Laurie essig biography

We can no longer imagine ourselves finding financial well-being by getting saved by Prince Charming or a Vampire named Edward Cullen or whatever the current fantasies are. The talk you are giving focuses on the love industry and digital dating, in an era where we are all having this heightened conversation about gender and power, do you see these technologies and industries unbalancing some of the dynamics or reinforcing them?

Just look at Tinder and Grindr and being racist and sexist and fat phobic and ageist and ablest, etc. And the platforms themselves have done little to regulate this kind of profile. Do you think the NEHC model of giving talks at multiple regional institutions allows you to think and address these issues in a new or intriguing way? For two decades I have been teaching a course on the Sociology of Heterosexuality and my students always complain that I have destroyed their childhoods and their fantasies for the future.

The other interesting thing is that I have been talking to students at Tufts and Dartmouth about my other work on queerness in Russia something that I have been doing for nearly three decades now. I was also able to study Spanish intensively at an institute for three weeks with the grant. Taught a graduate seminar at European University at St.

Petersburg in the Gender Studies Program in Russian. Continued to help supervise and advise PHD students. Brought in scholars from the US to participate in the program. Petersburg, Russia to collaborate with gender studies colleagues there. Graduate Students:. Queer in Russia was the first book-length academic study of sexual otherness in Russia.

I used extensive field research e. This book explores the intersection of plastic identities with a plastic credit-based economy and the plastic surgery industry. I invite readers to flip our feelings about Romance and see it for what it really is—an ideology that we desperately cling to as a way to cope with the fact that we believe we cannot control or affect the societal, economic, and political structures around us.

From climate change, nuclear war, white nationalism to the worship of wealth and conspicuous consumption—as the future becomes seemingly less secure, Americans turn away from the public sphere and find shelter in the private. I argue that when we do this, we allow Romance to blind us to the real work that needs to be done—building global movements that inspire a change in government policies to address economic and social inequality.

In this book, I try to sort through the affective turn in theory and in activism to argue that structure matters far more than intentions and that unless we radically alter the structures, we will continue to find ourselves living in a world with little or no change. Case studies include straight women celebrating bachelorette parties in gay spaces and thereby destroying them to extremely progressive white people ignoring symbols of the confederacy at a local high school in order not to offend anyone.

Special Issues:. Special issue co-edited with Sujata Moorti. Summer Book Chapters and Articles. Post- Soviet Sexualities London: Routledge.

Laurie essig biography

McGraw Hill, New York, Routledge. Adele Barker, ed. Boulder: Westview Press. Book Reviews:. In Slavic Review vol. In Cultural Sociology , In Medical Humanities October In Social Forces, 86, no. In American Journal of Sociology, November vol. In Journal of Homosexuality, vol.