Category Archives: Sociology of Gender

Crime, Law and Deviance, Gender and Sexuality, Immigration, Latin American Studies, Race and Ethnicity, Sociology of Gender, University of Texas at Austin Sociology

Spring 2019 Speaker Series “Critical Criminology: Feminist Approaches to Crime, Law, and Deviance”

March 6, 2019 Katie K. Rogers Leave a comment

Three distinguished scholars from outside the University of Austin are visiting the sociology department this semester as part of a graduate-student organized speaker series called “Critical Criminology: Feminist Approaches to Crime, Law, and Deviance.” This series showcases professors who use ethnographic methods to study aspects of the criminal-legal system, an area more commonly explored through quantitative datasets and methodologies.

Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera, Jan. 30-31
Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera is Associate Professor at the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University and President of the Association for Borderlands Studies (ABS). She studies Mexico-U.S. relations, organized crime, immigration, border security, and human trafficking. Her books include Los Zetas Inc.: Criminal Corporations,Energy, and Civil War in Mexico (2017) and Democracy in“Two Mexicos”: Political Institutions in Oaxaca and Nuevo León (2013). She currently analyzes Mexican immigration in the United States for a project called Mexican “Illegal” Immigration in the U.S.: A Human Problem.

Cecilia Menjívar, Feb. 27-March 1
Cecilia Menjívar is Professor and Dorothy L. Meier Social Equities Chair in the Department of Sociology at UCLA. Her work has made substantial contributions to Latin American Studies, particularly within the fields of immigration, family, gender, and violence. She has authored and co-authored a number of books, including Immigrant Families (2016), Enduring Violence: Ladina Women’s Lives in Guatemala (2011), and Fragmented Ties: Salvadoran Immigrant Networks in America, and was recently honored with the 2017 Feminist Criminology Best Article Award.

Nikki Jones, March 25-27
Nikki Jones is Associate Professor in the Department of African American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research focuses on the experiences of African American men, women, and youth with the criminal justice system, policing, and violence. She is author of The Chosen Ones: Black Men and the Politics of Redemption (2018) and Between Good and Ghetto: African American Girls and Inner City Violence (2010), and winner of the William T. Grant Award for Early Career Scholars, as well as the New Scholar Award from the American Society of Criminology’s Division on Women and Crime and Division on People of Color and Crime.

In addition to presenting research findings, each scholar is hosting a workshop session with graduate students on the use of feminist and ethnographic methods to study crime, law, and deviance. These workshops cover processes such as conceptualizing research questions; gathering and organizing data; conducting data analysis; using critical race and/or feminist frameworks to guide the research process; and disseminating findings to a broader public in service of promoting social change.

The series is part of an ongoing student-led initiative in the Ethnography Lab called “Ethnographic Approaches,” a series established with the support of the university’s Academic Enrichment Fund. This series helps sustain the Lab’s momentum by regularly bringing ethnographers from other institutions to campus, including, recently, Kimberly K. Hoang (Chicago), Gianpaolo Baiocchi (NYU), and Silvia Pasquetti (Newcastle).

The “Critical Criminology” speaker series is organized by UT Austin sociology PhD candidates Shannon Malone Gonzalez and Katie Kaufman Rogers. It is hosted by the Urban Ethnography Lab and generously supported by LLILAS, the Academic Enrichment Fund, and the Sociology Department’s Fem(me) Sem and Crime, Law, and Deviance Workgroups.

Crime, Law and Deviance, Demography, Ethnography, Gender and Sexuality, Political Sociology, Race and Ethnicity, Sociology of Gender, University of Texas at Austin Sociology

Meet Our New NSF Awardees!

February 10, 2019 jeo848 Leave a comment

To add to an already incredible year of funding acceptances for the department, four UT Austin sociology graduate students have received dissertation awards from the National Science Foundation (NSF). Below is some information about their research, as well as their advice for future applicants.

