SOCIOLOGY 2021 | Chapter Showcase

SOCIOLOGY 2021 | Chapter Showcase LEXINGTON BOOKS An Imprint of Rowman & Littlefield LEXINGTON BOOKS CHAPTER SHOWCASE FROM THE EDITOR Over the past year, humankind has been forced into a new normal. This new normal has further oppressed people of color and women, and has reshaped families, education, healthcare, the economy, and the workforce. We also live in a polarized society in which truth and facts are distorted. We’re tackling these new challenges while reckoning with our racist past and present as well as our warming planet. Now, more than ever, sociology provides a crucial space for examining our communities and societies during these tumultuous times. The Lexington Books sociology titles, written by an array of diverse scholars, investigate and scrutinize our social world while simultaneously creating a sense of solidarity that we so desperately need. These selected chapters explore gender, work, and childcare; minority social movements; the impact of natural disasters on social inequality; sexuality and aging; and symbolic interaction in popular culture—all topics that affect and unite each of us. I invite you to publish your next scholarly book with Lexington Books. We publish monographs, edited collections, revised dissertations, and ethnographies by emerging and established scholars, including interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary works. While we publish many standalone titles, we also publish books in series that bring together incisive scholarship around a key subject, such as Breaking Boundaries: New Horizons in Gender & Sexualities, Health and Aging in the Margins, Critical Animal Studies, and Studies in Urban–Rural Dynamics. Click here to see a full list of our series. Lexington Books offers an expedited decision-making process, peer review, and a rapid production process to ensure that your research is published quickly. We publish high-quality books with full-color covers, and we market our new titles aggressively around the world. Our titles are regularly reviewed in scholarly journals and have received significant awards and honors for academic scholarship. To submit a proposal for a book project, please review our submission guidelines and email a full prospectus to me at [email protected]. Or, if you prefer to discuss your project with me first, please email me to set up a time for a phone call. I look forward to hearing from you. Sincerely, Courtney Morales COURTNEY MORALES Associate Acquisitions Editor LEXINGTON BOOKS contents 4 - 20 J.E. Sumerau and Eric Anthony Grollman, “Framing Minority Movements,” in Black Lives and Bathrooms: Racial and Gendered Reactions to Minority Rights Movements 21 - 48 Paul S. Adams, “Working for the Clampdown: The Impact of Hyper-Decentralization on Voter Registration and Ballot Ac- cess in the Wake of Natural Disasters” in The Impact of Natural Disasters on Systemic Political and Social Inequities in the U.S., ed. Paul S. Adams and Geoffrey L. Wood 49 - 70 Laura Bunyan, “Gender and Power: Interactions in the Work- place and on the Homefront” in Modern Day Mary Poppins: The Unintended Consequences of Nanny Work 71 - 84 David G. LoConto, “I Cosplay, Therefore I Am” in Social Move- ments and the Collective Identity of the Star Trek Fandom: Boldly Going Where No Fans Have Gone Before 85 - 94 Lacey J. Ritter and Alexandra C.H. Nowakowski, “Aging Openly” in Sexual Deviance in Health and Aging: Uncovering Later Life Intimacy The pagination of the original chapters has been preserved to enable accurate citations of these chapters. These chapters are provided for personal use only and may not be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means without permission of the publisher. All rights reserved. J.E. Sumerau and Eric Anthony Grollman, “Framing Minority Movements,” in Black Lives and Bathrooms: Racial and Gendered Reactions to Minority Rights Movements (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2020), 13-29. Series: Breaking Boundaries: New Horizons in Gender & Sexualities. All Rights Reserved. Chapter One Framing Minority Movements We were sitting in a hotel lobby late one summer night in 2016. As friends and colleagues who live in different cities, we were catching up on life and processing a long day of academic conference activities. We were both feel- ing frustrated by the numerous dirty looks at J’s skirt given by fellow conference-goers and others in the city throughout the day. We also felt frustrated by the implicit and explicit racist comments we had each heard, individually and while together, at times during the day within and outside the conference. At least one of the comments from a another person attending the conference, we were fairly sure, was directed at Eric specifically. We were talking about these frustrations while also discussing ideas, potential research projects, our families, and other topics when we noticed news coverage on the