How Do Institutions Think about Gender Trouble?
This fundamental question guides my research agenda, which investigates how a range of social institutions produce, negotiate, and respond to cultural beliefs about gender and sexuality. As its interdisciplinary riff on Mary Douglas's How Institutions Think and Judith Butler's Gender Trouble suggests, that effort is bound neither by a focus on one particular topic nor by the use of one core methodology. Rather, the common thread across my work is a central, sociological emphasis on boundary processes: that is, the everyday cultural work of finding similarities and differences between objects, people, organizations, and ideas—ones which serve as a subtle, often unintentional conduit for reinforcing broader patterns of social stratification.
A short summary of my two book projects and other published research can be found below. If you'd like more information about any of the projects listed, please feel free to reach out through the contact link above.
This fundamental question guides my research agenda, which investigates how a range of social institutions produce, negotiate, and respond to cultural beliefs about gender and sexuality. As its interdisciplinary riff on Mary Douglas's How Institutions Think and Judith Butler's Gender Trouble suggests, that effort is bound neither by a focus on one particular topic nor by the use of one core methodology. Rather, the common thread across my work is a central, sociological emphasis on boundary processes: that is, the everyday cultural work of finding similarities and differences between objects, people, organizations, and ideas—ones which serve as a subtle, often unintentional conduit for reinforcing broader patterns of social stratification.
A short summary of my two book projects and other published research can be found below. If you'd like more information about any of the projects listed, please feel free to reach out through the contact link above.
Bathroom Battlegrounds: How Public Restrooms Shape the Gender Order
Now available for pre-order!
Today’s debates about transgender inclusion and public restrooms may seem unmistakably contemporary, but they have a surprisingly long and storied history in the United States—one that concerns more than mere “potty politics.” Bathroom Battlegrounds takes readers behind the scenes of two hundred years’ worth of conflicts over the existence, separation, and equity of gendered public restrooms, documenting at each step how bathrooms have been entangled with bigger cultural matters: the importance of the public good, the reach of institutional inclusion, the nature of gender difference, and, above all, the myriad privileges of social status.
Chronicling the debut of nineteenth-century “comfort stations,” twentieth-century mandates requiring equal-but-separate men’s and women’s rooms, and twenty-first-century uproar over laws like North Carolina’s “bathroom bill,” the book reveals how public restrooms are far from marginal or unimportant social spaces. Instead, they are—and always have been—consequential sites in which ideology, institutions, and inequality collide.
Now available for pre-order!
Today’s debates about transgender inclusion and public restrooms may seem unmistakably contemporary, but they have a surprisingly long and storied history in the United States—one that concerns more than mere “potty politics.” Bathroom Battlegrounds takes readers behind the scenes of two hundred years’ worth of conflicts over the existence, separation, and equity of gendered public restrooms, documenting at each step how bathrooms have been entangled with bigger cultural matters: the importance of the public good, the reach of institutional inclusion, the nature of gender difference, and, above all, the myriad privileges of social status.
Chronicling the debut of nineteenth-century “comfort stations,” twentieth-century mandates requiring equal-but-separate men’s and women’s rooms, and twenty-first-century uproar over laws like North Carolina’s “bathroom bill,” the book reveals how public restrooms are far from marginal or unimportant social spaces. Instead, they are—and always have been—consequential sites in which ideology, institutions, and inequality collide.
Sex on the Brain: How Cognitive Scientists Think about Gender in the Twenty-First Century
(Data collection in progress.)
Over the last three decades, a revolutionary understanding of the human brain has taken hold in the cognitive sciences: synaptic pathways and cognitive abilities once thought to be fixed or immutable are surprisingly plastic. And while neuroscientific scholarship has often treated gender as unusually stable amidst that ever-shifting neural tide, emergent research findings from the last five years suggest that sex in the human brain is every bit as nurtured as it is natural. Has such evidence of gender fluidity been present in the field all along, but relegated to marginal journals—or left to linger in unpublished lab reports? Have feminist critiques of sex difference research led scientists to ask new questions, choose different methods, or interpret their results differently? Have ideological shifts outside of the academy, especially changes to journalism in the digital age, impacted the culture of academic neuroscience? And perhaps most critically of all, what do today’s neuroscientists believe about the “nature”—and “nurture”—of gender difference?
