Sexual and Gender Inequality
My first line of research examines inequality in the contemporary United States by sexuality and across the gender spectrum. Leveraging recent advancements in data collection and measurement, I examine how gender and sexuality shape material, social, and health inequality across the life course.
Published research in this area investigates well-being disparities (e..g, physical and mental health, social connectedness, financial security) by sexuality and across the gender spectrum. My research illimunates that many sexual and gender minorities face acute disadvantage across many dimensions (e.g., social connectedness, financial security). Another study of mine, drawing on theories of multiple disadvantage, demonstrates that sexual and gender minorities experience worse physical and mental health than cisgender heterosexuals and sometimes relative to cisgender sexual minorities and gender minority heterosexuals.
Other work in this area draws on dating profile and in-depth interview data to examine how inequality is felt and reproduced in dating markets. In one published article, we found that racial fetishization made men feel objectified and as if it were more difficult to find connection with other users. Another article interrogated a paradox: why are “personal preferences” (e.g., “No femmes, fats, or Asians”) understood by gay dating app users to be racist and heterosexist and yet are seen as acceptable, even as those systems of subordination are not? We argued that the reason for this paradox lies in part in how preferences for White, masculine men are expressed, as we observed that the way preferences were expressed carried different meanings and could thus be viewed as more or less problematic.
Example articles
Families and the (Re)Production of Gender and Sexuality
Given the consequences of gender and sexual nonconformity for inequality, it is equally important to understand how gender and sexuality are produced. In my second line of research, I examine how parents shape children’s gender and sexual normativity through their actions and attitudes. This research focuses on parenting practices, and the extent to which parents internalize the need for children to conform to gender and sexual norms.
Published research emerging from this line draws on original qualitative and experimental data. This research finds that biological parents tend to have more realized hopes for children’s gender and sexual conformity relative to stepparents, citing concerns about violence/bullying, grandchildren, and how nonconformity would reflect on their parenting. To gain more causal leverage on this question, I conducted an online vignette experiment. This article shows that attitudes toward stepchildren’s, compared to biological children’s, gender nonconformity are more permissive and less harsh. Biological parents thus appear to occupy a more rigid position in accountability structures and are held more accountable by themselves and others for children’s nonconformity than are stepparents. In a review article, I trace the development of theoretical and empirical thinking on the ways the family in function and in form shapes children’s gender and sexuality.
Example articles
Adverse Childhood Experiences, The Life Course, and Health and Relationships
My third line of research takes a sociological approach to the study of Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs)—the constellation of experiences of abuse, neglect, and household dysfunction and stressors in childhood. Most research on ACEs has emerged out of the biomedical field, public health, and developmental psychology, leaving much for sociologists to document the consequences of early life adversity. In this line of work, I examine how ACEs affect parenting practices, intergenerational relationship dynamics with children, and whether ACEs are associated with partner’s physical and mental health.
In a co-authored paper, we examine whether mothers who have been exposed to more childhood adversity provide less socioemotional support and less cognitive stimulation to children, demonstrating a tight link between ACEs and parenting practices later in the life course. Another paper in progress finds that children whose mothers experiences greater early life adversity are more likely to become estranged from and experience less contact and less emotionally close relationships wtih their mothers. We argue that dynamics of the parent-adult child relationship are being shaped before children are evn born, and that the intergenerational consequences of ACEs are lengtheir than prior research has documented.
Finally, in a first-authored paper in progress, my co-authors and I use nationally representative dyadic data from different- and same-gender couples and find that people who have greater ACEs exposure tend to partner with others who have greater ACEs exposure (i.e., suggesting that ACEs are a previously uncovered feature of assortative mating). We also find that one person’s ACEs are negatively associated with the self-rated health and life satisfaction, and positively associated with the depressive symptoms of their partner. These findings highlight the inadequacy of what my co-authors and I refer to as “the biomedical model” in ACEs research theorizing the biological and behavioral mechanisms that link ACEs to later life health and well-being at the intrapersonal level and suggest that ACEs have interpersonal consequences.