Verta Taylor
Biographic Data
| ID | 82039 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Verta Taylor |
| GIVEN NAMES | Verta |
| FAMILY NAME | Taylor |
| SIGNATURE | TAYLOR V |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of California, Santa Barbara |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 71 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1270 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 57 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 14 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1977 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 15 |
We Will Survive
Verta Taylor on persisting in the face of LGBTQ rights retrenchment
Drag Queens and Drag Kings
Drag queens and drag kings are men, women, and transgender or nonbinary people who perform femininity, masculinity, or something in between. Different styles of drag across the USA and around the world call attention to the performativity of gender and play a part in community‐building for gay, lesbian, bisexual, queer, and transgender people. Drag queens have a long history, while drag kings are a more recent phenomenon. In black and Latino comm…
How Social Movements (Sometimes) Matter
The Oxford Handbook of U.S. Women's Social Movement Activism
Women have long been involved in social movement activism in the United States, from the nation’s beginning up to the present, and in waves of feminist activism as well as in a variety of other social movements, including the civil rights movement, the environmental movement, and conservative mobilizations. The Oxford Handbook of U.S. Women’s Social Movement Activism provides both a detailed and extensive examination of the wide range of U.S. wom…
Women in the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Movement
This chapter explores the history of women’s participation in the LGBT movement, from the homophile phase in the 1950s–1960s through gay liberation, lesbian feminism, anti-AIDS activism in the 1980s–1990s, to contemporary queer activism and the marriage equality movement. The chapter points to shifts in women’s participation, ranging from fighting for women’s issues within male-dominated organizations to creating separatist groups to collaboratin…
American Women’s Environmental Activism
Women have played instrumental, often leading, roles in the twentieth-century environmental movement. The sparse literature on women’s activism in the early twentieth century indicates that both White and Black women in the racially segregated, middle-class women’s club movement pursued urban reforms. But White women additionally adopted conservationism, while Black women led the struggle for racial justice. The more robust literature focuses on …
Mobilizing the Faithful
In this chapter, we examine how conservative and right-wing organizations mobilize predominately White, religious women to action. We begin by outlining the importance of networks to mobilization efforts. Then, we discuss how conservative and right-wing women’s groups use religious doctrine as well as gendered assumptions regarding women’s and men’s roles in society to move women from their armchairs to the streets. The second half of the chapter…
The Swells between the “Waves”
American women’s history is often understood as unfolding in two movement “waves”: the movement for political equality (suffrage) in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the movement for social and economic equality a half-century later. In the period between these two waves, women supposedly retreated from the public sphere. This chapter argues that the inter-wave era was actually a politically vibrant time for American women. …
Women in the White Supremacist Movement
A small but growing body of literature highlights the roles of women in White supremacist movements in the United States. This chapter reviews the diverse findings of this work by showing when, why, and how women participate in White supremacist movements. It begins by analyzing the interlocking ideologies of race and gender that shape women’s participation. Most White supremacist movements glorify stereotypical gender norms for both men and wome…
Women’s Activism in the Modern Movement for Black Liberation
This chapter examines women’s activism in the modern movement for Black liberation. It examines women’s roles across three phases of mobilization. Starting with an exploration of women’s participation in the direct action phase of the U.S. civil rights movement (1954–1966), the chapter discusses the key roles that women played in the fight for legal equality for African Americans. Next it examines women’s central role in the Black Power movement …
Push, Pull, and Fusion
Women’s activism has focused not only on state institutions, such as the military, electoral politics, and education, but also on religious institutions. At the same time, participation in organized religion has helped women develop organizational and leadership skills that they can then draw on for their activism, both in movements directed toward religious institutions and in other, non-religious movements. Further, religion provides cultural f…
Sexuality, Gender Identity, Fluidity, and Embodiment
Social movement activists have frequently used a variety of embodied tactics to negotiate cultural conceptions of gender and sexuality, which are in constant flux. This chapter attends to the ways that new social formations of gender and sexuality—including the recent emphases on gender and sexual fluidity—have impacted the politics, goals, tactics, and identities of contemporary women’s movements. Incorporating queer, transgender, critical race,…
Women’s Activism and Educational Institutions
