Gender and Sexuality Commons^™

Student Perceptions Of The Impact Of Faculty Race And Gender On Their Sense Of Connectedness, Engagement, And Persistence, Sherrie Y. Fuller

Dissertations

This quantitative study examined how faculty demographic characteristics, specifically race and gender, influence undergraduate students’ perceptions of connectedness, engagement, and persistence at a public Midwestern university. Guided by Tinto’s Model of Student Integration (1975, 1993, 2012), the research explored whether perceived alignment between student and faculty identities contributes to students’ sense of belonging and motivation to persist toward degree completion. Data were collected from 100 undergraduate participants representing diverse racial, gender, and academic backgrounds. Participants completed a researcher-developed survey instrument utilizing a four-point Likert scale to measure connectedness, engagement, and persistence.

Producing A Map Of Political Advocacy – Locational Difference And Interconnectedness In West Michigan Lgbt Advocacy, Samuel J. Darnell

Masters Theses

This study examines, through a qualitative lens, the influence of a local environment upon the operations, messaging, and perspectives of individuals within LGBT advocacy organizations and broader LGBT advocacy efforts. This was achieved via analysis of in-person and verbal interviews with individuals involved in the operation of these advocacy organizations. Interviews were analyzed with a focus on political perception, organization structure and history, funding sources, and challenges faced in operation such as political conflicts or harassment. Initially focusing on a comparison of the advocacy environment of Kalamazoo and Grand Rapids, the study expanded to several neighboring towns that hosted advocacy …

The Rose That Grew From Concrete: Exploring The Romantic Experiences Of Black Men With Histories Of Childhood Sexual Abuse, Tatyana Nichelle Smith

Dissertations

Contemporary research typically characterizes Black heterosexual relationships by dismal marriage and divorce rates, largely ignoring the reality of how Black men develop attachments with their romantic partners and therefore continuing to perpetuate deficit perspectives of Black men (e.g., the cause of conflictual romantic relationships and “broken” Black families). What may be less understood about these relationships is the influence of childhood trauma, such as childhood sexual abuse, and Black men’s experiences of gender role conflict. Research shows that Black men’s experiences of childhood sexual abuse and socialization about masculinity have important implications for how they come to view themselves and …

The Ebony Edge: A Qualitative Exploration Of Math Success Among Black College Women, April Ruiz

Dissertations

Historically, women have been underrepresented as leaders in STEM. However, according to the National Science Foundation (2022), women accounted for a little more than half of the college-educated workforce and underrepresented minority women increased in broad science and engineering occupational categories. This promising upturn underscores the importance—if progress is to continue—of better understanding why some African American women succeed in and persist with their study of college mathematics.

This study aimed to explore the experiences of Black college women attending a predominantly White institution in the Midwest, to better understand what reasons Black college women ascribe to their success in …

Mothering, Leadership, And Career: A Narrative Analysis, Joanne Susan Roehm

Dissertations

In March 2020, much of the world was “sent home” from work and periods of lockdown began. In West Michigan, Friday, March 13 was the day that most workplaces closed their doors and employees began working from home for what was assumed to be a period of weeks. In the spring of 2020 between March and April, some million mothers living with school-age children left active work—either shifting into paid or unpaid leave, losing their job, or exiting the labor market all together.

The stories of mothers who experienced the “balancing act” of mothering and working at home during the …

The Role Of Hope In The Lives Of Sexual And Gender Minority Youth: The Relationship Between Bullying And Life Satisfaction, Jedediah E. Bragg, Daniel Howell, Shane R. Brady

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

Among sexual and gender minority students, 70% are bullied at school every year in the United States (2019). This study utilized a random 6% sample (n = 400) from the 2018 Washington State Healthy Youth Survey (n = 32,271), to assess the relationships between sexuality, bullying and life satisfaction, and then how hope moderates this established relationship. Results of this study illustrate the negative effects of bullying on life satisfaction for all students, while highlighting differences across sexuality. Additionally, this study illustrates that interventions to address the impacts of bullying might be best served by including the positive construct of …

