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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Moving Beyond The Gender Binary: A Critical Analysis And Review Of Contemporary Scholarship On Nonbinary Gender Identities, Rie Harding
Masters Theses
For decades gender scholars have recognized the importance of gender to subjectivity, lived experiences, and life chances. Nonbinary gender identities are becoming more recognized by social, legal, and government institutions. However, currently there is a lack of research and scholarship that focuses on nonbinary gender identities. I demonstrate that the sociology of gender must move beyond the constraints of the hegemonic gender binary system in order to have a full and holistic conceptualization of gender. This paper reviews and critically analyzes contemporary interdisciplinary scholarship on nonbinary gender identities, then sets out a research agenda for moving forward. Within this scholarship …
Trans Women And Reproductive (In)Justice - How Race, Class, And Gender Shape Experiences Of Family Formation And Parenthood, Derek Siegel
Trans Women And Reproductive (In)Justice - How Race, Class, And Gender Shape Experiences Of Family Formation And Parenthood, Derek Siegel
Data and Datasets
The following support document includes demographic data from my dissertation research, disaggregated to preserve the anonymity of respondents. It also includes two separate interview schedules for semi-structured interviews I conducted with trans women who were either currently parents (the first guide) or who want to be parents in the future (the second guide). My dissertation examines how race, class, and gender shape trans women’s parenting journeys. Trans women, and particularly trans women of color, experience high levels of discrimination across the contexts of employment, healthcare, and the legal system, yet remain virtually absent from contemporary research on family and parenting …
By The Numbers: How Academic Capitalism Shapes Graduate Student Experiences Of Work And Training In Material Sciences, Timothy Sacco
By The Numbers: How Academic Capitalism Shapes Graduate Student Experiences Of Work And Training In Material Sciences, Timothy Sacco
Doctoral Dissertations
The neoliberal reorganization of higher education has reshaped the research and education missions of university science. Much of the scholarship examining this shift focuses on faculty experiences. This dissertation centers the experiences of student scientists to explore: (1) how entrepreneurial universities manage marginal academic knowledge workers, including students, through processes that shift responsibility onto individual workers; (2) how universities use mechanisms like internships and Individual Development Plans to shift educational responsibilities onto students; and (3) how performances of masculinity in commercial spaces of university science contribute to durable gender inequalities among students under academic capitalism. Longitudinal qualitative methods were employed …
Homophily, Gender-Typed Behavior, And Cultural Contexts In Adolescent Friendship Segregation, Chen-Shuo Hong
Homophily, Gender-Typed Behavior, And Cultural Contexts In Adolescent Friendship Segregation, Chen-Shuo Hong
Masters Theses
It is well-documented that adolescents tend to befriend those who share demographic characteristics like gender. Less clear is how culture connects to these homogeneous relationships. This study examines the effects of gender-typed behavior on adolescent friendships at dyadic and school levels. The friendship network data are drawn from the well-known wave 1 ‘saturation school’ component of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health. I show that adolescents tend to befriend those who share similar gender-typed behavior, above and beyond simple demographic affiliation. Also, when students in particular schools exhibit more heterogeneous gender-typed behavior, the expression of gender-typed behavior …
The Voice Of The Other: The Influence Of Capitalism On The Representation Of Gender And Race In Western Classical Music, Marie Comuzzo
The Voice Of The Other: The Influence Of Capitalism On The Representation Of Gender And Race In Western Classical Music, Marie Comuzzo
Masters Theses
This thesis argues that in order to understand the non-representation of women and BIPOC in the Western musical canon, the analysis of their cultural musical production and reception must start in early modern period, a time heavily influenced by the establishment of capitalism. Intertwining political feminist studies, critical race theory and musicology critique, I argue that the witch hunts and the inhumane colonial practices in Africa and the America (fundamental to establish capitalism as a global system), had an important role in shaping Western musical culture as homogeneous and monolithic. Thus, I first trace the change in female customs in …
Family Dimensions Of Unequal College Experiences: Students’ Talk Of Self And College In Relation To Family Resources And Relationships, Michael Carl Ide
Family Dimensions Of Unequal College Experiences: Students’ Talk Of Self And College In Relation To Family Resources And Relationships, Michael Carl Ide
Doctoral Dissertations
The “college experience” is normatively presented as enacting independence, often while financially relying on parents. This view normalizes white, middle-class models of college and family. The three interrelated papers comprising this dissertation investigate race, class, and gender differences and inequalities at college through the lens of students’ talk of family. These inductive, qualitative studies draw on semi-structured intensive interviews with undergraduates to explore divergent ways they make sense of college, family, and their self-development. Analyses highlight the multifaceted, and sometimes contradictory meanings participants attach to themes commonly presented as simple and objective (i.e. “paying for college,” “independence,” and “adulthood”). Findings …
Criminalizing Childhood: The Politics Of Violence At Delhi's Urban Margins, Ragini Saira Malhotra
Criminalizing Childhood: The Politics Of Violence At Delhi's Urban Margins, Ragini Saira Malhotra
Doctoral Dissertations
The intensification of neoliberal economic reforms and new patterns of middle-class consumption in India have coincided with rising levels of urban inequality and poverty. Yet India’s capital, Delhi, positions itself as a “world-class city,” invoking neoliberal state aspirations to justify widespread violence against communities living and working in state-contested spaces. While much has been written about the reproduction of urban inequality and poverty in India, this body of scholarship under-emphasizes mechanisms of social control and violence, specifically, criminalization by the state.
