A C Saguy
Biographic Data
| ID | 36759 |
|---|---|
| NAME | A C Saguy |
| GIVEN NAMES | A C |
| FAMILY NAME | Saguy |
| SIGNATURE | SAGUY A C |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of California, Los Angeles |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8406-3022 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 38 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 480 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 38 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2000 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 12 |
The Social Constructions of Gender
The concept of social construction—i.e., the premise that something is created through social interactions, rather than being God‐given, natural, or otherwise inevitable—is foundational to gender studies and to the sociology of gender subfield. Through most of the twentieth century, when feminist scholars said that “gender is socially constructed,” they were disputing the idea that women's subordination was inevitable. Instead, they maintained th…
Too 'Full of Gender' How Activists Conceptualize the Promises and Pitfalls of Gender-Neutral Identity Documents
The social movements literature identifies a dilemma that activists face between principles of affirming and deconstructing identity. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 85 activists from diverse political perspectives, this article shows that, in discussing identity documents (IDs), progressive activists took a practical approach that recognized both the advantages and drawbacks of recognition. They expressed support both for initiatives that wo…
Following a Child's Lead and Setting Kids Up for Success: Convergence and Divergence in Parenting Ideologies on the Political Right and Left
Public discourse has become more polarized, especially when it comes to moral issues. Moral issues related to gender and sexuality-particularly concerning children-are politically fraught. To assess the extent to which ideologies about gender and parenting are polarized, we interviewed eighty-five gender activists from diverse political orientations. Surprisingly, we found some convergence in how activists on the political left and right discusse…
When Abortion Was a Crime: Women, Medicine, and Law in the United States, 1867-1973
A Little Word That Means A Lot: A Reassessment of Singular They in a New Era of Gender Politics
Singular they has emerged as a key term in contemporary gender politics, reflecting growing usage of they/them as nonbinary personal pronouns. Drawing on interviews with 54 progressive gender activists, we consider how singular they can be used to resist and redo aspects of the prevailing gender structure. We identify three distinct usages of singular they: (1) as a nonbinary personal pronoun, (2) as a universal gender-neutral pronoun, and (3) as…
Come Out, Come Out, Whoever You Are
This book examines how and why people use the concept of coming out as a certain kind of person to resist stigma and collectively mobilize for social change. It examines how the concept of coming out has taken on different meanings as people adopt it for varying purposes—across time, space, and social context. Most other books about coming out—whether fiction, academic, or memoir—focus on the experience of gay men and lesbians in the United State…
Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia
Reassessing Gender Neutrality
Since the 1970s, advocates have used the term gender neutral to press for legal change in contexts ranging from employment discrimination to marriage equality to public restroom access. Drawing on analyses of all Supreme Court cases, federal courts of appeals cases, and Supreme Court amicus briefs in which the terms gender neutral/neutrality, sex neutral/neutrality, or sexually neutral/sexual neutrality appear, this study examines how US courts h…
Representations of Fatness by Experts and the Media and How This Shapes Attitudes
The past two decades have seen an explosion of research on “fat frames.” Scholars have found that medical researchers and the pharmaceutical industry have dominated such debates, whereas fat rights activists have struggled to get their message out. Media scholars have found that the news media primarily frame fatness as a medical problem and public health crisis that people bring on themselves through poor food choices and physical inactivity. In…
Reimagining Gender: Gender Neutrality in the News
Since the 1970s, the term gender neutral has risen to prominence in debates over issues ranging from pronouns to parenting to public restrooms. To advance understanding of this key term in recent gender politics, we conduct quantitative and qualitative analyses of almost one thousand articles from four major newspapers—over a forty-year period—that mention the term gender neutral. The term arises in news articles discussing gender equality betwee…
