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Introduction
Sexual identity and fluidity among college age students
Gender and social movements
Current institution
Publications
Publications (103)
The term “identity politics” refers to activism engaged in by status‐based social movements organized around such categories as gender, race/ethnicity, and sexuality, in contrast to class‐based movements. The term also applies to any mobilization related to politics, culture, and identity. It is sometimes used in a derogatory manner to criticize mo...
Abeyance depicts a holding pattern in which a social movement manages to sustain itself and mount a challenge to authorities in a hostile political and cultural environment, thereby providing continuity from one stage of mobilization to another. Abeyance carries with it the connotation of movement decline, failure, and demobilization relative to pe...
Feminist movements, in the broadest sense, are collective efforts to improve the situation of women, and they have emerged in most parts of the world, beginning in the mid‐nineteenth century and continuing into the present. Most contemporary feminist movements are intersectional, linking gender to racial/ethnic, class, and other categories of diffe...
Health social movements are collective campaigns to bring about change in medical and public health policy, beliefs, research, and practice. In American society, social movements attempt to influence healthcare at many levels. At the macro level, movements historically have mobilized a range of interest groups and moral and political values both to...
The sociological study of gender and social movements is relatively new. Until the 1970s, scholarship on social movements largely neglected questions of feminism and gender, and the fields of gender and social movements consisted of separate literatures. As a result, the major theories of social movements failed to take into account the impact of g...
This chapter reviews research on the cultural consequences of social movements, addressing two questions: (1) What kinds of cultural outcomes have been documented in social movement scholarship? and (2) What circumstances allow movements to bring about cultural change? The analysis relies on a conception of culture that parses it into three cultura...
This chapter analyzes the significance of gender conflict and feminist mobilization for the emergence and dynamics of the Occupy Wall Street movement that began in 2011. The analysis is based on participant observation, in-depth interviews with seventy-three participants, and movement documents. The chapter shows that gender conflict influenced the...
Research on lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) movements has accelerated in recent years. We take stock of this literature with a focus on the United States. Our review adopts a historical approach, surveying findings on three protest cycles: gay liberation and lesbian feminism, queer activism, and marriage equality. Existing scholarshi...
Social movement scholars use the concept of tactical repertoires of contention to refer to the actions and strategies used by collective actors to persuade or coerce authorities to support their claims. The notion of repertoires of contention grows out of the work of Charles Tilly, who introduced the concept to explain historical variations in form...
Drag queens and drag kings are men, women, and transgender people who perform femininity, masculinity, or something in between. Different styles of drag, across the United States and around the world, call attention to the performativity of gender and play a part in community building for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people. Drag queens...
Drag queens and drag kings have received a great deal of attention for their roles in the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community and movement. Their sexual and gender identities vary but most are gay men, lesbians, or transgender people who perform identities on the stage, which both depict and defy conventional binary gender and...
Sociologist Verta Taylor and historian Leila Rupp, who wed in 2008 after 30 years together, complicate the debate between queer critics and supporters of same-sex marriage over the consequences of marriage equality. Sociologist and gender studies scholar Suzanna Walters explores how the framework of tolerance?and the marriage mania that depends on...
Verta Taylor, Katrina Kimport, Nella Van Dyke, and Ellen Andersen draw on interviews and a random survey of couples who married in San Francisco in 2004 to examine the impact of marriage equality activism on activists themselves. They show that the lesbian and gay couples who participated in this event viewed their weddings as intentional contentio...
The college hookup scene is a profoundly gendered and heteronormative sexual field. Yet the party and bar scene that gives rise to hookups also fosters the practice of women kissing other women in public, generally to the enjoyment of male onlookers, and sometimes facilitates threesomes involving same-sex sexual behavior between women. In this arti...
This article focuses on lesbian and gay couples and families and the politics of same-sex marriage. Drawing from the literature on same-sex couples, same-sex marriage, and queer theory’s concept of heteronormativity, we argue that gay and lesbian couples and families both affirm and challenge heterosexual and gendered family forms. First, we review...
Health social movements are collective campaigns to bring about change in medical and public health policy, beliefs, research, and practice. In American society, social movements attempt to influence healthcare at many levels. At the macro level, movements historically have mobilized a range of interest groups and moral and political values both to...
Abeyance depicts a holding pattern in which a social movement manages to sustain itself and mount a challenge to authorities in a hostile political and cultural environment, thereby providing continuity from one stage of mobilization to another. Abeyance carries with it the connotation of movement decline, failure, and demobilization relative to pe...
Feminist movements, in the broadest sense, are collective efforts to improve the situation of women, and they have emerged in most parts of the world, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century and continuing into the present. Feminism has also influenced other social movements, such as the peace, environmental, global justice, reproductive rights, an...