television in the hotel lobby about transgender people’s attempts to gain adequate bathroom access in the U.S. The television was muted. It was also across the room. It was hard to tell what the contents of the program might be from our vantage point. Eric turned to J and asked, “Have you ever felt safe or comfortable in a bathroom?” J thought about it and responded honestly, “Not in public, at least that I can remember. There is always at least a little fear.” Eric asked, “I wonder how people outside of the academy or the actual movements think or feel about trans rights?” Smiling, J said, “I would like to know that about all kinds of social movements, now that you mention it.” Eric took a sip of their tea. J turned back toward the television and watched the screen for a few minutes. The seeds of this book were planted in that moment. Over the next few months, we both spent time searching through academic literatures, popular media, and other artifacts trying to 13 4 Lexington Books Sociology Chapter Showcase 14 Chapter 1 ascertain potential answers to this question. At the same time, as J traveled around to small towns, rural areas, and flea markets in her spare time as she often does, she began asking people in these settings, as well as students in her classes, what they thought about, for example, the pro-choice or pro-life movements, the gay and lesbian marriage rights movements, or the Black Lives Matter movement. As we continued this process, we came to see that people framed or defined social movements in specific ways. As a result, we sought to design a formal study to ascertain what people thought about specific social movements. We saw this type of inquiry as especially important considering any suc- cess or failure movements have will ultimately be tied to what the broader public thinks about the movement (Reger et al. 2008). Whereas movements themselves are typically composed of people dedicated to a given social issue, group, or topic, social changes generally emerge as others beyond a movement—or its direct, organized opponents—respond to movement activities over time. We thus sought to understand this area of political processes; how people outside of an organized movement respond to said movement in relation to their own lives. To this end, we sought to create a study that would allow us to ascertain this type of information through the use of specific case studies and in-depth interviews with people outside of the specific movements. In this chapter, we return to this original impetus for our project—how do people who are not researchers nor members of a given social movement make sense of such a movement? What do they think about them? How do they define what the movement is and what it stands for? From where do they get these impressions? What do such impressions say about how movement activities arrive in the thoughts and feelings of the broader population? In short, as social theorist Erving Goffman (1974) argued long ago, we sought to see how people “frame” social movements that may be relevant in their social world by creating their own interpretations of “what is going on” within and in relation to social movements, political issues, and social norms. WHAT IS GOING ON HERE? Examining the everyday interactions and norms of social life, Goffman (1959; 1963; 1974; 1977) argued that society revolves around a series of information exchanges. People encounter society as a collection of thoughts, beliefs, traditions, rules, and expectations they must learn to navigate and interpret throughout their own lives. You may, for example, recall a moment in childhood when you first encountered a restroom in a public space that was defined by others as only for one type of person (i.e., whites only or men only). Within such an encounter, you had to determine whether you were the Lexington Books Sociology Chapter Showcase 5 Framing Minority Movements 15 type of person allowed in that space based on the information you received beforehand and in that moment (i.e., am I white or am I one of the men). Based on this interpretation or understanding of what is going on in this situation, you then know that you are supposed to use or not use this particu- lar restroom according to the rules established by a given social authority. You may then choose to either conform to the rule or violate the rule. In this way, social life can be boiled down to a series of interactions wherein you encounter existing social rules, interpret said rules in relation to your own self-concept, and then act based on your interpretation of yourself and the rule in question. The entirety of social life can be viewed as an ongoing experience wherein social beings “frame” each situation in certain ways, consciously or un- consciously, and act in relation to such frames (see also Blumer 1969; Bonil- la-Silva 2018; Collins 2005; Ridgeway 2011; Lampe et al.

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