Can she be healthy at her weight? Effects of news media frames on antifat attitudes, dieting intentions, and perceived health risks of obesity
Combattre le harcèlement sexuel aux USA. Quand le droit et les procédures internes se heurtent aux mentalités
A French Paradox
The French news media has framed "obesity" largely as a product of corporate greed and social inequality. Yet, France has-like other nations including the United States-adopted policies that focus on changing individual-level behavior. This article identifies several factors-including food industry lobbying, the Ministry of Agriculture's rivalry with the Ministry of Health and alliance with the food industry, and competition with other policy goa…
Europeanization or National Specificity? Legal Approaches to Sexual Harassment in France, 2002-2012
This paper examines whether-and if so how-a 2002 European Directive on sexual harassment has changed the practice and content of sexual harassment law in France. It finds that the European Directive shaped how French courts address sexual harassment and informed the content of a new sexual harassment law France passed in 2012. Yet, its influence has been mediated by dominant national attitudes about: (1) the nature of sexual harassment, (2) which…
I Would Never Want to be an Only Wife: The Role of Discursive Networks and Post-Feminist Discourse in Reframing Polygamy
Understanding the processes that lead to change in institutions and meanings is a central concern of sociology. This paper examines the tactics used by “plural-marriage” activists to cast members of such marriages as an oppressed minority and portray polygamy as empowering to women. In-depth interviews with Mormon fundamentalist polygamist women (N = 30) and men (N = 4) involved in the plural-marriage-rights movement suggest that, to achieve thes…
Culture, health, and bigotry: How exposure to cultural accounts of fatness shape attitudes about health risk, health policies, and weight-based prejudice
Coming out of the shadows: Harnessing a cultural schema to advance the undocumented immigrant youth movement
How to Describe It? Why the Term Coming Out Means Different Things in the United States and France
Drawing on 30 in‐depth interviews with U.S. and French lesbians, gay men, and bisexuals, we find important similarities in how U.S. and French respondents strategically managed the visibility of their sexual identities but differences in the vocabulary used to discuss those experiences. Specifically, all of the Americans used the expression coming out spontaneously while only five French respondents did so. Instead, French respondents typically r…
Insecurity, Inequality, and Obesity in Affluent Societies
Reporting risk, producing prejudice: How news reporting on obesity shapes attitudes about health risk, policy, and prejudice
Gendered Homophobia and the Contradictions of Workplace Discrimination for Women in the Building Trades
Drawing on 63 interviews with a diverse sample of tradeswomen, this article examines how the cultural meanings of sexual orientation-as well as gender presentation, race, and body size-shapes the constraints that women face in the construction industry and the specific resistance strategies they develop. We argue that women's presence in these male-dominated jobs threatens (1) notions of the work as inherently masculine and (2) a gender order tha…
What's Wrong with Fat?: The War on Obesity and its Collateral Damage
"Abigail Saguy argues that these fraught and frantic debates obscure a more important question: How has fatness come to be understood as a public health crisis at all? Why, she asks, has the view of 'fat' as a problem-a symptom of immorality, a medical pathology, a public health epidemic-come to dominate more positive framings of weight-as consistent with health, beauty, or a legitimate rights claim-in public discourse? Why are heavy individuals …
Les conceptions juridiques du harcèlement sexuel en France et aux États-Unis: Avant et après l'affaire DSK
Lorsque l'ancien directeur du Fonds monétaire international, Dominique Strauss Kahn ( dsk ), a été arrêté pour tentative de viol sur une femme de chambre d'un hôtel Sofitel à New York en mai 2011, on a beaucoup spéculé sur le rôle qu'avaient joué les différences d'attitude vis-à-vis de la sexualité en France et aux États-Unis. Cet article explique que si ce scandale avait plus de chances d'éclater à New York qu'à Paris c'est moins en raison de di…
Why Fat is a Feminist Issue
Coming Out as Fat: Rethinking Stigma
This paper examines the surprising case of women who “come out as fat” to test and refine theories about social change, social mobilization, stigma, and stigma resistance. First, supporting theories about “social movement spillover,” we find that overlapping memberships in queer and fat activist groups, as well as networks between these groups, have facilitated the migration of this cultural narrative. Second, we find that the different, embodied…
