Gay sexuality has been racialized as White and Latino ethnicity opposes a homosexual identity. Adopting a gay sexual identity thus seemingly requires the shedding of an expressive and instrumental ethnic identity, something that is challenging if not impossible for Latino men. I argue, however, that it is possible to be both gay and Latino and I show how that happens for my Latino gay men respondents. The focus of my dissertation is on gay men who are out to their family members and invested in a romantic, committed relationship. I analyzed Latino gay men’s lives in order to shed light on how LGBTQ people of color reconcile historically unreconcilable aspects of their lives: sexual identity and ethnic identity. I find that my respondents contest ethnosexual boundaries in their everyday interactions with family members. The Latino gay men in my study, predominantly of Mexican origin, become gay within the family context as they engage family in processes that are shaped by broader shifts in the cultural, social, economic, and political contexts in which they and their families are embedded.

Asexuality, an umbrella term that refers to those who experience low/no sexual attraction, exists at the margins of both the heteronormative and queer worlds. This makes it an invaluable strategic site to examine the relationships between gender, sexuality, and the politics of categorization. In this dissertation, I draw on 77 interviews and email dialogues with individuals under the asexuality umbrella to examine what asexuality can reveal about these relationships. In the first chapter, I examine how gender shapes one’s experience of asexuality. I find that for men, asexuality is seen as impossible, for women asexuality is seen as unremarkable, and nonbinary experiences of asexuality are typically sidelined from participants’ answers altogether. This speaks to the endurance of the gender binary even among a group where nonbinary experiences of gender are common, the deep intermingling of gender and sexuality as systems of social regulation, and the denial of women’s sexual desire as part of the scaffolding of rape culture. In the second chapter, I find that over a third of my participants were resistant to claiming any gender identity. Based on this finding, I coin the term gender detachment, which refers to individually-held notions that gender presentation/identity is unimportant, pointless, and potentially even oppressive. I also consider how the unraveling of common assumptions about sexuality (i.e. that everyone does and should experience sexual attraction) can lead to the unraveling of common assumptions about gender as well. In the third chapter, I explore the apparent paradoxes created by asexual ways of identifying. Drawing on Gloria Anzaldúa’s borderlands theory, I examine the (a)sexual borderlands that trouble the queer/hetero binary. I also consider how all three chapters help us think about—and disrupt—the systems of gender and sexual categorization upon which sociologists and everyday people so often rely.

This dissertation takes a multi-level approach to understanding the extent to which the relationship between drugs and society has evolved over the past twenty years by looking at macro, state-level changes in the policy environment along with changes in the services provided by drug treatment organizations. I begin by examining the diffusion of Good Samaritan and Naloxone Access laws: two state-level policy reforms, which reflect an overall shift towards the medicalization (rather than criminalization) of opioid addiction. With this changing policy landscape as a background, I investigate whether this increased concern with treating opioid addiction as a health issue is also reflected in the availability of three kinds of drug treatment services relevant to people who are dealing with opioid addiction: methadone, buprenorphine, and treatment for co-occurring mental health issues. Consequently, this dissertation seeks to answer three separate (yet interrelated) questions that address the extent to which the US is shifting to addressing drug addiction as health problem and the reasons for these changes: 1) Why have Good Samaritan and Naloxone Access laws diffused, and why are their diffusion patterns different?; 2) How have medicalized opioid addiction treatment services diffused in the last 20 years?; and 3) Do factors predicting the availability of medical-based treatment services vary over time or by type of treatment? While medicalized drug policies and practices have all diffused widely, this diffusion has not bee uniform – with Naloxone laws diffusing more than Good Samaritan laws, Buprenorphine diffusing more than Methadone, and treatment for co- occurring mental health issues diffusing more than medication-assisted treatment. In total, my dissertation makes three key arguments. First, understanding how policies and practices alter definitional and institutional loci of social problems is integral to understanding the diffusion of policy and practices. Second, policies or practices that expand institutional domains diffuse wider than those that challenge institutional logics. Finally, institutions and their responses to social problems are racialized – possible solutions to a social problem and the institutional context of these solutions depends on whether whites or non-whites are seen as the affected population.

This dissertation investigates student veteran educational experience from a multimethodological institutionally comparative perspective. Quantitatively, using nationally representative data, it explores student veteran academic and social engagement. Qualitatively, this work investigates student veteran educational decision-making and the role of peer communities in veteran success at colleges and universities.

