Paige L Sweet
Biographic Data
| ID | 187022 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Paige L Sweet |
| GIVEN NAMES | Paige L |
| FAMILY NAME | Sweet |
| SIGNATURE | SWEET P L |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Michigan |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9173-0396 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 27 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 247 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 27 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2014 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Who’s a “Good” Victim of Gender-Based Violence?: Credibility, Worthiness, and Ideal Victimhood in Victim Compensation Law
Scholars have argued that institutions privilege “good” victims of gender-based violence – those deemed sympathetic, morally upstanding, and worthy of public support. We extend existing research by synthesizing theories of good victimhood and theoretically distinguishing victims’ credibility in relation to the crime from their worthiness in relation to the state . Both credibility and worthiness are tied up in expectations of normative femininity…
Extending biomedicalization, complicating stratification
He's a Full-Blown Narcissist: Tracing an Emerging Cultural Narrative in Action
The terms 'narcissism' and 'narcissistic personality disorder' have skyrocketed in popularity over the past several years. What does narcissism discourse accomplish for people who use it? In this paper, we trace the rise of 'narcissism' through interviews with victim/survivors of psychological abuse. We find that using the language of narcissism allows people to: 1) reclaim their rationality, or make the case that they are not 'the crazy one'; 2)…
Daddy Issues” and Diagnoses: Gendered Weaponization of Mental Health in Intimate Relationships
Through life story interviews with victims of psychological abuse, we offer new empirical evidence for a tactic of coercive control: mental health weaponization . Shaped by structural vulnerabilities, mental health weaponization involves three key features: gendered accusations that victims are “crazy” and emotionally unstable; leveraging victims' past traumas against them, particularly that they form “bad” attachments to men; mobilizing victims’…
Clustered Vulnerabilities: The Unequal Effects of Covid-19 on Domestic Violence
How did the COVID-19 pandemic affect domestic violence? We might expect that the most marginalized victims experienced the most dramatic upticks in violence during the pandemic. However, through life-story interviews, I found that survivors who were enduring abuse, poverty, housing insecurity, and systems involvement pre-COVID did not suffer worse abuse during the pandemic. For multiply marginalized survivors, COVID did not produce more violence …
Vaccine Hesitancy and the Accumulation of Distrust
Scholarship on vaccine hesitancy portrays racially marginalized populations as undervaccinated, undereducated, or under the influence of social movements. However, these explanations cannot account for vaccine hesitancy among the Somali diaspora in Minneapolis. Drawing on interviews with Somali parents and health, education, and government professionals in Minneapolis, we argue that vaccine hesitancy among marginalized populations stems from accu…
The domestic violence victim as Covid crisis figure
Sex education and the right to complex personhood in relationships
This article suggests ways to teach teenagers about their right to complex personhood in relationships in a way that honours the psychological complexities of intimacy, as well as teenagers’ wisdom as people already ‘in’ relationships. Recognition of students’ complex personhood entails attention to two dimensions: 1) the emotional ambiguities, pleasures and risks inherent in all intimate relationships; 2) the socio-structural context of students…
Mask Up: Identifying Anger in Gender and Racial Formations
In a passing observation made while reading Joan Riviere’s theory of womanliness as masquerade, Judith Butler comments that what is hidden in masquerade is not sexuality, but rage. It’s a provocative glance at how gender and anger converge. But the quickness with which the discussion moves on from this insight suggests that this rage must also be quickly covered over by the discourse of gender. It recalls to my mind Frantz Fanon’s description of …
Response to Discussion
In her discussion of “Mask Up,” Annie Lee Jones pressures the two main metaphors in the essay, masks and masquerade, to ask what kinds of stories they license, articulating an important set of concerns for what the metaphors may obscure. The response considers oversights in the original essay and offers additional material to extend the conversation. Disclosure StatementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.Additional info…
The Particular and the Provincial: Thinking with Dorothy Smith's Phenomenology
I focus on Smith's phenomenological insights related to the concepts of 'bifurcation' and 'consciousness' to explore the persistent tension in her work between particularity and abstraction. For Smith, because marginalized groups' experiences are excluded from dominant ways of knowing, we must begin inquiry from the embodied activity of everyday life, never from the abstracted categories of accepted knowledge. Smith's concept of bifurcation is es…
