Gate 47B at the American Airlines terminal provided a great place to people watch without being noticed. As we waited the departure of flight 162 from Los Angeles to Boston, I observed a variety of folks. A college-aged, brunette girl playing a Nintendo DDS sat on my right. On her right sat an older gentleman wearing a gray shirt that had an American flag imprinted on it, and he was watching her while she was playing her computer game. His carry-on was an old, beat up guitar. It turned out that the girl and the man were together and were traveling with another girl who was in a US Navy uniform with her hair pulled back tight into a small knot. The sailor sat ramrod straight, never slouched, and appeared to be fresh out of basic training. It looked as though these three people were related. The sailor showed her two companions pictures from her Mac laptop and seemed to be explaining each picture. A corporate guy in a black business suit, who slightly resembled Pat Bateman from American Psycho, talked the entire two hours on his cell phone before boarding the plane. He would eventually sit in the first class section of the plane. An older Korean couple sitting behind my mom and me were quiet for the most part, but when they did speak, they talked sternly to each other in short abrupt sentences. In the seats directly in front of us sat two older ladies studying a clipboard that had numerous maps attached to it. The nature of their relationship (mother/daughter, sisters, or friends) was hard to determine. They talked about their upcoming trip and when they would be visiting in New England. The younger of the two women would periodically get a phone call upon which she would talk so loudly that everyone could hear exactly what she was saying. An elderly white haired couple sat quietly near the windows looking out on the runway. The woman read a newspaper from front to back while her husband simply sat next to her watching other people in the terminal. A few times the old man went to get coffee or water for his wife who never stopped reading her newspaper. Two young punk guys with their wild black and red hairstyles and abundance of tattoos and piercings, possibly in their early 20’s, literally ran to the counter to check in for the stand-by list. They disappeared as quickly as they had appeared at the gate; happily, they did make it on the plane. About an hour before the time to board the plane, an Asian couple walked into the waiting area. The woman wanted to sit in the seats to the right, but her husband wanted to sit in the seats on the left side of the room. The wife motioned for her husband to come over to her seats, but as she turned around to show him the seats, she saw that he was already sitting down in his desired seat. The woman then shuffled over to her husband and sat down next to him. Simone de Beauvoir once wrote “Now, woman has always been man’s dependant, if not his slave; the two sexes have never shared the world in equality. And even today woman is heavily handicapped, though her situation is beginning to change. Almost nowhere is her legal status the same as man’s, and frequently it is much to her disadvantage” (de Beauvoir, 6). This woman’s husband seemed to be almost acting as if she was more of his dependent than a partner in marriage. To him, she was a social insubordinate who was not even worth the effort to respond to about the available seats in the terminal. One of the last arrivals to the gate area was a young father and his little daughter. The dad looked slightly disheveled and confused as he looked at the screen behind the desk to make sure he was in the right terminal. The blonde, energetic little girl, leaving her dad at the counter, ran to the windows to look out at the planes. He suddenly realized that his daughter was no longer by his side and he located her quickly, then briskly walked over to her and lovingly put his arm around her and pulled her close. The young dad with the floppy 90’s hair cut went and sat down while his daughter, who was wearing a giraffe-shaped backpack that was larger than she was! She would repeatedly run from the windows back to where he was sitting.
The family with the sailor, the girl playing on her Nintendo game, and their father with his well loved guitar epitomized the "all-American" family. However, instead of having a son in the military, one of the daughters was in the service. Simone de Beauvoir discusses, in her Woman as Other article, how even though women make up about one half of humanity, women are characterized as "the other" and they have to work hard to make up for the difference between men and themselves (de Beauvoir, 1). The female sailor was able to easily show that she was pretty and feminine while at the same time she was able to exude a professional, militaristic quality, which could be seen in the way she conducted herself. She was a combination of the women de Beauvoir writes of: the feminine woman with the woman who is more comfortable with men than women (de Beauvoir, 4). The elderly couple by the window represented a past generation that was not ruled by technology. The man and woman never checked their cell phones or pulled out a laptop from under their chairs. Instead, they engaged each other in conversation without electronic distractions and the woman read an entire newspaper, which is something rarely done by the current generation. Also, the husband would get drinks and other necessities for his wife without her asking him to, which showed how selfless and how in tune they were to each other. The two punk kids wore almost the exact same outfit: black beanies, skinny jeans, band shirts, and spacer earrings. They reminded me of today's society, in which people attempt to be original, but in reality they are just clones of each other. Even though they looked the same, the way they were dressed was a “signification of difference and that their style constituted a group identity” (Barker, 415). Style is a signifying practice that, in the case of spectacular subcultures, is an obviously fabricated display of codes of meaning. The Asian couple that had a difficult time picking seats resembled Brick and Maggie from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. The man was wearing dress slacks and a dress shirt and his wife had a Chanel purse; however, their nice clothes and accessories did not hide the fact that they appeared unhappy to be together. A few times the wife would try to lovingly lean against her husband, but he would always pull away and say something that would make her sit up and lean away. Their relationship was not so much radical, but, perhaps, cultural. To Westerners, the distance in this couple's relationship could translate as "radical", but for other cultures, this might just be the normal way they view relationships. The father and his young daughter were the epitome of a loving relationship. The young dad was very protective and caring towards his little girl who in turn loved him unconditionally and wanted to show him every interesting thing she found or could see out of the windows. The father and his daughter's relationship should be among the norm. However in today's society, it is almost as if a pure and loving relationship devoid of perversity is rare and actually could be considered radical.
This assignment gave purpose to our long wait to board our flight. In normal situations, the wait would have seemed endless, but this time, viewing the crowd at the terminal in the context of love, gender, and relationships, was an exciting exercise in people-watching.
Works Cited
Barker, Chris. Cultural Studies: Theory and Practice. 3rd ed. Los Angeles: Sage
Publications, 2008.
de Beauvoir, Simone. Woman as Other. 1949.