To answer such questions, Sex on the Brain will analyze nearly two centuries’ worth of peer-reviewed neuroscientific journal articles, draw from over one hundred in-depth interviews with academic neuroscientists, and trace the uptake of gender-related research findings across hundreds of newspaper articles and policymaking documents. But more importantly, the book will meld those empirical data with an equally diverse array of theoretical tools: philosophical takes on phenomenology, anthropological insights about the behind-the-scenes “doing” of laboratory science, and sociological perspectives on the gendered organization. That interdisciplinary approach will allow Sex on the Brain to identify how beliefs about gender ricochet from scientific laboratories to popular and political spheres and back to laboratories again, but it will also allow the book to make an important theoretical contribution to the sociology of gender. Rather than documenting “how institutions think” about gender within themselves, as is often the case within contemporary work in the field, Sex on the Brain will expose how beliefs about gender travel across institutional settings—and thus offer social scientists a new framework for understanding the material, cultural, and organizational underpinnings of the gender order.
(Data collection in progress.)
Over the last three decades, a revolutionary understanding of the human brain has taken hold in the cognitive sciences: synaptic pathways and cognitive abilities once thought to be fixed or immutable are surprisingly plastic. And while neuroscientific scholarship has often treated gender as unusually stable amidst that ever-shifting neural tide, emergent research findings from the last five years suggest that sex in the human brain is every bit as nurtured as it is natural. Has such evidence of gender fluidity been present in the field all along, but relegated to marginal journals—or left to linger in unpublished lab reports? Have feminist critiques of sex difference research led scientists to ask new questions, choose different methods, or interpret their results differently? Have ideological shifts outside of the academy, especially changes to journalism in the digital age, impacted the culture of academic neuroscience? And perhaps most critically of all, what do today’s neuroscientists believe about the “nature”—and “nurture”—of gender difference?
To answer such questions, Sex on the Brain will analyze nearly two centuries’ worth of peer-reviewed neuroscientific journal articles, draw from over one hundred in-depth interviews with academic neuroscientists, and trace the uptake of gender-related research findings across hundreds of newspaper articles and policymaking documents. But more importantly, the book will meld those empirical data with an equally diverse array of theoretical tools: philosophical takes on phenomenology, anthropological insights about the behind-the-scenes “doing” of laboratory science, and sociological perspectives on the gendered organization. That interdisciplinary approach will allow Sex on the Brain to identify how beliefs about gender ricochet from scientific laboratories to popular and political spheres and back to laboratories again, but it will also allow the book to make an important theoretical contribution to the sociology of gender. Rather than documenting “how institutions think” about gender within themselves, as is often the case within contemporary work in the field, Sex on the Brain will expose how beliefs about gender travel across institutional settings—and thus offer social scientists a new framework for understanding the material, cultural, and organizational underpinnings of the gender order.
Other Projects and Publications
Toward Exclusion through Inclusion: Engendering Reputation with Gender-Inclusive Facilities at Colleges and Universities in the United States, 2001-2013. Gender & Society 32 (3): 321-347.
Ample sociological evidence demonstrates that binary gender ideologies are an intractable part of formal organizations and that transgender issues tend to be marginalized by a wide range of social institutions. Yet, in the last 15 years, more than 200 colleges and universities have attempted to ameliorate such realities by adopting gender-inclusive facilities in which students of any gender can share residential and restroom spaces. What cultural logics motivate these transformations? How can their emergence be reconciled with the difficulty of altering the gender order? Using an original sample of 2,036 campus newspaper articles, I find that support for inclusive facilities frames such spaces as a resource through which an institution can claim improved standing in the field of higher education. This process of engendering reputation allows traditional gender separation in residential arrangements to be overcome, but it also situates institutional responsiveness to transgender issues as a means of enhancing a college or university’s public prestige. This, in turn, produces novel status systems in the field of higher education—albeit ones that perpetuate familiar forms of institutional and cultural exclusion.
The Hidden Privilege of Potty Politics. Contexts 16 (3): 34-41.
To some, debates like North Carolina's recent debacle over HB2—which would limit public restroom access on the basis of the sex officially listed on an individual's birth certificates—may seem uniquely contemporary, as elected officials, political activists, and ordinary citizens alike grapple with the meaning and consequences of increased transgender visibility. To others, “potty politics” feel excessively myopic: a “bizarrely outsize” distraction, as one Washington Post commentator put it, from other, more pressing dimensions of gender inequality in the twenty-first century. And still others will find the recent deluge of civil discourse about public restrooms decidedly un-civil, as any discussion related to bodily excrement troubles the limits of acceptable political rhetoric. But as my research investigating the cultural history of American public restrooms reveals, such debates are neither new nor marginal. Instead, they are merely the most recent in a long history of substantive cultural conflicts over gender and public restrooms—conflicts that have been as integral to upholding social class distinctions as they have been to, as sociologist Erving Goffman puts it, “honoring” gender difference.
"Epiphenomenology of the Closet: Feeling and Fashioning Sexuality in Everyday Life." Sexualities 18 (8): 959-979.
