E A Armstrong
Biographic Data
| ID | 43903 |
|---|---|
| NAME | E A Armstrong |
| GIVEN NAMES | E A |
| FAMILY NAME | Armstrong |
| SIGNATURE | ARMSTRONG E A |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Michigan |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3860-8743 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 33 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1386 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 33 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1943 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 12 |
It's Complicated
The sexual and romantic activities of unmarried women at midlife are often invisible in survey research based on normative categories of adult intimacy. However, women at this stage in the life course are structurally positioned to innovate with intimacy. In our interviews with 53 Black and white women between ages 33-58, outside of stable partnerships, and open to sex and intimacy with men, we find that women's frustration with marriage and marr…
Litigation politics
Critics point to increasing private lawsuits filed by students accused of campus sexual assault as evidence that Obama-era Title IX guidance overcorrected and favored victims at the expense of the due process rights of the accused. This overcorrection narrative powerfully reshaped the debate surrounding campus sexual assault and ultimately contributed to the rescinding of the guidance. Existing analytical tools from legal mobilization scholarship…
Racialized Horizontal Stratification in US Higher Education
In this review, we integrate three bodies of scholarship-education stratification research, political-historical sociology of higher education, and sociological theories of race and racism-to understand the production of 'separate and unequal' postsecondary experiences for racially marginalized college students in the United States. We argue that the US postsecondary system is plural, heterogeneous, and stratified partly as a result of hundreds o…
How Many Terms Does It Take to Define Sexual Assault? Inconsistencies in U.S. Higher Education Sexual Misconduct Policies
Campus sexual misconduct policies (SMPs) outline prohibited conduct. We sought to document the range of terms used to refer to forms of nonconsensual sexual contact in SMPs and to analyze the content of definitions provided for the term "sexual assault." We coded the 2016-2017 SMPs from a sample of 381 U.S. schools. We identified 125 unique terms and documented both a terminological and conceptual morass around sexual assault. Policy language may…
Title IX, Campus Sexual Misconduct, and the Criminalization of a US Civil Rights Law
Preventing Campus Sexual Violence
To reduce campus sexual violence, administrators must work with faculty experts in structural inequalities to develop, implement, evaluate, and share structural-level policy interventions
Gender Equity and Due Process in Campus Sexual Assault Adjudication Procedures
Title IX prohibits sex discrimination in federally funded education programs. In 2011, the Department of Education under President Obama issued a Dear Colleague Letter (DCL) advising schools of their obligation to protect Title IX rights by more effectively responding to campus sexual assault. Many observers hoped that this would promote gender equity. Yet it also generated a backlash, as critics charged schools with stripping accused students of…
Classed Pathways to Marriage
Objective: This article identifies mechanisms through which social class background shapes the marital outcomes of college-going white American women. Background: Scholars are interested in the relative influences of ascriptive and achieved characteristics on mate selection. Research indicates that social class background continues to influence the marriage patterns of college-educated Americans but does not identify the mechanisms through which …
Sex and Power on Campus
In 2014 Columbia University had a problem with campus sexual assault. So did other universities, but Columbia was the site of a visible protest. To highlight university failure to respond to her sexual assault and those of others, undergraduate art student Emma Sulkowicz carried a 50-pound mattress everywhere she went on
Parents, Partners, and Professions
with family resources and motivations, as well as the larger socio-economic context. In addition, not all projects-even if successfully executed-led to the same level of economic security
Feminist Praxis
Feminist praxis in conference planning and implementation may be a promising approach to addressing the complex issue of gender-based violence in an academic setting. This “In Brief” provides an overview of how the Michigan Meeting on Ending Gender-Based Violence planning committee at the University of Michigan embraced feminist praxis by foregrounding diversity in conference presenters and topics presented; structuring the conference’s formal an…
Hegemonic Femininities and Intersectional Domination
We examine how two sociological traditions account for the role of femininities in social domination. The masculinities tradition theorizes gender as an independent structure of domination; consequently, femininities that complement hegemonic masculinities are treated as passively compliant in the reproduction of gender. In contrast, Patricia Hill Collins views cultural ideals of hegemonic femininity as simultaneously raced, classed, and gendered…
Silence, Power, and Inequality
