In this episode, guest host Allison Nobles talks to Tulane professor Mimi Schippers about her book Beyond Monogamy: Polyamory and the Future of Polyqueer Sexualities. The book interrogates “compulsory monogamy”, or our cultural disposition towards being in a relationship with only one other person at a time. Schippers argues that this compulsory disposition towards monogamy limits the ways that we can view relationships, and reproduces various kinds of inequalities.
gender
In this episode, guest hosts Amber Powell and Allison Nobles talk to Associate Professor of Sociology at Occidental College Lisa Wade about her book American Hookup: The New Culture of Sex on Campus. The conversation focuses on interrogating what ‘hookup culture’ really is— and how college students make sense of themselves and their positions within (and excluded from) the culture. Using students’ self-reported experiences with sex on campus, Wade is able to narrate the complexities involved in navigating this ‘hookup culture’.
Stanford sociologist Marianne Cooper is a leading expert in the field of gender and family dynamics. Her latest book, Cut Adrift: Families in Insecure Times, details her efforts to understand how families representing an array of social classes perceive and manage contemporary economic anxieties. She and guest-host Sarah Catherine Billups discuss the many ways that these problems often fall to wives and mothers, even amongst those who have transcended gender boundaries in professional life.
New host Allison Nobles interviews Jane Ward, a professor of gender and sexuality studies at the University of California Riverside. Dr Ward’s most recent book, Not Gay: Sex Between Straight White Men, explores the relationship between whiteness, masculinity, and sexuality. She explains how sex between straight, white men actually reaffirms their straightness, rather than calling it into question. In fact, she argues that homosexual acts are a necessary part of heterosexuality and have been since these categories were created. Not Gay clearly illustrates the complexity of human sexuality at the intersections of race and gender.
In this episode, University of Colorado sociologist Sanyu Mojola discusses her work on HIV rates among young African women. She discusses social mechanisms – specifically the entanglement of love and money – that lead to higher rates of HIV death among African females compared to African males. She also considers why money holds a value for African women above and beyond its economic value, specifically pointing to its cultural power and ability to advance women toward modernity.
Her new book earned the 2015 American Sociological Association’s Sex and Gender Section Distinguished Book Award. It’s
called Love, Money, and HIV: Becoming a Modern African Woman in the Age of AIDS.
In this episode, we step into the global market for surrogate mothers with University of Texas sociologist Sharmila Rudrappa. She explains why India has become an increasingly popular destination for American couples searching for affordable pregnancy assistance. She also considers why most Indian women who become surrogates come from working class backgrounds, and how their experiences as wage workers inform what kind of value gets placed on this new form of “labor”. Her book is called Discounted Life: The Price of Global Surrogacy in India.
Because they suffer from an invisible affliction, people with migraines are sometimes suspected of “making up” their disease in order to avoid performing unwanted duties. Even within psychology, women were once suspected of self-inducing their own migraines as a result of their inability to cope with the chaos of daily life. These days, neurobiological research has helped to establish migraine as a legitimate disease, with causes rooted within the organic structure of certain brains. However, as Rutgers professor Joanna Kempner explains, even this paradigm shift tends to imply that the feminine “migraine brain” differs from the masculine “normal brain” in problematic ways. In Not Tonight: Migraine and the Politics of Gender and Health, she explores how cultural assumptions about gender and pain continue to inform how migraines are diagnosed, treated, and stigmatized.
Today we are joined by Kathryn Henne. Kathryn is a Research Fellow at the Regulatory Institutions Network, a research center housed at the Australian National University and also a fellow of the Research School of Asia and the Pacific. Kathryn joins us to talk about her article “The ‘Science’ of Fair Play in Sport: Gender and the Politics of Testing”, which will appear in the forthcoming issue of Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. We discuss the shifting models of sex testing used by the International Olympic Committee, efforts to enforce the male female binary, and assumptions about fair play and the natural body.
In this episode, we talk with Holly Thorpe about her excellent book Snowboarding Bodies in Theory and Practice. We discuss the use of theory to study physical practice, the rapid growth of the sport, gender relations, marketing, the snowboarding body, and writing about sports for different audiences.
