Handbook of the Sociology of Gender

This handbook provides a comprehensive view of the field of the sociology of gender. It presents the most important theories about gender and methods used to study gender, as well as extensive coverage of the latest research on gender in the most important areas of social life, including gendered bodies, sexuality, carework, paid labor, social movements, incarceration, migration, gendered violence, and others. Building from previous publications this handbook includes a vast array of chapters from leading researchers in the sociological study of gender. It synthesizes the diverse field of gender scholarship into a cohesive theoretical framework, gender structure theory, in order to position the specific contributions of each author/chapter as part of a complex and multidimensional gender structure. Through this organization of the handbook, readers do not only gain tremendous insight from each chapter, but they also attain a broader understanding of the way multiple gendered processes are interrelated and mutually constitutive. While the specific focus of the handbook is on gender, the chapters included in the volume also give significant attention to the interrelation of race, class, and other systems of stratification as they intersect and implicate gendered processes.

Barbara J. Risman is currently a College of Liberal Arts & Sciences Distinguished Professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. During 2018, she is a Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study in Durham University, U.K. She was previously Alumni Distinguished Research Professor at North Carolina State University. Professor Risman is mostly recently the author of Where the Millennials Will Take Us: A New Generation Wrestles with the Gender Structure (Oxford University Press, 2018) and with Virginia Rutter, Families As They Really Are (Norton, 2010, 2015). Professor Risman has served the profession in a variety of roles, as President of the Southern Sociological Society, Vice-President of the American Sociological Association, President of the Board of Directors for the Council on Contemporary Families, and President of Sociologists for Women in Society. In 2005, Dr. Risman received the Katherine Jocher Belle Boone Award from the Southern Sociological Society for lifetime contributions to the study of gender. In 2011, Dr. Risman received the American Sociological Association’s Award for the Public Understanding of Sociology. She has also received mentoring awards from Sociologists for Women in Society and from the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Carissa Froyum is an associate professor of sociology at the University of Northern Iowa. She is co-editor of Inside Social Life (Oxford) and Creating and Contesting Inequalities (Oxford) and former deputy editor of The Journal of Contemporary Ethnography. Her work on how identities and emotions reproduce inequality appears in Qualitative Sociology, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Sociological Studies of Children and Youth, and is forthcoming in Symbolic Interaction.

William J. Scarborough is a PhD candidate in Sociology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His research focuses on the economic and cultural determinants of gender wage gaps across labor markets in the U.S. He has published multiple journal articles and book chapters on issues related to gender and race inequality.