Katie Kaufman Rogers

Katherine Rogers

Dissertation: “Breaking the Grass Ceiling: Gender, Race, and Class in the U.S. Legal Cannabis Industry”
Advisor: Christine Williams
Year in the program: 4

This project investigates how the emerging multibillion-dollar U.S. legal cannabis industry is stratified by race and gender. Employing the techniques of ethnographic assemblage (Collins 2017), this multi-method study uses content analysis, in-depth interviews, and field research in dispensaries to explore stratification in the emerging industry. This research will have theoretical implications for studies of gender, race, drug economies, and labor inequality, and contribute to policy debates around these issues.

What is some advice you would give students who are applying to NSF in the future?

My two pieces of advice are to get started early, so you have ample opportunity to revise the proposal, and to begin by reading successful proposals from past years, if you can. The NSF wants a particular style and framing and it helps to see examples.

Samantha Simon

Dissertation: “The Police Force: Gender, Race, and Use of Force Training in Police Academies”
Advisor: Christine Williams
Year in the program: 5

If you ask police officers why they chose a career in law enforcement, most will tell you that they wanted to help people and serve their community. These honorable motivations stand in stark contrast to the patterns of racially-biased and excessive force that have given rise to protest movements across the country. In this project, we examine police training to discern how high-minded ideals are transformed into the excessive use of force. At the academy, cadets are exposed to the institutional ideologies, practices, and embodiments of U.S. law enforcement, including when, how, and on whom they can or should use force, and thus, the academy is a key site of study to better understand why racially-biased and excessive force persists. In this study, I address three questions: (1) How do police departments decide who to hire? (2) How are police officers trained to use force? (3) What do the recruitment strategies and training practices reveal about how police departments conceptualize gender, race, and violence? I turn the focus away from explanations of police violence that point to officers’ individual racial biases, the purported necessity of using force in high-crime areas, or inadequate de-escalation training, to instead examine how the ways in which police departments choose applicants and train cadets may play a role in the use of excessive force. By focusing on training, this study will help scholars, policy makers, and police departments better understand how previous reform efforts – for example, increasing the racial and gender diversity of the police force, implementing de-escalation training, or requiring body cameras – may be ineffective, and will provide important insights into developing new approaches to training recruits.

What is some advice you would give students who are applying to NSF in the future?

I would definitely advise that anyone applying to NSF read as many past proposals as possible. Reviewing colleagues’ proposals gives great insight into how to structure the document, what kind of language to use, and how to frame the project.

Ilya Slavinski

Dissertation: “The Racialized and Gendered Governance of the Poor in Low Level Misdemeanor Courts”
Advisor: Becky Pettit
Year in the program: 4

There are about ten million misdemeanor cases every year in the United States, almost five times the amount of felony cases. Focusing on misdemeanor courts gives insight as to how the criminal justice system regulates and manages millions of people. This view goes against the dominant narrative that punishment has abandoned its productive functions and simply locks people away and warehouses them. Misdemeanor courtroom interactions suggest that courts regulate those that walk through its doors. Meanwhile, stringent court requirements and norms paradoxically make the fulfillment of court-mandated requirements more difficult sometimes even impossible. How do we reconcile such contradictory demands? Drawing on ethnographic methods, including participant observation of 15 misdemeanor courtrooms around Texas and interviews with misdemeanor court defendants, prosecutors, defense attorneys and judges, this project explores the ways in which misdemeanor courts actors and practices manage and regulate marginalized populations and how these populations react and resist to this regulation.

What is some advice you would give students who are applying to NSF in the future?

Read examples of winning submissions, don’t start from scratch! Use the resources in the department and the PRC [Population Research Center] that help with the process. Have colleagues and faculty read and give feedback before you submit.

