Cognitive labor is an obdurate source of inequality between partners, and is usually considered so because the nature of the work makes it “invisible” to those involved. Yet given that talk of the “mental load” is now widespread and the pandemic amplified awareness of disparities, gender scholars have reason to question its “invisibility.” I ask: Are partners in heterosexual relationships aware of

Although the ratio of women’s to men’s housework hours has declined, women still spend more time than men doing household tasks in most high-income contexts. This article examines one of the hypothesized mechanisms underlying the persistence of housework disparities—fairness perceptions—via a survey experiment in the United States. We ask: What factors contribute to fairness assessments of unequal

In this article, I examine the strategies of resistance deployed by people who have experienced street harassment. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 47 heterosexual women and LGBTQ+ people, I document how participants skillfully and contextually deployed resistance strategies to disrupt harassment. Notably, participants often represented resistance practices as moments of affective, subconscious

While literature on mass incarceration has focused primarily on incarcerated men, their children, and their romantic partners, this article builds on a smaller body of work that highlights the harms to mothers under the constraints of the neoliberal carceral state. In this study, I examine how mothers with incarcerated adult children have been conscripted to perform extractive caring labor. Drawing

Using data from a series of semi-structured interviews with gender-diverse participants, we propose reframing the phenomenon of gender dysphoria as part of a larger social process rooted in the pursuit of gender euphoria. Our findings suggest that gender dysphoria is the result of a social process of negotiating access to gender-euphoric desires across the macro, interactional, and individual levels

Feminists scholars based in the United States have long struggled with applying intersectionality to a transnational lens. This article explores intersectionality’s translations, drawing on two cases in Japan: the first, an anti-racism movement, and the second, a coalitional anti-rape campaign. We offer the concept of compartmentalizing intersectionality to describe the practices of prioritizing and

“Doing gender” has been explored in a variety of contexts. However, accountability to gender is understudied, leading scholars to call for work that analyzes the varying salience of gender accountability. I respond by studying transgender and gender-nonconforming (TGNC+) migrants originally from the West and Southeast Asia who now live in South Korea. How do TGNC+ migrants experience accountability

Social psychological research suggests that workplace discrimination harms women’s self-confidence and mental health, which may lead them to remain silent or quit their jobs after facing discrimination. However, feminist scholarship argues that discrimination can generate feminist consciousness and resistance. To interrogate these conflicting expectations, we draw on in-depth interviews with professional

Drawing on gender structure and life course theories, this article examines how heterosexual couples “undo gender” in their work–family arrangements within the conservative context of Switzerland. Focusing on how gendered norms and expectations are challenged, we explore in a longitudinal analysis the influence of both partners’ gender ideologies on paid and unpaid work arrangements across family life

In this article, I demonstrate how piety and feminism can come together to motivate women’s departures from gender-traditional religious communities. I draw on, and combine, theories of religious defection with those on the development of feminist consciousness to show how some Muslim women, who joined the Salafi community in London between 1980s and 2010, later moved out of the community in different

The recent revival of Du Boisian sociological scholarship has resituated W.E.B. Du Bois as a foundational innovator of empirically grounded sociology who theoretically and methodologically shaped the development of multiple subfields. At the same time, this emerging body of work leaves unclear how Du Boisian sociology should be understood in relation to theorizing on the intersections of race and gender

Feminist debates on how the state incorporates and reshapes feminist categories of violence reveal unintended consequences, such as the depoliticization of these ideas. Through a case study of the Feminicídio Law in Brazil, I examine feminist writings on feminicídio, following its state incorporation as a criminal category, to address the killing of women based on gendered reasons. Drawing on materialist

Historically, suicidal women and women in distress have been pathologized and trivialized. Despite high rates of suicidality among women, the role of gender and femininity continue to be overlooked in suicide research. I perform a qualitative “sociological autopsy” on 17 cases of young women who communicated intent before their deaths by suicide but were dismissed or ignored. I identify two tropes

The cultural economy of the contemporary Canadian sex industry, particularly the upscale sectors, requires workers to conform to white aesthetics and gestures in conscious attempts to generate desire among white consumers. This article, drawing on a qualitative study, posits Canadian sex workers of color as a critical point of inquiry to understand how they negotiate market expectations against the

The 2013 Charter of Values in Québec proposed to ban “ostentatious” religious symbols in the public sphere; while ostensibly neutral, such bans harm women who identify as Muslim, hurting their sense of belonging. This article examines the emotional experiences of Canadian Muslim women and the emotion work they do to manage non-Muslims’ impressions of them in a context of rampant Islamophobia. To understand

Political and popular tropes portray Muslims as monolithically, uniquely, and inherently patriarchal and misogynistic—a phenomenon of which Muslims are acutely aware. This study asks whether and how Islamophobic tropes influence Muslims’ gender ideologies. Using life history interviews with Muslim Americans, we find a diversity of gender beliefs, challenging the discourses that frame Muslims’ gender

Changing socioeconomic conditions are enticing more and more Nigerian mothers to work and pursue careers. This article explores how middle-class professional women navigate working mother subjectivities in the context of Nigeria’s strong patriarchal culture, where traditional notions of maternal femininity prevail. We argue that the working mother’s subjectivity is a key site where the struggle over

The field of critical heterosexualities studies invites sociologists to untether heterosexuality from biology. In this article, I leverage the findings of 113 interviews with a racially diverse sample of cis and trans women to examine how women maintain everyday dignity in the street despite widespread gender harassment and systemic, racialized sexual inequalities. Drawing on social constructionist

Questions about women’s safety have gained importance in both India and Pakistan, as gendered and sexual violence in public spaces has risen. This motivates questions about the presence and mobility of women in public spaces in South Asia and their determinants. In this paper, we extend feminist scholarship on space and time, social reproduction, classical patriarchy, and the everyday by unpacking

The cessation of breastfeeding by low-income mothers returning to work is a feminist concern. Our research advances knowledge from the Global South to extend understanding of breastfeeding at work as a form of foodwork in organizational settings. A major reason for breastfeeding cessation is the conflict between this foodwork labor and the physical labor of paid employment. In-depth interview data

There is little scholarship on how gender impacts the construction of leadership in supposedly leaderless, horizontal social movements. In this study, I expand the concept of leading tasks, to get at the ways in which gender intersects with the critical organizing work of maintaining horizontal movements. Drawing on comparative data from 7 months of fieldwork conducted with two grassroots groups in

This study extends the literature on the impact of the family of origin on gender identity by theorizing about refusing gender. We define refusing gender as the intimate refusal of gender identity by family members that is perceived as intentional and deliberate by transgender and nonbinary people in the United States. In this article, we demonstrate how refusing gender is intimate, perceived as intentional

This article is an expansion of the Feminist Lecture that I gave at the Sociologists for Women in Society Meetings in April 2021. I map my journey toward conocimiento, highlighting the centrality of my volunteer work with asylum seekers, traveling to their sponsors after being released from ICE detention, for the development of my identity as a scholar activist. I rely on two theories, intersectionality