I first mentioned collecting baseball cards in this post from last December. Since that time I have continued collecting - much to the wife’s annoyance. “There is nothing more un-sexy than a man playing with his baseball cards,” she has said - so I hide my hobby from her eyes.
I have pondered why I chase after these 30+ year old pieces of paper. Today I found this review of a book about card collecting aptly named “A House of Cards“.
Bloom links this nostalgia to anxieties about deindustrialization and the rise of the civil rights, feminist, and gay rights movements. He examines the gendered nature of swap meets as well as the views of masculinity expressed by the collectors: Is the purpose of baseball card collecting to form a community of adults to reminisce or to inculcate young men with traditional masculine values? Is it to establish “connectedness” or to make money? Are collectors striving to reinforce the dominant culture or question it through their attempts to create their own meaning out of what are, in fact, mass-produced commercial artifacts?
Gendered nature of swap meets? Anxieties about deindustrialization?
Uhm. Nope.
Gendered? Is that even a word?
Gendered deindustrialization of the feminist and gay rights movements.
Does that sound like a master’s thesis in Sociology or what?
Personally the best answer I’ve found is that card collecting reminds me of my father. It also allows me to relatively cheaply fulfill some childish dreams I had as a kid. Beyond that, I couldn’t care less about gendered anything.
