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Congratulations 2010 Award Winners!! The Sex and Gender Section sponsors a number of awards for outstanding scholarship. We are pleased to announce the following distinguished contributions to the field. Information about applying for the 2011 is below. Previous years' awards are archived here. THE SALLY HACKER GRADUATE STUDENT PAPER AWARD Catherine J. Turco, “The Cultural Foundations of Tokenism: Evidence from the Leveraged Buyout Industry” The winner of this year’s Sally Hacker award is Catherine J. Turco for her paper “The Cultural Foundations of Tokenism: Evidence from the Leveraged Buyout Industry.” This incredibly well written and convincing paper examines the variation in experiences of different low status minority groups in a single setting, the leveraged buyout industry. In doing so it develops a theory of tokenism that explains why a group’s low status in society cannot account for its low status in a given work place. Drawing on 117 interviews with women and African-American men working in the leveraged buyout industry, Turco argues that tokensim is dependent upon what she calls the “local cultural context” in which this tokenism takes place. Turco’s interviews reveal that the two key components of this local cultural context are an industry’s construction of an ideal worker and the cultural resources that this ideal worker is expected to bring to the job. In examining the leveraged buyout industry she concludes that the industry’s ideal worker is gender-typed male but not race-typed white. As such, Turco finds that the industry values cultural resources that women do not bring to the workplace and that African American men do. Additionally, she convincingly argues that some women do try to fit the image of the model employee, but in doing so they invest the local cultural context that constitutes a hostile work environment to other women, or as she writes, the way in which tokenism “is able to enlist its victims in its own preservation.” Turco’s well documented and strong argument sheds much needed light on the way in which the complex intersections of race and gender are at the heart of processes of tokenism. Catherine Turco’s powerful and well researched paper encourages a new understanding of theories of tokenism while also adding to the literature on the construction of gender in the context of the workplace Catherine J. Turco is a doctoral student in the Department of Sociology at Harvard University. Her email address is cturco@fas.harvard.edu Honorable Mention: Lauren Joseph, “From the Gayborhood to the Small Town: LGBT Pride Organizations and the Mobilization of Resources, Culture and Symbolic Capital” This paper comparatively examines the organizational, social, and cultural production and accomplishment of “Pride” in three U.S. cities of different sizes, politics and social conditions – New York City, Boise, and St. George (Utah). The author draws on over a year and a half of intensive ethnography that included participant observation and archival research with four LGBT Pride organizations in these cities. Joseph is particularly interested in the strategies used by these organizations to grow, generate financial resources, mobilize cultural resources, and institutionalize themselves within their communities. Resource mobilization theories often understand social movement institutionalization as cooptation or demise and define success in material terms, such as financial and structural reproduction. Social movement literature more attuned to cultural and symbolic processes, in contrast, is concerned with frames, symbols, and discourse. Similar to resource mobilization perspectives, critics of LGBT organizations will often condemn them for their distance from “grassroots” concerns, their alliance with corporate interests, and their integration into the “mainstream.” Joseph argues that these approaches underestimate the pressing need and political significance of organizational reproduction and growth, the significance of mainstream integration and building community ties, and the importance of building cultural and symbolic capital for sexual minorities. Lauren Joseph’s paper is an ethnographically rich and insightful analysis of these organizations’ agendas, workings, and impact, as well as the tensions they negotiate in specific settings. Honorable Mention: Erin Cech and Tom Waidzunas, “Navigating the Heteronormativity of Engineering: The Experiences of Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Students” There is a great deal of very interesting and sociologically valuable research that examines self-presentation, challenges, and gender performance of individuals in gendered institutions and occupations. Erin Cech and Tom Waidzunas' paper makes an important contribution to this literature by examining the ways lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LBG) students navigate the hegomonically masculine world of engineering. The authors use the concept of heteronormativity to challenge commonsense assumption of the engineering school as a neutral, "meritocratic" space. Cech and Waidzunas reveal the challenges--the heteronormative climate of engineering and the ways it marginalizes LGB students, the intersections between sexual orientation and other categories; and the strategies used in response to these issues--"passing" for heterosexual or "covering" clues that might suggest LBG identity, compartmentalizing their lives. This study offers a valuable contribution to existing research that focuses on other minorities in majority settings. Cech and Waidzunas effectively highlight the ways that the processes that affect these students are similar to those experienced by women and racial minorities, but also do an excellent job showing how the culture of engineering and LBG identity work to provide a unique experience. This is a well-written, insightful paper that is sure to make a contribution to the literature on engineering, work, gender, & sexuality. Erin Cech and Tom Waidzunas are graduate students