A Kaleidoscope of Identities: Reflexivity, Routine, and the Fluidity of Sex, Gender, and Sexuality (2022)Contemporary theoretical tools in the social sciences and humanities hinder an understanding of the dynamic interplay between reflexivity and routine in the formation of sex, gender, and sexual identities. In A Kaleidoscope of Identities, James W. Messerschmidt and Tristan Bridges build on the work of feminist sociologists in examining the relationship among situational interaction, accountability, and relational and discursive social structures to uniquely conceptualize sex, gender, and sexual practice as both reflexive and routine. Drawing on nuanced and powerful life-history interviews, Messerschmidt and Bridges present a new theoretical framework situating reflexivity and routine in a much more symbiotic relationship than has been previously acknowledged. Without privileging either, Messerschmidt and Bridges explore this relationship through a novel analysis of the ways reflexivity and routine collaboratively shape sex, gender, and sexual identities over time and across space. A Kaleidoscope of Identities provides a fresh, accessible, and provocative argument advancing our knowledge on the changing nature of sex, gender, and sexual identity formations alongside transforming systems of power and inequality.
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Sociology NOW, third edition
This introduction to the field of sociology explains how the classic concerns of sociologists–social order, social conflict, social interaction–have been reshaped. Sociology has always offered a way to make sense of the complex and sometimes contradictory forces that shape our social lives in any era. As Sociology NOW, 3e explains, sociology is both a body of knowledge and a “way of seeing”-the sociological imagination. In this revision, Kimmel, Aronson, and Bridges offer a new framework for teaching the sociological imagination–a model they call “iSoc.” iSoc provides students with a new way of understanding the ways that sociologists look at the world with new up-to-date examples of cutting-edge scholarship offering a dynamic overview of the body of knowledge this field has produced. In the third edition, Sociology NOW will be available as a digital textbook (using Pearson’s REVEL platform) as well as in print. Digital readers will get additional insights from the authors in the form of video clips, video animations about key concepts, ideas, and findings, and an array of interactive maps, graphs, and visuals allowing students to interact with the material as they encounter it in the text.
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Exploring Masculinities: Identity, Inequality, Continuity, and Change is a comprehensive and contemporary reader for the growing field of men’s and masculinities studies. It takes a conceptual approach by covering the wide range of scholarship being done on masculinities beyond the model of hegemonic masculinity. C.J. Pascoe and Tristan Bridges extend the boundaries of the field and provide a new framework for understanding masculinities studies. Rather than taking a topics-based approach to masculinity, Exploring Masculinities offers an innovative conceptual approach that enables students to study a given phenomenon from a variety of perspectives. It divides up the field in ways that provide accessible introductions to complex debates and key intra- and interdisciplinary distinctions. The book provides a portable set of conceptual tools on which scholars and students can rely to analyze masculinities in different contexts, time periods, and embodiments.
“…a vital contribution to gender scholarship as it opens up many new and different ways of thinking and talking about masculinity, while still leaving much to be explored.”
(Theordora H. Sakellarides, Lebanon Valley College)
“…the most in-depth and comprehensive treatment of masculinities around.”
(Freeden Oeur, Tufts University)
“It explicitly interrogates the fluidity of masculinities—how they transform over history, differ across contexts and groups, compel individuals and groups to navigate the nested systems of dominance underpinning ‘established’ gender practices, and how they are discursive and symbolic.”
(Edward H. Thompson, Jr., College of the Holy Cross)
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Othering Other Men: Hybrid Masculinities and Transformations in Gender and Politics among Men (manuscript and prospectus in preparation)
This qualitative, multi-method research project compares three separate groups of men with very different gender-political affiliations and levels of awareness of gender and sexual inequality. In this research, I compared two groups of men at the ostensible poles of men’s gender-political activism—a pro-feminist group and a fathers’ rights activist organization—with a group of men less concerned with inequality and whose gender-political affiliation is less easily defined: a group of male bar regulars. One of my key findings is that men in all three of these groups challenge conventional understandings of masculinity and push the boundaries of contemporary masculinity through their performances of gender. Building on and retheorizing an emerging literature on “hybrid masculinities,” this work examines the ways that men in each group positioned their themselves as men simultaneously against and alongside an array of “Other” men (often, non-white, lower class, and most interestingly, gay). The gender identity projects in which these men engage are intimately connected with a larger transformation in gender relations: the increasing visibility of the privilege. On the heels of several waves of feminist activism, this project traces the gendered strategies of action newly made available to contemporary men and the ways that gender inequality is both challenged and reproduced in their wake.
Tristan Bridges 