A Descriptive Account Of The Practicum Experiences Of Trans And Nonbinary Social Work Students, Jama Shelton, Sj Dodd, Jamie Borgan, Gabriel San Emeterio, Ana Rikki Wilhelm

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

Current anti-transgender legislative activity necessitates social workers take action in solidarity with transgender and nonbinary (TNB) individuals and communities. Pervasive discrimination and marginalization of TNB people across multiple public domains, including education, is irrefutable (James et al, 2016). Social work education is no exception. Not only is there a documented lack of affirming educational and practicum opportunities for TNB social work students (Austin et al., 2016), social work students also report being ill-prepared to practice with TNB individuals and communities (Craig et al., 2015). Social workers are ethically obligated by their professional identification to demonstrate competency related to service provision …

Committed To The Cause? Examining Social Work Education's Role In Supporting Ally Behavior For Transgender And Nonbinary People And Communities, Brittanie Atteberry-Ash, N. Eugene Walls, Brendon T. Holloway, Jayme Dooley

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

Transgender and nonbinary (TNB) youth and adults are under attack in the United States, with at least 300 state-level anti-transgender bills introduced thus far in 2022 (HRC, 2022). Social workers, guided by professional values and ethics, play a critical role in supporting and advocating for TNB youth and adults, clinically and through mezzo and macro approaches. Given the current political context and the goals of the social work profession, understanding correlates of ally behavior on behalf of TNB people among social work students can help guide improvements in social work education. Specifically, in this study, we examine how demographic differences, …

“An Institution Can Have Good Intentions And Still Be Atrocious": Transgender And Gender Expansive Experiences In Social Work Education, M. Killian Kinney, Darren Cosgrove, Tayon R. Swafford, Richard A. Brandon-Friedman

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

Educational settings have been found to be challenging arenas for transgender and gender expansive (TGE) youth and young adults due to misgendering, lack of affirming bathrooms, systemic exclusion (e.g., legal names and lack of inclusive gender identity demographic options), and frequent silence or avoidance related to TGE issues. Though studies of TGE adult experiences in higher education are emerging, most explore disaffirming experiences. Social work education focuses on diversity, equity, and inclusion, along with how to promote social justice, which suggests more affirming environments for TGE individuals. However, little is known about the experiences of TGE students and even less …

Anti-Transgender Policies And Practices In Social Work Education, Accreditation, And Licensing: A Call For Change, Darren L. Whitfield, Liam Westgate, Rachel E. Gartner, Leah A. Jacobs, Brittanie Atteberry-Ash

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

The social work profession is guided by the values of social justice and the dignity and worth of the person. The National Association of Social Workers (NASW) Code of Ethics requires that all social workers act in a professional manner consistent with these values. These values mandate that social workers “challenge social injustice on behalf of and in concert with vulnerable and oppressed individuals and groups.” Yet, historically, and contemporarily, the social work profession and national professional organizations (i.e., NASW, the Council on Social Work Education (CSWE), Associate of Social Work Boards (ASWB), Society for Social Work and Research (SSWR), …

An Introduction To The Special Issue, Megan S. Paceley, Candace Christensen

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

No abstract provided.

Transphobia In Class, Anti-Trans Legislation At The State: A Commentary On Navigating Harm And Hope In A Social Work Education Program, Emera Greenwood, Megan S. Paceley

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

EG (they/them): I was misgendered on day one of my BSW program; isolation and transphobia continued for two years. While I did my best to advocate for myself, I learned that you can't fight institutionally entrenched oppression alone.

MP (they/them): EG joined my class mid-semester after repeated incidents of transphobia. For two years, during an onslaught of anti-trans policies across the U.S., we advocated for changes in our school and social work education.