Mobilized women have indelibly changed educational institutions, their activism creating equality in many spheres of higher education. This chapter draws on literature on women’s movements and movements within institutions to argue that women’s activists have successfully organized for educational accessibility and resources, the legal rights of women and girls in educational institutions, and the presence of women and incorporation of scholarshi…
Battles over Abortion and Reproductive Rights
This chapter examines the history of feminist struggles for abortion and reproductive rights in the United States. It analyzes why these issues continue to mobilize participants in opposing movements. Symbolic politics are an important reason for the longevity of the conflict, and issues of abortion and reproduction are connected to concerns about gender and sexuality. Movement/countermovement dynamics also help to keep the conflict alive; when o…
The Historical Roots of a Global Feminist Perspective and the Growing Global Focus among U.S. Feminists
This chapter examines the emergence and existence of a global feminist perspective within the United States. The authors argue that the foundation of the relationship between U.S. feminists and global understandings is rooted in women’s international organizing and activism. Examining U.S. feminists’ involvement in international women’s movements from the end of the nineteenth century until post Beijing 95 (the United Nations Fourth World Confere…
Gendered Activism and Outcomes
U.S. women’s peace and anti-war activism grew from their involvement in the abolition and suffrage movements of the nineteenth century, and some have continued to foster women-focused organizations in the twenty-first century. This chapter examines the relationship between the historical development of women’s peace activism and a U.S. political system that frequently excluded women from international relations. Women enlarged the U.S. peace move…
Identity Politics, Consciousness-Raising, and Visibility Politics
This chapter describes the emergence of consciousness-raising, including differences among women. It then discusses collective identity, explaining the concept and describing activists’ attempts to reconstruct collective identity as women and to determine how to practice their collective identity in daily life. Next, it discusses coming out and other forms of visibility politics, which aim to display collective identity and change conceptualizati…
Contention, Tactical Repertoires of
Social movement scholars use the concept of tactical repertoires of contention to refer to the actions and strategies used by collective actors to persuade or coerce authorities to support their claims. The notion of repertoires of contention grows out of the work of Charles Tilly, who introduced the concept to explain historical variations in forms of political contention used by challenging groups. The tactical repertoires of social movements i…
Drag Queens and Drag Kings
Drag queens and drag kings are men, women, and transgender people who perform femininity, masculinity, or something in between. Different styles of drag, across the United States and around the world, call attention to the performativity of gender and play a part in community building for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people. Drag queens have a long history, while drag kings are a more recent phenomenon. In black and Latino communities,…
Cycles of Sameness and Difference in LGBT Social Movements
Research on lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) movements has accelerated in recent years. We take stock of this literature with a focus on the United States. Our review adopts a historical approach, surveying findings on three protest cycles: gay liberation and lesbian feminism, queer activism, and marriage equality. Existing scholarship focuses primarily on oscillations of the movement's collective identity between emphasizing simila…
Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Trans-sexual Drag Culture
Queer Women in the Hookup Scene
The college hookup scene is a profoundly gendered and heteronormative sexual field. Yet the party and bar scene that gives rise to hookups also fosters the practice of women kissing other women in public, generally to the enjoyment of male onlookers, and sometimes facilitates threesomes involving same-sex sexual behavior between women. In this article, we argue that the hookup scene serves as an opportunity structure to explore same-sex attractio…
Same‐Sex Couples, Families, and Marriage
This article focuses on lesbian and gay couples and families and the politics of same‐sex marriage. Drawing from the literature on same‐sex couples, same‐sex marriage, and queer theory’s concept of heteronormativity, we argue that gay and lesbian couples and families both affirm and challenge heterosexual and gendered family forms. First, we review literature that discusses how same‐sex relationships and families are similar to and different from…
Women’s Cultures and Social Movements in Global Contexts
This article examines the role that women’s cultures and communities have played in political protest and social change. We argue that women’s cultures, which form around the reproductive roles, labor, and emotional expectations placed on women, have been used to express femininity and as cultural resources or “toolkits” to transform male‐dominated spheres of society. We begin by defining women’s cultures, emphasizing that there is no universal w…
Going Back and Giving Back
Social Movement Continuity
This article uses social movement and organization theory to develop a set of concepts that help explain social movement continuity. The theory is grounded in new data on women's rights activism from 1945 to the 1960s that challenge the traditional view that the American women's movement died after the suffrage victory in 1920 and was reborn in the 1960s. This case delineates a process in social movements that allows challenging groups to continu…