To understand these dynamics, children’s experiences are particularly important given their age-based potential and vulnerabilities. To give visibility to …
Reproductive Journeys: Indo-Caribbean Women Challenging Gendered Norms, Tannuja Rozario
Reproductive Journeys: Indo-Caribbean Women Challenging Gendered Norms, Tannuja Rozario
Masters Theses
Little is known about the factors that influence people from the Caribbean to seek reproductive health services in the United States. In this paper, I focus on Indo-Caribbean women from Guyana and Trinidad who undertake reproductive journeys to New York. I ask: (1) What influences Indo-Caribbean women to begin their reproductive journeys to Richmond Hill, New York? (2) How do Indo-Caribbean women challenge gender norms during their reproductive journeys? (3) How does women’s class inform their decision making in challenging gendered norms? After conducting 30 in-depth interviews with Indo-Caribbean women from Guyana and Trinidad who seek reproductive health services in …
Queering Kinship: Lgbtq Parents And The Creation Of Real Utopias, Laura V. Heston
Queering Kinship: Lgbtq Parents And The Creation Of Real Utopias, Laura V. Heston
Doctoral Dissertations
Parenting in queer families calls into question some of our most fundamental assumptions: that parents are biologically related to their children, that only women give birth, that all fathers are men, that families push away friendships and communities based in anything other than “blood” ties, and that parenting is life-long. In this dissertation, presented through five in-depth family case studies and a series of analytic chapters based on fifty semi-structured interviews with LGBTQ adults in families with children I discuss gay sperm donors, gestational fathers, non-binary foster parents, transwomen dads, queer adopters of kids from queer birth parents, trans step-dads, …
Motherhood Wage Penalty Across Life Course And Cohorts, Misun Lim
Motherhood Wage Penalty Across Life Course And Cohorts, Misun Lim
Doctoral Dissertations
This dissertation explores the connections between changing family structures and economic inequalities in the United States. While previous research shows that motherhood lowers women’s earnings, few studies explore how wage penalties for motherhood change over women’s lives. Moreover, most research examines only the baby boomer cohort; consequentially, little is known about how millennials experience this wage penalty and how such burdens of motherhood have changed across cohorts. This study investigates whether and how the motherhood wage penalty changes both across women’s life course and cohorts with these questions: (1) Does the motherhood penalty change over women’s lives? (2) What are …
Complicating Gender: Gender Inequality In Education And Employment, Skylar Davidson
Complicating Gender: Gender Inequality In Education And Employment, Skylar Davidson
Doctoral Dissertations
Sociologists have always acknowledged the complexity of gender, but despite acknowledging this complexity, much sociological research does not put this knowledge into practice; indeed, a great deal of research focuses on distinctions between men and women with regard to some other variable, reinforcing a narrow and binary understanding of gender. This tendency has two limitations: (1) it does not recognize the variability in men's and women's expression of masculinity and femininity; and (2) it does not recognize gender identities other than those of cisgender man and cisgender woman (i.e., transgender people). This study mitigates this limitation through telling a story …
Mothering In A Era Of Choice: Race And Gender In Schooling Decisions Of Homeschool And Public School Families, Mahala Stewart
Mothering In A Era Of Choice: Race And Gender In Schooling Decisions Of Homeschool And Public School Families, Mahala Stewart
Doctoral Dissertations
My dissertation draws from in-depth interview data to compare the schooling choices of 95 mothers living in United States. The sample is split between white and black mothers. Within each racial group, one set teaches their children at home and a second set sends them to public schools. School choice, which places the responsibility of selection on individual families, is central to current U.S. education debates. Yet homeschooling, an option that transfers labor from schools to home, is often overlooked in these debates. To date no research has compared homeschoolers to other schooling families in the same region, or examined …
Apostles Of Abstinence, Katherine Castiello Jones
Apostles Of Abstinence, Katherine Castiello Jones
Doctoral Dissertations