Organizing Penal-Welfare Hybridity: Trauma, Vulnerability, and State Recognition of Crime Victims
Existing literature argues that the incorporation of “crime victims” into the U.S. state has been a causal force in carceral expansion. I argue that instead of carceral expansion alone, victim politics have contributed to penal-welfare hybridity: the welfare state expands as it gets attached to criminal procedures. Drawing from archival data on the crime victims’ movement, I show how victim policies generated a new welfare infrastructure that ope…
Conviction: The Making and Unmaking of the Violent Brain
Counter‐Clinical Spaces 1
Intermediary spaces between health social movements and biomedicine have proliferated since the 1970s and have typically been analyzed through the lenses of co‐optation or hybridization. In this article, we present data from two separate empirical projects (teaching and learning the pelvic exam in medical schools and feminist anti‐violence counseling programs) in order to theorize what we call “counter‐clinical spaces.” Counter‐clinical spaces ar…
The bad expert
We focus on two cases in which participants narrate and perform a new culture of expertise by constructing a bad expert, a reviled or dangerous figure of scientific credibility gone wrong. We show that a key mechanism in the construction of expertise cultures is the use of antithesis performances, which are performances of scientific and professional credibility that rely on telling stories about a scientific enemy or ostracized Other. By perform…
Towards a critical realist epistemology
When critical realists consider epistemology they typically start from “epistemological relativism.” We find this position necessary, but we also find it insufficient because it lacks a critique of the highly unequal social relations among observers themselves—relations that shape the very production of knowledge. While it is indeed the case that all knowledge is fallible, it is also the case that all knowledge is positioned , with a particular s…
Who Knows? Reflexivity in Feminist Standpoint Theory and Bourdieu
Though the invocation to be 'reflexive' is widespread in feminist sociology, many questions remain about what it means to 'turn back' and resituate our work-about how to engage with research subjects' visions of the world and with our own theoretical models. Rather than a superficial rehearsal of researcher and interlocutor standpoints, I argue that 'reflexivity' should help researchers theorize the social world in relational ways. To make this c…
The Sociology of Gaslighting
Gaslighting-a type of psychological abuse aimed at making victims seem or feel "crazy," creating a "surreal" interpersonal environment-has captured public attention. Despite the popularity of the term, sociologists have ignored gaslighting, leaving it to be theorized by psychologists. However, this article argues that gaslighting is primarily a sociological rather than a psychological phenomenon. Gaslighting should be understood as rooted in soci…
The Paradox of Legibility: Domestic Violence and Institutional Survivorhood
Existing literature has demonstrated that victims of domestic violence and rape undergo processes of discipline when they interact with legal structures, transforming themselves into 'worthy victims.' Intervening in this literature, I show how the medicalization of institutions surrounding domestic violence creates conditions under which women must prove their survivorhood, performing psychological recovery to achieve institutional legibility. Le…
Contesting normal: The DSM-5 and psychiatric subjectivation
The Feminist Question in Realism
Feminist standpoint theory and critical realism both offer resources to sociologists interested in making arguments that account for causal complexity and epistemic distortion. However, the impasse between these paradigms limits their utility. In this article, I argue that critical realism has much to gain from a confrontation with feminist theory. Feminist theory's emphasis on boundary-crossing epistemologies and gendered bodies can help critica…
Custodial Citizenship in the Omnibus Autism Proceeding
In contemporary processes of citizenship, parents and other caregivers often must make claims to the state on behalf of children with disabilities. In this article, we draw from data on the Omnibus Autism Proceedings ( OAP ), which were a series of hearings in 2007 and 2008 in which parents of children with autism attempted to receive compensation from a federal program for vaccine injury. During these hearings, parents and their attorneys obfusc…
Psychiatry’s little other: DSM-5 and debates over psychiatric science
The Renewed Work of Copies
Some Men: Feminist Allies and the Movement to End Violence Against Women
Some Men explores the history of men's involvement in the feminist anti-violence movement, tracking the rise of activist cohorts, their pathways to anti-violence work, and the sociopolitical contexts of their participation. Grounded in life story interviews with male activists, the book charts the shifting politics of feminist anti-violence work, from the radicalism of the 1970s toward its institutionalization in the 1990s and 2000s. Messner and …
The Sociology of Gaslighting
