Mary Nell Trautner

Doing Gender, Doing Class The Performance of Sexuality in Exotic Dance Clubs

Organizations are not only gendered; they are also classed—that is, they articulate ideas and presentations of gender that are mediated by class position. This article pursues the idea of organizations as gendered and classed by means of a comparative ethnographic analysis of the performance of sexuality in four exotic dance clubs in the Southwestern United States. Strip clubs construct sexuality to be consistent with client class norms and assumptions and with how the clubs and dancers think working-class or middle-class sexuality should be expressed. Class differences are represented as sexual differences in very concrete ways: the appearance of dancers and other staff, dancing and performance styles, and interactions that take place between dancers and customers.

Bringing the Polluters Back In: Environmental Inequality and the Organization of Chemical Production

Environmental justice scholars have suggested that because chemical plants and other hazardous facilities emit more pollutants where they face the least resistance, disadvantaged communities face a special health risk. In trying to determine whether race or income has the bigger impact on a neighborhood’s exposure to pollution, however, scholars tend to overlook the facilities themselves and the effect of their characteristics on emissions. In particular, how do the characteristics of facilities and their surrounding communities jointly shape pollution outcomes? We propose a new line of environmental justice research that focuses on facilities and how their features combine with communities’ features to create dangerous emissions. Using novel fuzzy-set analysis techniques and the EPA’s newly developed Risk-Screening Environmental Indicators, we test the influence of facility and community factors on chemical plants’ health-threatening emissions. Contrary to the idea that community characteristics have singular, linear effects, findings show that facility and community factors combine in a variety of ways to produce risky emissions. We speculate that as chemical firms experiment with different ways of producing goods and externalizing pollution costs, new “recipes of risk” are likely to emerge. The question, then, will no longer be whether race or income matters most, but in which of these recipes do they matter and how.

Using the Sociological Imagination to Teach about Academic Integrity

The sociological imagination is a useful tool for teaching about plagiarism and academic integrity, and, in turn, academic integrity is a good case to help students learn about the sociological imagination.  We present an exercise in which the class discusses reasons for and consequences of dishonest academic behavior and then examines a series of scenarios using the sociological imagination. Students and instructors consider whether each scenario is a violation of academic integrity norms and how it can be viewed as both personal and public. We demonstrate that this kind of discussion helps students learn about academic integrity and how to think of violations (including causes and a range of outcomes) sociologically. In other words, we encourage students to think of academic dishonesty (both causes and consequences) not just as “personal troubles” but also as “public issues.”

Judging Books by Their Covers Teaching about Physical Attractiveness Biases

Sociologists have developed a wide range of pedagogical strategies to facilitate student learning about racial/ethnic, class, and gender inequalities. Despite the growing subdiscipline of the sociology of the body and evidence pointing to the prevalence of inequalities based on physical attractiveness, the pedagogical literature has yet to develop strategies for teaching students about biases based on physical attractiveness. In this article, the authors report on a pedagogical module that involves student evaluations of photographs (depicting individuals ranging in levels of physical attractiveness) using semantic differential scales, and discuss the results of this evaluation. The authors test for student learning outcomes through (1) a one-group pretest-posttest design and (2) an assessment survey with both qualitative and quantitative components. Because this photograph evaluation typically illustrates students’ beauty biases, a discussion of these results, paired with relevant readings, provides a powerful tool for the exchange of ideas about physical attractiveness biases.

Masculinity, Competence, and Health The Influence of Weight and Race on Social Perceptions of Men

Like other visible characteristics such as skin color, gender, or age, body size is a diffuse status characteristic that impacts perceptions, interactions, and social outcomes. Studies demonstrate that individuals hold preconceived notions about what it means to be fat and document a long list of negative stereotypes associated with fat individuals, including laziness, unintelligence, and incompetence. Such perceptions have consequences for employment, including decisions about hiring, promotion, compensation, and dismissal. In this article, we examine how body size and race interact to affect individuals’ perceptions of success, competence, health, laziness, and masculinity. Based on undergraduate students’ ratings of photographs of men, our findings demonstrate significant differences between evaluations of black and white men based on body size. Thin white men are perceived to be more intelligent, more successful, and more competent than their thin black counterparts. However, these results reverse when the men are overweight: overweight black men are seen as more intelligent and more competent than overweight white men. They are also seen as more successful and hardworking and more masculine. These results suggest that the stigma of body size differently impacts black and white men; individuals judge overweight white men more negatively than overweight black men. We discuss two possible explanations for these findings: black threat neutralization and race-based attribution theory.

Personal responsibility v. corporate liability: How personal injury lawyers screen cases in an era of tort reform

Who is ultimately responsible for the harms that befall us? Corporations who make dangerous products, or the consumers who use them? The answer to this question has a profound impact on how personal injury lawyers screen products liability cases. In this chapter, I analyze results from an experimental vignette study in which 83 lawyers were asked to evaluate a hypothetical products liability case. Half of the lawyers practice in states considered to be difficult jurisdictions for the practice of personal injury law due to tort reform and conservative political climates (Texas and Colorado), while the other half work in states that have been relatively unaffected by tort reform and are considered to be more “plaintiff friendly” (Pennsylvania and Massachusetts). While lawyers in reform states and non-reform states were equally likely to accept the hypothetical case with which they were presented, they approached the case in different ways, used different theories, and made different arguments in order to justify their acceptance of the case. Lawyers in states with tort reform were most likely to accept the case when they focused on the issue of corporate social responsibility – that is, what the defendant did wrong, how they violated the rules, and how they could have prevented the injury in question. Lawyers in non-reform states, however, were most likely to accept the case when they believed that jurors would feel sorry for the injured child and not find their client at fault for the injury.

Teaching-infused Graduate Seminars Incorporating Pedagogy into Substantive Courses

Even though pedagogy courses in sociology are on the rise, many departments do not offer or require a course on teaching sociology or a teaching proseminar series. However, faculty in such departments do have other options for incorporating and integrating pedagogical issues into their standard curriculum. In this note, I offer one suggestion for incorporating teaching and learning into the curriculum: integrating pedagogy into substantive seminars. “Teaching-infused” graduate seminars are a great way to transmit norms, values, and common practices of the department to graduate students, and they allow for discussions of particular substantive challenges that graduate student instructors may face when teaching undergraduates about privilege, inequality, discrimination, and social structure. I describe my approach and present qualitative evaluations of this approach from two semesters of graduate students who have taken one of these seminars.

What Workers Want Depends: Legal Knowledge and the Desire for Workplace Change Among Day Laborers

In this article, we identify legal knowledge as a key difference between workers who desire workplace change and those who do not. Based on surveys with 121 day laborers, we find that not all day laborers are equally dissatisfied with their jobs, despite uniformly difficult working conditions. Some day laborers do not want to make any real changes to the day labor industry, while others desire a range of industry changes, from higher wages to greater government regulation and unionization. A key difference between these workers is their knowledge of employment law: Those who know the law are more likely to desire workplace change.