meaty roles for Black actors in particular, as the New York City of the era had a vibrant Black culture and societybarely touched in the series. Building on this criticism, in this piece I explore how Agent Carter also marginalizes Asians.
Firstly, there aren’t many Asian faces on the cast. Only two Asian characters get any significant screen-time: a woman who is one of Howard Stark’s many former conquests and is unnamed onscreen in episode 6, “A Sin to Err,” and S.S.R. Agent Mike Li, introduced—and promptly killed off—in episode 5, “The Iron Ceiling.” To put it concisely, one is a red-shirt, killed off to show the danger the main characters are in, and the other merely more evidence of Howard Stark’s raging libido and callousness towards women. At least we know Stark’s pecker is #YesAllWomen. Okay, gotcha.
Edith Oberon, Howard Stark’s former paramour, in “A Sin to Err” (1.6). via Marvel Cinematic Universe Wikia.
In the “The Iron Ceiling,” Peggy, Agent Thompson (Chad Michael Murray), and the Howling Commandos go into the U.S.S.R. to track a lead on Howard Stark. S.S.R. believes Stark has committed treason by selling his dangerous inventions to enemy powers. By this point, we know Agent Thompson as a competent agent and a Navy Cross winner but also an arch-chauvinist, having told Peggy in the last episode, “The Blitzkrieg Button,” that no man would ever see her as an equal and believing up until the mission really goes underway in the U.S.S.R that Peggy will be a burden and not an asset. We also know Thompson received his Navy Cross for service in the Pacific Theater in World War II, after he killed six Japanese soldiers about to attack his sleeping camp in Okinawa.
As it turns out, however, Agent Thompson isn’t the hero his country thinks he is. At the end of “The Iron Ceiling,” Thompson—who has showed signs of PTSD throughout the episode—admits to Peggy that the soldiers he killed had come to his camp to surrender. He hadn’t noticed their white flag until it was too late.
“I’ve been trying to tell that story since I came home from war,” he says to Peggy.
“You just did,” she answers sympathetically.
Agent Thompson confesses to Agent Carter in “The Iron Ceiling,” via Marvel Cinematic Universe Wikia.
The exchange is meant to be a tender moment of bonding between two people who, up to this point, have been antagonistic; it’s a moment of character-deepening vulnerability for Agent Thompson. Both Atwell and Murray sell the hell out of the scene.
And yet, it doesn’t completely work for me.
The problem: humanizing Agent Thompson’s character comes, as it so often does in TV storytelling, at the cost of treating people of color as marginal and purely instrumental bodies. Time and again we see how the deaths of people of color or white women are used to generate sympathy for white male characters, to give their seemingly impermeable armor a few cracks. The viewer is invited to lament—oh no! They died because of him? Because they happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time? Let’s pity the man for his mistake. To err is to be human.
But “human” is a label rarely afforded those whose deaths are used to create a tragic backstory for more central, white characters. Agent Thompson’s Japanese victims aren’t given the time or space to be human, much less superhuman; they are mere specters that haunt Thompson’s past. What’s more, the kinds of bodies that too often serve this narrative function belong to the already marginalized, to those already denied anything resembling significant, nuanced characterization in television and other media.
The cheap tragedy of Agent Thompson’s backstory is highlighted by the fact that the incident isn’t meaningfully brought up again in Agent Carter. Thompson is nicer to Peggy after confiding in her, but to the show’s credit, he doesn’t really change substantially by the end. When Peggy, Howard Stark, Stark’s butler and Peggy’s sidekick Jarvis, and a team of S.S.R. agents, who finally recognize Peggy’s worth, save the day, Thompson takes all the credit and buries any mention of Peggy’s or the disabled Agent Sousa’s contributions. Because if he already lied about the much bigger problem of having murdered six surrendering soldiers, why not lie again for another prize?
There’s really no one on the show to push back against Agent Thompson’s lying. Peggy chose compassion, and as I mentioned before, there’s no developed Asian, much less specifically Japanese, character in the show who might challenge Thompson on that count. Hell, the only Asian agent with a name, Agent Li, dies in the same episode Agent Thompson confesses that he isn’t a WWII hero.
