Sociology

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Start date: 2010Subject: search.filters.subject.Gender studies

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    Mothers as Agents of Social Change in the Movement Against Sexual Violence
    (2023) Drotning, Kelsey J.; Cohen, Philip N; Sociology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    My dissertation examines how the #MeToo movement is changing generational understandings of sexual violence. Through this research, I examine how sexual violence is both a cause and a consequence of systemic gender and race inequality. Using eighteen in-depth semi-structured interviews of mothers with at least one child aged five-years or older, I investigate three sets of questions. First, how are mothers evaluating their own experiences with sexual violence post #MeToo movement? Second, how is sexual violence part of mother-child conversations about sexual behavior? Third, how do mothers; social location contribute to how they feel about the #MeToo movement and how they teach their children about sexual violence? My findings suggest mothers are transmitting new understandings of sexual violence to their children. Specifically, mothers are teaching their children that appropriate touch, sexual or nonsexual, cannot be determined using a binary yes or no standard of consent. Their approach to sex education is driven by their own experiences with sex that was violating and/or nonconsensual and consideration of their own and their children's social location. Overall, my findings demonstrate the #MeToo movement and other associated events have ushered in a change in mothers' rape consciousness which is facilitating change in children's sex education. If successful, mothers will have contributed to decreased prevalence of sexual violence as these children age into adolescence and adulthood.
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    Sex Cam Modeling: Labor, Intimacy, and Prosumer Porn
    (2021) Patella-Rey, PJ; Ritzer, George; Korzeniewicz, Patricio; Sociology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    This dissertation begins with the assumption that the porn industry has radically changed in ways we are yet to fully understand. Drawing on interviews and auto-ethnography, it attempts to offer three distinct theoretical lenses through which these changes can be observed. First, I examine what is bought and sold in cam rooms, concluding that the work of cam modeling (both on camera and behind the scenes) has many dimensions that are not captured by reductionist tropes about selling one’s body. Second, I argue that camming fits a broader pattern in online content, where clear divisions between producer and consumer begin to break down. I conclude that camming (and especially custom content/shows) can best understood as prosumer pornography (i.e., as a co-creation of model and viewer). Finally, I explore the ways in which sex cam models actively develop intimacy with clients in spite of the fact that the interactions are defined by social and spatial distance; technological mediation; asymmetry; gendered expectations; and commercial transaction.
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    Inequality in the College-to-Career Transition: Self-Scarring and Underemployment
    (2020) Dernberger, Brittany Noel; Kleykamp, Meredith; Sociology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    A recent college graduate working as a coffee shop barista, earning minimum wage and carrying thousands of dollars in student loan debt, is a familiar trope in conversations about the value of a bachelor’s degree. In the college-for-all era, young people are encouraged to attain a bachelor’s degree to bolster their labor market opportunities (Rosenbaum 2001), yet 42 percent of recent college graduates, and 35 percent of all college graduates, are working in jobs that do not require a college degree (Federal Reserve Bank of New York 2020). The American Dream posits that individual perseverance will lead to increased economic security. Young people invest in college as a pathway to a good job. Why does a degree not equally benefit all graduates, and how do graduates respond when their college investment does not pay off? I employ restricted-access Monitoring the Future panel data (1976 – 2015) and interviews with 60 recent college graduates to examine how college graduates transition from school-to-work, and how they respond when it does not go as planned. I contribute to studies of underemployment scarring by extending the context from workplace consequences to individual decision-making, unpacking how and why young people make choices related to their post-graduation employment outcomes. By examining how graduates engage as students and connecting that to post-college employment outcomes, I illustrate how graduates self-scar by making choices that diminish their ability to quickly translate their degree into a good job along three dimensions: 1) not engaging in outside-the-classroom activities during college, which are critical for career exposure and career-relevant skill-building; 2) downshifting job expectations in response to underemployment; and 3) making labor market choices that elongate underemployment. However, graduates’ decisions are not made in a vacuum, and preexisting inequalities – in economic resources, first generation student status, and social and cultural capital – are often perpetuated in the wake of underemployment. Graduates often blame themselves for their lack of labor market success. This project illuminates how inequality is replicated during the college-to-career transition through graduates’ self-scarring decisions and contributes to our understanding of who can achieve economic mobility through returns on a college education.
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    The Jezebel Speaks: Black Women's Erotic Labor in the Digital Age
    (2019) Brown, Melissa; Ray, Rashawn; Sociology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    According to contemporary scholars of sex work in the digital age, information and communication technologies (ICTs) provide sex workers various affordances. Some of these affordances include new ways of business or marketing; greater security; more autonomy; and better wages. Much of this scholarship centers young white women working in specific fields of sex work that cater to young white men clientele. Thus, several questions remain about the affordances and constraints of the internet for sex workers of color. Affordances refer to the functional and relational aspects of objects that create possibilities for human agency through interaction with them. In this present study I use existing theories of the mobile internet and Black feminist thought to intervene into the sociology of sex work and the internet to show how Black women sex workers negotiate controlling images of Black women's sexuality on the social networking application Instagram. This study seeks to address the following broad research questions with respect to embodiment and labor: 1) In what ways, if any, do controlling images of Black women’s sexuality emerge online? 2) How do power dynamics within the matrix of domination shape racial-sexual hierarchies of worthiness and desirability online? And finally, 3) What sexual politics, if any, do Black women exotic dancers use on social networking sites to negotiate controlling images? To answer these questions, I use a mixed methods approach to examine the affordances of digital technology for Black women sex workers. First, I used GIS mapping software to visualize the locations of where Black women exotic dancers based in the Memphis, Atlanta, and D.C. metropolitan areas perform. Second, I distributed an online survey among this group of women to create an exploratory profile. Finally, I conducted a content analysis to explore the erotic labor of Black women sex workers as a form of racial-sexual and gendered embodiment and performance of sexuality. My findings indicate Black women exotic dancers use social networking sites (SNS) and the mobile internet to leverage racialized erotic capital into various entrepreneurial pursuits and forms of self-eroticism beyond exotic dance. Nevertheless, controlling images of Black women’s sexuality popular within the discourse of contemporary rap music shape expectations around their erotic labor. As a result, the innovation of social networking sites on the mobile internet has done little to reshape the racially and economically marginalized landscape of strip clubs wherein Black women exotic dancers perform.