Culture and Mobilization
Social movement scholars have long been skeptical of culture's impact on political change, perhaps for good reason, since little empirical research explicitly addresses this question. This article fills the void by examining the dynamics and the impact of the month-long 2004 same-sex wedding protest in San Francisco. We integrate insights of contentious politics approaches with social constructionist conceptions and identify three core features o…
Identity Politics as High-Risk Activism
Journal Article Identity Politics as High-Risk Activism: Career Consequences for Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Sociologists Get access Verta Taylor, Verta Taylor Ohio State University Please direct correspondence to: Professor Verta Taylor, Department of Sociology, 300 Bricker Hall, 190 North Oval Mall, Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio 43210. Phone: 614-292-6681. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Scholar Ni…
Whatever Happened to The Women's Movement
Analyses of the women's movement that focus on its "waves" and theories of social movements that focus on contentious politics have encouraged the view that the women's movement is in decline. Employing alternative perspectives on social movements, we show that the women's movement continues to thrive. This is evidenced by organizational maintenance and growth, including the international expansion of women's movement organizations; feminism with…
Gender and Social Movements
Mainstream theory and research in the field of social movements and political sociology has, by and large, ignored the influence of gender on social protest. A growing body of feminist research demonstrates that gender is an explanatory factor in the emergence, nature, and outcomes of all social movements, even those that do not evoke the language of gender conflict or explicitly embrace gender change. This article draws from a case study of the …
Loving Internationalism
Research on the collective identities of social movement participants points to the strong convictions that underlie activism. A great deal of mobilization work involves channeling, transforming, legitimating, and managing emotions. In this article we use the concept of emotion culture, drawn from social constructionist approaches to emotions, to understand how women in the three major transnational women's organizations from the late nineteenth …
Cycles of Sameness and Difference in LGBT Social Movements
Research on lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) movements has accelerated in recent years. We take stock of this literature with a focus on the United States. Our review adopts a historical approach, surveying findings on three protest cycles: gay liberation and lesbian feminism, queer activism, and marriage equality. Existing scholarship focuses primarily on oscillations of the movement's collective identity between emphasizing simila…
Women's Culture and Lesbian Feminist Activism
Feminist Methodology in Social Movements Research
Forging Feminist Identity in an International Movement
Chicks with Dicks, Men in Dresses
One of the burning questions about drag queens among both scholars and audiences is whether they are more gender-revolutionaries than gender-conservatives. Do they primarily destabilize gender and sexual categories by making visible the social basis of femininity and masculinity, heterosexuality and homosexuality? Or are they more apt to reinforce the dominant binary and hierarchical gender and sexual systems by appropriating gender displays and …
Same‐Sex Couples, Families, and Marriage
This article focuses on lesbian and gay couples and families and the politics of same‐sex marriage. Drawing from the literature on same‐sex couples, same‐sex marriage, and queer theory’s concept of heteronormativity, we argue that gay and lesbian couples and families both affirm and challenge heterosexual and gendered family forms. First, we review literature that discusses how same‐sex relationships and families are similar to and different from…
Women's Self-Help and The Reconstruction of Gender
Recent research reveals that the mobilization, leadership patterns, and strategies of social movements are organized by gender in previously unrecognized ways. Scholars have had less to say about the consequences of social movements for the reconstruction of gender relations in American society. Using data from two women's self-help movements, we outline a framework for analyzing the impact of social movements on the transformation of gender. Dra…
When the Girls Are Men
Queer Women in the Hookup Scene
The college hookup scene is a profoundly gendered and heteronormative sexual field. Yet the party and bar scene that gives rise to hookups also fosters the practice of women kissing other women in public, generally to the enjoyment of male onlookers, and sometimes facilitates threesomes involving same-sex sexual behavior between women. In this article, we argue that the hookup scene serves as an opportunity structure to explore same-sex attractio…
Required Reading
This text selects 17 of the most influential books in the area of sociology, written in the late 20th-century. It analyzes the character of the books and the extent of their influence, and includes essays on the most influential controversy itself
Going Back and Giving Back
Mobilizing for Change in a Social Movement Society
Verta Taylor, Mobilizing for Change in a Social Movement Society, Contemporary Sociology, Vol. 29, No. 1, Utopian Visions: Engaged Sociologies for the 21st Century (Jan., 2000), pp. 219-230
Guest Editors' Introduction
Self-Labeling and Women's Mental Health