This episode is especially galling given the historical setting of the show. The United States imprisoned Japanese-American citizens in internment camps all along the West Coast because they might be “dangerous,” just as Agent Thompson assumed the soldiers approaching his camp to be. There are also troubling echoes of all-too-real coverups of U.S. military atrocities, and the lack of consequences for those responsible when such atrocities are brought to light. When American soldiers murdered about 500 Vietnamese people in My Lai hamlet, mostly women, children, and the elderly, on March 16, 1968, claiming, incorrectly, they were harboring Viet Cong, the murders were covered up for nearly a year by high-ranking officials. The eventual leak of the story led to such outrage that 14 officers were charged with the crime in 1970.
Only one was convicted.
This history of the U.S. government and its military abducting, detaining, killing, and hiding from sight the Asian bodies they fear and call enemy makes the erasures of Agent Carter all the more painful. This is the history in which the bodies are buried and forgotten.
With yesterday’s announcement Agent Carter has been renewed for a second season, its creators have a new opportunity to respond to this and other criticisms. Let us hope that the bodies they uncover in the future—Asian bodies and all the bodies of the marginalized—stay unburied and unforgotten.
Anna Cabe lives, teaches, and writes in Indonesia. Her work appears or is upcoming in The Hairpin, The Toast, the Atticus Review, and Pink Pangea, among others. She will be attending Indiana University-Bloomington’s MFA program as a fiction candidate in the fall. In her spare time, she’s either ranting about movies on Twitter (@annablabs) or killing it at karaoke.
The post Unburied but Forgotten: Asian Bodies in Agent Carter appeared first on Racialicious - the intersection of race and pop culture.
Fergus Noodle4 Webz. Seems dumb. Only 1 feijoa thing
Spring is here and you know what that means. In high schools across the country, it means the dress code enforcers are sure to be cracking down on girls and their “distracting” knees, clavicles, and shoulders.
Continuing the awesome trend of teenage girls fighting back against sexist dress codes, one student made a pre-emptive strike by posting these reminders around her school:
Nothing to add.
Fergus Noodlewho doesn't love being worn down?
Suzanne Venker is back at Fox News doing what she does best: blaming feminism for something everything. This time, it’s feminism’s fault that men supposedly don’t want to get married anymore. Why? Because there’s exactly “nothing in it for them.”
Beyond the fact that there’s no actual evidence of the “problem” that Venker is addressing, this quote really drives home what a sad view of romantic relationships between men and women anti-feminists like Venker have:
Men used to marry to have sex and a family. They married for love, too, but they had to marry the girl before taking her to bed, or at least work really, really hard to wear her down. Those days are gone.
When more women make themselves sexually available, the pool of marriageable men diminishes.
After this point, Venker defiantly writes, “Scoff if you wish. Call me a fuddy-duddy. But how’s that new plan working out?” as if she imagines feminists’ problem with this statement would be its prudishness and not the idea that men need the incentive of sex to marry — and that the era when men had to “wear [women] down” to get laid were the good ole days.
As for how the new plan’s working out? Personally, I can safely say that even if I end up a life-long spinster, I will be thankful to live in a time when people marry out of love, mutual respect, and a desire for companionship.
After the magnitude 7.9 earthquake that hit Nepal on April 25th, international media has provided what is surely a disproportionate number of pieces on the ordeal of foreign citizens during a disaster that has killed 7,500 Nepalis, injured twice as many, and according to the UN, affected 8 million — more than one quarter of Nepal’s population.
Among these human interest stories focused on white families is one that really caught me off guard: “How an Earthquake Highlighted the Plight of Israeli Gays and Their Surrogate Babies” (or for more nuance, read Time‘s “Israel Evacuates Surrogate Babies From Nepal but Leaves the Mothers Behind).” As Time reports, an Israeli Boeing-747 returning from Nepal last week completed the evacuation of 26 babies, all born within the past six weeks to surrogate mothers in Nepal. Some of the babies were with their parents — mostly gay Israeli men denied access to surrogacy at home –and others were cared for by Israeli passengers.