EG’s experience is not unique. Numerous studies document transphobia experienced by transgender and gender expansive (TGE) social work students and the lack of TGE content, visibility, and …

Between The Noise And Silence: An Autoethnography Challenging Schools Of Social Work To Evolve For Trans Students, Isaac M. Akapnitis, G. Trey Jenkins, Natasha S. Mendoza

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

Social work programs have been largely silent in the face of legislative at- tacks on transgender/nonbinary (TGNB or “trans”) communities across the U.S., which signals to TGNB students that they may not be supported in their respective programs. Consequently, TGNB students, staff, and faculty shoulder the burden to advocate for change within social work academic institutions and to speak out about violence perpetrated against TGNB communities. Using our voices as two trans doctoral students and a queer cisgender associate professor, we employed collaborative and critical autoethnography to share insights about the impact of this burden on TGNB social work students …

Volume 50, Issue 1 (2023)

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

No abstract provided.

Teaching Beyond Trans-Competency: Exploring Trans-Affirming Pedagogy Through Applied Case Studies, Sam Harrell, Sarah Mountz, Hazel (Bobbi) Ali Zaman

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

In this paper, we share two applied case studies social work instructors can use to teach trans-affirming, anti-oppressive practice. These cases span two practice arenas, child welfare and low-barrier shelter services, and are derived from practice in the authors’ personal and professional experiences in the Northeastern and Midwestern regions of the United States. For each case, we describe the accompanying class context, share our pedagogical approach, name the underlying assumptions and structures that facilitate harm, explore relevant practice skills, and identify theoretical, philosophical, and ethical commitments essential for trans-affirming practice. Our approach to social work education on transgender and gender …

"We're All We Have": Envisioning The Future Of Mutual Aid From Queer And Trans Perspectives, Brendon T. Holloway, C. Riley Hostetter, Karaya Morris, Jax Kynn, Maximillion Kilby

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

Mutual aid has prevailed for as long as humans have existed. However, the concept of mutual aid became popularized in 2020 as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, the racial uprisings in response to the continued police brutality toward Black people, and an increase in global climate crises. Mutual aid spread as a way of survival and collective care when formal systems, such as federal and local governments within the U.S., were failing to meet people's needs. Using a subset of data from semi-structured interviews, the current study relied on a desire-based research framework and foresight lens to capture the …

Applications Of Transformative Justice Principles For Centering Transgender And Gender Expansive Experiences In Social Work Education And Practice, E. Bickford, Angela Matijczak, Aaron Kemmerer, Florence Martinez, M. Alex Wagaman

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

Social work education has traditionally used frameworks, such as cultural competency, to guide implicit and explicit curricula that shape how we think about communities that live and thrive outside of white supremacist and cis/heteronormative norms and values. While the cultural competency framework intends to promote a level of consciousness and attention that is required to practice with diverse individuals, families, and communities whose identities differ from that of the social worker, it instead inadvertently creates a knowledge base that reinforces harmful power dynamics between social worker and client/community. The cultural competency framework is absent of historical and structural context and …

Suicide At The Intersection Of Race And Gender, Marina Geider

Masters Theses

Sociological studies have examined suicide rate differences between groups since the work of Durkheim in 1897, and current literature still draws on his classic theories and methods. Although research has begun identifying the social factors that affect the suicides of Black and White populations differentially, little progress has been made towards an understanding of Black female suicide. The present study takes an intersectional approach to Durkheim's social integration-regulation thesis to bridge this gap. Several negative binomial regression analyses were employed to model suicide counts for Black men, Black women, non-Hispanic White men, and non-Hispanic White women in the United States. …

What We Say Matters: Exploring The Importance Of Microaggression Language For Lgbtq+ Science Major Undergraduate Students, Madison L. Fitzgerald-Russell

Dissertations

The purpose of this exploratory qualitative study is to better understand the climate for LGBTQ+ science major undergraduates in their departments through a transformative queer theory lens and intersectionality. Prior research on campus and STEM department climates have demonstrated inclusion issues continue to persist for LGBTQ+ individuals in higher education. One of these issues is discrimination in the form of microaggressions. Microaggressions against LGBTQ+ individuals have been demonstrated to cause physical, mental, and academic harm. In the literature, there is limited information on how microaggressions impact students in particular STEM fields.

