Interview

Questions with Asia Friedman

Beginning in 2024, Asia Friedman (University of Delaware), along with two of her colleagues, will assume the editorship of Sociological Forum, the Eastern Sociological Society’s flagship journal. Like her soon-to-be editorial predecessor Karen Cerulo, who has served as the journal’s editor for more than fifteen years, Friedman brings a cognitive cultural perspective to sociological inquiry. In particular, the cultural patterning of human thought, attention, and perception comprise three focal points in the interpretive approach that Friedman takes to understanding the cognitive and sensory mechanisms underpinning processes of social construction. In her distinguished award–winning book Blind to Sameness: Sexpectations and the Social Construction of Male and Female Bodies (University of Chicago Press, 2013), Friedman developed a cultural-cognitive framework and vocabulary for theorizing how culturally informed conventions of perception and attention “filter” the way individuals (both blind and sighted) make gendered distinctions in their everyday lives. Anne Marie Champagne (Yale University) recently spoke to Friedman about her intellectual orientation in cultural-cognitive sociology, her further development of “perceptual filters,” “cultural blind spots,” and “attentional diversity” as analytical concepts, and about how each of these – and more – shape the interpretive lens she brings to bear in her latest work Mammography Wars: Analyzing Attention in Cultural and Medical Disputes (Rutgers University Press, June 2023) and, as coeditor, Interpreting the Body: Between Meaning and Matter (Bristol University Press, June 2023).

Anne Marie Champagne: What drew you to cultural sociology? Can you briefly describe your intellectual trajectory and how it led you to your current disciplinary wheelhouse?

Asia Friedman: My interest in cultural-cognitive sociology can be traced directly to Eviatar Zerubavel’s cognitive sociology class, which I took in 2002 as a second-year doctoral student. When I began the PhD program in sociology at Rutgers, I was convinced that I was pretty narrowly interested in gender, specifically in what at the time I was calling feminist “biophobia” in reference to the way that sexed biology had been ignored in constructionist gender theory. I knew I wanted to explore this problem and what might be done about it, but I was still uncertain what approach I should take. I enrolled in Zerubavel’s cognitive sociology class expecting it to be interesting but tangential to my research interests. Instead, it was there that I arrived at the particular angle on the subject that ultimately became my dissertation project and first book. The set of concepts he presented in thatclass, particularly attention and inattention, proved a unique and productive way to conceptualize the social construction of sex that had not yet entered the conversation in either gender studies or the sociology of the body.
 
Anne Marie Champagne: In your book Blind to Sameness: Sexpectations and the Social Construction of Male and Female Bodies (Chicago University Press, 2013), you explore how “categories of the mind” establish mechanisms of attention and inattention, such as “filters” and “blind spots,” that construct individuals’ experiences of bodily sex. What are perceptual filters and cultural blind spots, and how are they implicated in how people experience or interpret categories of identity such as gender?

Asia Friedman: My arguments in Blind to Sameness are rooted in the fundamental idea that human attention and perception are selective, and that culturally available categories of thought play a significant role in directing what we select for focus as well as what we do not attend to or perceive. When using the metaphor of a perceptual filter, I specifically had in mind a mental“strainer” through which perceptual stimuli pass before being consciously perceived, a mechanism that simultaneously lets in culturally meaningful details while sifting … the culturally irrelevant. The filter metaphor specifically directs us to ask questions about the details to which we attend and, arguably more significantly, about those that go unnoticed.
 
When applying this approach to analyzing sexed bodies, the question becomes, what features of human biology do we pay attention to and ignore when we see bodies as male or female? What I show in the book is that such an approach reveals a significant amount of human biological sameness that is normally not noticed and that, if taken into account, holds the potential to disrupt the notion of binary biological sex. In work where I analyze the construction of race in terms of cultural attention and inattention, I similarly highlight the significant, normally unacknowledged, biological commonalities among bodies classified as of different “races.”
 
Anne Marie Champagne: In your new book, Mammography Wars: Analyzing Attention in Cultural and Medical Disputes (Rutgers University Press, June 2023), you explore how social actors – doctors, patients, and the broader public – construct contradictory understandings of the relevance and meaning of mammography. What characterizes a “mammography war,” and what led you to this topic as a cultural sociologist?


