Laura M Carpenter
Biographic Data
| ID | 133702 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Laura M Carpenter |
| GIVEN NAMES | Laura M |
| FAMILY NAME | Carpenter |
| SIGNATURE | CARPENTER L M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Vanderbilt University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2803-4654 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 27 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 308 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 27 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1998 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Remembering our Dead: Physicalizing State-Level Covid-19 Mortality Data in Textile Form
This illustrated essay recounts one feminist scholar’s efforts to present state-level COVID-19 daily mortality data in textile form. It details how she turned data from US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) public reports for the period February 2020 through January 2021 into knitted color-coded wall hangings for Maryland, Massachusetts, and Tennessee. Three-dimensional data physicalizations using humble, everyday materials have the…
Heterosexual women's pleasure trajectories: How aging helps undo gendered sexual scripts
Heterosexual women are less likely than heterosexual men to experience pleasure in partnered encounters. However, because most research on women's sexual pleasure focuses on adolescents and young adults, little is known about how processes associated with aging may change heterosexual women's sense of sexual subjectivity and entitlement to sexual pleasure. Relying on 60 life story interviews with single, heterosexual women between the ages of 18 …
Circumcision and Medicine in Modern Turkey
Sex and Coronavirus
Human sexual relationships are one of the myriad aspects of social life that have been affected by our coronavirus-inspired regime of “social distancing.” Will self-seclusion on a massive scale enhance or diminish people's sex lives? Will they have more or less sex? Better or worse sex? In this article, the author explores these questions and more
If You Prick Us: Masculinity and Circumcision Pain in the United States and Canada, 1960–2000
Male circumcision – the surgical removal of the foreskin of the penis – has long been a contested practice in Anglo-American countries. Competing beliefs about pain as potentially redemptive and as essentially malign have fueled the controversy, with medical professionals and lay people alike debating whether circumcision causes or ameliorates physical or emotional pain, as well as how to respond to that pain. Because circumcision is a surgical i…
Botox Nation: Changing the Face of America
Sexualities across the Life Course
The life‐course perspective is a powerful tool for studying sexual life. Scholars who approach sexualities from a life‐course perspective are chiefly interested in how sexual and social experiences – such as childhood sex play, immigration, or divorce – at one point in a person's life affect their sexual beliefs and behaviors at later junctures. They are also concerned with how individuals' sexual biographies are shaped by broader cultural and hi…
Im)perishable Pleasure, (In)destructible Desire: Sexual Themes in U.S. and English News Coverage of Male Circumcision and Female Genital Cutting
Under what conditions do sexual pleasure and desire get addressed in news coverage of sexual health issues like female genital cutting (FGC) and male circumcision (MC)? In this study we employed an embodied ethnosexuality approach to analyze sexual themes in 1,902 items published from 1985 to 2009 in 13 U.S. and 8 English newspapers and news magazines. Journalists' discussions of sexual pleasure, desire, control, problems, and practices differed …
Embodiment without bodies? Analysis of embodiment in US-based pro-breastfeeding and anti-male circumcision movements
This article uses the cases of pro-breastfeeding and anti-circumcision activism to complicate the prevailing conceptualisation of embodiment in research on embodied health movements (EHMs). Whereas most EHM activists draw on their own bodily experiences, in the breastfeeding and circumcision movements, embodiment by proxy is common. Activists use embodiment as a strategy but draw on physical sensations that they imagine for other people's bodies,…
Sexualities Across the Life Course
Scholars who approach sexualities from a life course perspective are chiefly interested in how sexual and social experiences – such as childhood sex play, immigration, or divorce – at one point in a person's life affect their sexual beliefs and behaviors at later junctures. They are also concerned with how individuals’ sexual biographies are shaped by broader cultural and historical changes, such as the development of oral contraceptives or the g…