None of the surrogate mothers were allowed to travel.
There is something particularly unnerving about Western men gathering their Nepali-born babies and boarding a foreign aircraft, while the women that birthed those babies are left stranded in a disaster zone. DarkMatter shared this news on their Facebook page with the caption, “so many layers.” I think they are right, and unpacking these layers has left me with more questions than answers, but here are some initial thoughts.
Much of the media coverage of the evacuation has glamorized Israel — and other Western countries — as humanitarian actors. While the relief currently being provided to Nepal is undoubtedly helping many, it is crucial not to confuse such false charity with what Paulo Freire described as true generosity, which fights the systemic injustice that necessitates such charity in the first place.
In many ways, this is an example of pinkwashing, which DarkMatter has covered extensively: in which the state of Israel uses gay rights (everything from Pride celebrations to asylum to evacuating gay fathers) as a distraction from its occupation. As they duly note, “the erasure of race and class violence and suppression of race and class warfare by gay rights is not an Israel-only phenomenon.” This case in Nepal is just another example of the focus on white, Israeli, and other settler queer bodies, while ignoring the ways in which they benefit from race and class privilege.
It also reveals the hypocrisy of Western countries calling poor countries homophobic, backwards, etc. — remember the reason that these Israeli men are going to Nepal is because gay parents are discriminated against at home. While Israel or the United States do not have a monopoly on anti-queer violence, they certainly are not exceptions.
While this increased attention to why discriminatory laws exist preventing gay couples from having surrogate babies is important, that the well-being of the surrogates in Nepal has been largely ignored is really disturbing. It reflects the fact that our media only tends to care when white couples and white babies are hurt. It shows how social justice movements in wealthy countries can be completely detached from their role in perpetuating global inequality. And it reveals, as Israeli social activist Alon-Lee Green writes in Haaretz, that “without much deep or serious thought and almost without noticing, we have allowed capitalism to expand to include the bodies of numerous disadvantaged women.”
Indeed, this case leaves me with just a whole lot of questions about how surrogacy can operate justly in a world that routinely exploits poor women and women of color.
What does it mean for brown women to be commoditized machines to deliver white babies? Western gay men are using women in the Global South largely as gestational surrogates; the eggs come from elsewhere, mostly from women in Europe, Ukraine, or South Africa. It seems nothing less than utterly fucking absurd to me that men are going out of their way to seek a white woman’s eggs to implant into a brown woman’s womb. What does it mean when low-income, brown women’s bodies are desired for bearing the brunt of pregnancy — for exclusively facing potentially fatal health risks — but not seen as desired genetic material? What does it mean for a gay man in the Global North to ask a woman of color in abject poverty, “Will you carry a child for me?” in the same breath as “I don’t want my child to look like you.”
What does it mean for a surrogate mother in India or Nepal to be “cheaper” than a mother in the United States? As Time reports, “[Surrogacy] can cost up to $150,000 in the U.S. and Canada but only $30,000 in Nepal.” When the service in question is a woman’s body itself, by sanctioning these uneven prices with our language, are we suggesting that brown woman bodies are literally “worth” a fraction of the amount? Some people have pointed out that this fraction is still much more than a woman in Nepal or India might be able to make in a year. How then do we look at individual choices and autonomy while recognizing systems that collectively put certain women at risk, limit their financial agency, and rarely do anything to support women long-term?
On that note, what support do surrogates have long-term? Again, there was something particularly eerie and symbolic about Western men gathering their Nepali-born babies and an aircraft forbidding the mothers from leaving a disaster zone. But while a state may only be expected to airlift its own citizens, this tragedy is just a painfully explicit reminder that the responsibility for a surrogate mother’s well-being is often absolved right after delivery — leaving mothers with the medical costs and health risks that often do stem directly from their pregnancy.
