B Fahs
Biographic Data
| ID | 14084 |
|---|---|
| NAME | B Fahs |
| GIVEN NAMES | B |
| FAMILY NAME | Fahs |
| SIGNATURE | FAHS B |
| AFFILIATIONS | Arizona State University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6843-8066 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 73 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 422 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 73 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1969 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 13 |
Does Fatness Politicize Women? Fat Women’s Narratives on Whether Fatness is a Feminist Issue
Intimate portraits of fat women eating
Although some researchers have addressed fat women’s complicated feelings about their bodies and fat stigma, little is known about fat women’s eating practices, particularly their positive or joyful eating experiences. This study drew from semi-structured interviews with 20 fat women from a diverse community sample (Mage = 40.4, SD = 11.83, 40% queer-identified, 50% women of color, wide range of body weights) collected across the United States to…
I feel like a sausage stuffed into a casing”
Hypervisibility meets hyperinvisibility
The smooth skin every woman wants
The Many Genealogies of Feminist Activism
The stakes of feminist activism, and the fault lines within feminism, have a newfound significance in this cultural moment. In response to the fall of Roe, the ascendancy of incendiary far-right politics, and the mainstreaming of white-supremacist ideologies, grassroots feminist activism and its impacts have never mattered more. When reading Rachel Seidman's Speaking of Feminism and Arielle Rotramel's Pushing Back , both books that feature interv…
The Urgent Need for Radical Feminism Today
Radical feminism remains one of the most fraught, maligned, and misunderstood segments of the feminist movement, yet it has left deep imprints on ideas about feminist activism and thought. Though certainly not without its limitations, second-wave radical feminism opened up new understandings of gender and power, reimagined solidarity between movements, made space for angry and impatient agitators, and embodied notions of feminist praxis. This ess…
Psychological kinship between fat therapists and fat patients
While therapist matching between patient and therapist based on race and gender has received much scholarly attention, and some work has examined fatness in therapy for either the patient or the therapist, little has been written about therapies that involve fat therapists and fat patients. This manuscript explores the psychological kinship of the patient and therapist relationship when both identify as fat, particularly as connected to therapeut…
Sexual identities and political solidarities among cisgender women
This study addressed the relative liberalism of White lesbians. In doing so, we compared sexuality differences in White women's reactions to sexual, gender, and racial hierarchies. In the end, our analysis of 2,950 women from the American National Election Survey (ANES) suggested three trends. First, lesbians and bisexual women rejected and challenged heteronormativity more than heterosexual women. Second, the relationship between sexual identiti…
Who counts as a sexual partner? Women’s criteria for defining and sorting through their sexual histories
Notions of who counts as a sexual partner – that is, what specific actions, feelings, or relationships become defined as part of one’s sexual history – often carry assumptions about sexual scripts, power, and social identities. In this exploratory study, we analysed semi-structured interviews with eighteen women from a diverse 2019 community sample (mean age = 36.39, SD = 12.24) collected in a large Southwestern U.S. city in order to examine how …
Sexual Identities and Reactions to Black Lives Matter
Friends or Foes? U.S. Women’s Perceptions of Racial Justice and the Black Lives Matter Protests during the Covid-19 Pandemic
Scholarship on the first waves of the Black Lives Matter protests (2013–2014) has emerged in recent years but little is yet known about women’s responses to the cycle of Black Lives Matter/George Floyd protests that occurred in the Summer of 2020. This study analyzed semi-structured interviews with a racially diverse community sample of 20 women and two nonbinary individuals who mostly identified as feminists (mean age = 34.05, SD = 13.11). To ad…
I'll take the check
Traditional gender scripts in restaurants assume that men wield money, while women are framed as ‘accessories’ who do not pay restaurant checks in mixed-gender settings. While some research has addressed how servers replicate this script at U.S. restaurants, no previous research has looked at this practice longitudinally over time. This study explores how bill placement practices are connected to gendered power dynamics via observations of server…
Fatness, friendship, and “corpu-allyhood” stratagems