Sexual violence reproduces inequalities of gender, race/ethnicity, class, age, sexuality, ability status, citizenship status, and nationality. Yet its study has been relegated to the margins of our discipline, with consequences for knowledge about the reproduction of social inequality. We begin with an overview of key insights about sexual violence elaborated by feminists, critical race scholars, and activists. This research leads us to conceptua…
Stonewall Riots
The Stonewall riots are often viewed as the spark of the gay liberation movement. This is not historically accurate: The gay liberation movement was active by fall 1968, and likely before. Gay liberation was particularly vibrant in New York. In 1969 Greenwich Village was home to some of the most skilled and visionary gay activists in the country. The riots were not the first time the gay community had fought back against police, nor were they the…
Social Movement Organizations
Social movements organize people, resources, and ideas for social change. Many do this through formal organizations, and most sociologists recognize the social movement organization (SMO) as a key factor in the study of movements. SMOs can be defined as formal organizations that take the collective pursuit of social change as a primary goal. This concept is trickier than it may initially seem, since it relies on two concepts that are themselves d…
Good Girls
Women's participation in slut shaming is often viewed as internalized oppression: they apply disadvantageous sexual double standards established by men. This perspective grants women little agency and neglects their simultaneous location in other social structures. In this article we synthesize insights from social psychology, gender, and culture to argue that undergraduate women use slut stigma to draw boundaries around status groups linked to s…
The Sociology of Higher Education
Paying for the Party
In an era of skyrocketing tuition and concern over whether college is “worth it,” Paying for the Party is an indispensable contribution to the dialogue assessing the state of American higher education. A powerful exposé of unmet obligations and misplaced priorities, it explains in detail why so many leave college with so little to show for it.
Accounting for Women's Orgasm and Sexual Enjoyment in College Hookups and Relationships
This article investigates the determinants of orgasm and sexual enjoyment in hookup and relationship sex among heterosexual college women and seeks to explain why relationship sex is better for women in terms of orgasm and sexual enjoyment. We use data from women respondents to a large online survey of undergraduates at 21 U.S. colleges and universities and from 85 in-depth interviews at two universities. We identify four general views of the sou…
Women's Negotiation of Cunnilingus in College Hookups and Relationships
Using in-depth interviews with 43 college women who were, on average, 21 years old (SD = 0.79), the authors explored women's attitudes toward and experiences of cunnilingus. The authors found that cunnilingus posed interactional challenges for women, but that these varied by relationship context. Drawing on scripting theory, the authors argue that the sexual scripts available to contemporary American college students assume cunnilingus in relatio…
Is Hooking Up Bad for Young Women?
“Girls can't be guys in matters of the heart, even though they think they can,” says Laura Sessions Stepp, author of Unhooked: HowYoung Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love, and Lose at Both, published in 2007. In her view, “hooking up”—casual sexual activity ranging from kissing to intercourse—places women at risk of “low self-esteem, depression, alcoholism, and eating disorders.” Stepp is only one of half a dozen journalists currently engaged in the bu…
Gendered Sexuality in Young Adulthood
Current work on hooking up-or casual sexual activity on college campuses-takes an individualistic, 'battle of the sexes' approach and underestimates the importance of college as a classed location. The authors employ an interactional, intersectional approach using longitudinal ethnographic and interview data on a group of college women's sexual and romantic careers. They find that heterosexual college women contend with public gender beliefs abou…
The Contributions of Reorganizing the Rust Belt to Social Movement Scholarship
Hooking Up
Sieve, Incubator, Temple, Hub
Higher education lacks an intellectually coherent sociology; varied research on colleges and universities is dispersed widely throughout the discipline. This review initiates a critical integration of this scholarship. We argue that sociologists have conceived of higher education systems as sieves for sorting and stratifying populations, incubators for the development of competent social actors, temples for the legitimation of official knowledge,…
Culture, Power, and Institutions
We argue that critiques of political process theory are beginning to coalesce into a new approach to social movements-a 'multi-institutional politics' approach. While the political process model assumes that domination is organized by and around one source of power, the alternative perspective views domination as organized around multiple sources of power, each of which is simultaneously material and symbolic. We examine the conceptions of social…
Movements and Memory