Fat in the Fire? Science, the News Media, and the “Obesity Epidemic” 2
In recent years, the “obesity epidemic” has emerged as a putative public health crisis. This article examines the interconnected role of medical science and news reporting in shaping the way obesity is framed as a social problem. Drawing on a sample of scientific publications on weight and health, and press releases and news reporting on these publications, we compare and contrast social problem frames in medical science and news reporting. We fi…
Constructing Social Problems in an Age of Globalization: A French-American Comparison
Despite growing academic interest in political and cultural globalization, sociologists have failed to systematically account for the factors that favor cross-national convergence or divergence in the form or content of public political debates in news media. This article uses two original data sets on American and French news reporting on immigration and sexual harassment to test the effects of four factors potentially relevant to such convergen…
Morality and Health: News Media Constructions of Overweight and Eating Disorders
This article examines how widely shared cultural values shape social problem construction and, in turn, can reproduce social inequality. To do so, we draw on a comparative case study of American news reporting on eating disorders and overweight/obesity between 1995 and 2005. In the contemporary United States, thinness is associated with high social status and taken as evidence of moral virtue. In contrast, fatness is linked to low status and seen…
Coming Out as Fat: Rethinking Stigma
This paper examines the surprising case of women who “come out as fat” to test and refine theories about social change, social mobilization, stigma, and stigma resistance. First, supporting theories about “social movement spillover,” we find that overlapping memberships in queer and fat activist groups, as well as networks between these groups, have facilitated the migration of this cultural narrative. Second, we find that the different, embodied…
Employment Discrimination or Sexual Violence? Defining Sexual Harassment in American and French Law
In this article I examine how and why the term "sexual harassment" has been defined very differently in American and French law. Drawing on political and legal history, I argue that feminists mobilized in both countries to create sexual harassment law, but encountered dissimilar political, legal, and cultural constraints and resources. Having adapted to these distinct opportunities and constraints, feminists and other social actors produced sexua…
Why Fat is a Feminist Issue
Coming out of the shadows: Harnessing a cultural schema to advance the undocumented immigrant youth movement
Culture and Law: Beyond a Paradigm of Cause and Effect
This article examines a variety of ways in which social scientists make cultural argument about the law, including (1) holding culture as the independent variable to explain variations in law, (2) taking law as an independent variable to explain culture, or (3) considering law as culture. The authors explore each general strategy and its advantages and disadvantages in turn and argue that the law as culture perspective is one of the most interest…
Social Problem Construction and National Context: News Reporting on 'Overweight' and 'Obesity' in the United States and France
Drawing on analyses of American and French news reports on "overweight" and "obesity," this article examines how national context—including position in a global field of nation states, as well as different national politics and culture—shapes the framing of social problems. As has been shown in previous research, news reports from France—the economically dominated but culturally dominant nation of the two—discuss the United States more often than…
Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia
Reporting risk, producing prejudice: How news reporting on obesity shapes attitudes about health risk, policy, and prejudice
Gendered Homophobia and the Contradictions of Workplace Discrimination for Women in the Building Trades
Drawing on 63 interviews with a diverse sample of tradeswomen, this article examines how the cultural meanings of sexual orientation-as well as gender presentation, race, and body size-shapes the constraints that women face in the construction industry and the specific resistance strategies they develop. We argue that women's presence in these male-dominated jobs threatens (1) notions of the work as inherently masculine and (2) a gender order tha…
A Little Word That Means A Lot: A Reassessment of Singular They in a New Era of Gender Politics