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    Penalties and Premiums: Clarifying Perceptions of Parents in the Professional Workplace
    (2014) Denny, Kathleen; Milkie, Melissa A; Sociology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Parental status inequality is pervasive in American workplaces. Mothers' wage penalties and fathers' wage premiums are well-documented, with much academic and policy interest invested in explaining why we observe these disparate earnings patterns. Employer discrimination and biased perceptions of parents are likely, although not easily researchable, culprits. In this dissertation, I contribute to the ongoing effort to explain parental status inequality at work by examining how parents are perceived and evaluated in the context of the professional workplace, beyond differences by gender alone. I advance the literature by assessing how perceptions of mothers and fathers vary based on three dimensions: a) their level of involvement with children; b) their race/ethnicity; and c) characteristics of the perceivers. Data come from three sources: two parallel experimental vignette studies in which nationally representative samples of employed adults rated a fictitious job applicant, one male and one female, who varied on parenthood status (non-parent, nominal parent, less involved parent, highly involved parent) and race/ethnicity (white, African-American, Latino, Asian), as well as a semi-structured interview study of 15 employers in the professional sector. Together, results from these studies expound upon our existing knowledge of workplace parental penalties and premiums, yielding three major findings: 1) Fathers received an involvement premium as highly involved fathers, but not mothers, were offered higher salaries than their childless and less involved counterparts; 2) The documented perceptual penalty leveled at mothers in the workplace was most acutely directed at white mothers, whereas Asian mothers, by contrast, were perceived most favorably among women; and 3) Mothers may suffer from an interpersonal penalty in the workplace as employers observed that their childless employees perceive parent coworkers with resentment and as being unfairly advantaged. Together, these results bring the cultural terrain of parental status inequality into sharper relief. Following a discussion of the dialectical relationship between culture and policy for reducing parental status inequality at work, I conclude by calling for a reconceptualization of the ideal worker norm based on evidence of a cultural shift underway in how parenthood, namely fatherhood, is interpreted in the workplace.
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    IMPROVING SURVEY MEASUREMENT QUESTIONS FOR SEXUAL MINORITIES AND THE TRANS POPULATION: TOWARD AN UNDERSTANDING OF THE SOCIALLY CONSTRUCTED NATURE OF THE TRANS LIFE COURSE
    (2013) Ryan, John Michael; Milkie, Melissa; Moghadam, Linda; Sociology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Sexual minorities are a hidden population who are difficult for social researchers to analyze well. One specific group of sexual minorities, the transgender population, and how they understand their sometimes changing identities, may be especially complex to study. Not only is this sometimes a hidden population, but they may only identify as transgender at certain points in the life course, preferring other identity categories at different life stages and in different circumstances. I use the shortened term "trans" to refer to all members of what the hegemonic gendered order would consider gender non-conforming. Using the overarching sociological concepts of social constructionism and classification and drawing on a life course perspective, this dissertation explores how the self-identity of members of the trans community might shift across the life course. The goal then is to better understand trans identity awareness and developments across the life course in order to make better sense of existing survey data as well as to improve future questions related to trans identity. Analysis for this dissertation drew upon data collected from 139 in-depth cognitive interviews in both English and Spanish from a project related to testing a new sexual identity question for the National Health Interview Survey conducted by the Questionnaire Design Research Laboratory at the National Center for Health Statistics to explore how survey wording affects what researchers know, or think they know, about sexual identity distribution, particularly as it relates to trans identity. It also drew upon data collected from 10 in-depth qualitative interviews done with members of the trans community in order to explore how an understanding of the trans life course enables us to make better sense of the ways in which this group identifies on official surveys. A sociological approach, one particularly embedded in social constructionism, was used to address the improvement of a survey research question.
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    Do Economics Trump Culture? Effects of Women's Work and Relative Economic Resources on Married Women's Authority in Household Decisionmaking in Jordan
    (2013) Temsah, Gheda Khodr; Desai, Sonalde; Sociology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    The effects of work on women's household decisionmaking authority have been documented in many empirical studies. However, few studies have explored its effects in a social context where women's labor force participation is low. Little is known about the conditions through which women's work enhances authority within the household. Using 2007 Jordan Demographic and Health Survey I explore the effects of women's work and relative economic resources on their authority in household decisionmaking net of culturally relevant sources of power. The country has enhanced its human capital base, developed new industries and promoted women's work, but it also remains a bastion of traditional gender norms. Drawing on resource theory, gender performance theories, theories of institutionalized patriarchy and bargaining approaches, I argue that women's work and relative economic resources matter more for some dimensions of household decisionmaking than others. Engagement in the labor market confers exclusive control over matters of personal wellbeing, while enhancing women's leverage to participate in family management decisions. However, only women in nuclear households experience the benefits of productive work on authority in household decisionmaking. Results confirm the multidimensionality of household decisionmaking power, and a possible causal effect of work participation. While individual factors matter, regardless of women's economic resources and other characteristics, living in regions with high socio-economic development and less patriarchal norms is associated with greater decisionmaking authority. The results of this research contribute to our understanding of women's empowerment by empirically demonstrating the conditions under which economic resources may trump cultural scripts, when cultural factors may matter more, and when the two interact.