LGBTQ+ science undergraduates from public colleges and universities in …

The Influence Of Integrated Behavioral Health Primary Care Setting On The Utilization Of Mental Health Services And Depression Treatment Response Among Men, Tendai Masiriri

Dissertations

The 2010-2013 National Health Interview Survey showed that nearly 9% of men had daily feelings of anxiety or depression, yet less than 41% sought help for their symptoms (Blumberg et al., 2016). Men are more reluctant than women to seek help (Angst et al., 2002; Brownhill et al., 2005). The failure to seek help among men is associated with multiple factors related to stigma and gender, yet male suicide rates are approximately 3-5 times higher than their female counterparts. However, they have a higher likelihood of seeking help from a medical provider rather than a mental health provider. If men …

Punishment By Another Name? The Welfare State’S Disciplinary Role In The United States And Britain, Kavya Padmanabhan

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

Scholarship on the changing nature of the welfare state in both the United States and in Britain has revealed how the influence of neoliberal ideologies has heightened the experience of punishment for poor mothers. Through a comparative literature review on the welfare states in the United States and in Britain, this article builds upon prior research to consider how the welfare state’s contemporary focus on discipline may be the product of neo- liberalism and may encourage similarities across different contexts. Furthermore, this article considers how the welfare state’s different agencies may be united in their goals and treatment of poor …

Centering Trans-Gender Experiences Of Marginalization, Precarity, And Representation: Developing A Theory Of Trans-Precarity, Christine E. Strayer

Dissertations

The LGBTQ+ community is commonly perceived as homogenous, affluent, and inclusive. Despite these perceptions, there is substantial evidence to suggest that trans* people, particularly those of color, experience greater levels of marginalization and precarity than gay, lesbian, and bisexual people. The purpose of this phenomenological study is to develop an understanding of how trans* people experience and navigate various forms of marginalization, precarity, and distorted public representation by implementing an intersectional framework and a transfeminist methodology. Semi-structured interviews were used to document the experiences of 34 trans* participants, ranging in age from 20-55 years. Constructed grounded theory analysis was used …

Compassion For Self-Identity: An Evaluation Of A Compassion-Based Intervention For Stigmatized Sexual Identities, Du T. Nguyen

Dissertations

Sexual minority persons often experience notable negative mental and physical health disparities when compared to their heterosexual counterparts. According to the minority stress framework, it is posited that these discrepancies are due to additional, group-specific stressors that they experience beyond stress felt by the general population. One such minority stress variable that has received considerable attention is sexual stigma. Not only has sexual stigmatization been found to be related to negative mental and physical health outcomes, it has also previously been found to hinder adaptive emotion regulation.

Due to the minority stress felt by sexual minority persons, there is a …

Politically And Historically Bound: Examining Whiteness And Intersectionality Among Self-Identified Feminists, Olivia M. Mclaughlin

Dissertations

This dissertation examined the perspectives and beliefs of 23 self-identified feminists who are White. Specifically, it explored whether—and if so, to what extent—Whites have adopted intersectionality. Intersectional feminism refers to the activism and scholarship that recognizes the multi-dimensional nature of power and privilege and stands in contrast to the white-centered feminism that has dominated most feminist spaces since the suffrage movement. Since Kimberlé Crenshaw’s seminal article where the concept of intersectionality was formally introduced to the academy, feminist scholars have characterized the most recent wave of feminism as the intersectional wave. This third, intersectional wave of feminist movement is believed …

Medical Cannabis And Recreational Marijuana: Patient Perceptions, Stigma, And Gender During A Time Of Emerging Legalization, Matt Reid

Dissertations

Marijuana’s status as an illegal drug has been redefined over the previous three decades. Despite Michigan and 32 other states having comprehensive medical cannabis programs, both academics and laypeople commonly present the medicalization of marijuana as an intermediary phase or proxy for fully legalized recreational use. While some evidence exists to support this position, this framework marginalizes the struggles and experiences of patients who have found relief through their therapeutic use of cannabis. As such, the goal of this study is to re-center the voices of cannabis patients in academic conversations of cannabis as medicine.