My dissertation examines three organizations that promote premarital sexual abstinence. These three organizations broadly mirror different strands within the New Right: an evangelical Christian abstinence ministry called Purity Ring Posse, Revolutionary Romance, an elite group of conservatives on an Ivy-League campus, and Stand Up! a group at a Mormon university that seeks to “burst the bubble” and facilitate outreach between pro-family organizations and students. Drawing on participant observation, interviews, and content analysis, my dissertation demonstrates how each group attempts to promote a unique version of abstinence that can be successfully mobilized in the public square. Purity Ring Posse articulates “ …
Immigration And Within-Group Wage Inequality: How Queuing, Competition, And Care Outsourcing Exacerbate And Erode Earnings Inequalities, Eiko H. Strader
Immigration And Within-Group Wage Inequality: How Queuing, Competition, And Care Outsourcing Exacerbate And Erode Earnings Inequalities, Eiko H. Strader
Doctoral Dissertations
The rhetoric against immigration in the United States mostly focuses on the economic threat to low-educated native-born men using a singular labor market competition lens. In contrast to this trend, this dissertation builds on a large body of previous work on job queuing and ethnic competition, as well as insights gained from the studies on female labor force participation and the outsourcing of care work. By exploring regional differences in the wage effects of immigration across 100 metropolitan areas between 1980 and 2007, I argue that immigration is an intersectionally dynamic localized source of wage inequality and equality. The first …
Distributing Condoms And "Hope": Race, Sex, And Science In Youth Sexual Health Promotion, Chris A. Barcelos
Distributing Condoms And "Hope": Race, Sex, And Science In Youth Sexual Health Promotion, Chris A. Barcelos
Doctoral Dissertations
This project uses discursive, visual, and ethnographic approaches situated in a critical feminist methodology to understand how ways of knowing about youth sexuality and reproduction influence community health work. I understand the “problem” in this inquiry as the discursive contexts that limit critical ways of knowing about young people’s sexual subjectivities and practices and about the design of policies and programs. Although race, class, gender, and sexuality are understood in the public health literature as important social determinants of health, there is a lack of research that applies a critical, feminist lens to these constructs. I draw on three years …
A Mixed Methods Analysis Of The Intersections Of Gender, Race, And Migration In The High-Tech Workforce, Sharla N. Alegria
A Mixed Methods Analysis Of The Intersections Of Gender, Race, And Migration In The High-Tech Workforce, Sharla N. Alegria
Doctoral Dissertations
Despite public policy initiatives and private sector investment to recruit more women, women’s participation in high-tech work has decreased since 1990. I use interviews with tech workers and nationally representative quantitative workforce data from the American Community Survey to examine the consequences of race, gender, and immigration for tech workers’ experiences and wages. While previous research shows a decrease in the proportion of women in tech work, these conclusions are somewhat misleading as they do not consider the intersections of race and migration with gender. I find only modest change in the absolute numbers of women. Rather, as the field …
The Shifting Structure Of Chicago's Organized Crime Network And The Women It Left Behind, Christina Smith
The Shifting Structure Of Chicago's Organized Crime Network And The Women It Left Behind, Christina Smith
Doctoral Dissertations
Women are underrepresented in crime and criminal economies compared to men. However, research on the gender gap in crime tends to not employ relational methods and theories, even though crime is often relational. In the predominantly male world of Chicago organized crime at the turn of the twentieth century existed a dynamic gender gap. Combining social network analysis and historical research methods to examine the case of organized crime in Chicago, I uncover a group of women who made up a substantial portion of the Chicago organized crime network from 1900 to 1919. Before Prohibition, women of organized crime operated …
Bringing The Household Back In: Family Wage Gaps And The Intersection Of Gender, Race, And Class In The Household Context., Melissa J. Hodges
Bringing The Household Back In: Family Wage Gaps And The Intersection Of Gender, Race, And Class In The Household Context., Melissa J. Hodges
Doctoral Dissertations
Using the 1980- 2008 waves of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY), this dissertation examines how parenthood exacerbates gender wage inequality within married, heterosexual households and across families stratified by race and social class. The majority of research on motherhood penalties and fatherhood premiums investigates how individual men and women’s earnings change after the arrival of children, yet it is unclear how parental bonuses and penalties accrue within coupled households. Although studies investigating child effects on individuals’ wages draw on theoretical explanations that rely on the joint decision-making of couples, empirical analysis rarely situates the effects of children on …
