Douglas Schrock

Transsexuals’ Embodiment of Womanhood

This article draws on in-depth interviews with nine white, middle-class, male-to-female transsexuals to examine how they produce and experience bodily transformation. Interviewees’ bodywork entailed retraining, redecorating, and reshaping the physical body, which shaped their feelings, role-taking, and self-monitoring. These analyses make three contributions: They offer support for a perspective that embodies gender, further transsexual scholarship, and contribute to feminist debate over the sex/gender distinction. The authors conclude by exploring how viewing gender as embodied could influence medical discourse on transsexualism and have personal and political consequences for transsexuals.

Managing Emotional Manhood: Fighting and Fostering Fear in Mixed Martial Arts.

Based on two years of fieldwork and over 100 interviews, we analyze mixed martial arts fighters’ fears, how they managed them, and how they adopted intimidating personas to evoke fear in opponents. We conceptualize this process as “managing emotional manhood,” which refers to emotion management that signifies, in the dramaturgical sense, masculine selves. Our study aims to deepen our understanding of how men’s emotion work is gendered and, more generally, to bring together two lines of research: studies of gendered emotion management and studies of emotional identity work. We further propose that managing emotional manhood is a dynamic and trans-situational process that can be explored in diverse settings.

“Little Girls Unwilling to Do What’s Best for Them” Resurrecting Patriarchy in an LGBT Christian Church

This paper examines how a group of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) Christians resurrected patriarchal patterns of gender inequality in their local church. On the basis of more than 450 hours of fieldwork, we analyze how a group of lesbian and gay members collaborated with a new pastor to transform an egalitarian, inclusive, and democratic organization into one characterized by the elevation of men and the subordination of women via restricting leadership to men, instituting a gendered division of labor, and discrediting women dissidents. In so doing, the pastor and his supporters, regardless of their intentions, collaboratively reproduced patriarchal practices that facilitated the subordination of women. We conclude by suggesting that there is not a one-to-one correspondence between gains for LGBT organizations and gains for women, and we outline implications for understanding how retrenchment from egalitarian practice can undo gender-equality gains.

Maintaining Art-World Membership: Self-taught Identity Work of the Florida Highwaymen

In this article, we examine how a group of aging black artists, labeled The Florida Highwaymen, maintained membership in a self-taught art world. Based on fieldwork, interviews, and Web sites, we analyze how the artists constructed identities in ways that enabled them to continue benefiting from the art world, even when they appeared in violation of membership criteria or codes. Such identity work involved affiliating with the artist collective, aligning with the self-taught identity code, and denying and reframing code violations. Rather than adopting racist imagery employed by art-world insiders, they drew from color-blind tactics and cultural discourses to maintain membership in the self-taught art world, and their dignity. Our study demonstrates the usefulness of an identity work approach for the sociology of art worlds and has implications for exploring how people construct selves to maintain membership benefits in other social arenas.

Gender and Emotions

The sociology of gender and the sociology of emotions have developed considerably over the past 30 years. Yet work in the two fields generally advanced independently from each other despite Hochschild’s early influence on both. In this chapter, we review research in three primary areas of scholarship—socialization, intimate relationships, and organizational life—with an eye towards linking insights from gender scholars and emotions scholars. Although we draw from various perspectives on emotions and gender, our approach resonates most broadly with a critical interactionist perspective that incorporates identity and culture, process and consequences, domination and subordination, and sensitivity to intersectional inequalities.

Gendering Truck Driving Songs: The Cultural Masculinization of an Occupation

Our analysis of more than a thousand songs about truck driving uncovers how cultural discourse defines an occupation as inherently for men. First, trucker songs essentialize the work as most suited for men by depicting male truckers as born to drive, and whose innate need to drive big rigs often resembles an addiction. Second, the songs imbue the occupation with masculine valor by glorifying instances of male truckers as overcoming the dangers of the road or falling prey to tragic martyrdom. In contrast, songs construct women truckers as mis-nurtured gender deviants whose ability to operate tractor-trailers is surprising given their sex category. Our analysis contributes to understanding the importance of culture in reinforcing occupational sex segregation and how cultural representations create and anchor gendered meanings to occupations.

Diversifying Feminist Ethnographers’ Dilemmas and Solutions

Avishai, Gerber, and Randles (2013a, 394) describe the feminist dilemma as arising when established “feminist analytic frameworks clash with observations.” All three felt this dilemma when conducting research on groups commonly thought to be “conservative” or “nonfeminist.” They felt unable to reconcile what they imagined was the feminist imperative to privilege the voice of participants with their stated feminist political commitments. In spite of their expectations of male dominance and support of a patriarchal system in the field, they interpreted some of their observations as reflecting feminist ideals. However, they were uncomfortable drawing such conclusions, as they felt pressure to conform to an institutionalized orthodoxy of feminist thought. As self-identified feminists, they worried how other feminists would evaluate their work. To help better navigate this dilemma, the authors encourage “institutional reflexivity,” or critical reflection of how feminist theoretical and methodological orthodoxies “constrain and enable interpretations of the world.” They also encourage feminists to privilege their analytic interpretations over their political projects when this dilemma arises. By introducing the notions of “the feminist dilemma” and “institutional reflexivity,” the authors provide a language to interrogate not only the issues