Haley Stritzel

Dissertation: “Interagency Collaboration, Child Welfare Involvement, and its Consequences for Children and Families”
Advisors: Rob Crosnoe and Shannon Cavanagh
Year in the program: 4

The majority of child maltreatment reports received by child protective service agencies in the United States come from professionals such as teachers, healthcare providers, and social workers. Informal and formal data sharing between the child welfare system and other institutions thus facilitates the investigation of and intervention in cases of child maltreatment. One consequence of this collaboration, however, is that families may avoid institutions that provide necessary resources out of fear of coming into contact with the child welfare system. My research analyzes under what circumstances institutional engagement is associated with a greater likelihood of child protective services involvement, as well as how child protective services involvement is related to future institutional engagement. Exploring how interactions with the child welfare system constrain families’ willingness to access needed services sheds light on one understudied mechanism in the reproduction of social stratification. In addition, this project will generate practical suggestions for encouraging greater service uptake and collaboration between social service workers and clients.

What is some advice you would give students who are applying to NSF in the future?

The application itself looks really intimidating with all of the bureaucratic mumbo-jumbo. Don’t be afraid to ask for help with this part! Faculty and other staff who regularly deal with grants can help make this part much easier. Your most important job is to concentrate on describing the actual research.

___________________________________________________________________________

Applications for for the Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Awards for sociology are due in October and are awarded based on four criteria:

(1) the theoretical grounding of the research

(2) the ability for the research to be empirically observed or validated

(3) the appropriateness of the research design to the questions asked

(4) the ability for the research to advance understanding of social processes, structures, and methods

Here’s to hoping for an equally successful round next year!

Current Events, Gender and Sexuality, Power, Public Sociology, Race and Ethnicity, Sociology of Gender

Sociology Roundup: Kavanaugh Hearings

September 28, 2018 Katie K. Rogers 1 Comment

Today the United States Senate voted narrowly to advance the nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to a final confirmation vote, which will take place this Saturday. If confirmed, Kavanaugh will enjoy a lifetime appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The vote took place after a polarizing public hearing in which a woman, Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, gave a testimony accusing Kavanaugh of sexual assault. During the hearing, Kavanaugh angrily denied the accusation, repeatedly interrupting, raising his voice, demanding answers to questions he himself was being asked, and decrying what he has called a “circus,” a “national disgrace,” and a “vicious” attack on his family and good name.

Senators made today’s decision in the wake of widespread protests (including an elevator confrontation with swing-vote Republican Sen. Jeff Flake), a withdrawn endorsement from the magazine of the Jesuit religious order, and urgings from Yale Law School and the American Bar Association, whose support Brett Kavanaugh cited just yesterday, and which Republican Senator Lindsey Graham called “the gold standard.” The ABA has since stated that Kavanaugh has not been sufficiently vetted for appointment to the Supreme Court. In a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee, the ABA called for postponing the vote until the FBI completed “an appropriate background check into the allegations made by Professor Blasey and others.”

The Kavanaugh hearing has dominated the news cycle for weeks. It has sent waves of anger, sadness, confusion, frustration, and loss across the country, leaving many of us reeling and unsure how to process our emotions, let alone make sense of the situation.

A variety of social science researchers have published sociological responses to the hearings. This post is an effort to consolidate and share those works of public sociology. The following list includes analyses from scholars with expertise in the areas of law, race, class, gender, sexuality, and sexual violence.

“We Still Haven’t Learned From Anita Hill’s Testimony”
Kimberlé Crenshaw | The New York Times

In this New York Times op-ed, law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw, who introduced the term “intersectionality,” offers instructive words for white feminists and anti-racists. She shows that what many of us assume justice should look like—be it the outcome or the process—neglects to consider black women’s specific needs and circumstances:

I watched Anita Hill testify as a member of her support team. I worried that she would be trapped between an antiracist movement that foregrounded black men, and a feminism that could not fully address how race shaped society’s perception of black victims. …

Such colorblind feminism did a profound disservice to Ms. Hill. And it marked another key moment of political erasure — in this case, one that effaced modern feminist history. Treating the racial backdrop of the hearing as just noise meant that we missed an opportunity to create a nuanced understanding of sexual harassment. In the great awakening around sexual harassment, race was politely ushered offstage.