Gaslighting-a type of psychological abuse aimed at making victims seem or feel "crazy," creating a "surreal" interpersonal environment-has captured public attention. Despite the popularity of the term, sociologists have ignored gaslighting, leaving it to be theorized by psychologists. However, this article argues that gaslighting is primarily a sociological rather than a psychological phenomenon. Gaslighting should be understood as rooted in soci…
The Paradox of Legibility: Domestic Violence and Institutional Survivorhood
Existing literature has demonstrated that victims of domestic violence and rape undergo processes of discipline when they interact with legal structures, transforming themselves into 'worthy victims.' Intervening in this literature, I show how the medicalization of institutions surrounding domestic violence creates conditions under which women must prove their survivorhood, performing psychological recovery to achieve institutional legibility. Le…
Who Knows? Reflexivity in Feminist Standpoint Theory and Bourdieu
Though the invocation to be 'reflexive' is widespread in feminist sociology, many questions remain about what it means to 'turn back' and resituate our work-about how to engage with research subjects' visions of the world and with our own theoretical models. Rather than a superficial rehearsal of researcher and interlocutor standpoints, I argue that 'reflexivity' should help researchers theorize the social world in relational ways. To make this c…
The Feminist Question in Realism
Feminist standpoint theory and critical realism both offer resources to sociologists interested in making arguments that account for causal complexity and epistemic distortion. However, the impasse between these paradigms limits their utility. In this article, I argue that critical realism has much to gain from a confrontation with feminist theory. Feminist theory's emphasis on boundary-crossing epistemologies and gendered bodies can help critica…
Chronic Victims, Risky Women: Domestic Violence Advocacy and the Medicalization of Abuse
Critical literature on the antiviolence movement has largely overlooked the role of biomedical institutions in depoliticizing domestic violence advocacy. Additionally, studies of medicalization have largely failed to attend to domestic violence screening and diagnosis as key technologies through which gendered biomedical surveillance has expanded. Based on interviews with domestic violence medical advocates and health-care providers, I show how d…
Every bone of my body: Domestic violence and the diagnostic body
Organizing Penal-Welfare Hybridity: Trauma, Vulnerability, and State Recognition of Crime Victims
Existing literature argues that the incorporation of “crime victims” into the U.S. state has been a causal force in carceral expansion. I argue that instead of carceral expansion alone, victim politics have contributed to penal-welfare hybridity: the welfare state expands as it gets attached to criminal procedures. Drawing from archival data on the crime victims’ movement, I show how victim policies generated a new welfare infrastructure that ope…
The bad expert
We focus on two cases in which participants narrate and perform a new culture of expertise by constructing a bad expert, a reviled or dangerous figure of scientific credibility gone wrong. We show that a key mechanism in the construction of expertise cultures is the use of antithesis performances, which are performances of scientific and professional credibility that rely on telling stories about a scientific enemy or ostracized Other. By perform…
Towards a critical realist epistemology
When critical realists consider epistemology they typically start from “epistemological relativism.” We find this position necessary, but we also find it insufficient because it lacks a critique of the highly unequal social relations among observers themselves—relations that shape the very production of knowledge. While it is indeed the case that all knowledge is fallible, it is also the case that all knowledge is positioned , with a particular s…
Vaccine Hesitancy and the Accumulation of Distrust
Scholarship on vaccine hesitancy portrays racially marginalized populations as undervaccinated, undereducated, or under the influence of social movements. However, these explanations cannot account for vaccine hesitancy among the Somali diaspora in Minneapolis. Drawing on interviews with Somali parents and health, education, and government professionals in Minneapolis, we argue that vaccine hesitancy among marginalized populations stems from accu…
Counter‐Clinical Spaces 1
Intermediary spaces between health social movements and biomedicine have proliferated since the 1970s and have typically been analyzed through the lenses of co‐optation or hybridization. In this article, we present data from two separate empirical projects (teaching and learning the pelvic exam in medical schools and feminist anti‐violence counseling programs) in order to theorize what we call “counter‐clinical spaces.” Counter‐clinical spaces ar…
Custodial Citizenship in the Omnibus Autism Proceeding
In contemporary processes of citizenship, parents and other caregivers often must make claims to the state on behalf of children with disabilities. In this article, we draw from data on the Omnibus Autism Proceedings ( OAP ), which were a series of hearings in 2007 and 2008 in which parents of children with autism attempted to receive compensation from a federal program for vaccine injury. During these hearings, parents and their attorneys obfusc…
Clustered Vulnerabilities: The Unequal Effects of Covid-19 on Domestic Violence
