Category: Gender & Sexuality

Gender & Sexuality / Political & Economic Sociology / Social Movements / Social Change / Sociology of Organizations & Work

Men and Global Gender Justice

The Huffington Post recently ran an article by Juliana Carlson, Assistant Professor of Social Welfare at the University of Kansas and member of the Mobilizing Men in Violence Prevention research collaboration, on the topic of men’s global engagement in the prevention of violence against women and girls.  She argues that “men and boys have been largely relegated to the sidelines of violence preventions efforts” but that a growing movement “aims to create structural change by engaging boys and men in...

Gender & Sexuality

How men use, abuse, and misunderstand Sexual Capital

  A couple of weeks ago I was listening to Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee discuss the recent political sex scandal in the UK where Lord Rennard – a Liberal Democrat peer and senior party grandee (picture above) – was accused of sexual harassment and inappropriate ‘groping’ of junior party members. Although cleared of criminal charges, the saga rolls on as the women still maintain their accusations of sexual impropriety against Rennard, which he denies and refuses to apologise for, and...

Gender & Sexuality / Sociology of Law, Crime and Deviance / Sociology of Media & Communication

The Rapist's Voice

  **Warning: This posting contains content some readers may find disturbing. Recently, a student told me about a 2012 Reddit thread where a Reddit user invited rapists to tell their stories and the motives behind their sexual assault(s).  Although the posts and all comments connected to the post were eventually deleted, the thread sparked heated debates not only on Reddit but on Jezebel and in the Huffington Post. And despite the site’s attempt to remove the content of the thread,...

Gender & Sexuality / Opinion

"I'll have the extreme creampie MILF, please.": What can PornHub's research teach us about sex?

The pornography search engine PornHub, for reasons I can assume only they know, appear to have become sociologists. Using the collected data they have from their search engine that provides access to many free pornography sites, they have started a blog called ‘PornHub Insights’. This offers exactly what the name suggests – research and analysis directly from the ‘Pornhub team’, offering insights based on their data as to the numbers of viewers they have, how long they watch, and from...

Gender & Sexuality / Sociology of Law, Crime and Deviance / Sociology of Organizations & Work

The U.S. Military’s Sexual Assault Problem

The United States Senate failed to pass a bill that would have altered the military’s response to sexual assault.  The bill, sponsored by Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) would have stripped senior military commanders of their authority to prosecute or prevent charges for alleged rapes and other serious offenses in favor of giving the authority to military trial lawyers operating under a newly established office independent of the chain of command.  The vote fell 5 votes short of the 60 necessary to...

Gender & Sexuality

Shifting Hegemonic Masculinity? Gay Male Athletes and Discourses of Masculinity

The NBA has its first openly gay player in Jason Collins, and the NFL will follow soon, as former college player Michael Sam is expected to join a team this summer. This might indicate that we are seeing a radical shift in society’s stereotypes about gay men. At the same time, it remains to be seen, as Dave Zirin asks at The Nation whether gay male athletes like Sam can help shift our definitions of masculinity more broadly or whether...

Gender & Sexuality / Opinion

Gender and the Quest to Close Unauthorized Health Clinics in Cameroon

  A recent segment on NPR’s Morning Edition commented on the government of Cameroon’s recent campaign to shut down unauthorized health clinics throughout the country.  In recent years hundreds of illegal clinics have opened across the nation, treating individuals who cannot access public health care for financial or geographic reasons. The short radio piece attempted to present contrasting voices.  The operator of an unauthorized clinic and the medical director of a major hospital in Douala each presented their side of...

Gender & Sexuality / Sociology of Culture / Teaching & Learning Guide

"Normative" Marriage in the Fourth Grade Classroom

When I picked my friend’s nine year old daughter up from school last week the first thing she said to me was, “We had to do something really weird in class today.  The teacher paired all the girls with a boy and we had to be a married couple.” It turns out the teacher was having her students work on writing dialogue and since it was right before Valentine’s Day she thought it would be cute for them to write...