“Kavanaugh’s ‘Good Guy’ Defense Reveals a Dangerous Rape Myth”
Sarah Diefendorf | The Huffington Post

Masculinities scholar Sarah Diefendorf analyzes the discourses being proffered in defense of Kavanaugh. She points out that these defenses characterize men’s proclivity to commit sexual violence as something that individual “bad guys” do, and elide the reality that sexual violence is part of a system of masculine domination:

When Kavanaugh or other men respond to allegations of sexual assault by making themselves look like good guys, they’re trying to pin the blame on other “bad” men as failures of masculinity. This good guy defense is brilliant. It allows men to make the problem of sexual assault and rape about being an individual ― the work of bad men, not a bad culture ― when we know that it is actually a widespread cultural problem. When men point to others as the problem, we are left with individual accounts, denials, and explanations that hide the overarching theme in all of them: masculinity and dominance.

This good guy rhetoric repeats the same cycle we are all taught at an early age: that men are in charge of the conversation and of women’s bodies and that women’s voices are dismissed or berated when we dare speak up.

“A Sociological Take on the Kavanaugh Hearing”
Nicole Bedera | Scatterplot, a blog for public sociology

Sociologist Nicole Bedera, who studies adolescent sexual violence, synthesizes findings from social science about sexual violence. Her blog post (in addition to this Twitter thread) offers context for the hearing by sharing evidence not typically acknowledged in public discourse about sexual violence:

We generally think of sexual violence—and particularly its perpetration—as something rare. When we do recognize sexual misconduct as a common experience, we tend to focus on victimization and the stories we heard during the beginnings of #MeToo and imagine serial rapists as the primary perpetrators of sexual assault. However, sexual assault perpetration is similarly ordinary. According to one of the most recent and rigorous studies, as many as 10.8% of college-attending young men commit an act of rape before graduating (Swartout et al. 2015). The rate might be alarming, but the reasons are different than we traditionally think. … The allegations against Judge Kavanaugh are consistent with what sociologists know about sexual violence: it’s common, rooted in male bonding, and situational.

“Kavanagh is Lying. His Upbringing Explains Why.”
Shamus Khan | The Washington Post

Shamus Khan, whose 2012 book Privilege is an ethnography of an elite boarding school that Khan himself attended, examines the classed dimensions of the hearing. He details how elite institutions such as those Kavanaugh attended (Georgetown Prep, Yale College, and Yale Law School) socialize their members to believe they are entitled to positions of power, special treatment, and the ability to break rules with impunity:

Kavanaugh’s privilege runs deep, and it shows. He grew up in a wealthy Washington suburb where his father spent three decades as CEO of a trade association. There has been a sense among his supporters that his place is deserved, which mirrors the climate of aristocratic inheritance he grew up around. … This collective agreement that accountability doesn’t apply to Kavanaugh (and, by extension, anybody in a similar position who was a youthful delinquent) may help explain why he seems to believe he can lie with impunity — a trend he continued on Thursday, when he informed senators he hadn’t seen the testimony of his accuser, Christine Blasey Ford, even though a committee aide told the Wall Street Journal he’d been watching. In his furious interview with the panel that afternoon, Kavanaugh appeared astonished that anybody might impugn his character or try to keep him from the seat he is entitled to. ‘I’m never going to get my reputation back,’ he complained.

Katie K. Rogers is a doctoral student in the Department of Sociology at UT Austin. Her research is on race, gender, and the legal cannabis industry in the United States. You can follow her on Twitter at @katie_k_rogers.

Gender and Sexuality, Globalization and Development, History and Society, Power, Sociology of Gender

Myra Marx Ferree on Globalizing Universities and Growing Gender Equality

February 25, 2018 Katie K. Rogers Leave a comment

by Rachel Karen

On Friday, February 16, the Sociology department’s Power, History, and Society (PHS) working group hosted its PHS Annual Distinguished Lecture featuring Professor of Sociology Myra Marx Ferree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Dr. Ferree discussed her comparative work on feminism and higher education in the United States and Germany, and provided an overview of the dialectic inherent in feminism. She pointed to two major university transformations during the last century. First, the potential student body is larger and more diverse. Second, the feminist movement went beyond expanding women’s access to education, by enabling women to learn what they want to know, and be able to find employment afterwards. This access was crucial for women to both join professoriate and institutionalize the creation of new knowledge in the creation of Women and Gender Studies programs. The second transformation driving the restructuring of higher education was decolonization. Former colonial subjects also want access to knowledge on a more self-determined basis, and technological advances helped facilitate international research.