Asia Friedman: Arguably no medical screening has been more studied than the mammogram. Yet breast cancer screening remains one of the most deeply contested topics in medicine, and disagreements have basically revolved around the same questions for several decades, primarily whether or not to screen women age 40–49. The conflict is also quite emotional, with notable judgment and anger directed at each side by the other; hence, the title, Mammography Wars. Collectively, these three observations – the large amount of research, the largely unchanged terms of the debate, and the highly charged tone – also suggested to me the need for a better understanding of the discourse and epistemological structure of the debate itself. In light of this, in the book I analyze the cognitive structure of the mammography wars, drawing on concepts from the sociology of attention to frame the conflict as an attentional battle rather than a strictly scientific disagreement over the data. I map the attentional norms of relevance and patterns of attention and inattention that conceptually and rhetorically organize the debates. I also recast the two dominant competing perspectives in terms of “attentional types,” which I identify as interventionism and skepticism.
 
Anne Marie Champagne: For those of us who are unfamiliar with the sociology of attention as a subfield, could you describe its relationship to cultural sociology as well as its particular usefulness as an analytical framework for studying social conflict?
 
Asia Friedman: I understand the sociology of attention as embedded in the broader field of cultural-cognitive sociology, which treats both thinking and sensory perception as social phenomena, in part by analyzing variations and patterns in thought and perception and linking them to social norms. Recognizing attention as a process and mechanism of social construction is essential for understanding variations in cognition and sensory perception. Attention can be defined as the selection of certain features or details among those technically available to us, whether mentally or perceptually.
 
At the core of any sociological understanding of attention is some concept of an attentional collective, group, or subculture, all of which drive analytic focus to social influences – social influences on our patterns of attention and the processes of attentional socialization that underpin attentional norms and conventions. Through this socialization process, we learn not only what we should pay attention to but what we should ignore. Thus, our sense of what is “relevant” and “irrelevant” is a key part of attentional socialization.
 
With respect to the usefulness of “attention” as a framework for analyzing cultural conflicts, because relevance is socially defined, basic questions about whether a detail, concept, or piece of evidence should be regarded as relevant become sources of significant conflict. It therefore can be analytically productive to reframe cultural conflicts as attentional battles, which is what I have done in Mammography Wars. As a focal concept, “attentional battle” draws out instances where relevance is contested, where differences in attention are called upon to polarize a disagreement, or where one group attempts to marginalize or discredit another’s attentional norms. The sociology of attention takes as a starting point the notion that all attention presupposes inattention. Engagement with such exclusions across differences of perspective can help facilitate awareness of and accountability for one’s patterns of inattention. Rather than treating any one perspective in isolation, the concept of attentional battle emphasizes the rhetorical and cognitive organization of a conflict as a whole, thereby fostering the recognition of, among other things, the attentional common ground shared between otherwise polarized patterns of attention. Furthermore, since attentional conflicts are intrinsically comparative, reframing cultural conflicts as attentional battles correspondingly highlights a diversity of possible interpretations.


Anne Marie Champagne: Speaking of interpretation, it serves as an organizing theme for your coedited volume Interpreting the Body: Between Meaning and Matter (Bristol University Press, June 2023). How has the interpretive lens of cultural sociology organized your own approach to studying bodies and embodiment?
 
Asia Friedman: I have a longstanding interest in thinking through new analytic approaches for studying the social construction of the body, which is part of why I was drawn to the Interpreting the Body project. Many have pointed out that the term “construction” has problematic connotations when it comes to bodies and matter more generally because it suggests that matter is created out of nothing but cultural ideas. As a result, we sometimes see cultural sociologists using more qualified language like “social shaping,” “social structuring,” or “social framing.” Interpretation as a concept prompts the analyst to examine how patterns of social salience lead us to perceive some aspects or details of the body as notable or more important than others. In this way, interpretation can be conceptually linked with attention to reveal the attentional topography of the body’s materiality. One important benefit of this approach, which directly engages with the body’s materiality via attention and inattention, is that it avoids lapsing into overly textual and disembodied accounts of the social construction of the body, which has been correctly identified as a limitation of many theories of the body that followed the linguistic turn in the social sciences.