I’m grateful to the five professors (including Paul Secunda) who in the last few days emailed me with a link to the story in Thailand regarding the Hello Kitty armbands. You can read the story here in the NYT and here on Yahoo. I shouldn’t be surprised it caught so much attention among my friends: the story is the second most emailed on the NYT from the last week, and it appears on the heels of some stories about Walmart’s experience with shaming shoplifters, such as this recent one
Comments
You have to understand Thai culture to realize that this is pretty tongue in cheek. The social concerns in this country are pretty alien over there. Of course, America probably has an absolutist view on this.
Posted by: Sanuk | Aug 14, 2007 10:39:39 PM
If this approach were used in the U.S., the gender issues would be pretty transparent. I don’t know enough about how this plays in Thailand to be nearly as clear about the message this sends: is it an effort to feminize or infantilize the cops? Or both? More interesting to me is the fact that this story gets traction in America – precisely because it’s situated on a cultural fault line. Effective shaming requires a sanction that the offender actually finds shameful. This story suggests that the punishment needn’t be grand or abusive. But it may be most effective if it capitalizes on the offender’s own anxieties – even if those anxieties aren’t viewed as socially legitimate.
Posted by: Dan Filler | Aug 14, 2007 11:29:46 AM
I don’t know much about the “shaming” issue in general, but it seems pretty clear to me that this particular type of shaming is troubling on the gender/sexuality front.
Posted by: Joseph Slater | Aug 14, 2007 10:22:12 AM
It’s interesting that the accounts you’ve seen don’t focus on the gender aspects; the accounts I’ve seen put that at the center. See, e.g., http://giandujakiss.livejournal.com/216703.html and http://feministing.com/archives/007512.html — perhaps another example of the “news for storage jars” phenomenon.
Posted by: Rebecca Tushnet | Aug 13, 2007 7:35:10 PM