Clothing is an essential means through which social actors construct, perform, and negotiate their sexualities in their everyday lives. Existing research about dress and sexual performance suggests that social actors carefully balance institutional demands, their sexual identities, and their erotic desires when determining what to wear. Yet broader theories of culture and cognition point out that the majority of everyday social action is much more rapid and automatic than cautiously and deliberately considered. How can these accounts be reconciled? Drawing from interviews with young adults comprising a variety of sexual identities about the contents of their closets, I find that my respondents are sometimes strategic about how they present their sexual identities and desires with their clothes. But much more often, they articulate connections between emotions and temporalities: how particular items have made them feel in the past, how they expect certain outfits will make them feel in the future, and what sorts of feelings emerge when they wear clothing in the present. Moreover, they link those affective understandings to specific recollections of face-to-face interaction. Their memories of previous interactions drive their anticipations about future face-to-face interactions, and those same memories further imbue particular articles of clothing with an emotional charge that innervates affective states for them in the present moment. Thus, I argue that the intersection of emotion, interaction, and temporality crucially informs how social actors use their clothing to manage their sexualities, and more importantly, how they experience their sexual desires and identities in the first place.
"Own It! Constructions of Masculinity and Heterosexuality on Reality Makeover Television." With Laura E. Rogers and Bethany Bryson. Cultural Sociology 8 (3): 258-274.
Makeover television shows are notorious for presenting oppressive and unrealistic images of women, but a sizable portion of makeover contestants are men. What does this mean for the impact of such shows on gender culture? Using data collected from transcripts of five different programs, we find that gender, power, and heterosexuality intertwine within makeover plots in three ways. First, makeover shows link the promise of personal transformation to uncovering an accentuated femininity or masculinity lurking beneath surface-level shortcomings. Second, shows featuring male contestants make status and wealth central to their transformations. While female contestants focus on their bodies, men are offered opportunities and encouragement to engage in ‘manhood acts’ (Schrock and Schwalbe, 2009): deliberate efforts to claim membership in the privileged gender group. Third, makeovers rely upon heteronormative understandings of masculinity and femininity as opposites that attract. For men in particular, heterosexual relationships (whether real or imagined) provide the evidence within each episode that their makeovers have successfully rehabilitated their masculinity and their gender privilege. Thus the presence of men in the makeover genre reifies existing ideologies of gender inequality in which social status is a requisite component of masculinity, deference to men is a requisite component of femininity, and a male-dominated heterosexuality is a requisite component of both.
"Conquering Stereotypes in Research on Race and Gender." With Bethany Bryson. Sociological Forum 25 (1): 161-166.
Is sociology racist? In The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois accused sociologists of reinforcing preconceived notions of black lives rather than challenging them. Specifically, he indicts sociologists and “cold statistician[s]” for spending so little time on their studies of black America that their research directly reproduces the stereotypes they attempt to dispel. "To the car‐window sociologist," he writes, "to the man who seeks to understand and know the South by devoting the few leisure hours of a holiday trip to unraveling the snarl of centuries—to such men very often the whole trouble with the black field‐hand may be summed up by Aunt Ophelia’s word, 'Shiftless!'” (2005:198) Those stereotypes, in turn, lead us to misrecognize the study of crime and immorality as the study of black experience: “But alas! while sociologists gleefully count his bastards and his prostitutes, the very soul of the toiling, sweating black man is darkened by the shadow of a vast despair” (2005:19). In other words, the stereotypes that Cynthia Epstein (2010) identifies in her essay as an ongoing component of racism served as the foundation of sociological scholarship a mere century ago. Today, we argue, it is the continued use of the term stereotype that serves as our “car window” and can hold us back from truly understanding race and gender.
Toward Exclusion through Inclusion: Engendering Reputation with Gender-Inclusive Facilities at Colleges and Universities in the United States, 2001-2013. Gender & Society 32 (3): 321-347.
Ample sociological evidence demonstrates that binary gender ideologies are an intractable part of formal organizations and that transgender issues tend to be marginalized by a wide range of social institutions. Yet, in the last 15 years, more than 200 colleges and universities have attempted to ameliorate such realities by adopting gender-inclusive facilities in which students of any gender can share residential and restroom spaces. What cultural logics motivate these transformations? How can their emergence be reconciled with the difficulty of altering the gender order? Using an original sample of 2,036 campus newspaper articles, I find that support for inclusive facilities frames such spaces as a resource through which an institution can claim improved standing in the field of higher education. This process of engendering reputation allows traditional gender separation in residential arrangements to be overcome, but it also situates institutional responsiveness to transgender issues as a means of enhancing a college or university’s public prestige. This, in turn, produces novel status systems in the field of higher education—albeit ones that perpetuate familiar forms of institutional and cultural exclusion.
The Hidden Privilege of Potty Politics. Contexts 16 (3): 34-41.