How did the COVID-19 pandemic affect domestic violence? We might expect that the most marginalized victims experienced the most dramatic upticks in violence during the pandemic. However, through life-story interviews, I found that survivors who were enduring abuse, poverty, housing insecurity, and systems involvement pre-COVID did not suffer worse abuse during the pandemic. For multiply marginalized survivors, COVID did not produce more violence …
The domestic violence victim as Covid crisis figure
The Particular and the Provincial: Thinking with Dorothy Smith's Phenomenology
I focus on Smith's phenomenological insights related to the concepts of 'bifurcation' and 'consciousness' to explore the persistent tension in her work between particularity and abstraction. For Smith, because marginalized groups' experiences are excluded from dominant ways of knowing, we must begin inquiry from the embodied activity of everyday life, never from the abstracted categories of accepted knowledge. Smith's concept of bifurcation is es…
Every bone of my body: Domestic violence and the diagnostic body
Chronic Victims, Risky Women: Domestic Violence Advocacy and the Medicalization of Abuse
Critical literature on the antiviolence movement has largely overlooked the role of biomedical institutions in depoliticizing domestic violence advocacy. Additionally, studies of medicalization have largely failed to attend to domestic violence screening and diagnosis as key technologies through which gendered biomedical surveillance has expanded. Based on interviews with domestic violence medical advocates and health-care providers, I show how d…
Psychiatry’s little other: DSM-5 and debates over psychiatric science
The Renewed Work of Copies
Some Men: Feminist Allies and the Movement to End Violence Against Women
Some Men explores the history of men's involvement in the feminist anti-violence movement, tracking the rise of activist cohorts, their pathways to anti-violence work, and the sociopolitical contexts of their participation. Grounded in life story interviews with male activists, the book charts the shifting politics of feminist anti-violence work, from the radicalism of the 1970s toward its institutionalization in the 1990s and 2000s. Messner and …
Custodial Citizenship in the Omnibus Autism Proceeding
In contemporary processes of citizenship, parents and other caregivers often must make claims to the state on behalf of children with disabilities. In this article, we draw from data on the Omnibus Autism Proceedings ( OAP ), which were a series of hearings in 2007 and 2008 in which parents of children with autism attempted to receive compensation from a federal program for vaccine injury. During these hearings, parents and their attorneys obfusc…
Contesting normal: The DSM-5 and psychiatric subjectivation
The Feminist Question in Realism
Feminist standpoint theory and critical realism both offer resources to sociologists interested in making arguments that account for causal complexity and epistemic distortion. However, the impasse between these paradigms limits their utility. In this article, I argue that critical realism has much to gain from a confrontation with feminist theory. Feminist theory's emphasis on boundary-crossing epistemologies and gendered bodies can help critica…
The Sociology of Gaslighting
Gaslighting-a type of psychological abuse aimed at making victims seem or feel "crazy," creating a "surreal" interpersonal environment-has captured public attention. Despite the popularity of the term, sociologists have ignored gaslighting, leaving it to be theorized by psychologists. However, this article argues that gaslighting is primarily a sociological rather than a psychological phenomenon. Gaslighting should be understood as rooted in soci…
The Paradox of Legibility: Domestic Violence and Institutional Survivorhood
Existing literature has demonstrated that victims of domestic violence and rape undergo processes of discipline when they interact with legal structures, transforming themselves into 'worthy victims.' Intervening in this literature, I show how the medicalization of institutions surrounding domestic violence creates conditions under which women must prove their survivorhood, performing psychological recovery to achieve institutional legibility. Le…
The bad expert
We focus on two cases in which participants narrate and perform a new culture of expertise by constructing a bad expert, a reviled or dangerous figure of scientific credibility gone wrong. We show that a key mechanism in the construction of expertise cultures is the use of antithesis performances, which are performances of scientific and professional credibility that rely on telling stories about a scientific enemy or ostracized Other. By perform…
Towards a critical realist epistemology
When critical realists consider epistemology they typically start from “epistemological relativism.” We find this position necessary, but we also find it insufficient because it lacks a critique of the highly unequal social relations among observers themselves—relations that shape the very production of knowledge. While it is indeed the case that all knowledge is fallible, it is also the case that all knowledge is positioned , with a particular s…
Who Knows? Reflexivity in Feminist Standpoint Theory and Bourdieu
