Sociology Department

Laurel Westbrook

 
Laurel Westbrook (Assistant Professor): Professor Westbrook earned her M.A. and Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California, Berkeley. Her research and teaching interests include gender, sexuality, theory, social movements, social problems, violence, and the media. Her current research explores the mechanisms by which ideas and practices of gender and violence are produced and reproduced.
 
In her dissertation, “Violence Matters: Constructions of Gender and Violence in Accounts of Murder by Mainstream News Media and Social Movement Actors,” she focused on one such means of (re)production: social narratives about acts of violence. She investigated the ideas about gender, sexuality, and violence that have been produced, circulated, and reinforced in ‘non-fiction’ narratives told about the murders of transgendered people. To do so, she collected and analyzed all the available non-fiction texts produced about these murders in the United States between 1990 and 2005 by the mainstream news media and transgender activist groups. She found that, although gender violence is usually only studied in terms of what Michel Foucault called repressive power, the stories we tell about violence are highly productive of ideas and practices of violence, including practices of victimhood and violence prevention.
 
Professor Westbrook is in the process of starting a new project which will examine the production of ideas about and practices of gender, sexuality, and violence in a new setting: self-defense courses for girls and boys. Through interviews and ethnography, she will compare ideas of vulnerability and dangerousness produced in self-defense training programs. She plans to explore both the different fears of violence these trainings assuage (and/or produce) and how these courses perpetuate or challenge the ideas of females and children as inherently vulnerable to violence. Moreover, she plans to attend to questions of race and class in these courses, examining how children of different races and classes are taught to protect themselves and who they are taught to fear, as well as how the object of fear is both raced and classed. This work continues her engagement with the subfields of gender, sexuality, race, social movements, social stratification, violence, and theory.
 
Recent Publications
 
“Doing Gender, Doing Heteronormativity: ‘Gender Normals,’ Transgender People, and the Social Maintenance of Heterosexuality.” Gender & Society, vol. 23, no. 4: 440-464. Co-authored with Kristen Schilt.
 
“Vulnerable Subjecthood: The Risks and Benefits of the Struggle for Hate Crime Legislation.” The Berkeley Journal of Sociology, vol. 52: 2008.
 
“On Writing Public Sociology: Accountability Through Accessibility, Dialogue, and Relevance.” The Handbook of Public Sociology. Ed. Vincent Jefferies. Rowman & Littlefield: 2009. Co-authored with Damon Mayrl.
 
"Where the Women Aren't: Gender Differences in the Use of LGBT Resources on College Campuses.” In press at The Journal of LGBT Youth: 2009.
 
“Becoming Knowably Gendered: The Production of Transgender Possibilities and Constraints in the Mass and Alternative Press from 1990-2005 in the United States.” Forthcoming in Transgender Identities: Towards a Social Analysis of Gender Diversity. Eds. Dr. Sally Hines and Dr. Tam Sanger. London, Routledge: 2009.
 
2159 ASH Phone: (616) 331-3198 Email: Laurel_Westbrook@gvsu.edu