To some, debates like North Carolina's recent debacle over HB2—which would limit public restroom access on the basis of the sex officially listed on an individual's birth certificates—may seem uniquely contemporary, as elected officials, political activists, and ordinary citizens alike grapple with the meaning and consequences of increased transgender visibility. To others, “potty politics” feel excessively myopic: a “bizarrely outsize” distraction, as one Washington Post commentator put it, from other, more pressing dimensions of gender inequality in the twenty-first century. And still others will find the recent deluge of civil discourse about public restrooms decidedly un-civil, as any discussion related to bodily excrement troubles the limits of acceptable political rhetoric. But as my research investigating the cultural history of American public restrooms reveals, such debates are neither new nor marginal. Instead, they are merely the most recent in a long history of substantive cultural conflicts over gender and public restrooms—conflicts that have been as integral to upholding social class distinctions as they have been to, as sociologist Erving Goffman puts it, “honoring” gender difference.
"Epiphenomenology of the Closet: Feeling and Fashioning Sexuality in Everyday Life." Sexualities 18 (8): 959-979.
Clothing is an essential means through which social actors construct, perform, and negotiate their sexualities in their everyday lives. Existing research about dress and sexual performance suggests that social actors carefully balance institutional demands, their sexual identities, and their erotic desires when determining what to wear. Yet broader theories of culture and cognition point out that the majority of everyday social action is much more rapid and automatic than cautiously and deliberately considered. How can these accounts be reconciled? Drawing from interviews with young adults comprising a variety of sexual identities about the contents of their closets, I find that my respondents are sometimes strategic about how they present their sexual identities and desires with their clothes. But much more often, they articulate connections between emotions and temporalities: how particular items have made them feel in the past, how they expect certain outfits will make them feel in the future, and what sorts of feelings emerge when they wear clothing in the present. Moreover, they link those affective understandings to specific recollections of face-to-face interaction. Their memories of previous interactions drive their anticipations about future face-to-face interactions, and those same memories further imbue particular articles of clothing with an emotional charge that innervates affective states for them in the present moment. Thus, I argue that the intersection of emotion, interaction, and temporality crucially informs how social actors use their clothing to manage their sexualities, and more importantly, how they experience their sexual desires and identities in the first place.
"Own It! Constructions of Masculinity and Heterosexuality on Reality Makeover Television." With Laura E. Rogers and Bethany Bryson. Cultural Sociology 8 (3): 258-274.
Makeover television shows are notorious for presenting oppressive and unrealistic images of women, but a sizable portion of makeover contestants are men. What does this mean for the impact of such shows on gender culture? Using data collected from transcripts of five different programs, we find that gender, power, and heterosexuality intertwine within makeover plots in three ways. First, makeover shows link the promise of personal transformation to uncovering an accentuated femininity or masculinity lurking beneath surface-level shortcomings. Second, shows featuring male contestants make status and wealth central to their transformations. While female contestants focus on their bodies, men are offered opportunities and encouragement to engage in ‘manhood acts’ (Schrock and Schwalbe, 2009): deliberate efforts to claim membership in the privileged gender group. Third, makeovers rely upon heteronormative understandings of masculinity and femininity as opposites that attract. For men in particular, heterosexual relationships (whether real or imagined) provide the evidence within each episode that their makeovers have successfully rehabilitated their masculinity and their gender privilege. Thus the presence of men in the makeover genre reifies existing ideologies of gender inequality in which social status is a requisite component of masculinity, deference to men is a requisite component of femininity, and a male-dominated heterosexuality is a requisite component of both.
"Conquering Stereotypes in Research on Race and Gender." With Bethany Bryson. Sociological Forum 25 (1): 161-166.
Is sociology racist? In The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois accused sociologists of reinforcing preconceived notions of black lives rather than challenging them. Specifically, he indicts sociologists and “cold statistician[s]” for spending so little time on their studies of black America that their research directly reproduces the stereotypes they attempt to dispel. "To the car‐window sociologist," he writes, "to the man who seeks to understand and know the South by devoting the few leisure hours of a holiday trip to unraveling the snarl of centuries—to such men very often the whole trouble with the black field‐hand may be summed up by Aunt Ophelia’s word, 'Shiftless!'” (2005:198) Those stereotypes, in turn, lead us to misrecognize the study of crime and immorality as the study of black experience: “But alas! while sociologists gleefully count his bastards and his prostitutes, the very soul of the toiling, sweating black man is darkened by the shadow of a vast despair” (2005:19). In other words, the stereotypes that Cynthia Epstein (2010) identifies in her essay as an ongoing component of racism served as the foundation of sociological scholarship a mere century ago. Today, we argue, it is the continued use of the term stereotype that serves as our “car window” and can hold us back from truly understanding race and gender.