The practice, theory, and critique of allyship have been central to feminist scholarship and activism. Identities once not regarded as identities at all but as neutral givens, such as maleness, whiteness, cisnormativity, heterosexuality, abledness, and settlerhood, have all become politicized planes of analysis and action. Yet little scholarship, praxis, and activism has held people with thin privilege accountable for the role they play in fuelin…
I just tell myself it’s okay’
While some researchers have studied the spread of sexually-transmitted infections and diseases (STIs and STDs), little attention has been paid to the subjective narratives of how women assess sexual safety and the possibility of contracting STIs when having sex with partners. This study analysed semi-structured interviews with twenty women from a diverse 2014 community sample collected in a large Southwestern U.S. city in order to examine how wom…
Redefining the Work of Feminist Praxis
This article traces the practices and outcomes of an undergraduate research group that began organically to foster research and activist collaborations in a small group setting and without the rubric of a structured course, formal lab setting, or formal institutional backing. We consider several outcomes of this group: (1) Graduate school entry and preparation for graduate school; (2) The importance of feminist friendships and feminist community …
Pray the gay will stay? Church shopping and religious gatekeeping around homosexuality in an audit study of Christian church officials
Reciprocity, Partner Pressure, and Emotional Labor
From Bloodless Respectability to Radical Menstrual Embodiment
While menstrual activism has a robust history rooted in feminist ideals of bodily autonomy and anticonsumerism, its current iterations prioritize an anemic view of menstruation that grounds it in a neoliberal politics of respectability. As it stands now, menstrual activism has too often taken up menstrual products as the answer to “solving” menstrual stigma throughout the world while making invisible other aspects of the politics of menstruation …
Ending Ageism, or How Not to Shoot Old People Margaret Morganroth Gullette
I Just Go with It”
Explaining the Sexuality Gap in Protest Participation
This study investigated the relationship between sexual orientations and the protest actions of adults in the United States. Drawing from General Social Survey data from 1996 to 2004, we found that lesbians, gays, and bisexuals were more than twice as likely to protest as heterosexuals. To account for this sexuality gap, we used Patrick Egan's (2008) political distinctiveness theories to identify possible underlying causes of these protesting dif…
Working at the crossroads of pleasure and danger
For those entering the field of sexuality studies, there is often little advice or guidance on the many facets of the work, some of which are pleasurable and some of which are dangerous. Drawing from our personal and professional conflicts surrounding our work as feminist psychologists and sociologists studying women’s sexuality, we extend Carole Vance’s (1984) claims about pleasure and danger by arguing that, for the sex researcher, pleasure and…
Fat Sex
Exploring stigma of “extreme” weight gain
An Intersectional Analysis of Gender and Race for Sexual Minorities Who Engage in Gay and Lesbian Rights Activism
Compulsory Bisexuality
Although Adrienne Rich once posited that “compulsory heterosexuality” required women to identify as heterosexual to comply with implicit social norms, this study examined the possibility of compulsory bisexuality in light of increasing reports of heterosexual-identified women engaging in homoerotic behavior with other women, usually in front of men and in social settings like fraternity parties, bars and clubs. Forty qualitative interviews were c…
Notes from the Back Room
While popular culture has more frequently depicted women's masturbation in recent years, scholarly attention to women's own meaning making about masturbation remains largely absent. Existing research that emphasizes women's masturbation frequency, health correlates, masturbation as a factor in couples therapy, and masturbation as a substitute for partnered sexual behaviors have dominated the research, largely neglecting social identity correlates…
Adventures with the “Plastic Man”
Region, Social Identities, and Disclosure Practices as Predictors of Heterosexist Discrimination Against Sexual Minorities in the United States
Exposure to heterosexist discrimination may vary by a person's place of residency. Utilizing a minority stress perspective, an online survey of self-identified lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) individuals (n = 285) examined whether rural and small town inhabitants experienced greater exposure to six types of enacted stigma. After comparing the frequency of enacted stigma by community type, findings demonstrated that rural LGBs reported experienci…
Rural location and exposure to minority stress among sexual minorities in the United States