Ferree then turned to her work on the feminist agenda in American and German universities. Here, she brought in a discussion of the dialectic in feminism. She conceptualized two models of feminist intervention based on two characters—Cassandra, who in Greek mythology was cursed to speak true prophesies that no one believed, and Pollyanna, a character from a 1913 novel whose name is now used to describe those who always have a positive outlook. The “Cassandra approach” is combative and critical, and the “Pollyanna approach” holds that by accessing power structures, change can happen from the inside. Dr. Ferree urged us all to recognize both approaches are right, and both are limited. She acknowledged that feminist knowledge production emphasizes change as the only constant. Globalization is not a unidirectional process of modernity: globalization is part of a contested struggle about whose knowledge counts.

For Dr. Ferree, pragmatic feminist advocacy means efforts should be concentrated at the national level, in order to focus on institutionally specific structures to be able to act and make change. Universities are a place of citizenship, and Dr. Ferree believes democratic norms can be used to challenge all academic inequalities. Furthermore, feminists should identify where market leverage exists for specific policy changes, since in this era of academic capitalism, administrators must create a university that can work and compete in the market. Because of this, Dr. Ferree is hopeful that feminists can indeed enact positive change at the university level.

Rachel Karen is a first-year doctoral student in the Department of Sociology. Her research interests include state formation in Africa and European responses to the 2008 economic crisis.

Academia, Gender and Sexuality, History and Society, Power, Sociology of Gender, University of Texas at Austin Sociology

Follow the Thread and Leave Room for Serendipity: Reflections on the PHS Graduate Workshop with Myra Marx Ferree

February 24, 2018 Katie K. Rogers Leave a comment

by Marta Ascherio

Roter faden is the German term for “red thread,” and is used to mean common thread. “Unlike most of German academia, it borrows from sewing,” said University of Wisconsin-Madison Professor of Sociology Myra Marx Ferree, during UT Austin Sociology’s annual Power, History, and Society workshop. “Women’s practical knowledge.” Whether we intend it or not, there is always a red thread in what we study. It’s about what we do with the red thread that matters.

The red thread that runs through Dr. Ferree’s work is now emerging as a network, called the Society of Gender Professionals. This society will set professional standards, share job opportunities, and work to institutionalize the legitimacy of gender experts. She is particularly interested in how expertise gets used, and how certain types of expertise are credited or discredited. For instance, one of her students researches family law reform in Chile, and finds that gender experts are discredited, with economists being perceived as a more legitimate form of authority.

Dr. Ferree also discussed the debates that took place in the 1980s about whether Women’s Studies should be its own discipline or a sub-specialty in another discipline. “Both ways actually succeeded beyond the expectations of anyone on either side of that debate,” Dr. Ferree told us, which is refreshing to hear in a moment when it seems like the only constant is the reproduction of inequality, and even progressive social movements often re-package existing power relationships.

In the first few minutes of Dr. Ferree’s arrival, as we set up food, she engaged every single graduate student, as attentively as if we were her advisees, commenting on the relevance of our research topics, suggesting literature, and offering introductions. She leaned back in her chair, so much at ease. Here is some of the advice she had for graduate students:

Keep track of your ideas. C. Wright Mills kept all his ideas on notecards, said Dr. Ferree, and Charles Tilly kept a filing cabinet full of all the topics he would write about if he lived to be 150. She advised us to do the same. “You can’t pursue every idea, so you have to cut them off, but don’t throw them away!”