A "Greedy" Institution With Great Job Benefits: Family Structure And Gender Variation In Commitment To Military Employment, Karen M. Brummond
A "Greedy" Institution With Great Job Benefits: Family Structure And Gender Variation In Commitment To Military Employment, Karen M. Brummond
Masters Theses
Scholars describe both the military and the family as “greedy institutions,” or institutions that require expansive time and energy commitments, and alter participants’ master status (Segal 1986; Coser 1974). However, the military’s employment benefits may counteract its greedy elements. I use data from the 2008 Survey of Active Duty Members to examine commitment to military employment in wartime, accounting for greedy elements of military service (such as geographic mobility, risk of bodily harm, and separations), job benefits, family structure, and gender. The results show that women in dual-service marriages, unmarried men, and those who experienced separations reported lower career commitment …
Navigating Paid Work And Parenthood: New Parents’ Long-Term Employment Pathways In The United States, Irene Boeckmann
Navigating Paid Work And Parenthood: New Parents’ Long-Term Employment Pathways In The United States, Irene Boeckmann
Doctoral Dissertations
Mothers have contributed disproportionately to women’s rising employment rates in the United States, and contemporary fathers spend more time caring for children compared to previous generations of men. Still, parenthood continues to shape women’s and men’s employment participation patterns in profoundly gendered ways. Changes and continuities in aggregate labor market participation patterns raise questions with regard to the variation in mothers’ and fathers’ employment participation, and in the ways in which different-sex couples organize engagement in paid work after they become parents. Using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, this dissertation examine the variation in new parents’ long-term …
Buying Time: Gendered Patterns In Union Contracts, Dan Clawson, Jillian Crocker
Buying Time: Gendered Patterns In Union Contracts, Dan Clawson, Jillian Crocker
Dan Clawson
As products of negotiations, union contracts provide insight into areas of stress concerning work hours and schedules. Our analysis demonstrates the ways workers in two occupations—nurses and firefighters—use collective bargaining to develop workplace policies that enable them to manage jobs and family. The contracts show significant differences between firefighters and nurses over issues of work scheduling, overtime, and vacations. These differences reflect nurses’ concern with putting boundaries on their work lives in favor of caregiving and firefighters’ concern with bread winning. Nurse contracts specify scheduling rules in detail, heavily restrict mandatory overtime, and outline guidelines for distributing prime time vacations. …
Parental Leave Usage By Fathers And Mothers At An American University, Jennifer H. Lundquist, Joya Misra, Kerryann O'Meara
Parental Leave Usage By Fathers And Mothers At An American University, Jennifer H. Lundquist, Joya Misra, Kerryann O'Meara
Dr. Jennifer H. Lundquist
While many U.S. research universities now offer gender neutral family friendly policies, very few are what might be considered “father friendly.” Campus cultures rarely encourage men to access these policies, or do so reluctantly because some campus actors believe men will use parental leave time for their research instead of for childcare. We employ quantitative and qualitative data to compare the parental leave experiences of men and women faculty at a large research university. In doing so, we assess whether the allegation that men take unfair advantage parental leave is true at a large research university. We find that it …
Resisting Schools, Reproducing Families: Gender And The Politics Of Homeschooling, Brian Paul Kapitulik
Resisting Schools, Reproducing Families: Gender And The Politics Of Homeschooling, Brian Paul Kapitulik
Open Access Dissertations
The contemporary homeschooling movement sits at the intersection of several important social trends: widespread concern about the effectiveness and safety of public schools, feminist challenges to the patriarchal family structure, anxiety about the state of the family as an institution, and challenging economic conditions. The central concern of this dissertation is to make sense of homeschooling within this broader context. Data were gathered through interviews with forty-five homeschooling parents, approximately half of whom are religious and half of whom are secular. The interviews were organized around three central questions: 1) What are the frames that parents use to justify homeschooling? …
Gender, Work Time, And Care Responsibilities Among Faculty, Joya Misra, Jennifer H. Lundquist