Recently, there has been an increase in the number of studies on minority stress among sexual minorities. Few of these studies have explored the ways in which regional or spatial factors influenced the amount of minority stress that lesbians, gay men and bisexuals (LGBs) endure. To see if living in rural and small towns creates stressful social environments for LGBs in the United States, this study analysed the associations between location and t…
When Sex and Power Collide
Attentive to the collision of sex and power, we add momentum to the ongoing development of the subfield of critical sexuality studies. We argue that this body of work is defined by its critical orientation toward the study of sexuality, along with a clear allegiance to critical modalities of thought, particularly feminist thought. Critical sexuality studies takes its cues from several other critical moments in related fields, including critical p…
Resources, Social Networks, and Collective Action Frames of College Students Who Join the Gay and Lesbian Rights Movement
This article explores the reasons why some college students join the gay and lesbian rights movements. After addressing the frequency of students joining this social movement, the article then considers the contexts and motivations behind such actions. To explore the catalysts to gay and lesbian rights activism, this study utilizes variables from resource, mobilizing, and framing theories of political participation. Using data from 820 heterosexu…
Explaining the Sexuality Gap in Protest Participation
This study investigated the relationship between sexual orientations and the protest actions of adults in the United States. Drawing from General Social Survey data from 1996 to 2004, we found that lesbians, gays, and bisexuals were more than twice as likely to protest as heterosexuals. To account for this sexuality gap, we used Patrick Egan's (2008) political distinctiveness theories to identify possible underlying causes of these protesting dif…
Breaking body hair boundaries
Courses in women’s studies and gender studies within US contexts have long prioritized content that critically examines the social construction of bodies and sexualities, consciousness-raising about how social identities interface with disciplinary and institutional practices, and the notion that ‘the personal is political.’ This article examines the social and pedagogical implications of an extra-credit assignment where I asked women to grow out…
Perilous Patches and Pitstaches
Although some research has examined men and women’s general attitudes toward women growing body hair, little research has engaged in a side-by-side examination of women’s imagined experiences of growing body hair with an experiential component of growing their own body hair. In the first of two studies, I asked a diverse community sample of women aged 18 to 59 to assess their impressions of women who grew body hair and to imagine their own, and o…
Pathways to Political Activism among Americans who have Same-Sex Sexual Contact
Understanding Feminist Activism among Women
This study examines whether women's feminist activism is connected to three key factors: sufficient educational and financial resources, the internalization of a feminist consciousness, and being involved in feminist mobilization structures. Analysis of the 2012 American National Election Survey (N = 1,876) suggests that participation and engagement in the women's movement is least common among less educated women and stay-at-home mothers. Femini…
The front lines of the “back door”
Despite the frequent depiction of heterosexual anal sex in pornography, and growing indications that heterosexual couples engage in anal sex, almost no research has examined women’s subjective experiences with receptive anal sex with men. This study draws upon qualitative interviews with 20 American women (mean age = 34, SD = 13.35) from diverse ages and backgrounds to illuminate five themes in women’s narratives about receptive anal sex: (1) ini…
College Students, Sexualities Identities, and Participation in Political Marches
I Just Go with It”
Dreaded 'Otherness
Research on bodies and sexualities has long debated ideas about choice, agency, and power, particularly as women conform to, or rebel against, traditional social scripts about femininity and heterosexuality. In this study, I have used responses from 34 college women who completed an extra credit assignment in a women's studies class that asked them to reject social norms and grow out their leg and underarm hair for a period of 10 weeks. Responses…
Sex during menstruation
While much research has addressed negativity surrounding women’s menstruation, surprisingly little research has interrogated the relationship between menstruation and sexuality. This study used inductive thematic analysis of qualitative interviews with 40 women across a range of age, race and sexual orientation backgrounds to examine women’s experiences with sex during menstruation. Results showed that, while 25 women described negative reactions…
From Bloodless Respectability to Radical Menstrual Embodiment