This article examines why the Stonewall riots became central to gay collective memory while other events did not. It does so through a comparative-historical analysis of Stonewall and four events similar to it that occurred in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York in the 1960s. The Stonewall riots were remembered because they were the first to meet two conditions: activists considered the event commemorable and had the mnemonic capacity to cre…
Accounting for Women's Orgasm and Sexual Enjoyment in College Hookups and Relationships
This article investigates the determinants of orgasm and sexual enjoyment in hookup and relationship sex among heterosexual college women and seeks to explain why relationship sex is better for women in terms of orgasm and sexual enjoyment. We use data from women respondents to a large online survey of undergraduates at 21 U.S. colleges and universities and from 85 in-depth interviews at two universities. We identify four general views of the sou…
Sieve, Incubator, Temple, Hub
Higher education lacks an intellectually coherent sociology; varied research on colleges and universities is dispersed widely throughout the discipline. This review initiates a critical integration of this scholarship. We argue that sociologists have conceived of higher education systems as sieves for sorting and stratifying populations, incubators for the development of competent social actors, temples for the legitimation of official knowledge,…
Good Girls
Women's participation in slut shaming is often viewed as internalized oppression: they apply disadvantageous sexual double standards established by men. This perspective grants women little agency and neglects their simultaneous location in other social structures. In this article we synthesize insights from social psychology, gender, and culture to argue that undergraduate women use slut stigma to draw boundaries around status groups linked to s…
Gendered Sexuality in Young Adulthood
Current work on hooking up-or casual sexual activity on college campuses-takes an individualistic, 'battle of the sexes' approach and underestimates the importance of college as a classed location. The authors employ an interactional, intersectional approach using longitudinal ethnographic and interview data on a group of college women's sexual and romantic careers. They find that heterosexual college women contend with public gender beliefs abou…
Silence, Power, and Inequality
Sexual violence reproduces inequalities of gender, race/ethnicity, class, age, sexuality, ability status, citizenship status, and nationality. Yet its study has been relegated to the margins of our discipline, with consequences for knowledge about the reproduction of social inequality. We begin with an overview of key insights about sexual violence elaborated by feminists, critical race scholars, and activists. This research leads us to conceptua…
Sexual Assault on Campus
This article explains why rates of sexual assault remain high on college campuses. Data are from a study of college life at a large midwestern university involving nine months of ethnographic observation of a women's floor in a “party dorm,” in-depth interviews with 42 of the floor residents, and 16 group interviews with other students. We show that sexual assault is a predictable outcome of a synergistic intersection of processes operating at in…
Hegemonic Femininities and Intersectional Domination
We examine how two sociological traditions account for the role of femininities in social domination. The masculinities tradition theorizes gender as an independent structure of domination; consequently, femininities that complement hegemonic masculinities are treated as passively compliant in the reproduction of gender. In contrast, Patricia Hill Collins views cultural ideals of hegemonic femininity as simultaneously raced, classed, and gendered…
Hooking Up
Women's Negotiation of Cunnilingus in College Hookups and Relationships
Using in-depth interviews with 43 college women who were, on average, 21 years old (SD = 0.79), the authors explored women's attitudes toward and experiences of cunnilingus. The authors found that cunnilingus posed interactional challenges for women, but that these varied by relationship context. Drawing on scripting theory, the authors argue that the sexual scripts available to contemporary American college students assume cunnilingus in relatio…
Social Movement Organizations
Social movements organize people, resources, and ideas for social change. Many do this through formal organizations, and most sociologists recognize the social movement organization (SMO) as a key factor in the study of movements. SMOs can be defined as formal organizations that take the collective pursuit of social change as a primary goal. This concept is trickier than it may initially seem, since it relies on two concepts that are themselves d…
Parents, Partners, and Professions
with family resources and motivations, as well as the larger socio-economic context. In addition, not all projects-even if successfully executed-led to the same level of economic security
Racialized Horizontal Stratification in US Higher Education
In this review, we integrate three bodies of scholarship-education stratification research, political-historical sociology of higher education, and sociological theories of race and racism-to understand the production of 'separate and unequal' postsecondary experiences for racially marginalized college students in the United States. We argue that the US postsecondary system is plural, heterogeneous, and stratified partly as a result of hundreds o…
The Sociology of Higher Education
Gender Equity and Due Process in Campus Sexual Assault Adjudication Procedures
