Research

The Battle for Hegemonic Masculinity in a White Nationalist Online Community

Undertaking a “virtual” ethnography of a white supremacist online forum, I explore how masculinity is re-articulated in this social movement community. I find two masculinities vying for dominance who define themselves against a differing prime adversary revealing these two groups’ differing race, class, and gender ideologies. By analyzing these two discursive strategies of masculinity, I highlight how masculine hierarchies are sustained and challenged in a local community through forum contestation.

This paper has been published in the journal of Men and Masculinities. Article Here

An interview about this paper was featured on U of T – you can read more about the paper and how I approached my research site as a WOC: U of T interview with Jillian Sunderland

Media Attribution, Sexual Assault, and Elite Boy Violence

Through a content and discourse analysis of popular Canadian newspapers, I explore a sexual assault at an elite private all-boys school in Toronto, ON. My study weaves literature on media framing, attributions of responsibility, and feminist anti-violence work. I examine how attributions of blame were diffused away from the boys and onto the school and society to shield privileged young men from accountability. Further, I theorize how the media drew on common feminist frames of “rape culture” and “toxic masculinity” to negate the boys’ culpability and thus reproduce hierarchies of race, class, and gender in media coverage.

This paper has recently been submitted to the journal of Social Problems and is under review. The findings of this project have been presented at American Sociological Association (ASA) Conference and the Canadian Sociological Association Conference (CSA). This has also served as the basis for guest lectures at the University of Toronto.

Fatherhood, Hybrid Masculinity, Gender Identity and Roles

As an RA for Dr. Casey Scheibling, we use interviews with new fathers in Ontario and Quebec to explore how they grapple with new ideologies of “involved fatherhood.” Using participants’ narratives, we argue that when becoming dads, new fathers’ gender identities are expanded, allowing for more caring, less rigid enactments of masculinity. However, this is coupled with constricting work-family roles. This project theorizes the strategies men use to wrestle with these contradictions.

Stateless, Citizenship, Politics of Non-Belonging

As an RA for Dr. Anna Korteweg, we undertook a discourse analysis of English (UK) and Dutch newspapers to compare the cases of two women who left their home countries and joined ISIS but occasioned different state responses to their actions. We argue that their differential treatment reveals how race, gender, and class intersect to produce citizenship outcomes of revocation or rehabilitation.

This paper is under review at Gender and Society.