Singular they has emerged as a key term in contemporary gender politics, reflecting growing usage of they/them as nonbinary personal pronouns. Drawing on interviews with 54 progressive gender activists, we consider how singular they can be used to resist and redo aspects of the prevailing gender structure. We identify three distinct usages of singular they: (1) as a nonbinary personal pronoun, (2) as a universal gender-neutral pronoun, and (3) as…
Fat Rights: Dilemmas of Difference and Personhood
Culture, health, and bigotry: How exposure to cultural accounts of fatness shape attitudes about health risk, health policies, and weight-based prejudice
How to Describe It? Why the Term Coming Out Means Different Things in the United States and France
Drawing on 30 in‐depth interviews with U.S. and French lesbians, gay men, and bisexuals, we find important similarities in how U.S. and French respondents strategically managed the visibility of their sexual identities but differences in the vocabulary used to discuss those experiences. Specifically, all of the Americans used the expression coming out spontaneously while only five French respondents did so. Instead, French respondents typically r…
Reassessing Gender Neutrality
Since the 1970s, advocates have used the term gender neutral to press for legal change in contexts ranging from employment discrimination to marriage equality to public restroom access. Drawing on analyses of all Supreme Court cases, federal courts of appeals cases, and Supreme Court amicus briefs in which the terms gender neutral/neutrality, sex neutral/neutrality, or sexually neutral/sexual neutrality appear, this study examines how US courts h…
Europeanization or National Specificity? Legal Approaches to Sexual Harassment in France, 2002-2012
This paper examines whether-and if so how-a 2002 European Directive on sexual harassment has changed the practice and content of sexual harassment law in France. It finds that the European Directive shaped how French courts address sexual harassment and informed the content of a new sexual harassment law France passed in 2012. Yet, its influence has been mediated by dominant national attitudes about: (1) the nature of sexual harassment, (2) which…
Les conceptions juridiques du harcèlement sexuel en France et aux États-Unis: Avant et après l'affaire DSK
Lorsque l'ancien directeur du Fonds monétaire international, Dominique Strauss Kahn ( dsk ), a été arrêté pour tentative de viol sur une femme de chambre d'un hôtel Sofitel à New York en mai 2011, on a beaucoup spéculé sur le rôle qu'avaient joué les différences d'attitude vis-à-vis de la sexualité en France et aux États-Unis. Cet article explique que si ce scandale avait plus de chances d'éclater à New York qu'à Paris c'est moins en raison de di…
A French Paradox
The French news media has framed "obesity" largely as a product of corporate greed and social inequality. Yet, France has-like other nations including the United States-adopted policies that focus on changing individual-level behavior. This article identifies several factors-including food industry lobbying, the Ministry of Agriculture's rivalry with the Ministry of Health and alliance with the food industry, and competition with other policy goa…
I Would Never Want to be an Only Wife: The Role of Discursive Networks and Post-Feminist Discourse in Reframing Polygamy
Understanding the processes that lead to change in institutions and meanings is a central concern of sociology. This paper examines the tactics used by “plural-marriage” activists to cast members of such marriages as an oppressed minority and portray polygamy as empowering to women. In-depth interviews with Mormon fundamentalist polygamist women (N = 30) and men (N = 4) involved in the plural-marriage-rights movement suggest that, to achieve thes…
International Crossways: Traffic in Sexual Harassment Policy
This article examines how sexual harassment has been conceptualized by French feminists in an increasingly global political environment, demonstrating how feminist ideas, politics and legal initiatives are transformed as they travel across space and time. I argue that feminist networks have been a central determinant of the ways in which ideas about sexual harassment have spread across the globe in the past 20 years. However, I further contend th…
When Abortion Was a Crime: Women, Medicine, and Law in the United States, 1867-1973
Sexual harassment in France and the United States: Activists and public figures defend their definitions
A saleswoman is continually badgered by her superior. He tells her that she has a “nice ass” and that he would like to see her naked. He asks her out frequently, despite her continual rejections. He touches her when they talk. At first, he would touch her shoulder or her waist, but today, he runs his hand down her thigh. When she pushes him away, he says: “Loosen up. Are you some kind of prude?” Is this sexual harassment? Why or why not? Various …
Employment Discrimination or Sexual Violence? Defining Sexual Harassment in American and French Law