Gender, Work Time, And Care Responsibilities Among Faculty, Joya Misra, Jennifer H. Lundquist
Dr. Jennifer H. Lundquist
This study explores how faculty at one research-intensive university spend their time on research, teaching, mentoring, and service, as well as housework, childcare, care for elders, and other long-term care. Drawing on surveys and focus group interviews with faculty, the article examines how gender is related to time spent on the different components of faculty work, as well as on housework and care. Findings show that many faculty report working more than 60 hours a week, with substantial time on weekends devoted to work. Finding balance between different kinds of work (research, teaching, mentoring, and service) is as difficult as …
Hands On Hips, Smiles On Lips! Gender, Race, And The Performance Of Spirit In Cheerleading, Laura Grindstaff, Emily West
Hands On Hips, Smiles On Lips! Gender, Race, And The Performance Of Spirit In Cheerleading, Laura Grindstaff, Emily West
Emily E. West
Cheerleading has long been synonymous with “spirit” because of its traditional sideline role in supporting school sports programs. In recent decades, however, cheerleading has become more athletic and competitive - even a sport in its own right. This paper is an ethnographic exploration of the emotional dimensions of cheerleading in light of these changes. We argue that spirit is a regulating but also flexible concept that is deployed in order to manage and uphold ideologies of emotion, and that these ideologies are central to how cheerleading reproduces racialized gender difference. On the one hand, the performance guidelines for spirit stabilize …
It’S ‘A Good Thing’: The Commodification Of Femininity, Affluence, And Whiteness In The Martha Stewart Phenomenon, Melissa A Click
It’S ‘A Good Thing’: The Commodification Of Femininity, Affluence, And Whiteness In The Martha Stewart Phenomenon, Melissa A Click
Doctoral Dissertations 1896 - February 2014
This study examines the ideologies of gender, race, and class present in Martha Stewart's unprecedented popularity, beginning with the publication of Stewart's first magazine in 1990 and ending in September 2004, after Stewart's conviction for her involvement in the ImClone scandal. My approach is built on the intersection of American mass communication research, British cultural studies, and feminist theory, and utilizes Hall's Encoding/Decoding model to examine how social, cultural and political discourses circulate in and through a mediated text and how those meanings are interpreted by those who receive them. Drawing from textual and ideological analysis of over thirteen years …
Ethnic And Gender Satisfaction In The Military: The Effect Of A Meritocratic Institution, Jennifer H. Lundquist
Ethnic And Gender Satisfaction In The Military: The Effect Of A Meritocratic Institution, Jennifer H. Lundquist
Dr. Jennifer H. Lundquist
This article reevaluates traditional racial and gender disparities in the work satisfaction literature by examining the U.S. military: an institution that has ameliorated many racial inequalities while exacerbating gender conflict. The military departs from civilian society in some analytically useful ways, making it a unique, though underutilized, setting for examining inequality. Using data from the Pentagon’s 1999 Survey of Active Duty Personnel (SADP), results suggest that black males and females, Latino males and females, and white females all experience greater perceived benefits to military service than do white males along several dimensions of self-assessed job satisfaction and quality of life. …
Cheerleading And The Gendered Politics Of Sport, Laura Grindstaff, Emily West
Cheerleading And The Gendered Politics Of Sport, Laura Grindstaff, Emily West
Emily E. West
Cheerleading occupies a contested space in American culture and a key point of controversy is whether it ought to be considered a sport. Drawing on interviews with college cheerleaders on coed squads as well as five years of fieldwork in various cheerleading sites, this paper examines the debate over cheerleading and sport in terms of its gender politics. The bid for sport status on the part of cheerleaders revolves around the desire for respect more than official recognition by athletic organizations; cheerleaders recognize the prestige associated with sport, a function of its historic association with hegemonic masculinity, and they claim …
An Exploration Of Gender Issues And The Role Of The Outsider In Women's Education Programs In Muslim Communities Case Studies In Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Senegal, And Yemen, Jode Lynne Walp
Master's Capstone Projects
No abstract provided.
The Anthropometry Of Barbie: Unsettling Ideals Of The Feminine Body In Popular Culture., Jacqueline Urla, Alan Swedlund
The Anthropometry Of Barbie: Unsettling Ideals Of The Feminine Body In Popular Culture., Jacqueline Urla, Alan Swedlund
Jacqueline L. Urla
No abstract provided.