The standard sociological approaches to women's mental health have tended to attribute women's higher rates of mental illness either to the objective structural conditions of gender inequality or the sexist treatment of women by psychiatry and the mostly male medical establishment. This paper draws from Thoits' self-labeling theory that conceptualizes mental illness as emotional deviance to offer an alternative to the victimization models that do…
John D. Mccarthy Lifetime Achievement Award
Editors Note: In 2007, The Center for the Study of Social Movements at the University of Notre Dame began sponsorship of an annual award named for its first recipient, John McCarthy. The John D. McCarthy Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Scholarship of Social Movements and Collective Action has subsequently been presented to Verta Taylor (2008), Mayer Zald (2009), and Doug McAdam (2010). As part of each year's award ceremony, the McCarthy Awa…
The 801 Girls Talk about Drag Queens at the 801 Cabaret
Guest Editors' Introduction
Sisterhood, Solidarity, and Modern Feminism
Women’s Cultures and Social Movements in Global Contexts
This article examines the role that women’s cultures and communities have played in political protest and social change. We argue that women’s cultures, which form around the reproductive roles, labor, and emotional expectations placed on women, have been used to express femininity and as cultural resources or “toolkits” to transform male‐dominated spheres of society. We begin by defining women’s cultures, emphasizing that there is no universal w…
Human Systems in Extreme Environments
Identities in the Lesbian World, The Social Construction of Self
The Mirror Dance
The Future of Women
Survival in the Doldrums
Journal Article Survival in the Doldrums: The American Women's Rights Movement, 1945 to the 1960s. By Leila J. Rupp and Verta Taylor. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. xi + 284 pp. $19.95.) Get access Lillian S. Williams Lillian S. Williams State University of New York, Albany Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 75, Issue 3, December 1988, Pages 1021–1022, https://do…
The Rise of a Gay and Lesbian Movement
Feminism in the Fifties
Social Movement Continuity
This article uses social movement and organization theory to develop a set of concepts that help explain social movement continuity. The theory is grounded in new data on women's rights activism from 1945 to the 1960s that challenge the traditional view that the American women's movement died after the suffrage victory in 1920 and was reborn in the 1960s. This case delineates a process in social movements that allows challenging groups to continu…
Survival in the Doldrums
Sisterhood, Solidarity, and Modern Feminism
Intimate Matters
Changing Goals and Changing Strategies
Sex, Gender, and the Politics of ERA
Sex, Gender, and the Politics of ERA is the most profound and sensitive discussion to date of the way in which women responded to feminism. Drawing on extensive research and interviews, Mathews and De Hart explore the fate of the ERA in North Carolina-one of the three states targeted by both sides as essential to ratification-to reveal the dynamics that stunned supporters across America. The authors insightfully link public discourse and private …
Women's Culture and Lesbian Feminist Activism
Centuries of Solace
Self-Labeling and Women's Mental Health
The standard sociological approaches to women's mental health have tended to attribute women's higher rates of mental illness either to the objective structural conditions of gender inequality or the sexist treatment of women by psychiatry and the mostly male medical establishment. This paper draws from Thoits' self-labeling theory that conceptualizes mental illness as emotional deviance to offer an alternative to the victimization models that do…
Identity Politics as High-Risk Activism
Journal Article Identity Politics as High-Risk Activism: Career Consequences for Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Sociologists Get access Verta Taylor, Verta Taylor Ohio State University Please direct correspondence to: Professor Verta Taylor, Department of Sociology, 300 Bricker Hall, 190 North Oval Mall, Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio 43210. Phone: 614-292-6681. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Scholar Ni…
Women's Self-Help and The Reconstruction of Gender
Recent research reveals that the mobilization, leadership patterns, and strategies of social movements are organized by gender in previously unrecognized ways. Scholars have had less to say about the consequences of social movements for the reconstruction of gender relations in American society. Using data from two women's self-help movements, we outline a framework for analyzing the impact of social movements on the transformation of gender. Dra…
Repertoires and Cycles of Collective Action
Rock-a-by Baby
Although self-help has been an integral strategy of the women's movement, the burgeoning self-help publishing industry and growing popularity of talk shows encouraging personal confession have provoked vicious attacks on self-help from many feminists. Rock-a-By Baby examines the postpartum depression support group movement and exploring the relationship between gender, the ideas and strategies of women's self-help groups and feminism. Taylor uses…
Sex and Sensibility
Feminist Methodology in Social Movements Research
Guest Editors' Introduction
Required Reading
This text selects 17 of the most influential books in the area of sociology, written in the late 20th-century. It analyzes the character of the books and the extent of their influence, and includes essays on the most influential controversy itself
Guest Editors' Introduction
Sociology (59 works) · Political science (47 works) · Gender Studies (44 works) · Politics (33 works) · Law (32 works) · Psychology (24 works) · Gender Studies (19 works) · Aesthetics (18 works) · Social movement (18 works) · Art (17 works)