Title IX prohibits sex discrimination in federally funded education programs. In 2011, the Department of Education under President Obama issued a Dear Colleague Letter (DCL) advising schools of their obligation to protect Title IX rights by more effectively responding to campus sexual assault. Many observers hoped that this would promote gender equity. Yet it also generated a backlash, as critics charged schools with stripping accused students of…
Identity and Competence
Cultural sociology agrees that meanings attributed to objects vary depending upon the cultural competencies of viewers, but tends to ignore the role of identities in interpretation. This article argues that both identities and competencies influence interpretation. Through an analysis of how 307 undergraduate students at a Midwestern state university interpreted a black-and-white photograph of an individual masturbating, this article finds that a…
It's Complicated
The sexual and romantic activities of unmarried women at midlife are often invisible in survey research based on normative categories of adult intimacy. However, women at this stage in the life course are structurally positioned to innovate with intimacy. In our interviews with 53 Black and white women between ages 33-58, outside of stable partnerships, and open to sex and intimacy with men, we find that women's frustration with marriage and marr…
How Many Terms Does It Take to Define Sexual Assault? Inconsistencies in U.S. Higher Education Sexual Misconduct Policies
Campus sexual misconduct policies (SMPs) outline prohibited conduct. We sought to document the range of terms used to refer to forms of nonconsensual sexual contact in SMPs and to analyze the content of definitions provided for the term "sexual assault." We coded the 2016-2017 SMPs from a sample of 381 U.S. schools. We identified 125 unique terms and documented both a terminological and conceptual morass around sexual assault. Policy language may…
The Ritual of the Plough
The Ritual of the Plough
Ethnic and Cultural Diversity among Lesbians and Gay Men
For the Common Good
From Struggle to Settlement
In 1969 gay liberation was new and exciting. The collision between existing homosexual organizing and the New Left had transformed activists' understandings of what could and should be accomplished by organizing on behalf of homosexuals. In this moment of intense energy the ideologies of the movement were contradictory. Gay liberationists wanted both to solidify gay identity and to demolish sexual identity categories altogether. They wanted both …
Movements and Memory
This article examines why the Stonewall riots became central to gay collective memory while other events did not. It does so through a comparative-historical analysis of Stonewall and four events similar to it that occurred in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York in the 1960s. The Stonewall riots were remembered because they were the first to meet two conditions: activists considered the event commemorable and had the mnemonic capacity to cre…
Sexual Assault on Campus
This article explains why rates of sexual assault remain high on college campuses. Data are from a study of college life at a large midwestern university involving nine months of ethnographic observation of a women's floor in a “party dorm,” in-depth interviews with 42 of the floor residents, and 16 group interviews with other students. We show that sexual assault is a predictable outcome of a synergistic intersection of processes operating at in…
Identity and Competence
Cultural sociology agrees that meanings attributed to objects vary depending upon the cultural competencies of viewers, but tends to ignore the role of identities in interpretation. This article argues that both identities and competencies influence interpretation. Through an analysis of how 307 undergraduate students at a Midwestern state university interpreted a black-and-white photograph of an individual masturbating, this article finds that a…
The Contributions of Reorganizing the Rust Belt to Social Movement Scholarship
Hooking Up
Sieve, Incubator, Temple, Hub
Higher education lacks an intellectually coherent sociology; varied research on colleges and universities is dispersed widely throughout the discipline. This review initiates a critical integration of this scholarship. We argue that sociologists have conceived of higher education systems as sieves for sorting and stratifying populations, incubators for the development of competent social actors, temples for the legitimation of official knowledge,…
Culture, Power, and Institutions
We argue that critiques of political process theory are beginning to coalesce into a new approach to social movements-a 'multi-institutional politics' approach. While the political process model assumes that domination is organized by and around one source of power, the alternative perspective views domination as organized around multiple sources of power, each of which is simultaneously material and symbolic. We examine the conceptions of social…
Gendered Sexuality in Young Adulthood
Current work on hooking up-or casual sexual activity on college campuses-takes an individualistic, 'battle of the sexes' approach and underestimates the importance of college as a classed location. The authors employ an interactional, intersectional approach using longitudinal ethnographic and interview data on a group of college women's sexual and romantic careers. They find that heterosexual college women contend with public gender beliefs abou…
Is Hooking Up Bad for Young Women?