in the Department of Sociology at University of California, San Diego. Erin can be reached by email at ecech@ucsd.edu, while Tom can be reached at twaidzun@ucsd.edu. SEX AND GENDER OUTSTANDING ARTICLE AWARD Co-winner: Deeb-Sossa, Natalia and Jennifer Bickham Mendez, “Enforcing Borders in the Nuevo South: Gender and Migration in Williamsburg, Virginia and the research Triangle, North Carolina,” Gender & Society, October 2008. This article, based on several years of ethnographic research in two locations, makes a significant contribution not only to the study of gender, but also to the study of immigration. In addition to being extremely well-written, this is a robust piece of research that seamlessly engages and examines a variety of actors and institutions that function to enforce borders and spatial isolation, particularly for women migrants. Focusing on women’s roles at work, in the home, and in the community, this study offers a nuanced analysis of the dynamics of race and gender among migrants to a region of the U.S. that has been under-studied: the nuevo South and more rural settings. This article is also noteworthy for linking theory and empirical analysis and for drawing out the policy implications of the findings. Co-winner: Schilt, Kristen and Laurel Westbrook, “‘Gender Normals,’ Transgendered People, and the Social Maintenance of Heterosexuality,” Gender & Society, 2009. Taking an innovative methodological approach, Schilt and Westbrook combine two studies, one based on interviews with female-to-male transexuals in the workplace, and the other employing textual analysis of media narratives about the murder of male-to-female transexuals between 1990 and 2005. The article is well written, engaging and presents interesting and important data which theoretically expands upon the notion of “doing gender.” The authors adeptly show the connections between cultural constructions of gender and sexuality and the differences in the ways “gender normal” men and women police boundaries, enforcing heteronormativity in both public and private interactions. THE SEX AND GENDER DISTINGUISHED BOOK AWARD Recipient: Jeanne Flavin for Our Bodies, Our Crimes: The Policing of Women’s Reproduction in America (NYU Press, 2008). Our Bodies, Our Crimes makes its mark at the intersection of several subfields: criminology, deviance, sexuality, reproductive politics, and –foremost among them—gender and motherhood. Flavin advances the subfield of Sex & Gender by demonstrating how an astonishingly diverse group of actors from the criminal justice and penal systems, as well as policy makers and regulators, attempt to solve social problems through reproductive and familial interventions focused on women. She extends our sociological understanding of the human rights framework by demonstrating how support for women’s rights is filtered through a distinctly gendered lens, documenting how social norms about femininity shape reactions to women’s attempts to exert their sexual and reproductive autonomy. By bringing together case studies from too-often separate fields and highlighting the threads that are common to them, Our Bodies, Our Crimes takes seriously the concept of “reproductive justice” that operates in activist circles and gives it theoretical bearing. This commanding approach also allows her to demonstrate how vulnerable women are frequently implicated in interlocking institutions that both reinforce women’s disenfranchisement and fail to coordinate to meet women’s needs. That is, the scope of this book allows us to see how women themselves experience the multiple bureaucracies which they must navigate. In addition to the scholarly contributions of Our Bodies, Our Crimes¸ this book realizes the potential of what great public sociology can be. Flavin writes clearly and compellingly, and the case study approach gives vivid life to her subjects. While the text of the book is accessible and can easily be read by a non-specialist, Our Bodies, Our Crimes also includes seventy pages of notes for those interested in her source material. Flavin also quite literally puts her money where her mouth is: all proceeds from the book are shared with the non-profit National Advocates for Pregnant Women. In short, this book is an excellent ambassador to the world beyond sociology, while furthering the conversation within it. Honorable Mention: C. J. Pascoe for Dude, You’re a Fag: Masculinity and Sexuality in High School (University of California Press, 2007). Dude, You’re a Fag is an insightful ethnography of sexualized and racialized daily practices through which high school students create particular forms of masculinity. A talented fieldworker and interviewer with a knack for hanging out with younger people, Pascoe immersed herself in the complex cultural and social worlds of a large public high school in northern California. She mapped the informal local geography of sexualized and gendered space; for example, a senior government classroom was fairly neutral in meanings, but students framed the drama class and meetings of the Gay-Straight Alliance as "gay," or in their language, "fag" spaces; and they defined the auto shop and weightlifting area of the gym as normatively, even hyper-ly heterosexualized "masculine." Pascoe did extensive fieldwork in each of these settings; she also focused on events such as the "Mr. Cougar" contest for the most popular boy. She complemented fieldwork with in-depth interviews with boys and girls from a range of class, racial-ethnic, and gender/sexual positionings. In the course of research, C.J. Pascoe was struck by a dramatic shift in the ways in which many of the boys presented themselves. In interviews, they were often sensitive, open, thoughtful, even critical of homophobia, but in school contexts, many of them switched to defensive and offensive maneuvering around the specter of "the fag." In Pascoe’s words, "boys turn into 'boys' in groups." C.J. Pascoe’s ethnography informs, and is informed by queer and poststructuralist theories of sexualized gender as discursive and performative, and