All of this just goes to show the need to reimagine transational solidarity, as well as the fact that while surrogacy is an issue on which few reproductive rights and justice groups are currently working, it is one that deserves our close attention. As Helen McDonald writes over at AutoStraddle, “as we fight for reproductive justice, let us also advocate for surrogate safety, so that assisted reproductive technologies are not simply another system that commodifies and exploits Black and Brown people around the world.”
Header image credit: Time
A peer reviewer’s suggestion that two female researchers find “one or two male biologists” to co-author and help them strengthen a manuscript they had written and submitted to a journal has unleashed an avalanche of disbelief and disgust on Twitter today—and prompted an apology from the publisher of the journal, which media reports have identified as PLOS ONE.
Evolutionary geneticist Fiona Ingleby was shocked when she read the review accompanying the rejection for her latest manuscript, which investigates gender differences in the Ph.D.-to-postdoc transition, so she took the issue to Twitter.
Earlier today, Ingleby, a postdoc at the University of Sussex in the United Kingdom, posted two excerpts of the anonymous review. “It would probably … be beneficial to find one or two male biologists to work with (or at least obtain internal peer review from, but better yet as active co-authors)” to prevent the manuscript from “drifting too far away from empirical evidence into ideologically biased assumptions,” the reviewer wrote in one portion.
“Perhaps it is not so surprising that on average male doctoral students co-author one more paper than female doctoral students, just as, on average, male doctoral students can probably run a mile a bit faster than female doctoral students,” added the reviewer (whose gender is not known).
To recap: A reviewer who thinks it’s not surprising that the study found male students authored more papers than female students on the basis that men, on average, can run faster thinks that it’s the paper’s authors who would might be unduly influenced by “ideologically biased assumptions.” The reviewer also suggested that perhaps the male students tended to get published in better journals than their female counterparts “simply because men, perhaps, on average work more hours per week than women, due to marginally better health or stamina.”
I mean, when you’re reaching to supposed physical differences between men and women to explain away gender disparities in academia, you might want to question how your ideological bias against seeing sexism at all costs might be blinding you to the empirical evidence.
Fergus NoodleI don't usually wanna eat Zumbo too much but I wanna eat that lemon meringue thing at the top
Sociologists are interested in studying how our institutions — in addition to our ideologies and interactions — reflect social norms in ways that tend to reproduce the status quo. A great example happened recently in South Carolina. In this case, the institution is the Department of Motor Vehicles, the norm is that boys and men don’t wear makeup, and the case is Chase Culpepper, a male-bodied trans teen who wanted to wear makeup in her driver’s license photo.
The officials at the DMV told her that she wasn’t allowed to wear makeup in the photo because it would be a “disguise.” As reported by NPR:
The department… cited a 2009 rule that prohibited applicants from “purposely altering his or her appearance so that the photo would misrepresent his or her identity.”
They told Culpepper to take off her makeup or go home without a license. She did what they said. She shared these before and after photos with the Transgender Legal Defense and Education Fund, who shared them with the public.
It’s hard to defend the idea that somehow makeup distorts a man’s identity, but not a woman’s. It has exactly the same illusory power on a female face as a male one; that’s exactly why women wear it. The DMV’s policy did nothing, then, to help it do its job, it only served to press citizens of South Carolina to conform to the gender binary, at least as far as their primary form of identification went.
With the help of the Transgender Legal Defense and Education Fund, Culpepper sued and the DMV settled. As part of the settlement,
[they] agreed to change its policy to allow people seeking drivers’ licenses to be photographed as they regularly present themselves, even if their appearance does not match the officials’ expectations of how the applicant should look. The department also promised to send Culpepper a written apology and train its employees in how to treat transgender and gender-nonconforming individuals in professional settings.
This is what institutional change looks like, at least potentially. Thanks to Culpepper and her advocates, the South Carolina DMV is a little bit less gender binary than it was before.
Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College and the co-author of Gender: Ideas, Interactions, Institutions. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.(View original at http://thesocietypages.org/socimages)