Though the invocation to be 'reflexive' is widespread in feminist sociology, many questions remain about what it means to 'turn back' and resituate our work-about how to engage with research subjects' visions of the world and with our own theoretical models. Rather than a superficial rehearsal of researcher and interlocutor standpoints, I argue that 'reflexivity' should help researchers theorize the social world in relational ways. To make this c…
Counter‐Clinical Spaces 1
Intermediary spaces between health social movements and biomedicine have proliferated since the 1970s and have typically been analyzed through the lenses of co‐optation or hybridization. In this article, we present data from two separate empirical projects (teaching and learning the pelvic exam in medical schools and feminist anti‐violence counseling programs) in order to theorize what we call “counter‐clinical spaces.” Counter‐clinical spaces ar…
Sex education and the right to complex personhood in relationships
This article suggests ways to teach teenagers about their right to complex personhood in relationships in a way that honours the psychological complexities of intimacy, as well as teenagers’ wisdom as people already ‘in’ relationships. Recognition of students’ complex personhood entails attention to two dimensions: 1) the emotional ambiguities, pleasures and risks inherent in all intimate relationships; 2) the socio-structural context of students…
Mask Up: Identifying Anger in Gender and Racial Formations
In a passing observation made while reading Joan Riviere’s theory of womanliness as masquerade, Judith Butler comments that what is hidden in masquerade is not sexuality, but rage. It’s a provocative glance at how gender and anger converge. But the quickness with which the discussion moves on from this insight suggests that this rage must also be quickly covered over by the discourse of gender. It recalls to my mind Frantz Fanon’s description of …
Response to Discussion
In her discussion of “Mask Up,” Annie Lee Jones pressures the two main metaphors in the essay, masks and masquerade, to ask what kinds of stories they license, articulating an important set of concerns for what the metaphors may obscure. The response considers oversights in the original essay and offers additional material to extend the conversation. Disclosure StatementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.Additional info…
The Particular and the Provincial: Thinking with Dorothy Smith's Phenomenology
I focus on Smith's phenomenological insights related to the concepts of 'bifurcation' and 'consciousness' to explore the persistent tension in her work between particularity and abstraction. For Smith, because marginalized groups' experiences are excluded from dominant ways of knowing, we must begin inquiry from the embodied activity of everyday life, never from the abstracted categories of accepted knowledge. Smith's concept of bifurcation is es…
Organizing Penal-Welfare Hybridity: Trauma, Vulnerability, and State Recognition of Crime Victims
Existing literature argues that the incorporation of “crime victims” into the U.S. state has been a causal force in carceral expansion. I argue that instead of carceral expansion alone, victim politics have contributed to penal-welfare hybridity: the welfare state expands as it gets attached to criminal procedures. Drawing from archival data on the crime victims’ movement, I show how victim policies generated a new welfare infrastructure that ope…
Conviction: The Making and Unmaking of the Violent Brain
Daddy Issues” and Diagnoses: Gendered Weaponization of Mental Health in Intimate Relationships
Through life story interviews with victims of psychological abuse, we offer new empirical evidence for a tactic of coercive control: mental health weaponization . Shaped by structural vulnerabilities, mental health weaponization involves three key features: gendered accusations that victims are “crazy” and emotionally unstable; leveraging victims' past traumas against them, particularly that they form “bad” attachments to men; mobilizing victims’…
Clustered Vulnerabilities: The Unequal Effects of Covid-19 on Domestic Violence
How did the COVID-19 pandemic affect domestic violence? We might expect that the most marginalized victims experienced the most dramatic upticks in violence during the pandemic. However, through life-story interviews, I found that survivors who were enduring abuse, poverty, housing insecurity, and systems involvement pre-COVID did not suffer worse abuse during the pandemic. For multiply marginalized survivors, COVID did not produce more violence …
Vaccine Hesitancy and the Accumulation of Distrust
Scholarship on vaccine hesitancy portrays racially marginalized populations as undervaccinated, undereducated, or under the influence of social movements. However, these explanations cannot account for vaccine hesitancy among the Somali diaspora in Minneapolis. Drawing on interviews with Somali parents and health, education, and government professionals in Minneapolis, we argue that vaccine hesitancy among marginalized populations stems from accu…
The domestic violence victim as Covid crisis figure
Extending biomedicalization, complicating stratification
Sociology (19 works) · Psychology (16 works) · Political science (12 works) · Law (11 works) · Criminology (10 works) · Epistemology (9 works) · Gender Studies (9 works) · Social Psychology (8 works) · Intimate Partner and Family Violence (7 works) · Medicine (7 works)