My study is unique in …

Cisgender Fragility, Zachariah Graydon Oaster

Masters Theses

Cisgender people in the United States are socialized in an environment that shields them from gender-identity-based stress. Like the construct of white fragility (DiAngelo, 2011), cisgender persons exhibit defensive behavior in response to encountering any gender-identity-based discomfort. Once triggered, defensive acts and false claims are deployed in an attempt to return to a state of comfort and normalcy. The stress that cisgender persons feel, and the defensive actions that they take upon encountering such gender-identity-based discomfort is what I refer to herein as Cisgender Fragility.

This theoretical construct of Cisgender Fragility is nuanced through intersectional synthesis of queer and race …

Gender, Social Networks, And Microenterprise: Differences In Network Effects On Business Performance, Seon Mi Kim

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

This article aims to find if female micro-entrepreneurs have different social networks that affect their business performance from males. This article uses the longitudinal Panel Study of Entrepreneurial Dynamic (PSED) II data set (2005-2011) in the U.S. The key finding is that even in cases where female micro-entrepreneurs gained the same number of weak ties and resources from their networks as their male counterparts, their weak ties and gained resources did not help them to improve their business performance unlike their male counterparts. Implications for Microenterprise Development Programs and future studies are informed.

School Shootings: A Nexus Of Adolescent Masculinity, Bullying, And Homophobia, Jack Marsden

Honors Theses

Though overall gun violence has plummeted since 1993, multi-victim school shootings have increased in frequency over the last fifty years and the number of adolescent perpetrators has more than doubled since 1996. I borrow from Kimmel and Mahler’s (2001) format to examine seven shootings that have occurred in the fifteen years since their paper’s original publication. I replicate their qualitative methodology and conduct my own analysis of these attacks. My findings suggest that these boys that open fire are mired in a history of routine, merciless bullying and that the content of the bullying is homophobic in nature. I also …

How Friendships Between Heterosexual And Sexual Minority Counseling Psychology Doctoral Students Affect Anti-Heterosexist Identity Development, Amber L. Sylvan

Dissertations

As the field of counseling psychology strives to embrace diversity and social justice issues, sexual minority issues have flourished into an active area of study among scholars and an area of focus for LGBT-affirming practitioners. One area of emphasis has been on how heterosexual people develop Anti-Heterosexist Identities. Some studies have noted the importance of friendship as it relates to Anti-Heterosexist Identity Development (Asta & Vacha- Haase, 2012; Duhigg, Rostosky, & Gray, 2010; DiStefano et al., 2000; Gelberg & Chojnacki, 1995; Larson, 2012), however, no known studies have more deeply explored the role of crosssexuality friendships. The purpose of this …

Race And Sexual Orientation Lssues In Graduate Classrooms: How Faculty In Psychology Experience Them Emerging Alongside One Another, Raymond L. Sheets Jr.

Dissertations

The inclusion of sexual orientation and race-related issues into mainstream psychology has gained much needed momentum in recent years. The field of counseling psychology, in particular, has helped fuel this momentum with its appreciation for, and commitment to, developing academic and applied psychologists who attend to an evolving multicultural society. Within the academic environment, faculty members have the responsibility of facilitating student learning in their respective classrooms; this facilitation becomes challenging in the face of emotionally charged topics such as race and sexual orientation. How then do graduate faculty who teach these courses experience race and sexual orientation comingling within …