While menstrual activism has a robust history rooted in feminist ideals of bodily autonomy and anticonsumerism, its current iterations prioritize an anemic view of menstruation that grounds it in a neoliberal politics of respectability. As it stands now, menstrual activism has too often taken up menstrual products as the answer to “solving” menstrual stigma throughout the world while making invisible other aspects of the politics of menstruation …
Social Identities as Predictors of Women’s Sexual Satisfaction and Sexual Activity
The dreaded body
While some literature has explored women’s feelings about social identities like fatness, race, disability, queerness, and aging, little research has examined, from an intersectional perspective, how women construct a dreaded or viscerally disgusting body and how this produces “appropriate” femininity. This paper utilized thematic analysis of qualitative data from a community sample of 20 US women (mean age = 34, SD = 13.35) to illuminate how wom…
Exploring stigma of “extreme” weight gain
Reciprocity, Partner Pressure, and Emotional Labor
On 'good sex' and other dangerous ideas
Existing studies of women’s sexual happiness and pleasure most often centre on sexual satisfaction, orgasm, and sexual dysfunction, largely failing to allow women to narrate their own experiences. With the recent release of the first drug to ‘treat’ women’s waning libidos a qualitative examination of women’s notion of ‘good sex’ is more pressing and urgent than ever. We need to extend feminist critiques of power, control, patriarchy and agency to…
Gay rights activism
While sexual minorities have produced large and efficacious social movements in many countries, there are few systematic studies on why gays and lesbians join these movements. To address this void, this study created a unique sample of activist and non-activist listservs to identify some factors that inspired greater involvement in protests for gay and lesbian equality (n = 285). Through the use of binary logistic regression, this study highlight…
Reading Between the Lines
Left History features articles from a variety of theoretical approaches; these include feminist, marxist, and postmodernist deliberations on topics such as race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, culture, the state, labour, the environment, theory, and method
Second Shifts and Political Awakenings
Links between personal life events (e.g., divorce) and political socialization have been understudied, particularly in midlife populations. This study examined a longitudinal sample of 98 female graduates from the University of Michigan class of 1967. Participants were divided into two groups: divorced (N= 27) and married (N= 71). T-tests and Chi-Square analyses were used to examine differences between groups for political orientation, power disc…
Compulsory Bisexuality
Although Adrienne Rich once posited that “compulsory heterosexuality” required women to identify as heterosexual to comply with implicit social norms, this study examined the possibility of compulsory bisexuality in light of increasing reports of heterosexual-identified women engaging in homoerotic behavior with other women, usually in front of men and in social settings like fraternity parties, bars and clubs. Forty qualitative interviews were c…
Radical refusals
This article examines how women consciously choosing asexuality might inform both radical feminist politics and anarchic concepts of positive and negative liberty. By resituating some of the lesser-known narratives of the 1960s’ and 1970s’ radical feminist movement (e.g. Valerie Solanas’ SCUM Manifesto and Boston’s Cell 16 and No More Fun and Games), asexuality is shown to disrupt key intersections between sexuality and the state, particularly in…
Daddy’s Little Girls
The Kids Are (Not?) All Right
Building upon claims that young people have inherited contradictory messages about sexual empowerment, Heather Powers Albanesi addresses some difficult questions about how young people make meaning
Performing Sex
Evaluating Appalachian Distinctiveness for Gender Expectations, Sexual Violence, and Rape Myths
Scholars and pundits have asserted that the United States has regions and pockets that serve as hotbeds of traditional gender roles. Through quantitative techniques, this analysis explores whether Appalachian college students differentiated themselves from others on a litany of different gender role measures (n = 508). Ultimately, Appalachian college students failed to distinguish themselves in the Feminist Perspectives Scale, the Modern Sexism S…
Pathways to Political Activism among Americans who have Same-Sex Sexual Contact
Sex during menstruation
While much research has addressed negativity surrounding women’s menstruation, surprisingly little research has interrogated the relationship between menstruation and sexuality. This study used inductive thematic analysis of qualitative interviews with 40 women across a range of age, race and sexual orientation backgrounds to examine women’s experiences with sex during menstruation. Results showed that, while 25 women described negative reactions…
Breaking body hair boundaries