Like a Virgin…Again: Secondary Virginity as an Ongoing Gendered Social Construction
Toward a Social Science of Sexual Satisfaction: Commentary on “Virginity Lost, Satisfaction Gained? Physiological and Psychological Sexual Satisfaction at Heterosexual Debut”
Higgins, Trussell, Moore, and Davidson (2010) expand our understanding of sexual satisfaction by showing that first vaginal sex is more likely to be psychologically than physically satisfying and by revealing differences between women and men and similarities between African Americans and Whites. Their analyses highlight the need for further theory-building, explicating the dynamics of change over time, integrating qualitative and quantitative ap…
Gendered Sexuality over the Life Course: A Conceptual Framework
Despite increasing interest in gendered sexuality over the life course, a comprehensive conceptual model, applicable to all aspects of sexual life and incorporating recent developments in life course sociology, feminist theory, and sexuality studies, has yet to be elaborated. The model presented here posits that sexual beliefs and behaviors result from individuals' lifelong accumulation of advantageous and disadvantageous experiences, and adoptio…
On remedicalisation: Male circumcision in the United States and Great Britain
This paper compares the histories of male circumcision in the United States and Great Britain to explicate the theoretically important, yet inadequately specified, processes of demedicalisation and remedicalisation. Circumcision became medicalised to a similar extent, through similar processes, in both countries before World War II. However, by the 1960s, circumcision was almost completely demedicalised in Britain and almost universal in the US, …
Influencing Health Debates Through Letters to the Editor: The Case of Male Circumcision
In this article I use the case of male circumcision (MC) to examine how grassroots activists, medical professionals, other stakeholders, and ordinary people employ letters to the editor (LTEs) to influence public health debates. I also show how journalistic practices affect the use of LTEs. Seventy LTEs about MC from U.S. newspapers between 1985 and 2006 are analyzed using qualitative methods. Pro-MC, anti-MC, and neutral LTE writers supported th…
Virginity Loss in Reel/Real Life: Using Popular Movies to Navigate Sexual Initiation 1
This study examines virginity‐loss movies as tools for navigating early sexual life. Data come from qualitative content analyses of 25 movies and in‐depth interviews with 61 socially diverse women and men, focusing on 28 participants who reported using movies to make sense of virginity loss. Films are open to multiple interpretations and young people use them creatively, both prospectively and retrospectively. Discrepancies between participants’ …
Physical Women, Emotional Men: Gender and Sexual Satisfaction in Midlife
Global Intimacies: Innovating the HPV Vaccine for Women's Health
According to the Pan American Health Organization's Silvana Luciani, "New technologies for cervical cancer prevention are revolutionizing public health."Yet the vaccine for human papillomavirus (HPV) is contested, in part because it evokes politics of contagion that foreground intimate transmissibility (Casper and Carpenter 2008).As a preventive technology, the vaccine promises to reduce rates of cervical cancer by controlling the spread of the c…
A Tale of Two Technologies: HPV Vaccination, Male Circumcision, and Sexual Health
This article brings insights from feminist science and technology studies to bear on recent public debates over the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine, which prevents many cervical cancers, and male circumcision as potential HIV preventive. In the United States, attempts to mandate HPV vaccination have activated intense concerns about female 'promiscuity,' whereas talk of promoting circumcision against HIV has triggered scant anxiety about Americ…
Sex, drugs, and politics: The HPV vaccine for cervical cancer
HPV is the most common sexually transmitted infection in the world. While most strains are relatively harmless, some increase a woman's risk of developing cervical cancer. This article explores the intimate, contested relationships among etiologies of cervical cancer, development and use of the new HPV vaccine, and contested notions of sexuality. We particularly focus on shifts in US health care and sexual politics, where the vaccine has animated…