As the fight for same-sex marriage rages across the United States and lesbian and gay couples rush to marriage license counters, the goal of marriage is still fiercely questioned within the LGBT movement. Rarely has an objective so central to a social movement’s political agenda been so controversial within the movement itself. While antigay forces...
This article examines the role that women’s cultures and communities have played in political protest and social change. We argue that women’s cultures, which form around the reproductive roles, labor, and emotional expectations placed on women, have been used to express femininity and as cultural resources or “toolkits” to transform male-dominated...
This article analyzes the benefits and ethical dilemmas of going back and continuing to write about the troupe of drag queens
featured in our book, Drag Queens at the 801 Cabaret. The benefits include providing the drag queens the opportunity to revise and add to the stories we told about them and,
through deepening friendships, changing the balanc...
The phenomenon of presumably straight girls kissing and making out with other girls at college parties and at bars is everywhere in contemporary popular culture, from Katy Perry's hit song, “I Kissed a Girl,” to a Tyra Banks online poll on attitudes toward girls who kiss girls in bars, to AskMen.com's “Top 10: Chick Kissing Scenes.” Why do girls wh...
In this article, we use case studies of two different drag performance collectives, the 801 Girls, a drag queen troupe in Key West, Florida, and the Disposable Boy Toys, a political feminist collective in Santa Barbara, California, to explore the differences between drag queens and drag kings. We argue that, despite their divergent routes to perfor...
Editors Note: In 2007, The Center for the Study of Social Movements at the University of Notre Dame began sponsorship of an annual award named for its first recipient, John McCarthy. The John D. McCarthy Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Scholarship of Social Movements and Collective Action has subsequently been presented to Verta Taylor (2008)...
Taylor and Leitz trace processes of collective identity construction and politicization among women suffering from postpartum psychiatric illness who have been convicted of infanticide. Joining a growing body of research suggesting that self‐help and consumer health movements can be a significant force for change in both the cultural and political...
Social movement scholars have long been skeptical of culture’s impact on political change, perhaps for good reason, since there is little empirical research that explicitly addresses this question. This article fills this void in the literature by taking as its case in point the dynamics and the impact of the month-long 2004 same-sex wedding protes...
Social movement scholars use the concept of tactical repertoires of contention to refer to the strategies used by collective actors to persuade or coerce authorities to support their claims. The tactical repertoires of social movements include conventional strategies of political persuasion such as lobbying, voting, and petitioning; confrontational...
Drag queens and drag kings are men, women, and transgendered people who perform femininity, masculinity, or something in between. Drag in various forms can be found in almost all parts of the world, and increasingly a transnational drag culture is evolving. Traditionally, drag queens have been gay men who cross‐dress and lip‐synch to recorded music...
Drag queens can teach us a lot about sexual desire—especially our own.
Among students of social movements, the prevailing view is that, in Western democracies, most social movements target the state and its institutions. Recently scholars have questioned this definition of social movements, associated with the political process and contentious politics approaches, arguing that public protest is also used to shape publ...
This paper presents a theoretical definition of protest that overcomes the bifurcation of politics and culture in mainstream social movement research. The model is grounded in a study of drag performances, which have a long history in same-sex communities as vehicles for expressing gay identity, creating and maintaining solidarity, and staging poli...
Analyses of the women's movement that focus on its "waves" and theories of social movements that focus on contentious politics have encouraged the view that the women's movement is in decline. Employing alternative perspectives on social movements, we show that the women's movement continues to thrive. This is evidenced by organizational maintenanc...
We tell here our all-too-unusual story of living and working together, reflecting on both the obstacles and the forces that made it possible for us to find each other, stay together, and develop a collaborative working relationship. Despite experiencing various forms of discrimination, we have been able over the years to contribute to the creation...
One of the burning questions about drag queens among both scholars and audiences is whether they are more gender-revolutionaries than gender-conservatives. Do they primarily destabilize gender and sexual categories by making visible the social basis of femininity and masculinity, heterosexuality and homosexuality? Or are they more apt to reinforce...
What motivates a lifelong scholarly pursuit, and how do one’s studies inform life outside the academy? Sociologists, who live in families but also study families, who go to work but also study work, who participate in communities but also try to understand communities, have an especially intimate relation to their research. Growing up poor, struggl...
Journal of Women's History 14.2 (2002) 83-87
In 1983, when we interviewed Pauli Murray for our book, Survival in the Doldrums: The American Women's Rights Movement, 1945 to the 1960s, we had no idea that Pauli Murray might be a lesbian. We were interested in her because she was one of the key women who linked pre-National Organization for Women act...
Research on the collective identities of social movement participants points to the strong convictions that underlie activism. A great deal of mobilization work involves channeling, transforming, legitimating, and managing emotions. In this article we use the concept of emotion culture, drawn from social constructionist approaches to emotions, to u...
The abstract for this document is available on CSA Illumina.To view the Abstract, click the Abstract button above the document title.