Courses in women’s studies and gender studies within US contexts have long prioritized content that critically examines the social construction of bodies and sexualities, consciousness-raising about how social identities interface with disciplinary and institutional practices, and the notion that ‘the personal is political.’ This article examines the social and pedagogical implications of an extra-credit assignment where I asked women to grow out…
Students for Peace
This article traces the development of peace activism among undergraduate social work students. In doing so, it explores how social statuses, political contexts, and collective action frames affect the likelihood of joining the movement against the Afghanistan war (2001 to current). After analyzing data from a multicampus sample of Bachelors in Social Work (BSW) students (n = 159), results show that peace activism was predicted by level of educat…
Social Identities as Predictors of Women’s Sexual Satisfaction and Sexual Activity
Ti-Grace Atkinson and the Legacy of Radical Feminism
Dreaded 'Otherness
Research on bodies and sexualities has long debated ideas about choice, agency, and power, particularly as women conform to, or rebel against, traditional social scripts about femininity and heterosexuality. In this study, I have used responses from 34 college women who completed an extra credit assignment in a women's studies class that asked them to reject social norms and grow out their leg and underarm hair for a period of 10 weeks. Responses…
Rural location and exposure to minority stress among sexual minorities in the United States
Recently, there has been an increase in the number of studies on minority stress among sexual minorities. Few of these studies have explored the ways in which regional or spatial factors influenced the amount of minority stress that lesbians, gay men and bisexuals (LGBs) endure. To see if living in rural and small towns creates stressful social environments for LGBs in the United States, this study analysed the associations between location and t…
Jamie Heckert and Richard Cleminson, Anarchism & Sexuality
An Intersectional Analysis of Gender and Race for Sexual Minorities Who Engage in Gay and Lesbian Rights Activism
Resources, Social Networks, and Collective Action Frames of College Students Who Join the Gay and Lesbian Rights Movement
This article explores the reasons why some college students join the gay and lesbian rights movements. After addressing the frequency of students joining this social movement, the article then considers the contexts and motivations behind such actions. To explore the catalysts to gay and lesbian rights activism, this study utilizes variables from resource, mobilizing, and framing theories of political participation. Using data from 820 heterosexu…
Adventures with the “Plastic Man”
Perilous Patches and Pitstaches
Although some research has examined men and women’s general attitudes toward women growing body hair, little research has engaged in a side-by-side examination of women’s imagined experiences of growing body hair with an experiential component of growing their own body hair. In the first of two studies, I asked a diverse community sample of women aged 18 to 59 to assess their impressions of women who grew body hair and to imagine their own, and o…
Shaving It All Off
Notes from the Back Room
While popular culture has more frequently depicted women's masturbation in recent years, scholarly attention to women's own meaning making about masturbation remains largely absent. Existing research that emphasizes women's masturbation frequency, health correlates, masturbation as a factor in couples therapy, and masturbation as a substitute for partnered sexual behaviors have dominated the research, largely neglecting social identity correlates…
Diving (Back) into the Wreck
For over a decade, the proliferation of donor funding and student enthusiasm for sexuality studies has spurred the creation of new programs and research centers across US and Canadian campuses. Many of these new sites have been established as distinct and separate from pre-existing women’s studies units — at times in response to donor mandates and, at other times, to reflect intellectual/political leanings. More recently, however, several univers…
Region, Social Identities, and Disclosure Practices as Predictors of Heterosexist Discrimination Against Sexual Minorities in the United States
Exposure to heterosexist discrimination may vary by a person's place of residency. Utilizing a minority stress perspective, an online survey of self-identified lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) individuals (n = 285) examined whether rural and small town inhabitants experienced greater exposure to six types of enacted stigma. After comparing the frequency of enacted stigma by community type, findings demonstrated that rural LGBs reported experienci…
Sociology (60 works) · Psychology (58 works) · Gender Studies (54 works) · Social Psychology (40 works) · Gender Studies (35 works) · Political science (33 works) · Social Psychology (29 works) · Human sexuality (25 works) · Law (24 works) · LGBTQ Health, Identity, and Policy (21 works)