Product Review: Girls in Power: Gender, Body, and Menstruation in Adolescence
Sex after 40: Gender, ageism, and sexual partnering in midlife
Consent to Sexual Relations
Gender and the Meaning and Experience of Virginity Loss in the Contemporary United States
This article draws on in-depth case studies of 61 women and men of diverse sexual identities to show how gender, while apparently diminishing in significance, continues to shape interpretations and experiences of virginity loss in complex ways. Although women and men tended to assign different meanings to virginity, those who shared an interpretation reported similar virginity-loss encounters. Each interpretation of virginity-as a gift, stigma, o…
The ambiguity of “having sex”: The subjective experience of virginity loss in the united states
Ambiguity surrounds virginity loss as defined and interpreted by young people in the contemporary United States. Drawing on in‐depth case studies of 61 women and men of various sexual orientations, ages 18 to 35, I explore the influence of that ambiguity on conduct and identity. Although uniformly agreeing that virginity loss could occur through first coitus, most respondents claimed that other kinds of genital sex could also sometimes result in …
From girls into women: Scripts for sexuality and romance in seventeen magazine, 1974–1994
Drawing on the scripting approach to sexual behavior, I use a combination of quantitative and qualitative content analysis to evaluate 244 articles on sexuality and romance from Seventeen, a teen magazine. I highlight changes and continuities in the magazine's depiction of sexuality from 1974 to 1994. Over this period, the variety of sexual scripts available in Seventeen expanded to recognize female desire, ambivalence about sexuality, homosexual…
The ambiguity of “having sex”: The subjective experience of virginity loss in the united states
Ambiguity surrounds virginity loss as defined and interpreted by young people in the contemporary United States. Drawing on in‐depth case studies of 61 women and men of various sexual orientations, ages 18 to 35, I explore the influence of that ambiguity on conduct and identity. Although uniformly agreeing that virginity loss could occur through first coitus, most respondents claimed that other kinds of genital sex could also sometimes result in …
Sex, drugs, and politics: The HPV vaccine for cervical cancer
HPV is the most common sexually transmitted infection in the world. While most strains are relatively harmless, some increase a woman's risk of developing cervical cancer. This article explores the intimate, contested relationships among etiologies of cervical cancer, development and use of the new HPV vaccine, and contested notions of sexuality. We particularly focus on shifts in US health care and sexual politics, where the vaccine has animated…
Sex after 40: Gender, ageism, and sexual partnering in midlife
Physical Women, Emotional Men: Gender and Sexual Satisfaction in Midlife
Gendered Sexuality over the Life Course: A Conceptual Framework
Despite increasing interest in gendered sexuality over the life course, a comprehensive conceptual model, applicable to all aspects of sexual life and incorporating recent developments in life course sociology, feminist theory, and sexuality studies, has yet to be elaborated. The model presented here posits that sexual beliefs and behaviors result from individuals' lifelong accumulation of advantageous and disadvantageous experiences, and adoptio…
Gender and the Meaning and Experience of Virginity Loss in the Contemporary United States
This article draws on in-depth case studies of 61 women and men of diverse sexual identities to show how gender, while apparently diminishing in significance, continues to shape interpretations and experiences of virginity loss in complex ways. Although women and men tended to assign different meanings to virginity, those who shared an interpretation reported similar virginity-loss encounters. Each interpretation of virginity-as a gift, stigma, o…
On remedicalisation: Male circumcision in the United States and Great Britain
This paper compares the histories of male circumcision in the United States and Great Britain to explicate the theoretically important, yet inadequately specified, processes of demedicalisation and remedicalisation. Circumcision became medicalised to a similar extent, through similar processes, in both countries before World War II. However, by the 1960s, circumcision was almost completely demedicalised in Britain and almost universal in the US, …
Virginity Loss in Reel/Real Life: Using Popular Movies to Navigate Sexual Initiation 1
