Honors Projects

This paper analyzes the methods of resistance enacted by women-identifying people in Mississippi against the institutions seeking to police how they understand their own sexuality and bodily autonomy. This analysis draws upon a series of in-depth, semi-structured interviews conducted in the summer of 2020 focused on construction of community, intersectional identity, relationship with the body, and what inputs frame how women in Mississippi understand sex. This project puts these interviews in conversation with literature from a variety of subfields, including resistance studies, the Sociology of the South, and the Sociology of sexuality, all of which help bring the argument behind these data to light. Resistance looks different in different eras, and generally scholars like to analyze resistance as collective action, collective voice, collective struggle. These data instead argue that strategic, individualized resistance is just as vital to marginalized bodies, particularly when explosive action is not possible. Studying strategies of resistance that lurk beneath the surface not only expands what we now see as “radical,” but it also lends insight into where lasting change can come from.

This paper draws on data collected through in-depth interviews with multi-generational participants recruited from various online sites to explore the place-making strategies among lesbian, bisexual, and queer (LBQ) women and trans- and gender-non-conforming people (tgncp) during the Covid-19 pandemic. Historically denied public space, placemaking in immaterial space (i.e., digital spaces) has been essential to the production and maintenance of communities for LBQ women and tgncp. Because these populations rely on non-traditional placemaking strategies that are not always instantiated in material space, sociologists often overlook their efforts to create place for themselves. This paper corrects this omission by exploring how communities create place through the deployment of subcultural capital onto immaterial space. Introducing four main strategies of community placemaking, material-constant communities, material-transient communities, immaterial-constant communities, and immaterial-transient communities, this article expands sociological conceptions of space to accommodate the placemaking strategies of marginalized communities who might lack the economic and political resources to foster communities in material spaces. Beyond the investigation of lesbian-queer placemaking, this research contributes to the growing sociological literature exploring the multifaceted, fluid, contested, and ephemeral nature of place and placemaking in the context of increasing Internet use. 

This paper identifies “embodied uncertainties”—possibilities of aging and infertility lodged within the body—as informing women’s conceptualizations of their reproductive bodies and their decisions about and approaches to getting pregnant. Using data from semi-structured interviews with a small sample of highly educated, professional, white women who had given birth within 18 months prior, this paper argues that (bio)medicalized risk discourses and neoliberal logics of responsible choice-making lodge uncertainty and the possibility of failure within women’s reproductive bodies. As they attempt to reconcile childbearing with professional and financial constraints, women may identify their bodies as laden with embodied uncertainties and may subsequently adopt strategies for becoming pregnant that seek to mitigate those embodied uncertainties, such as by trying to conceive before feeling completely ready for a pregnancy. Ultimately, (bio)medicalization and neoliberalism have transformed reproductive aging and infertility into individualized concerns and foreclosed recognition of the institutional failures that create conflicts of aging, careers, and childbearing in women’s lives.

Drawing on the plays and musicals of the 2018-2019 Broadway season, this thesis examines how theatre responds to the sociocultural, economic, and political conditions of society. Sociologists have largely overlooked theatre’s cultural influence, but Broadway productions act as social reflection by reproducing the conversations and inequalities of their context. Access to Broadway is limited, in various manners, by socioeconomic class, race, gender, ability, and age. As conversations about equity expand and audiences increasingly demand diversified representation, Broadway begins to shed the restraints of its conventions. In many regards, the recent changes fail in meaningfully transforming the Broadway institution. Those who control the stories on Broadway stages—producers, directors, writers—are disproportionately white and men, and the stories themselves predominantly uphold white privilege and heteronormativity. Economic pressures keep Broadway producers focused on high profit and cultural capital, at the expense of artistic and political risk. Broadway has particular affective power, employing the uniquely provocative effect of live theatre for unparalleled numbers of people. This influence is accompanied by responsibility to contribute to society’s progress rather than its stagnation, a responsibility which Broadway falls behind in fulfilling.