My research is centrally concerned with processes of legal and social classification and their relationship to social inequalities and social change. I have been particularly interested in how practices of measurement and categorization vary across institutional settings and overlap and interlock with gender, sexuality, race, and nationality. How do we determine which migrants are “deserving?” How do we assess the risk someone poses or faces? Who is an expert? What counts as transgender, and how does that calculus vary across legal and social contexts? These questions have not only been at the forefront of our political moment; they are some of the fundamental sociological questions that have driven my research agenda.
Work stemming from these projects has been published in Social Problems, Gender & Society, Law & Society Review, Law & Social Inquiry, and Theoretical Criminology, among others.
Winner, Sociology of Law Distinguished Book Award 2022
Winner, Sociology of Sexualities Distinguished Book Award 2022
In my first book, Sorting Sexualities, I unpack the politics of the techno-legal classification of sexuality in the United States. My study focuses specifically on state classification practices around LGBTQ people seeking asylum in the United States and sexual offenders being evaluated for carceral placement—two situations where state actors must determine individuals’ sexualities. Though these legal settings are diametrically opposed—one a punitive assessment, the other a protective one—they present the same question: how do we know someone’s sexuality?
I reveal how different legal arenas take dramatically different approaches to classifying sexuality and use those classifications to legitimate different forms of social control. By delving into the histories behind these diverging classification practices and analyzing their contemporary reverberations, Sorting Sexualities shows how the science of sexuality is far more central to state power than we realize.
Policing the Rainbow
In my newest project, “Policing the Rainbow: LGBTQ People’s Experiences with and Attitudes Toward Law Enforcement,” I (with my co-PI, Val Jenness) explore LGBTQ people’s interactions with and perceptions of the police using the first-ever national probability-based survey of LGBTQ people on these issues, along with 59 in-depth interviews with a subset of survey respondents. Policing the Rainbow addresses the tension between the LGBTQ community’s contentious history with the police and more recent efforts by law enforcement agencies to improve that historically fraught relationship. Taking an intersectional perspective, we contextualize this project in the current moment of increased attention to police brutality within communities of color and the ongoing struggle against police harassment and abuse faced by queer and trans people.
Findings from this project have been published in Contexts and a report co-authored with the project team and the ACLU. Several other manuscripts from this project are underway.