This study examines virginity‐loss movies as tools for navigating early sexual life. Data come from qualitative content analyses of 25 movies and in‐depth interviews with 61 socially diverse women and men, focusing on 28 participants who reported using movies to make sense of virginity loss. Films are open to multiple interpretations and young people use them creatively, both prospectively and retrospectively. Discrepancies between participants’ …
Global Intimacies: Innovating the HPV Vaccine for Women's Health
According to the Pan American Health Organization's Silvana Luciani, "New technologies for cervical cancer prevention are revolutionizing public health."Yet the vaccine for human papillomavirus (HPV) is contested, in part because it evokes politics of contagion that foreground intimate transmissibility (Casper and Carpenter 2008).As a preventive technology, the vaccine promises to reduce rates of cervical cancer by controlling the spread of the c…
Embodiment without bodies? Analysis of embodiment in US-based pro-breastfeeding and anti-male circumcision movements
This article uses the cases of pro-breastfeeding and anti-circumcision activism to complicate the prevailing conceptualisation of embodiment in research on embodied health movements (EHMs). Whereas most EHM activists draw on their own bodily experiences, in the breastfeeding and circumcision movements, embodiment by proxy is common. Activists use embodiment as a strategy but draw on physical sensations that they imagine for other people's bodies,…
A Tale of Two Technologies: HPV Vaccination, Male Circumcision, and Sexual Health
This article brings insights from feminist science and technology studies to bear on recent public debates over the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine, which prevents many cervical cancers, and male circumcision as potential HIV preventive. In the United States, attempts to mandate HPV vaccination have activated intense concerns about female 'promiscuity,' whereas talk of promoting circumcision against HIV has triggered scant anxiety about Americ…
The First Time/Das Erstes Mal: Approaches to Virginity Loss in U.S. and German Teen Magazines
Cross-national studies link mass media presentation of sexuality to different patterns of adolescent sexual socialization and conduct but have not analyzed media texts in detail. Using ethnographic content analysis, the author evaluates 76 stories about virginity loss-a key sexual transition-from one German and one U.S. teen magazine. Consistent with culture-specific approaches to teen sexuality, editors at both publications made similar recommen…
Botox Nation: Changing the Face of America
Im)perishable Pleasure, (In)destructible Desire: Sexual Themes in U.S. and English News Coverage of Male Circumcision and Female Genital Cutting
Under what conditions do sexual pleasure and desire get addressed in news coverage of sexual health issues like female genital cutting (FGC) and male circumcision (MC)? In this study we employed an embodied ethnosexuality approach to analyze sexual themes in 1,902 items published from 1985 to 2009 in 13 U.S. and 8 English newspapers and news magazines. Journalists' discussions of sexual pleasure, desire, control, problems, and practices differed …
If You Prick Us: Masculinity and Circumcision Pain in the United States and Canada, 1960–2000
Male circumcision – the surgical removal of the foreskin of the penis – has long been a contested practice in Anglo-American countries. Competing beliefs about pain as potentially redemptive and as essentially malign have fueled the controversy, with medical professionals and lay people alike debating whether circumcision causes or ameliorates physical or emotional pain, as well as how to respond to that pain. Because circumcision is a surgical i…
From girls into women: Scripts for sexuality and romance in seventeen magazine, 1974–1994
Drawing on the scripting approach to sexual behavior, I use a combination of quantitative and qualitative content analysis to evaluate 244 articles on sexuality and romance from Seventeen, a teen magazine. I highlight changes and continuities in the magazine's depiction of sexuality from 1974 to 1994. Over this period, the variety of sexual scripts available in Seventeen expanded to recognize female desire, ambivalence about sexuality, homosexual…
The ambiguity of “having sex”: The subjective experience of virginity loss in the united states
Ambiguity surrounds virginity loss as defined and interpreted by young people in the contemporary United States. Drawing on in‐depth case studies of 61 women and men of various sexual orientations, ages 18 to 35, I explore the influence of that ambiguity on conduct and identity. Although uniformly agreeing that virginity loss could occur through first coitus, most respondents claimed that other kinds of genital sex could also sometimes result in …