Leave room for serendipity. “I don’t pick projects. Projects pick me,” said Dr. Ferree. “When we do our dissertations, we often think that we choose them, but when we dig a little bit deeper, we see that it has to do with where we are located in time and space.”

Avoid identifying with one particular method. More than using quantitative or qualitative methods, Dr. Ferree observed, scholars seem to have “quantitative or qualitative identities.” She believes this quantitative/qualitative binary is a barrier to being relevant. Prioritize staying relevant, she said, and learning new methods. Methods are not something you learn once and set aside. You will be learning methods for the rest of your life.

Remember that methods and theories can be subject to trends. Dr. Ferree explained that sociological methods and theoretical approaches can fall in and out of fashion. For instance, while she was writing her dissertation, multi-dimensional scaling was all the rage, but the way she learned it became obsolete shortly after she spent a year grappling with it. If you are interested in getting a job, consider learning or using trendy methods, but do not forget that they may be subject to change. You have to see what works for you.

Marta Ascherio is a second-year doctoral student in the Department of Sociology and a graduate fellow of the Urban Ethnography Lab. Her research interests include immigration, crime, and social control.

Academia, Gender and Sexuality, Race and Ethnicity, Sociology of Gender, University of Texas at Austin Sociology

UT Austin Sociology at SWS in Atlanta

February 12, 2018 jeo848 Leave a comment

by Jamie O’Quinn and Katie K. Rogers

Feminist sociologists from UT Austin and members of the department’s gender working group, Fem(me) Sem, were well-represented at the annual winter meeting of Sociologists for Women in Society (SWS) this year in Atlanta, Georgia. The conference offered presentations, sessions, and workshops that engaged the theme of “They Persisted: Feminism, Work, Activism, Resistance.”

This year’s meeting addressed pedagogy and academic freedom in the age of hate speech and “fake news,” and tackled ongoing issues of race and racism in the academy, the discipline of sociology, and SWS as an organization. SWS President Adia Harvey Wingfield of Washington University in St. Louis convened plenary sessions on topics such as gender and precarious labor, feminism in the academy, and race, gender, and feminist activism.

(Left to right) UT-Austin PhD Kirsten Dellinger (now Professor of Sociology at the University of Mississippi) with current graduate students Jess Goldstein-Kral and Caitlin Carroll

Plenary sessions and workshops spotlighted the voices of faculty and activists of color who, in addition to sharing critiques of existing systems, offered strategies for the path forward. They urged feminists to make careful decisions about how to reform and transform their departments without experiencing burnout. They reminded young scholars that joy exists in research and teaching, even within institutions that can feel impossible to change. They also pushed white feminists in the audience to reflect on their own politics of solidarity, and consider how they might show up more effectively to build coalitions with feminists of color in their institutions, organizations, and networks. Ultimately, they challenged all feminist scholars to, as stated by sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom of Virgina Commonwealth University, “figure out the difference between performance politics and solidarity.”

Sociologist Kimberly K. Hoang asks a question during a plenary session on feminism in the academy

A contingent of feminist sociologists from UT Austin represented the department, with presentations that centered gender in varying ways. One highlight was a session that grew from Fem(me) Sem‘s Spring 2017 conference, “The Gender of Ethnography and the Ethnography of Gender,” which was organized by a group of sociology graduate students who were interested in using feminist methods in their research. The session, called “Feminist Ethnographies: Dilemmas from the Field,” featured Professor Christine Williams as a discussant, and UT Austin graduate students Shannon Malone, Vrinda Marwah, Ruijie Peng, Beth Prosnitz, and Katie K. Rogers as panelists. They grappled with a number of questions related to feminist methods, including what exactly makes a research design “feminist,” how to manage demands for “proof” in response to situated knowledge, what it means to “gain access,” and how to reckon with accusations of “bias,” particularly with respect to projects that center a researcher’s own community (“me-search”) or emerge from explicitly feminist commitments.