by feminist sociological approaches to the situated, interactional, and institutional dynamics of gender. It's a rich-- and overdue -- mix of frameworks, which Pascoe honed and reshaped in the course of interpretive empirical research. She found, for example, that boys who were vulnerable to and anxious about being labeled "fag" repudiated the label by defensively applying it to others, by claiming attachment to girlfriends and various kinds of heterosexual prowess, and by deprecating girls as weak and inferior. "Fag," Pascoe argues, is the "constitutive outside" (Judith Butler's term) that is evoked and used to produce particular masculine meanings. Dude, You’re a Fag unpacks a complex field of discursive meanings and interactional and institutional practices. In the best tradition of ethnography, the analysis reworks abstract theoretical concepts (e.g. "regimes of sexuality"; "the constitutive outside") in the thick, situated, and messy stuff of daily life and experience as recorded in fieldnotes and described in interviews. The vivid detail anchors and brings complex and sophisticated theoretical ideas to life. This is a terrific book, with a compelling
and original overall argument, vivid ethnographic detail, and perceptive insights
along the way. The book also speaks to challenging political issues, such as ways in which to support
gay and lesbian youth; the institutional and daily practices of high school
staff and teachers; and varied trajectories though and out of high school. Dude,
You’re a Fag makes a significant contribution to the sociology of sex and gender;
interdisciplinary work in gender and women’s studies; LGBT and queer studies; youth
studies; and the theorizing of masculinity in relation to sexuality, racial-ethnicity,
and age. Information about the 2011 Awards SEX AND GENDER DISTINGUISHED BOOK AWARD The 2011 Sex and Gender Distinguished book Award Committee is currently accepting nominations of outstanding and innovative books published in 2008, 2009, or 2010. The award honors those who make a significant contribution to the field of sex and gender through a book on the cutting edge of sociological inquiry. Self-nominations are acceptable, and authors need not be sociologists. Edited collections are ineligible, and nominations from publishers will not be accepted. To nominate a book for this award: 1) Please send a two page letter (either through email or hard-copy) explaining how the book makes a significant contribution to the sociology of sex and gender to the Committee’s Chair, Jennifer Reich, and 2) notify the book publisher to send copies of the books by February 1, 2011 to the chair and all the committee members. Contact information for all committee members is below. Please note that the nomination deadline for this award is February 1, 2011. Distinguished Book Award Committee: Jennifer Reich (Chair) Abby L. Ferber aferber@uccs.edu Melanie Heath Department of Sociology Gretchen Webber, Ph.D. OUTSTANDING ARTICLE AWARD The 2011 Sex and Gender Distinguished
Article Award Committee is currently accepting nominations of outstanding
and innovative articles or book chapters published in 2008, 2009, or
2010. The award honors those who make a significant contribution to
the field of sex and gender through an article or book chapter on the
cutting edge of sociological inquiry. Authors need not be sociologists,
and articles may be published in journals associated with disciplines
other than sociology. Self-nominations are acceptable. To nominate a
particular article or book chapter for this award, 1) please submit
a two- page letter (either email or hard copy) explaining why the article
makes a significant contribution to the sociology of sex and gender
to the Committee’s Chair,
Jessica Fields; and 2) send
an electronic version of the article/chapter to the committee chair
and all members of the committee. Contact information for all committee
members is below. Nomination deadline is February 15, 2011. Outstanding Article Award Committee: Shelley Correll Jennifer Mendez Jean-Ann Sutherland Laurel Westbrook SALLY HACKER GRADUATE STUDENT PAPER AWARD Papers are currently being accepted for
the 2011 Sally Hacker Graduate Student Paper Award. The paper should
deal with a theoretical issue or empirical problem important to the
field of sex and gender and should be based on a dissertation that is
still in progress or was completed and approved no earlier than February
2010. Papers should be journal length (35 pages maximum.) Self nominations
are acceptable. Please send a letter of nomination and an electronic version of the paper to the Committee Chair,
Mindy Stombler, at Stombler@gsu.edu. Nomination deadline is February 15, 2011. FEMINIST SCHOLAR ACTIVISM The Feminist Scholar Activism is established
to recognize and honor a scholar who has successfully used feminist
research to create broad social change in public understanding and consideration
of gender. This might have been accomplished through sustained critically
engaged pedagogy, community based research, translational work, advocacy
research, or other forms of scholar-activism. To nominate a feminist
scholar activist for this award, please submit a letter of nomination,
a copy of the nominee’s vita, two supporting letters, and any relevant
supporting material should be submitted electronically by someone familiar
with the nominee's contributions and body of work to the Committee’s
Chair, Nancy A. Naples, nancy.naples@uconn.edu. Nomination deadline
is February 15, 2011. Information for 2011 ASA Awards Nominations Sought for Major ASA Awards: ASA members are encouraged to submit nominations for the following ASA awards. The deadline for nominations are provided with each award criteria. Award selection committees, appointed by ASA Council, are constituted to review nominations. These awards are presented at the ASA Annual Meeting each August. The deadline for submission of nominations is January 31st of each year unless noted otherwise in the individual award criteria. Distinguished
Book Award Page last updated: Oct 7, '10 |