In this article I examine how and why the term "sexual harassment" has been defined very differently in American and French law. Drawing on political and legal history, I argue that feminists mobilized in both countries to create sexual harassment law, but encountered dissimilar political, legal, and cultural constraints and resources. Having adapted to these distinct opportunities and constraints, feminists and other social actors produced sexua…
International Crossways: Traffic in Sexual Harassment Policy
This article examines how sexual harassment has been conceptualized by French feminists in an increasingly global political environment, demonstrating how feminist ideas, politics and legal initiatives are transformed as they travel across space and time. I argue that feminist networks have been a central determinant of the ways in which ideas about sexual harassment have spread across the globe in the past 20 years. However, I further contend th…
What Is Sexual Harassment?: From Capitol Hill to the Sorbonne
In France, a common notion is that the shared interests of graduate students and their professors could lead to intimate sexual relations, and that regulations curtailing those relationships would be both futile and counterproductive. By contrast, many universities and corporations in the United States prohibit sexual relationships across hierarchical lines and sometimes among coworkers, arguing that these liaisons should have no place in the wor…
National specificity in an age of globalization: Sexual harassment law in France1
Weighing Both Sides: Morality, Mortality, and Framing Contests over Obesity
Despite recent and growing media attention surrounding obesity in the United States, the so-called obesity epidemic remains a highly contested scientific and social fact. This article examines the contemporary obesity debate through systematic examination of the claims and claimants involved in the controversy. We argue that four primary groups—antiobesity researchers, antiobesity activists, fat acceptance researchers, and fat acceptance activist…
Constructing Social Problems in an Age of Globalization: A French-American Comparison
Despite growing academic interest in political and cultural globalization, sociologists have failed to systematically account for the factors that favor cross-national convergence or divergence in the form or content of public political debates in news media. This article uses two original data sets on American and French news reporting on immigration and sexual harassment to test the effects of four factors potentially relevant to such convergen…
The epidemiology of overweight and obesity: Public health crisis or moral panic?
National and international health organizations have focused increasingly on a perceived obesity epidemic said to pose drastic threats to public health. Indeed, some medical experts have gone so far as to predict that growing body mass will halt and perhaps even reverse the millennia-long trend of rising human life expectancy.1 In response to such concerns public health agencies across the world have sprung into action, searching for policies or …
Fat in the Fire? Science, the News Media, and the “Obesity Epidemic” 2
In recent years, the “obesity epidemic” has emerged as a putative public health crisis. This article examines the interconnected role of medical science and news reporting in shaping the way obesity is framed as a social problem. Drawing on a sample of scientific publications on weight and health, and press releases and news reporting on these publications, we compare and contrast social problem frames in medical science and news reporting. We fi…
Culture and Law: Beyond a Paradigm of Cause and Effect
This article examines a variety of ways in which social scientists make cultural argument about the law, including (1) holding culture as the independent variable to explain variations in law, (2) taking law as an independent variable to explain culture, or (3) considering law as culture. The authors explore each general strategy and its advantages and disadvantages in turn and argue that the law as culture perspective is one of the most interest…
Fat Rights: Dilemmas of Difference and Personhood
Social Problem Construction and National Context: News Reporting on 'Overweight' and 'Obesity' in the United States and France
Drawing on analyses of American and French news reports on "overweight" and "obesity," this article examines how national context—including position in a global field of nation states, as well as different national politics and culture—shapes the framing of social problems. As has been shown in previous research, news reports from France—the economically dominated but culturally dominant nation of the two—discuss the United States more often than…
Morality and Health: News Media Constructions of Overweight and Eating Disorders