The First Time/Das Erstes Mal: Approaches to Virginity Loss in U.S. and German Teen Magazines
Cross-national studies link mass media presentation of sexuality to different patterns of adolescent sexual socialization and conduct but have not analyzed media texts in detail. Using ethnographic content analysis, the author evaluates 76 stories about virginity loss-a key sexual transition-from one German and one U.S. teen magazine. Consistent with culture-specific approaches to teen sexuality, editors at both publications made similar recommen…
Gender and the Meaning and Experience of Virginity Loss in the Contemporary United States
This article draws on in-depth case studies of 61 women and men of diverse sexual identities to show how gender, while apparently diminishing in significance, continues to shape interpretations and experiences of virginity loss in complex ways. Although women and men tended to assign different meanings to virginity, those who shared an interpretation reported similar virginity-loss encounters. Each interpretation of virginity-as a gift, stigma, o…
Consent to Sexual Relations
Sex after 40: Gender, ageism, and sexual partnering in midlife
Product Review: Girls in Power: Gender, Body, and Menstruation in Adolescence
Sex, drugs, and politics: The HPV vaccine for cervical cancer
HPV is the most common sexually transmitted infection in the world. While most strains are relatively harmless, some increase a woman's risk of developing cervical cancer. This article explores the intimate, contested relationships among etiologies of cervical cancer, development and use of the new HPV vaccine, and contested notions of sexuality. We particularly focus on shifts in US health care and sexual politics, where the vaccine has animated…
Influencing Health Debates Through Letters to the Editor: The Case of Male Circumcision
In this article I use the case of male circumcision (MC) to examine how grassroots activists, medical professionals, other stakeholders, and ordinary people employ letters to the editor (LTEs) to influence public health debates. I also show how journalistic practices affect the use of LTEs. Seventy LTEs about MC from U.S. newspapers between 1985 and 2006 are analyzed using qualitative methods. Pro-MC, anti-MC, and neutral LTE writers supported th…
Virginity Loss in Reel/Real Life: Using Popular Movies to Navigate Sexual Initiation 1
This study examines virginity‐loss movies as tools for navigating early sexual life. Data come from qualitative content analyses of 25 movies and in‐depth interviews with 61 socially diverse women and men, focusing on 28 participants who reported using movies to make sense of virginity loss. Films are open to multiple interpretations and young people use them creatively, both prospectively and retrospectively. Discrepancies between participants’ …
Physical Women, Emotional Men: Gender and Sexual Satisfaction in Midlife
Global Intimacies: Innovating the HPV Vaccine for Women's Health
According to the Pan American Health Organization's Silvana Luciani, "New technologies for cervical cancer prevention are revolutionizing public health."Yet the vaccine for human papillomavirus (HPV) is contested, in part because it evokes politics of contagion that foreground intimate transmissibility (Casper and Carpenter 2008).As a preventive technology, the vaccine promises to reduce rates of cervical cancer by controlling the spread of the c…
A Tale of Two Technologies: HPV Vaccination, Male Circumcision, and Sexual Health
This article brings insights from feminist science and technology studies to bear on recent public debates over the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine, which prevents many cervical cancers, and male circumcision as potential HIV preventive. In the United States, attempts to mandate HPV vaccination have activated intense concerns about female 'promiscuity,' whereas talk of promoting circumcision against HIV has triggered scant anxiety about Americ…
Sexualities Across the Life Course
Scholars who approach sexualities from a life course perspective are chiefly interested in how sexual and social experiences – such as childhood sex play, immigration, or divorce – at one point in a person's life affect their sexual beliefs and behaviors at later junctures. They are also concerned with how individuals’ sexual biographies are shaped by broader cultural and historical changes, such as the development of oral contraceptives or the g…
