Research areas:

Gender, Social Theory, Cognitive and Cultural Sociology, Visual Sociology, Sociology of the Body

 

Dissertation: Blind to Sameness: The Socio-Optical Construction of Male and Female Bodies

In my dissertation I explore two central questions: how does perception work sociologically, and how does perception specifically function in the case of sex attribution? To capture the normally taken-for-granted process of sex attribution, I decided to interview "outsiders" - people who either do not participate in sex attribution or do it very differently - and "experts" - people who are unusually self-conscious and deliberate about sex attribution. I chose to interview blind people because they literally cannot see sex, and as such their narratives provide access to a perceptual experience of sexed bodies that is totally different in sensory content from the typical sighted experience. By highlighting their alternate perceptual reality of bodies, I am able to demonstrate that the prevailing understanding of sex is specifically sex seen as opposed to sex sensed more broadly. I chose to interview transgender people as experts on sex attribution who, because they view the human body in light of the possibility of transitioning between sexes, are often deeply aware of the underlying similarities between male and female bodies as well as their most recalcitrant differences. As a result, they offer an account of sexed bodies that is similar in its sensory content to the dominant perceptual experience (in that it is visual), but with a heightened awareness of sex cues that non-transgender people take for granted, and a unique point of view that brings some of the normally unseen similarities between male and female bodies into the foreground. In short, both groups, for reasons of circumstance, speak from unique perspectives that magnify the social construction of dominant conceptions of sex. In highlighting their experiences, I tell a story that helps the reader see the body differently by rearranging the taken-for-granted cognitive and perceptual map of the body and bringing some of what is normally backgrounded into the foreground.

While sex attribution is my case, I also use my data to advance a more general theory of how - through what specific cognitive processes - visual perception is shaped by social categories and expectations. I argue that selective attention is a fundamental mechanism of the social construction of perception, and that this dialectic of attention and disattention is most evocatively represented by the metaphor of a filter. In addition to capturing what I believe is going on interpretively when we see sex, or more broadly when we see anything as something, the filter metaphor also provides a new way to think about the relationship between social constructionist perspectives and material realities, one that captures the interaction of biology and culture without denying either one.

 

Articles and book chapters:

"Toward a Sociology of Perception: Sight, Sex and Gender." Forthcoming, Cultural Sociology.

"Perception: A Cognitive Sociological Approach." Forthcoming in La Sociologie Cognitive, edited by Fabrice Clement and Laurence Kaufman. (Paris: Ophrys/Maison des Sciences de l?Homme).

(2006) "Unintended Consequences of the Feminist Sex/Gender Distinction." Genders 43.

(2004) "Looking for the Body in Sociological Literature on Gender." Berkeley Journal of Sociology 48: 3-25.

 

Other papers (in progress):

"A Blind Phenomenology of Sexed Bodies"

"Sexpectations: Socially Organized Selective Perception in Sex Attribution"

"Thinking With Socio-Mental Filters: Exploring the Social Structuring of Attention and Significance" (with Thomas DeGloma)