Category: My research

November 30, 2015

Book: How prostitution presaged the failure of Europe

My book The Cultural Politics of European Prostitution Reform: Governing Loose Women was published by Palgrave in 2016. Is the European Project Falling Apart? asks one of several headlines as the European refugee crisis moves into chronic mode. Where the Greek debt crisis exposed the problems of the Eurozone currency union, the refugee crisis shows how…
November 4, 2015

Article: Style and the Value of Gay Nightlife: Homonormative Placemaking in San Francisco

Another of my journal articles on San Francisco gay bars appears in the current edition of Urban Studies. My very simple point is not all gay neighborhoods are (or were) the same. The point was so simple it languished in 4 journals for 7 years, going through 9 revisions. But now it’s out – complete…
June 15, 2015

Article: The Modern Career of “The Oldest Profession,” and the Social Embeddedness of Metaphors

This article was fun to write, and it’s even more fun to play with Google n-grams to track the usage of metaphors about prostitution in the UK vs US (such as this or this). Among many nuggets I uncovered: Rudyard Kipling coined the metaphor “the most ancient profession!” “Sex work” initially referred to sexuality research!…
January 22, 2015

Bar Districts as Subcultural Amenities

Finally my bar research sees the light of day in City, Cuture and Society 6(1). Bar districts, agglomerations of drinking establishments, are important to urban economies by nurturing urban subcultures. Their vernacular nature presents important contrasts to planned urban entertainment districts (UEDs). Unlike UEDs, bar districts are not necessarily amenities for middle- and upper-class consumption…
October 15, 2014

Article: The Gender Gap in Reported Homosexuality

An article of mine in the International Journal Advances in Social Science and Humanities 2(10) 20-26. Men consistently report higher rates of homosexual behavior and identity than women in national population surveys of sexuality, a gender gap that has received little attention. Though women express similar levels of same-sex desire, they are far less likely…
February 14, 2013

State of the Field: Sex Work / Trafficking

I was fortunate to be part of an amazing team to craft a position paper on prostitution, sex work, and human trafficking during the 2012 Sexualities Section of the American Sociological Association conference Crossing Boundaries, Workshopping Sexualities. So in keeping with Valentine’s Day: Brents et al 2012 State of the Field Working Paper Sex Work…
February 11, 2011

Book review of The State of Sex by Brents, Jackson & Hausbeck

A Review of: “The State of Sex: Tourism, Sex and Sin in the New American Heartland. By Barbara G. Brents, Crystal A. Jackson, and Kathryn Hausbeck” New York, NY: Routledge, 2009, 320 pages. Paperback, $28.76. Archives of Sexual Behavior. 2011.
April 6, 2009

Article: Is America fragmenting?

Published in the Annual Review of Sociology in 2009, it was cited in The New York Times in 2010. “The view that America is fragmenting is popular among both pundits and academics and may well be endemic to American culture. We review claims that between 1970 and 2005 American society fragmented along lines of cultural…
June 25, 2007

Article: Urban ethnography’s “saloon problem” and its challenge to public sociology

This was my first article which presaged my interest in bars. And, given that the Anti-Saloon League was founded there, it presaged my interest in Oberlin, Ohio. “This essay assesses the legacy of urban ethnography’s (UE) early engagement with the “saloon problem.” Early sociologists (1880–1915) intervened in the national debate on alcohol on the basis…