(Left to right) “Feminist Ethnographies” graduate student panelists Vrinda Marwah, Shannon Malone, Katie K. Rogers, Ruijie Peng, and Beth Proznitz

(Left to right) Professor Christine Williams and panelists

UT Austin also exhibited a presence among the individual paper presentations, with graduate scholars sharing feminist research on topics that ranged from intimate relationships to the gendered state to issues of gender, race, and labor.

A list of individual papers by UT Austin graduate students is as follows:

Caitlin Carroll
“Antiviolence Organizations in Sweden and the Reproduction of Gender Regimes”

Jess Goldstein-Kral
“The Relationship Dynamics of Polyamorous Triads: Resisting and Reproducing Inequality”

Jamie O’Quinn
“Emerging Sexualities: Girls’ Sexual Agency and the State”

Katie K. Rogers
“Gender, Race, and Class in the U.S. Legal Cannabis Industry”

Kara Takasaki
“Racialized Masculinities: How Work Shapes the Lives of Asian American Men”

All told, the feminist scholarship and engagement of graduate students, alumni, and faculty affiliated with UT Austin Sociology helped make this year’s SWS conference an event to remember.

Jamie O’Quinn is a second-year doctoral student in the Department of Sociology. Her research interests center around sexuality, gender, race and ethnicity, and social inequality. She is currently researching state efforts to regulate young people’s sexualities.

Katie K. Rogers is a third-year doctoral student in the Department of Sociology at the University of Texas at Austin. Her current research examines how women who work in the U.S. legal cannabis industry reconfigure the meanings of “dealers” and “users” during legalization.

Ethnography, Gender and Sexuality, Latin American Studies, Sociology of Gender

Gloria González-López in Ms. Magazine

January 31, 2018 Katie K. Rogers Leave a comment

Gloria González-López, Professor of Sociology at the University of Texas at Austin, has published a piece in which she asks what the #MeToo movement can do for survivors of sexual violence in intimate spaces, such as the family. In the piece, she draws on research from her recent book Family Secrets: Stories of Incest and Sexual Violence in Mexico (2015, NYU Press) to articulate a vision for dismantling gender inequality and sexual violence within the family.

She writes:

What does it mean that uncles are the most frequent perpetrators of sexual abuse? Hollywood moguls aren’t the only ones who feel entitled to girls’ and women’s bodies—men in familial settings sadly often do as well.

One of the most important feminist revolutions has to take place at home. How could the #MeToo movement prompt a reckoning in our most secretive, intimate sector?

Sexual violence against girls and women in the context of family life is deeply rooted in gender inequality. The women who shared their lives with me were socially trained to serve the men in their families—in the most extreme case, an eight-year-old girl was cleaning, sweeping and mopping the room of an uncle in his forties. In these family patterns of gendered servitude, men who are expected to be served by the girls and women in the family may feel entitled to be sexually served by them as well.

Angela Stroud on Race, Gender, and Concealed Carry

November 7, 2016 Katie K. Rogers Leave a comment

by Katie Kaufman Rogers

This October, the UT Austin Department of Sociology and Fem(me) Sem welcomed sociologist Angela Stroud for a public talk and discussion with graduate students about her new book, Good Guys with Guns: The Appeal and Consequences of Concealed Carry. Dr. Stroud completed her PhD in sociology at UT Austin in 2012 and is now an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Social Justice at Northland College in Wisconsin.

Dr. Stroud opened her presentation with graphs showing rates of American gun ownership. Despite an overall decrease in gun ownership since 1970 (rates have fallen by nearly 20%), the Obama Era has seen a sudden proliferation of concealed handgun licenses. In 2007, she said, 4.5 million Americans held such licenses. But since, more than 6 million additional licenses have been administered, bringing today’s total to a staggering 11 million. But why? To better understand the explosion of firearm sales and spread of concealed carry legislation, Dr. Stroud sought to uncover what motivates Americans to attain permits and buy guns.