In this dissertation, I examine race and racism in U.S. stand-up comedy, with particular attention to discursive and demographic shifts from the civil rights era to the present. I situate an examination of race-talk in stand-up comedy within the broader literature on post-civil rights racial discourse in the U.S., which contends that offensive public race-talk is on the decline. I argue comedians occupy a critical and central role in the matter of racial speech, but that sociologists have largely sidelined them in favor of more “serious” matters. Moreover, humor scholars have largely ignored the race question and today emphasize a celebratory rather than critical analysis of humor. I contend popular cultural industries like comedy are important yet understudied cultural-fields that bridge academic and public debates about the limits of offensive discourse in a free speech society. Here, I analyze how racial ridicule has been contested and regulated by organized publics and private entities during and after the civil rights movement, how racial/ethnic comedy has changed as a result of such contestation, how racial insults are now deployed strategically by humorists, as well as how the demographic trends of elite comedians have changed from the civil rights era to the present. I use case studies of performers and discourse analysis of performances, recordings, and oral histories to examine the shift between pre-civil rights and post-civil rights race based comedy. Using participant observation in a comedy school, I map the strategic nature of racial discourse in contemporary stand-up comedy. Finally, I examine the racial and gender demography of the Grammy Award for Comedy over the last 5 decades. One overarching conclusion of my dissertation is that the intersection of race and comedy offers a fertile field for sociological analysis.

Human trafficking recently shifted from being considered a marginal problem to an urgent one. As recent as twenty years ago, however, laws criminalizing trafficking were few and public perception mostly understood slavery as an issue of the past. Why do issues enter the global arena and receive worldwide attention when they do? Why is there suddenly so much urgency and activity around a problem that has, in fact, existed throughout history? Social scientists increasingly devote attention to how global norms and policies emerge when they do, and how international policies are translated into meaningful action. This dissertation draws from cultural and global sociology to explain why human trafficking recently emerged as a significant global issue of concern, and how we might make better sense of its diffuse effects among practitioners and affected populations.To address the first question, I draw from over 300 UN documents to analyze why the UN Trafficking Protocol helped motivate international activity against trafficking in 2000 when a strikingly similar UN trafficking treaty in 1949 failed to do so. Contrary to popular accounts, trafficking did not re-emerge as an urgent problem in 2000 because the problem was worse than before, nor did it succeed because states suddenly had new political interests in combating the problem or because movements succeeded in getting trafficking on the agenda. Rather, I argue that the macro-cultural transformations that occurred during the decades after 1949, including decolonization and the institutionalization of human rights made trafficking’s perceived harms or “wrongs” at that time become increasingly obsolete. After the issue was resurrected and reshaped by delegates at UN conferences during the 1990s, its new framing as an issue of violence against women and transnational crime quickly gained traction and attention within the contemporary global environment. By probing the complex relationship between macro-cultural changes and political action, these findings provide new insights into why issues enter the global arena when they do, how existing policy paradigms transform into new ones, and the institutional mechanisms by which new global norms emerge. To address the extent to which human trafficking law actually addresses how trafficking works and victim vulnerabilities I use qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) to analyze over 800 interviews with formerly trafficked persons in Cambodia, a country routinely referred to as one of the “worst” places for child trafficking. Based on findings that suggest vulnerability to exploitation in Cambodia is intimately tied to structural and social inequalities more so than a typical perpetrator-victim incident, I problematize the legal definitions and remedies for trafficking propagated by international law that focus on criminal activity or the attribution of specific types of rights rather than structural vulnerabilities.

Through a comparative study of four sexual minority communities (nudists, polyamorists, furries, and BDSMers), I ask: (1) why do routine behaviors become seen as deviant and (2) how do individuals and groups respond to oppressive laws that were never meant to regulate them but nonetheless have a negative impact? My study analyzes how legal regimes are stretched to conform to the evolving habits of the moral crusaders and how marginalized groups assess possible risks and negotiate latent illegality from clusters of laws that are expanded to regulate new groups and individuals. This dissertation brings together scholarship on legal ambiguity, moral panics, organizational studies, and the burgeoning research on sexual minorities and the intersection of sexuality and the law (Smith et al 2022; Vogler 2016, 2021; Weinberg 2016). Sociologists of law and other sociolegal scholars have been increasingly interested in different forms of legal ambiguity, including legal process ambiguity and legal consciousness. This scholarship understands legal ambiguity as the wedge with which marginalized groups can use the court system to acquire new legal rights and protections (Gash and Raiskin 2018; Ewick and Sibley 1998). While much of the relevant literature stresses the limits of the law—its incapacity to regulate targeted activities—I reveal the negative side of legal ambiguity and how it is used to create new or expanded categories of illegality and deviance to conform to the moral preferences of power elites. My dissertation highlights the, at times, surprising reach of law and its capacity to regulate untargeted activities. Latent illegality, a concept I have developed to describe how a cluster of laws are weaponized to regulate new groups and behaviors, affects individuals and groups in ways that are not accounted for by legal ambiguity. I argue that different rhetorics for defining membership and levels of organizational flexibility affect the abilities of these groups to balance competing goals of inclusivity and risk mitigation. Drawing on more than 1,000 surveys, interviews with community leaders, and observational data, I offer a novel analysis of how marginalized groups, such as lesser studied sexual minorities, balance being welcoming and inclusive of non-members seeking support and community while protecting group members from legal and extralegal risks. In short, these groups strategically construct their community identities and the formal aspects of their organizations in ways that are both deeply resonant to their members while being immediately responsive to outside stigma, legal, and extralegal risks.