Gender & Sexuality / Sociology of Culture

Valentine's Day and the (sociological) Power of Love

In case you were the only person who didn’t realise, last Friday was Valentine’s Day. I hate Valentine’s. Its ever increasing prevalence, its cloying, creeping appearance that infiltrates perfectly normal looking things and makes them red or pink, and the way the world suddenly becomes full of people perpetually and disgustingly in love, or stressed, or miserable and alone, or a combination of all three. If I sound bitter, please know it is definitely intentional. I am bitter, but not...

Feminist Theory / Gender & Sexuality / Social Movements / Social Change

What Comes After Woman?: gender identity and the women's movement

Last year, as I completed my fieldwork, I was unexpectedly reminded of the continuing contention around gender identity. Interviewing dozens of people involved in social movement actions around austerity and economic inequality, I anticipated that there would be some emotional responses, moments of hesitation, perhaps even discomfort around some of my inquiries. I did not expect to elicit these reactions during the demographics section of the interviews. Yet, about a third of the time, when I asked the respondent to...

Gender & Sexuality

The elusive gay male soccer player in Germany – Homophobia and Solidarity

In 2013, NBA player Jason Collins made headlines when he became the first active openly gay male* athlete in one of the major 4 men’s team sports in the US. A similar story made headlines this winter in Germany, when recently retired soccer player Thomas Hitzlsperger – who formerly played in the German Bundesliga, Italian Serie A and English Premier League as well as for the German national team – came out as gay in an interview with the newspaper...

Feminist Theory / Gender & Sexuality / Opinion

Lesbians watching gay porn: fluid sexuality or a second wave hangover?

This post was borne out of a recent discussion with a good friend of mine, Harriet, who is a self-identified lesbian. (I include the phrase self-identified here deliberately: I realise her propensity to prefer the company and sex of woman does not categorise her as a lesbian, but it is a term she very comfortably uses herself). She was talking about going to a sex party, and I, in what I perceived to be ignorance, asked her what her interest...

Gender & Sexuality / Sociology of Law, Crime and Deviance

Do Guns Make Women's Lives Safer?

One of our readers responded to my previous article on the construction of rapists vs normal men in the media and the related issue of how to best respond to popular assertion that guns could play an effective role in women’s self-defense against rape. While agreeing with my overall analysis, she is looking for argumentative tools of how to counter ‘pro gun for self-defense against rape’ style arguments. Her question comes down to this: “The ‘change the society’ rhetoric makes...

Gender & Sexuality / Race & Ethnicity Studies / Sociology of Culture

Fatherhood and Black Fatherhood

You may have noticed that a photo of a Black man doing his daughter’s hair was plastered all over Facebook and Twitter newsfeeds last month. That man, Doyin Richards, runs a blog, Daddy Doin’ Work, about his experiences raising his two daughters. But, unlike most of the posts from his blog, this photo went viral. When the photo appeared all over social media, it was paired with a quote from his blog. “I have a dream that people will view...

Feminist Theory / Gender & Sexuality

Teaching Gender and Feminism as a Male-Identified Instructor

My colleague Cliff Leek elsewhere has recently talked about the tension, struggles and challenges of being an ally. Those of us located on the ‘privilege’ side of different axes of inequality and oppression (like race, class and gender) face the challenge of how to become (and stay) active and effective allies without reinforcing the very inequalities we are trying to fight, and trying to speak truth to power without claiming to speak for the movements we are aligned with. As...

Books and arts / Gender & Sexuality

Book Review: Dominatrix: Gender, Eroticism, and Control in the Dungeon

While recently working on a project that examines the representation of BDSM in popular culture, I ran across Danielle J. Lindemann’s new book Dominatrix: Gender, Eroticism, and Control in the Dungeon.  Studies of erotic labor are not uncommon in sociological literature.  The increase in published research on professional erotic dominance illustrates how scholars of gender have turned to dominatrix/client relationships to understand, contest, and complicate erotic hierarchies.  Lindemann expands beyond previous scholarship by suggesting that studies of professional dominatrices are...