Current & Previous Research Projects
Abstract: While recent advances in theories of hybrid masculinities have shown new avenues for gender domination afforded to young men, they have left undertheorized the role of femininity in these negotiations of gender regimes. This article offers a relational framework for understanding how femininity is incorporated in the construction of hybrid masculinities and how hybrid femininity and masculinity, codefined, can uphold hegemonic gender relations. To illustrate this, I examine the ongoing renegotiation of gender ideals in dyadic romantic relationships occurring against the backdrop of demographic and socioeconomic changes in contemporary Japan. Drawing on forty-five in-depth interviews with young Japanese men and women, as well as ethnographic observations of contemporary “marriage-hunting” practices, I show how everyday actors make sense of the hybrid gender categories of “herbivorous men” and “carnivorous women.” My findings suggest that by linking these categories to economic transformations, the participants underplay men’s structural power and overemphasize women’s empowerment while maintaining the hierarchy inherent in gender hegemony. The participants also maintain the normative function of marriage, which is deemed more important for women. By showing how these hybrid categories are evaluated by both married and unmarried individuals, I draw analytic focus to the multiple levels of social structure against which they are produced.
Recognitions:
* Sally Hacker Graduate Student Paper Award, American Sociological Association – Section of Sex & Gender
* Mark Chesler Student Research Award, Sociology Department – University of Michigan
* McGuigan Prize for the Best Graduate Essay in Women's Studies,Women’s and Gender Studies –University of Michigan
* William Malm Prize for Outstanding Graduate Student Writing in Japanese Studies, Center for Japanese Studies – University of Michigan
“Modalities of Cultural Guidance: Market Intermediaries, Cultural Fluency, and Valuation in Japanese ‘Marriage-Hunting.” (under review)
Abstract: This article theorizes how market intermediaries acclimate clients to different exchanges by relying on varying modalities of cultural guidance. Through an ethnographic study of the Japanese “marriage-hunting” industry, including 127 interviews with market professionals and their clients, participant observation in marriage-hunting events, and archival research, I demonstrate the different degrees of mediation through which intermediaries cater to clients unevenly versed in market rules. Weak mediation requires participants to mobilize their own cultural fluency, or familiarity with courtship scripts. To navigate ambiguity around interactions, participants enact exchanges that approximate those outside of the marriage-hunting market. With moderate mediation, intermediaries enunciate rules and goals and provide more guidance during interactions to enhance clients’ navigation of market rules. Intensive mediation, in turn, substitutes clients’ cultural fluency by orchestrating all steps of the courtship process and significantly reducing ambiguity. These different modalities of cultural guidance encourage clients’ prolonged participation in the market and contribute to market stratification by tethering mediation to broader cultural grammars of desirability.
Recognitions:
* SASE/Digit Early Career Workshop Award, Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics
* Percy Buchanan Graduate Prize, Northeast Asia, Midwest Conference on Asian Affairs
* Katherine Luke Award, Sociology Department – University of Michigan
“Domesticating the Salaryman: Marriage Promotion and Hybrid Masculinity in Japan.” (under review)
Abstract: This article analyzes the politics of masculinity underlying contemporary marriage promotion efforts in Japan. Scholarship on hybrid masculinities, limited to the United States, foregrounds these new conceptions of manhood as socially privileged men’s individual identity projects or as a mechanism of control imposed on marginalized groups. I contribute to this research by explicating how hybrid masculinity is mobilized in governance projects that target the middle classes and aim to induce cooperation through more diffuse means. Drawing on textual and pictorial data from a marriage promotion campaign and interviews with Japanese men and women, I show how feminized activities of housework and consumption become included into the ideal of marital masculinity and to what ends. By analyzing how these activities reintroduce the white-collar “salaryman” into the domestic sphere, I link hybrid masculinity with ongoing socioeconomic shifts in Japan and the changing meanings assigned to work and family.
“Moralizing the Production and Sale of Student Papers in Uganda” (with Margaret Frye)
Abstract: Sociologists have shown that moral understandings of market exchanges can differ between historical periods and institutional settings, but they have paid less attention to how producers’ moral frameworks vary depending on their unequal positions within both markets and institutions. We use interviews and ethnographic observations to examine the vibrant market of research shops selling academic work to students around two of Uganda’s top universities. We identify three groups of researchers—Knowledge Producers, Entrepreneurs, and Educators—who construct different professional identities and moral justifications of their trade, and who orient their market action accordingly. We demonstrate that these identities and moral frameworks reflect an interplay between the institutional contexts and the social class positions that researchers occupy within this illicit market. Knowledge Producers and Entrepreneurs both experienced a sense of “fit” with their respective institutional cultures, but the former now see their work as compromising ideals of research, whereas the latter capitalize on what they view as a broken system. Educators, disadvantaged at both institutions, articulate a framework countering the dominant institutional cultures and sympathetic to underperforming students. This approach illuminates how institutional contexts and individual class positions within them influence producers’ moral frameworks, leading to differentiation of the market.
Recognition:
Outstanding Published Article Award – Honorable Mention, American Sociological Association – Altruism, Morality, and Social Solidarity Section
“The Comparative Politics of Collective Memory” (with Geneviève Zubrzycki)
Abstract: This article examines the theoretical and empirical contributions of the interdisciplinary field of memory studies for a comparative sociology of collective memory and politics. We identify three major empirical foci that have structured the scholarship: the role of collective memory in the creation, legitimation, and maintenance of national identities and nation-states; political reckoning with the memory of difficult and violent pasts; and the ongoing transnationalization of collective memory. We conclude with suggestions for future research on the politics of memory given the rise of populism and so-called fake news.