Popular authors and scholars of lights describe the 1980s and 1990s as a post-feminist era of political apathy during which former feminist traded their political ideals for career mobility in cell phones and younger Women single-mindedly pursued career goals and viewed feminism as an anachronism. Yet this was not the first time that commentator’s...
L'A. decrit de quelle maniere l'identite feministe s'est constituee au 20 e siecle. Il qualifie le mouvement feministe de mouvement international. Il estime que l'identite collective des feministes se manifeste, d'une part, au travers d'un sentiment d'appartenance a une meme organisation, a un meme mouvement et, d'autre part, au travers de solidari...
Mainstream theory and research in the field of social movements and political sociology has, by and large, ignored the influence of gender on social protest. A growing body of feminist research demonstrates that gender is an explanatory factor in the emergence, nature, and outcomes of all social movements, even those that do not evoke the language...
Feminist social scientists have developed distinctive principles of inquiry that depart from the positivist ideal of the detached, value-free scientist and are consistent with the feminist goal of rendering women's experiences visible and challenging gender inequality. In this article, I show how my research on the postpartum depression self-help m...
In the first book to analyze shifts in lesbian identity, consciousness, and culture from the 1970s to the 1990s, Arlene Stein contributes an important chapter to the study of the women's movement and offers a revealing portrait of the exchange between a radical generation of feminists and its successors. Tracing the evolution of the lesbian movemen...
Introduction: The Feminism in Women's Self-Help. The Cradle Falls: Postpartum Illness and the Contradictions of Motherhood. Seize the day: The Emergence of a Self-Help Movement. Getting and Giving Support: Women's Self-Help Communities. The Metamorphosis of Feminism in Women's Self-Help: Collective Identity in the Postpartum Support Group Movement....
Recent research reveals that the mobilization, leadership patterns, and strategies of social movements are organized by gender in previously unrecognized ways. Scholars have had less to say about the consequences of social movements for the reconstruction of gender relations in American society. Using data from two women's self-help movements, we o...
This paper argues that identity politics is a form of high-risk activism. We draw from collective identity approaches to social movements to describe how the Sociologists’ Lesbian and Gay Caucus has used identity-based organizing, assimilationist politics, and personalized political strategies during the past two decades to challenge stigmatized re...
The standard sociological approaches to women's mental health have tended to attribute women's higher rates of mental illness either to the objective structural conditions of gender inequality or the sexist treatment of women by psychiatry and the mostly male medical establishment. This paper draws from Thoits' self-labeling theory that conceptuali...
The abstract for this document is available on CSA Illumina.To view the Abstract, click the Abstract button above the document title.
This article uses social movement and organization theory to develop a set of concepts that help explain social movement continuity. The theory is grounded in new data on women's rights activism from 1945 to the 1960s that challenge the traditional view that the American women's movement died after the suffrage victory in 1920 and was reborn in the...
Research is not important because it finds that certain things are so, that the evidence supports commonly held views, but rather because it establishes that certain things are not so, are different from what is widely believed, and advances new ways of looking at problems. Much of the research into disasters by social and behavioral scientists has...
In 1975, DRC was funded by the Health Resources Administration to undertake the first major, systematic and comparative study on the delivery of EMS in disasters. In the pages that follow, we summarize the resulting 28- month study. In the first chapter, we present background on the historical development of EMS in this country and indicate the cur...
In this paper we first briefly indicate the need and value of doing cross-cultural research on disasters and detail something about the nature of the studies so far undertaken, implying thereby some of their limitations. The second half of the paper elaborates a framework which might be used to systematize cross-cultural studies of disasters, sugge...
The Disaster Research Center (DRC) at The Ohio State University is conducting a systematic and comparative study of the delivery of emergency medical services (EMS) in large-scale and relatively sudden mass casualty producing situations in the United States. The objective of the research is to establish the nature and parameters of the conditions f...
Voluntary general hospitals may be viewed as emergency organizations in that the emergency treatment of the sick and injured is a part of their normal operations. The typical emergency patient most often becomes an input into the organization through the emergency facility of the hospital (Stallings, 1970). While under ordinary conditions an emerge...
The Disaster Research Center (DRC), founded in 1963 at the Ohio State University, has been concerned throughout its history with conducting sociological research studies on the response of groups and organizations to commnunity-wide emergencies, especially natural disasters. Well over three hundred field studies have been conducted by DRC personnel...
Prior to the last decade, there was very little involvement by federal, state and local governmental agencies as regulators or providers of emergency medical care on a day-to-day basis and even less interest in developing and improving plans to provide emergency medical services (EMS) in disaster contexts. However, a change began in 1966 with the N...
Early in the morning of May 27, 1973 a series of three tornadoes struck Jonesboro, Arkansas causing three deaths and extensive property damage. A two- person field team from the Disaster Research Center (DRC) arrived in the community the next afternoon and began observing community attempts at coordination and recovery. Relevant organizational offi...