SOURCE: University of North Carolina Press

During the talk, Dr. Stroud shared insights from her fieldwork in gun licensing courses, as well as excerpts from the in-depth interviews she conducted with gun permit holders. The title of the book plays on an old maxim in pro-gun discourse (“only a good guy with a gun can stop a bad guy with a gun”), but as Dr. Stroud explained, it also highlights a key finding: the cultural relevance of the “good guy” trope. She unpacked the construction of the “good guy” identity, arguing that its conflation with whiteness and hegemonic masculinity helps explain the appeal of concealed carry as a symbolic practice for men. She drew on elements of critical whiteness theory and Raewyn Connell’s theory of hegemonic masculinity to analyze participants’ narratives about the protection they perceive guns to offer.

Ultimately, she found that cultural definitions of “good” gun owners rely on a classed and racialized dichotomy of masculinities. Respondents saw themselves as “good guys” who earned the right to own guns through training and civic service, as opposed to to “bad guys,” whose gun ownership threatened the safety of “good” families and communities. Dr. Stroud argued that this binary paints white men as responsible heroes while casting Black and Latino men as dangerous criminals. Additionally, the trope displaces deviant whiteness onto working-class men (whom her participants dismissed as uneducated “Bubbas”). She also touched on how geographical space is invoked in “good guy” discourse, pointing to respondents’ racialized conceptualizations of sites like the highway, the ghetto, and the home.

Dr. Stroud’s work has a particular resonance within the context of the University of Texas at Austin. Texas’ new campus carry legislation, which took effect this past August, gives students and faculty members the right to carry concealed handguns in university buildings such as classrooms and dormitories. The law has added fuel to an already blazing national controversy about guns. It has also galvanized the UT community, sparking petitions, protests, resignations, lawsuits, several faculty op-eds, and a slew of cancellations from scheduled visitors ranging from famous musicians to guest lecturers.

Good Guys with Guns critically intervenes in gun control debates by illuminating an understudied facet of American gun culture: How gun owners understand the necessity of guns is tied to how they see themselves and their place in the world. Dr. Stroud’s talk added an important voice to the campus conversation about concealed carry, showing how both pro- and anti-gun advocates misunderstand the deeper issues of race, class, and gender that shape how Americans understand guns.

Good Guys with Guns is available through the University of North Carolina Press. You can follow Dr. Angela Stroud on Twitter at @astroud.

Katie Kaufman Rogers is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology. Her research focuses on the areas of gender, race, and sexuality. You can follow her on Twitter at @katiearog.

Austin, Current Events, Gender and Sexuality, History and Society, Sociology of Gender, University of Texas at Austin Sociology

On Jane Ward’s “NOT GAY”

March 9, 2016 sgbuggs Leave a comment

On February 25th, the Department of Sociology and the Center for Women’s and Gender Studies had the pleasure of hosting Professor Jane Ward for a public job talk on her most recent book, Not Gay: Sex Between Straight Men (New York University Press, 2015). The talk entitled “NOT GAY: The Homosexual Ingredient in the Making of Straight White Men,” traced the historical relationship between same-sex behaviors and practices and the construction of (white) masculinity, particularly addressing arguments around the increasingly more common phenomenon of “heteroflexibility.”

Her entire talk is available on YouTube via the Center for Women’s and Gender Studies:

As evidenced by the packed room (with undergraduate and graduate students spilling out the door!), Dr. Ward’s work has inspired a lot of excitement, thoughtfulness, and reflection. Additionally, Dr. Ward shared some of the reactions to her work, with critiques (surprisingly) mainly being directed at her by self-identified gay men. Overall, the talk and subsequent discussion were a useful and important intervention in how to think about white “heterosexual” masculinities and what implications and/or possibilities might exist for men of color’s sexual identities.

UT Austin SOC

Category Archives: Sociology of Gender

Spring 2019 Speaker Series “Critical Criminology: Feminist Approaches to Crime, Law, and Deviance”

Meet Our New NSF Awardees!

Katie Kaufman Rogers

Samantha Simon

What is some advice you would give students who are applying to NSF in the future?

Ilya Slavinski

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What is some advice you would give students who are applying to NSF in the future?

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