This article examines how widely shared cultural values shape social problem construction and, in turn, can reproduce social inequality. To do so, we draw on a comparative case study of American news reporting on eating disorders and overweight/obesity between 1995 and 2005. In the contemporary United States, thinness is associated with high social status and taken as evidence of moral virtue. In contrast, fatness is linked to low status and seen…
Why Fat is a Feminist Issue
Coming Out as Fat: Rethinking Stigma
This paper examines the surprising case of women who “come out as fat” to test and refine theories about social change, social mobilization, stigma, and stigma resistance. First, supporting theories about “social movement spillover,” we find that overlapping memberships in queer and fat activist groups, as well as networks between these groups, have facilitated the migration of this cultural narrative. Second, we find that the different, embodied…
Les conceptions juridiques du harcèlement sexuel en France et aux États-Unis: Avant et après l'affaire DSK
Lorsque l'ancien directeur du Fonds monétaire international, Dominique Strauss Kahn ( dsk ), a été arrêté pour tentative de viol sur une femme de chambre d'un hôtel Sofitel à New York en mai 2011, on a beaucoup spéculé sur le rôle qu'avaient joué les différences d'attitude vis-à-vis de la sexualité en France et aux États-Unis. Cet article explique que si ce scandale avait plus de chances d'éclater à New York qu'à Paris c'est moins en raison de di…
What's Wrong with Fat?: The War on Obesity and its Collateral Damage
"Abigail Saguy argues that these fraught and frantic debates obscure a more important question: How has fatness come to be understood as a public health crisis at all? Why, she asks, has the view of 'fat' as a problem-a symptom of immorality, a medical pathology, a public health epidemic-come to dominate more positive framings of weight-as consistent with health, beauty, or a legitimate rights claim-in public discourse? Why are heavy individuals …
How to Describe It? Why the Term Coming Out Means Different Things in the United States and France
Drawing on 30 in‐depth interviews with U.S. and French lesbians, gay men, and bisexuals, we find important similarities in how U.S. and French respondents strategically managed the visibility of their sexual identities but differences in the vocabulary used to discuss those experiences. Specifically, all of the Americans used the expression coming out spontaneously while only five French respondents did so. Instead, French respondents typically r…
Insecurity, Inequality, and Obesity in Affluent Societies
Reporting risk, producing prejudice: How news reporting on obesity shapes attitudes about health risk, policy, and prejudice
Gendered Homophobia and the Contradictions of Workplace Discrimination for Women in the Building Trades
Drawing on 63 interviews with a diverse sample of tradeswomen, this article examines how the cultural meanings of sexual orientation-as well as gender presentation, race, and body size-shapes the constraints that women face in the construction industry and the specific resistance strategies they develop. We argue that women's presence in these male-dominated jobs threatens (1) notions of the work as inherently masculine and (2) a gender order tha…
Coming out of the shadows: Harnessing a cultural schema to advance the undocumented immigrant youth movement
Culture, health, and bigotry: How exposure to cultural accounts of fatness shape attitudes about health risk, health policies, and weight-based prejudice
I Would Never Want to be an Only Wife: The Role of Discursive Networks and Post-Feminist Discourse in Reframing Polygamy
Understanding the processes that lead to change in institutions and meanings is a central concern of sociology. This paper examines the tactics used by “plural-marriage” activists to cast members of such marriages as an oppressed minority and portray polygamy as empowering to women. In-depth interviews with Mormon fundamentalist polygamist women (N = 30) and men (N = 4) involved in the plural-marriage-rights movement suggest that, to achieve thes…
Europeanization or National Specificity? Legal Approaches to Sexual Harassment in France, 2002-2012
This paper examines whether-and if so how-a 2002 European Directive on sexual harassment has changed the practice and content of sexual harassment law in France. It finds that the European Directive shaped how French courts address sexual harassment and informed the content of a new sexual harassment law France passed in 2012. Yet, its influence has been mediated by dominant national attitudes about: (1) the nature of sexual harassment, (2) which…
Political science (31 works) · Sociology (24 works) · Law (23 works) · Psychology (21 works) · Social Psychology (15 works) · Obesity and Health Practices (14 works) · Gender Studies (13 works) · Law (13 works) · Medicine (11 works) · Politics (11 works)