Like a Virgin…Again: Secondary Virginity as an Ongoing Gendered Social Construction
Toward a Social Science of Sexual Satisfaction: Commentary on “Virginity Lost, Satisfaction Gained? Physiological and Psychological Sexual Satisfaction at Heterosexual Debut”
Higgins, Trussell, Moore, and Davidson (2010) expand our understanding of sexual satisfaction by showing that first vaginal sex is more likely to be psychologically than physically satisfying and by revealing differences between women and men and similarities between African Americans and Whites. Their analyses highlight the need for further theory-building, explicating the dynamics of change over time, integrating qualitative and quantitative ap…
Gendered Sexuality over the Life Course: A Conceptual Framework
Despite increasing interest in gendered sexuality over the life course, a comprehensive conceptual model, applicable to all aspects of sexual life and incorporating recent developments in life course sociology, feminist theory, and sexuality studies, has yet to be elaborated. The model presented here posits that sexual beliefs and behaviors result from individuals' lifelong accumulation of advantageous and disadvantageous experiences, and adoptio…
On remedicalisation: Male circumcision in the United States and Great Britain
This paper compares the histories of male circumcision in the United States and Great Britain to explicate the theoretically important, yet inadequately specified, processes of demedicalisation and remedicalisation. Circumcision became medicalised to a similar extent, through similar processes, in both countries before World War II. However, by the 1960s, circumcision was almost completely demedicalised in Britain and almost universal in the US, …
Im)perishable Pleasure, (In)destructible Desire: Sexual Themes in U.S. and English News Coverage of Male Circumcision and Female Genital Cutting
Under what conditions do sexual pleasure and desire get addressed in news coverage of sexual health issues like female genital cutting (FGC) and male circumcision (MC)? In this study we employed an embodied ethnosexuality approach to analyze sexual themes in 1,902 items published from 1985 to 2009 in 13 U.S. and 8 English newspapers and news magazines. Journalists' discussions of sexual pleasure, desire, control, problems, and practices differed …
Embodiment without bodies? Analysis of embodiment in US-based pro-breastfeeding and anti-male circumcision movements
This article uses the cases of pro-breastfeeding and anti-circumcision activism to complicate the prevailing conceptualisation of embodiment in research on embodied health movements (EHMs). Whereas most EHM activists draw on their own bodily experiences, in the breastfeeding and circumcision movements, embodiment by proxy is common. Activists use embodiment as a strategy but draw on physical sensations that they imagine for other people's bodies,…
Sexualities across the Life Course
The life‐course perspective is a powerful tool for studying sexual life. Scholars who approach sexualities from a life‐course perspective are chiefly interested in how sexual and social experiences – such as childhood sex play, immigration, or divorce – at one point in a person's life affect their sexual beliefs and behaviors at later junctures. They are also concerned with how individuals' sexual biographies are shaped by broader cultural and hi…
Botox Nation: Changing the Face of America
Sex and Coronavirus
Human sexual relationships are one of the myriad aspects of social life that have been affected by our coronavirus-inspired regime of “social distancing.” Will self-seclusion on a massive scale enhance or diminish people's sex lives? Will they have more or less sex? Better or worse sex? In this article, the author explores these questions and more
If You Prick Us: Masculinity and Circumcision Pain in the United States and Canada, 1960–2000
Male circumcision – the surgical removal of the foreskin of the penis – has long been a contested practice in Anglo-American countries. Competing beliefs about pain as potentially redemptive and as essentially malign have fueled the controversy, with medical professionals and lay people alike debating whether circumcision causes or ameliorates physical or emotional pain, as well as how to respond to that pain. Because circumcision is a surgical i…
Circumcision and Medicine in Modern Turkey
Sociology (23 works) · Psychology (21 works) · Gender Studies (19 works) · Human sexuality (12 works) · Medicine (12 works) · Political science (11 works) · Social Psychology (11 works) · Gender Studies (10 works) · Developmental psychology (9 works) · Female Genital Mutilation/Cutting Issues (9 works)