Dr Yuchen Yang

In Week 3, we will extend our focus from gender to sexuality. I paired @kitzingercelia.bsky.social's CA work on person reference in medical calls with @cjpascoe.bsky.social's ethnography of homophobic epithet in school. Close analysis of mundane interaction makes heteronormativity visible.

"There are very few infallible rules in intellectual life, but a surely robust one would be to close any book on Northeast Asia as soon as it begins to hold forth on Confucius and Confucianism and their relevance to the contemporary era." ——John Lie, The Dream of East Asia (2018)

Social theory is as hard to teach as it is to learn.

The hardest part? When students do everything right—read every page, show up every time—and still feel theory won’t open up for them.

#EMCA
One of my 2nd year students mentioned in her homework about how she tried out a breaching experiment (in this case speaking in honorifics with her sister) and the reaction, and started diving deeper into the ideas.

I'm such a bad influence sometimes, but I love it.

I think it's from Forms of Talk 😁

Have you seen this acknowledgement from Goffman 🤣

This is who @emanabdelhadi.bsky.social is. Brilliant. Fearless. I fucking hate typing this shit out: Free Eman.

Amplify amplify amplify please.

WTF 😡

In Week 2, we will read West & Zimmerman's early work on interruption in cross-gender conversation, Goffman's work on Gender Display, and a chapter from Thorne's Gender Play. Hopefully these texts will prepare the students for reading "Doing Gender" in the first week of Gender & Sexuality next year.

Achievement Unlocked: I watched 6 films by Shinkai Makoto yesterday at the Birmingham Anime Film Festival! Their Shinkai Makoto Marathon included The Place Promised in Our Early Days, The Garden of Words, 5 Centimeter Per Second, Children Who Chase Lost Voices, Your Name, and Weathering with You.

Teaching starts next Monday, so I'm PINK again! ✧٩(ˊωˋ*)و✧

Fishman's article is quite short and based on a "small" sample of three couples (according to the standards of mainstream sociology today), but its depth and attentiveness to details are unparalleled. We really need more articles like this in our discipline.

Week 1: Introducing the Sociology of Everyday Life Adler, Patricia A., Peter Adler, and Andrea Fontana. 1987. “Everyday Life Sociology.” Annual Review of Sociology 13:217–235. Fishman, Pamela M. 1978. “Interaction: The Work Women Do.” Social Problems 25(4):397–406. Antaki, Charles. 2007. “Basic Transcription Notation Conventions.” https://learn.lboro.ac.uk/ludata/cx/ca-tutorials/notation.htm Recommended: Thorne, Barrie. 1997. “Brandeis as a Generative Institution: Critical Perspectives, Marginality, and Feminism.” Pp. 103–25 in Feminist Sociology: Life Histories of a Movement, edited by B. Laslett and B. Thorne. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Collins, Randall. 2004. “The Program of Interaction Ritual Theory.” Pp. 3–46 in Interaction Ritual Chains. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Jefferson, Gail. 2004. “Glossary of Transcript Symbols with an Introduction.” Pp. 13–31 in Conversation Analysis: Studies from the First Generation, edited by G. H. Lerner. Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

I'm revamping our Sociology of Everyday Life module at @birminghamschool.bsky.social this semester to make it more interactionist and ethnomethodological. For our first lecture next week, we'll read Adler et al.'s Annual Review article and Fishman's classic piece, "Interaction: The Work Women Do." 🤩

Congratulations!!! @stephanieternullo.bsky.social

Pritzker slams feds' silence on fatal ICE shooting in Franklin Park "This is the most unusual situation I've seen in my entire lifetime," the governor said Monday of what appears to be the first fatal shooting by a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent this y...

ICE killed a Chicago area man last week. His name was Silverio Villegas-Gonzalez. He wasn't "the worst of the worst." He was a cook. ICE hopes we'll forget about him. We won't.

Take action for international students! Proposed DHS rule eliminating Duration of Status is detrimental for international students. Submit public comment (naming Docket No. ICEB-2025-0001) before 11:59 pm EDT, Sept. 29: https://bit.ly/3KoPB0w. Context: https://bit.ly/42nbq6Y.

Gender and Sexuality MA - University of Birmingham Course information for prospective postgraduate students on our MA History taught masters degree programme at the University of Birmingham.

Some big news: the University of Birmingham is launching a new MA in Gender & Sexuality. It's interdisciplinary, with a focus on combining theory & practice. It's going to be amazing. I'm convening it: message or email with questions. www.birmingham.ac.uk/study/postgr... @unibirmingham.bsky.social

YESSS!!!

@kefanxue.bsky.social

Reunion of three sociologists of childhood from Hangzhou in Birmingham!

Apparently, Google AI has already learned what I mean by "gender uptake" (mostly) within 3 days of the publication of my article 😲

This article is a must-read for anyone interested in media, platform, nationalism, or China!!! anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Thank you!!!

Sociological Theory - Original Article Gender Uptake: Theorizing the Semiotics of (Un)Doing Gender Yuchen Yang Abstract “Doing Gender” is often read as a theory of how people signify femininity/masculinity via expressive “performances.” This prevailing interpretation falls short of what the theory calls for—an ethnomethodologically informed analysis of gender’s emergent “naturalness.” To further this agenda, I theorize the audience’s “gender uptake” as a central component of doing gender by elaborating ethnomethodology’s attention to interpretive acts. Integrating Dorothy Smith’s intellectual legacy for feminist interpretive sociology, ethnomethodology’s neglected insight on categorization, and cultural sociology’s recent rediscovery of Peircean semiotics, I argue the facticity of gender’s “naturalness” remains underdetermined until the audience makes a series of ideological moves that cannot be predetermined by the performer. With case studies of how feminist parents account for their children’s gender-stereotypical interests, I illustrate how this audience-centered approach helps us unpack the interactional production/naturalization of categorical differences processually as open-ended negotiation of sign relations, where meaning emerges from selective attention. Keywords accounts, categorization, childhood, doing gender, ethnomethodology, pragmatist semiotics

After 3 years, 14 drafts, and 3 paper awards, I finally published this paper on the semiotics of (un)doing gender in my favorite journal—Sociological Theory! @sociologicaltheory.bsky.social
doi.org/10.1177/0735...

And then my cat sealed me onto my keyboard. I guess she's saying, "You shall never stop writing."

What does fascism looks like? Extreme nationalism, cult of personality, statism, elimination of political opponents, militarism, state capitalism, false social mobilization, fear of difference, reify gender order, philosophy of existential struggles

officially, the military parade is to mark "the 80th Anniversary of the Victory of Chinese People’s War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression and the World Anti-Fascist War.” it's not WWII, but world anti-fascist war. but does it tell us anything about fascism? no. but on my fav social media..

The Q&A page for The Chicago Manual of Style is actually quite funny

It's September and I really need to start writing this book . . . but I procrastinated by reading The Chicago Manual of Style for two hours (though I did learn a lot about formatting and punctuation, including the spaced ellipse above) 🤪

One of the things that drives me up the wall is when people say students “need to learn how to use AI” to succeed in the workplace. It is EXTREMELY EASY to use a chatbot. That’s the whole point of it! You do not need training to type in the box! What are you even TALKING about?? +

LOVE THIS IDEA!!!!!!