Introducing Sociology: A Graphic Guide (Graphic Guides)

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Its up-to-date focus on decolonial and global perspectives, and intersectional perspectives on race, gender and class make it essential reading for new sociology students and inspiration to lecturers teaching sociology courses. Having illustrations to accompany the text definitely increases the quality of both comprehension and memory.

The national reviewers sounded like a bunch of middle-school kids who'd snuck in to see it and slunk out three hours later feeling horny, frustrated, and ripped off. The paintings that cover the Harfords' walls from floor to ceiling (painted by Kubrick's wife Christiane) almost all depict flowers or food, making explicit the function of art in their environment as mere décor-art for consumption.his repeated insistence on paying her for services not quite rendered, his extended haggling with Milich and the cab driver--all these conversations about cash are too frequent, drawn-out, and conspicuous to be included in the interest of verisimilitude. And it shows us that these people are empty and amoral, using their social inferiors as thoughtlessly as if they were possessions, ultimately more concerned with social transgressions like infidelity than with crimes like murder--just as the film's audience is more interested in the sex it was supposed to be all about than the killing that is at its core.

If we choose to believe the former, then the Harfords aren't just reconciling over their imagined and attempted infidelities; they're agreeing to cover up a crime, to be accomplices after the fact to a homicide. This is where the “sociology” part of things really comes into play: as sociologists we’re trying to understand how what people do and why they do it impacts on others. Additives like corn syrup, which are much cheaper to produce than natural sugars, led to the trend of super-sized fast foods and soft drinks in the 1980s. But Kubrick bends over so far backward to preserve these ambiguities that they become glaring, demanding of us that we, like Bill, consciously decide what we're going to believe.And in that film it's clear that Christianity is just a less effective version of the sadistic, Skinnerian Ludovico treatment. Certainly a subtler psychological reading of the film than has yet been attempted would be possible. She's identified with the hooker Mandy through a series of parallels: they're both tall redheads with a taste for numbing drugs, we first see them both in bathrooms, and Mandy's last night "being fucked by hundreds of men" is distortedly echoed in Alice's dream. Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times tells us that Kubrick "never paid much attention to the psychology of characters, much less relationships between men and women," and in fact "spent his career ignoring (or avoiding) the inner lives of people, their private dreams and frustrations.