This episode, we talk with Enid Logan about her book, “At This Defining Moment”: Barack Obama’s Presidential Candidacy and the New Politics of Race. Logan reflects back on race and gender in the 2008 campaign and also looks at how things have, and have not, changed for the current 2012 campaign.
In this episode, guest hosts Amber Powell and Allison Nobles talk to Associate Professor of Sociology at Occidental College Lisa Wade about her book American Hookup: The New Culture of Sex on Campus. The conversation focuses on interrogating what ‘hookup culture’ really is— and how college students make sense of themselves and their positions within (and excluded from) the culture. Using students’ self-reported experiences with sex on campus, Wade is able to narrate the complexities involved in navigating this ‘hookup culture’.
Stanford sociologist Marianne Cooper is a leading expert in the field of gender and family dynamics. Her latest book, Cut Adrift: Families in Insecure Times, details her efforts to understand how families representing an array of social classes perceive and manage contemporary economic anxieties. She and guest-host Sarah Catherine Billups discuss the many ways that these problems often fall to wives and mothers, even amongst those who have transcended gender boundaries in professional life.
New host Allison Nobles interviews Jane Ward, a professor of gender and sexuality studies at the University of California Riverside. Dr Ward’s most recent book, Not Gay: Sex Between Straight White Men, explores the relationship between whiteness, masculinity, and sexuality. She explains how sex between straight, white men actually reaffirms their straightness, rather than calling it into question. In fact, she argues that homosexual acts are a necessary part of heterosexuality and have been since these categories were created. Not Gay clearly illustrates the complexity of human sexuality at the intersections of race and gender.
In this episode, University of Colorado sociologist Sanyu Mojola discusses her work on HIV rates among young African women. She discusses social mechanisms – specifically the entanglement of love and money – that lead to higher rates of HIV death among African females compared to African males. She also considers why money holds a value for African women above and beyond its economic value, specifically pointing to its cultural power and ability to advance women toward modernity.
Her new book earned the 2015 American Sociological Association’s Sex and Gender Section Distinguished Book Award. It’s
called Love, Money, and HIV: Becoming a Modern African Woman in the Age of AIDS.
In this episode, we step into the global market for surrogate mothers with University of Texas sociologist Sharmila Rudrappa. She explains why India has become an increasingly popular destination for American couples searching for affordable pregnancy assistance. She also considers why most Indian women who become surrogates come from working class backgrounds, and how their experiences as wage workers inform what kind of value gets placed on this new form of “labor”. Her book is called Discounted Life: The Price of Global Surrogacy in India.
Because they suffer from an invisible affliction, people with migraines are sometimes suspected of “making up” their disease in order to avoid performing unwanted duties. Even within psychology, women were once suspected of self-inducing their own migraines as a result of their inability to cope with the chaos of daily life. These days, neurobiological research has helped to establish migraine as a legitimate disease, with causes rooted within the organic structure of certain brains. However, as Rutgers professor Joanna Kempner explains, even this paradigm shift tends to imply that the feminine “migraine brain” differs from the masculine “normal brain” in problematic ways. In Not Tonight: Migraine and the Politics of Gender and Health, she explores how cultural assumptions about gender and pain continue to inform how migraines are diagnosed, treated, and stigmatized.
Today we are joined by Kathryn Henne. Kathryn is a Research Fellow at the Regulatory Institutions Network, a research center housed at the Australian National University and also a fellow of the Research School of Asia and the Pacific. Kathryn joins us to talk about her article “The ‘Science’ of Fair Play in Sport: Gender and the Politics of Testing”, which will appear in the forthcoming issue of Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. We discuss the shifting models of sex testing used by the International Olympic Committee, efforts to enforce the male female binary, and assumptions about fair play and the natural body.
In this episode, we talk with Holly Thorpe about her excellent book Snowboarding Bodies in Theory and Practice. We discuss the use of theory to study physical practice, the rapid growth of the sport, gender relations, marketing, the snowboarding body, and writing about sports for different audiences.
This episode, we talk with Enid Logan about her book, “At This Defining Moment”: Barack Obama’s Presidential Candidacy and the New Politics of Race. Logan reflects back on race and gender in the 2008 campaign and also looks at how things have, and have not, changed for the current 2012 campaign.