“Girls can't be guys in matters of the heart, even though they think they can,” says Laura Sessions Stepp, author of Unhooked: HowYoung Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love, and Lose at Both, published in 2007. In her view, “hooking up”—casual sexual activity ranging from kissing to intercourse—places women at risk of “low self-esteem, depression, alcoholism, and eating disorders.” Stepp is only one of half a dozen journalists currently engaged in the bu…
Women's Negotiation of Cunnilingus in College Hookups and Relationships
Using in-depth interviews with 43 college women who were, on average, 21 years old (SD = 0.79), the authors explored women's attitudes toward and experiences of cunnilingus. The authors found that cunnilingus posed interactional challenges for women, but that these varied by relationship context. Drawing on scripting theory, the authors argue that the sexual scripts available to contemporary American college students assume cunnilingus in relatio…
Accounting for Women's Orgasm and Sexual Enjoyment in College Hookups and Relationships
This article investigates the determinants of orgasm and sexual enjoyment in hookup and relationship sex among heterosexual college women and seeks to explain why relationship sex is better for women in terms of orgasm and sexual enjoyment. We use data from women respondents to a large online survey of undergraduates at 21 U.S. colleges and universities and from 85 in-depth interviews at two universities. We identify four general views of the sou…
Paying for the Party
In an era of skyrocketing tuition and concern over whether college is “worth it,” Paying for the Party is an indispensable contribution to the dialogue assessing the state of American higher education. A powerful exposé of unmet obligations and misplaced priorities, it explains in detail why so many leave college with so little to show for it.
Good Girls
Women's participation in slut shaming is often viewed as internalized oppression: they apply disadvantageous sexual double standards established by men. This perspective grants women little agency and neglects their simultaneous location in other social structures. In this article we synthesize insights from social psychology, gender, and culture to argue that undergraduate women use slut stigma to draw boundaries around status groups linked to s…
The Sociology of Higher Education
Stonewall Riots
The Stonewall riots are often viewed as the spark of the gay liberation movement. This is not historically accurate: The gay liberation movement was active by fall 1968, and likely before. Gay liberation was particularly vibrant in New York. In 1969 Greenwich Village was home to some of the most skilled and visionary gay activists in the country. The riots were not the first time the gay community had fought back against police, nor were they the…
Social Movement Organizations
Social movements organize people, resources, and ideas for social change. Many do this through formal organizations, and most sociologists recognize the social movement organization (SMO) as a key factor in the study of movements. SMOs can be defined as formal organizations that take the collective pursuit of social change as a primary goal. This concept is trickier than it may initially seem, since it relies on two concepts that are themselves d…
Silence, Power, and Inequality
Sexual violence reproduces inequalities of gender, race/ethnicity, class, age, sexuality, ability status, citizenship status, and nationality. Yet its study has been relegated to the margins of our discipline, with consequences for knowledge about the reproduction of social inequality. We begin with an overview of key insights about sexual violence elaborated by feminists, critical race scholars, and activists. This research leads us to conceptua…
Feminist Praxis
Feminist praxis in conference planning and implementation may be a promising approach to addressing the complex issue of gender-based violence in an academic setting. This “In Brief” provides an overview of how the Michigan Meeting on Ending Gender-Based Violence planning committee at the University of Michigan embraced feminist praxis by foregrounding diversity in conference presenters and topics presented; structuring the conference’s formal an…
Hegemonic Femininities and Intersectional Domination
We examine how two sociological traditions account for the role of femininities in social domination. The masculinities tradition theorizes gender as an independent structure of domination; consequently, femininities that complement hegemonic masculinities are treated as passively compliant in the reproduction of gender. In contrast, Patricia Hill Collins views cultural ideals of hegemonic femininity as simultaneously raced, classed, and gendered…
Classed Pathways to Marriage
Objective: This article identifies mechanisms through which social class background shapes the marital outcomes of college-going white American women. Background: Scholars are interested in the relative influences of ascriptive and achieved characteristics on mate selection. Research indicates that social class background continues to influence the marriage patterns of college-educated Americans but does not identify the mechanisms through which …
Sex and Power on Campus
In 2014 Columbia University had a problem with campus sexual assault. So did other universities, but Columbia was the site of a visible protest. To highlight university failure to respond to her sexual assault and those of others, undergraduate art student Emma Sulkowicz carried a 50-pound mattress everywhere she went on
Sociology (24 works) · Political science (18 works) · Psychology (14 works) · Gender Studies (12 works) · Law (12 works) · Law (9 works) · Sexual Assault and Victimization Studies (9 works) · Politics (8 works) · Criminology (7 works) · Social Psychology (7 works)