Bisexual parents tend to be categorized as either straight, lesbian, or gay depending on the gender of their relationships, supporting the assumption that bisexuality has no impact on parenting. The present study examines bisexual parents separately from their non-bisexual peers to understand how bisexuals might parent differently. In particular, this project investigates how bisexual parents navigate conversations about sexuality with their children, given that a parent’s bisexuality is rarely obvious. This project employs a mixed-method approach, using both survey and interview data. The sample contains 6,638 survey respondents and 103 interviewees. The majority of interviewees identify as bisexual parents (n=71), although gay (n=8), lesbian (n=13), and straight (n=9) parents, as well as two adult children of parents, are included for comparison. Closed survey questions were coded primarily for descriptive statistics. Open-ended survey questions and interview transcripts were coded using grounded theory to identify emergent themes as they unfolded. The majority of bisexual parents in the sample desired conversations about bisexuality with their children, though they often reported feeling lost about how best to have these conversations given the lack of representation of bisexuality in media and parenting resources. Typically, parents used a child-centered approach, prioritizing concerns for their children’s development and decentering themselves in conversations about bisexuality. When asked how their parenting compared to the parenting of non-bisexuals, bisexuals insisted that they were more open-minded and better prepared for conversations about sexuality and gender with their children. Bisexual parents explained that their experiences being marginalized by both straight and lesbian/gay communities enabled them to better empathize with their children no matter how their children identified in terms of sexuality or gender. When comparing bisexual parents’ opinions toward various topics to the opinions of lesbian, gay, and straight parents, bisexual parents were particularly more open-minded toward their children’s bisexual and transgender identities. This phenomenon is referred to as the “Bisexual Parent Advantage.” When analyzing parents’ responses by gender, this study reveals that men were less likely to talk openly to their children about bisexuality compared to women. Bisexual men tended to focus solely on the physicality of their attraction, which often led them to feel less comfortable talking to their children about their bisexuality. In contrast, bisexual women described their bisexuality as a romantic rather than sexual identity, leading them to talk to children of all ages about their bisexuality. Differences in gender are linked to hegemonic masculinity and emphasized femininity, suggesting that bisexual men may be more invested in describing their bisexuality in non-romantic terms in order to maintain masculine expectations of fatherhood, and bisexual women may describe their bisexuality as a romantic identity in order to distance themselves from non-feminine stereotypes of hypersexuality. This research has three major academic implications: (1) I demonstrate that bisexuals experience systemic erasure and stigma which separates them from gays or straights and incentivizes studying their unique experiences further; (2) I complicate the popular narrative in LGBTQ+ parenting research that the gender of parents “matters,” in favor of a more complex analysis aligned with feminist standpoint theory which considers not just gender, but also the impact of experiences with oppression or marginalization on parenting practices; and (3) By highlighting the diversity of opinions and experiences within a large group of bisexual parents, I showcase a need for conducting more intersectional research in the sociologies of sexuality, gender, and family. This research also provides justification for federal protections of LGBTQ+ adoption and foster care.

I became a working tattooer via apprenticeship in a tattoo shop near downtown Oakland, California. Besides tattooing more than 400 strangers, I took abundant field notes, and spoke with roughly 50 tattooers, apprentices, and counter people during my first years tattooing. This dissertation is an auto-ethnographic account of that experience, and it primarily explains the embodied¬¬ production of tattooers— or how the process of becoming a tattooer can shape a person’s physical, mental, emotional, and moral life. Tattooers, I suggest, come to embody what tattooing means and what it takes through repetitive encounters with its challenges and rewards.

The project contributes to scholarship of body labor and that of tattooing. It offers at least three contributions to research on body labor: (1) It theorizes the temporalities of body labor; (2) It explores a masculine and masculinizing form of body labor; (3) It offers a pragmatist explanation of embodiment in relation to labor. It also contributes to research on tattooing that, even when aimed at tattooers, has yet to explain their embodiment. It is the first major sociological work to explore tattooing from within direct experience of becoming a tattooer.

The now-classic essay “Doing Gender'' by West and Zimmerman (1987) was published over 30 years ago. Since then, gender accomplishments and failures have been discussed at length; but what aspects of gender knowledge are necessary in order to do gender? Gender categories (men, women, nonbinary people, etc.) and statuses (cisgender or non-cisgender) structure social life and guide life chances, yet they lack significant sociological definition and analysis. To better understand gender categories and statuses, I conducted 75 interviews examining gender transgressions and the meaning-making of gender boundaries. My analysis of gender rule-breaking will produce a theoretical intervention explaining the construction and transmission of gender knowledge. What exactly do we know when we know that a gender boundary is transgressed? Specifically, I will focus on why, despite engaging in many of the same gendered actions, cis and non-cis people occupy such different social and material realities. While non-cis experiences have been theorized as the exemplar of doing gender, there remains a need to critically analyze the cisgender status as a social phenomenon. The aim of my research program is to investigate the commonly-accepted divisions between gendered actors: between binary and nonbinary people, and between those who are cisgender and non-cisgender. My inquiry primarily explores the idea of gender difference by considering the concept of gender transgressions as they occur through both gender category and gender status. By first offering a typology of gender transgressions, I will then uncover the functions they serve and ultimately examine how they are policed and perceived through social interaction. I will lay a theoretical foundation to assess everyday power dynamics among all gendered actors. My study of cisgender and non-cisgender people’s experiences will produce new analytical tools to understand the gender system in which we are all immersed. In so many ways, to know one’s gender is to know one’s place in society. My work seeks to build on the doing gender literature by exposing the underlying mechanisms of what it is to “know” gender.

The video game industry today is widespread and gargantuan, with a player base greater than a quarter of the world’s population. As the medium and its market expanded in the 1980s and 1990s, companies—particularly Japanese companies—developed new business practices to respond to the demands and frontiers of globalization. One particular set of practices involved the alteration and transformation of products to address presumed cultural differences between the site of production and the target consumer market—practices the games industry largely now calls “localization,” identified as a necessary part of the game development process. Articulated as idealized or best business practices, localization techniques seemed to reinforce cultural differences between Japan and their market regions abroad, namely North America and Europe. As I show in this project, however, localization instead produced those differences through the practices’ underlying assumptions, the use of localization logic as a preemptive and post-facto rationale, and the concept’s flexibility and malleability in response to differing social conditions. I track, in chapter order, the varied localization techniques employed in the 1980s and 1990s, the changing social contexts that influenced localization practices and resultant game content, and the impact of corporate social networks in spreading localization ideologies. I ultimately suggest that localization, as a set of discourses, an ideology of globalization, and eventual taken-for-granted cultural “truth” of the industry, mobilized imaginaries of nationalized Others, produced mythologies of essentialized cultural differences, and institutionalized the primacy of such mythologized differences in manipulating the circuitous flows of cultures under globalization.