Aging Bodies in Paradise: A Feminist Analysis of Key West’s Fantasy Fest

Cultural constructions of gender and age may be challenged within politically and socially progressive leisure environments, like Key West, that promote social deviance and out-group acceptance. However, this possibility receives limited scholarly attention. Addressing this gap, our study applies a framework that highlights gender and age as performances and uses interviews ( n = 77) collected in 2017 and 2018 at Key West’s Fantasy Fest, an annual carnivalesque event characterized by body displays of nudity, body paint, and costume. In this first systematic study of Fantasy Fest, data analysis revealed four themes centering on gender, age, and bodies—displaying diverse bodies; judging bodies; limiting body displays; and reinterpreting body-related norms. Key West’s cultural ideology of inclusion allowed both young and old participants to perform gender and age in ways that contributed to a more liberating environment celebrating a range of bodies—though performances were constrained by inequalities. Bodies, especially women’s, were subjected to judgments of their sexual appeal that led some, especially older women, to limit their displays. Our findings, nevertheless, suggest progressive, carnivalesque leisure environments’ potential, however fleeting or bounded, to disrupt everyday performances and broaden conceptions of gendered and aging bodies by reinterpreting the norms surrounding them.

“I Live Here”: How Residents of Color Experience Racialized Surveillance and Diversity Ideology in a Liberal Predominantly White Neighborhood

In many liberal predominantly white neighborhoods, white residents view their communities as inclusive yet they also engage in racialized surveillance to monitor individuals they perceive as outsiders. Some of these efforts center on people of color in neighborhood open spaces. We use a diversity ideology framework to analyze this contradiction, paying particular attention to how residents of color experience racialized surveillance of their neighborhood’s publicly accessible parks and swimming pools. This article draws on data from neighborhood documents, neighborhood digital platforms, and interviews with residents of a liberal, affluent, predominantly white community that was expressly designed with public spaces open to non-residents. We find that resident surveillance of neighborhood public spaces is racialized, occurs regularly, and happens in person and on neighborhood online platforms where diversity as liability rhetoric is conveyed using colorblind discourse. These monitoring efforts, which are at times supported by formal measures, impact residents of color to varying degrees. We expand on diversity ideology by identifying digital and in-person racialized surveillance as a key mechanism by which white residents attempt to enforce racialized boundaries and protect whiteness in multiracial spaces and by highlighting how Black and Latinx residents, in particular, navigate these practices.

The Intersecting Consequences of Race-Gender Health Disparities on Workforce Engagement for Older Workers: An Examination of Physical and Mental Health

The dramatic growth of older adults’ labor participation over the past 25 years, including women and people of color, is reshaping the American labor force. The current study contributes new knowledge concerning why individuals over age 50 years may be working longer despite negative impacts of deteriorating physical and mental health associated with aging. Inquiries regarding who continues to work and why can be answered, in part, by addressing how workforce engagement and health are shaped by notable social inequities along the dimensions of age, race, and gender. Guided by cumulative advantage/disadvantage and intersectionality frameworks, we examine whether having multiple chronic conditions (MCC)—two or more physical conditions—and depression affect workforce participation. Using multinomial logistic regression models, we analyze the 2014–2016 waves of the Health and Retirement Study ( N = 4250). Findings reveal that having multiple chronic illnesses increase the likelihood of labor force exit, especially among workers who also have depression. We also discover intersectional nuances which illuminate complex race-gender dynamics related to health and work processes in later life. We conclude with recommendations for workplace policy that promote the retention of older workers with chronic illness and depression and aim to decrease disparities in older workers’ work engagement.

Does State Allocation of University Funding Moderate Effectively Maintained Inequality?

According to the theory of Effectively Maintained Inequality (EMI), economically advantaged individuals not only enter each level of education at higher rates than do their less advantaged peers, but also enjoy qualitative advantages at each level that position them more favorably to continue to the next level. Governments may play a role in facilitating or limiting EMI because they allocate appropriations to public universities; the more between-university variability in these funds, the more horizontal differences high-income students may exploit. I ask whether Wisconsin’s unequal pattern of appropriations across its institutions of higher education exacerbates income-based disparities in college persistence. I test two hypotheses: (1) Economically advantaged students sort into the universities with greatest appropriations; (2) Appropriations promote first-to-second-year persistence. Evidence in favor of both hypotheses would support the claim that an unequal pattern of appropriations exacerbates college persistence disparities and, accordingly, suggest that unequal allocation facilitates EMI. Results support hypothesis (1) but not hypothesis (2). The results do not present evidence that the Wisconsin state government facilitated or limited EMI based on its allocation of funds across universities.

Resources in Relational Packages: Social Capital as a Byproduct of Relational Work

Social capital theory offers a compelling explanation as to why people are committed to making resources available to others outside of formal institutions. In this article, we build on social capital theory to explain how actors overcome two practical problems endemic to these resource transfers. We present Viviana Zelizer’s relational work theory as a complimentary framework which accounts for when an individual may act on commitments to offer resources and which commitments to act upon when they are in conflict. Drawing on our empirical work on almsgiving to social outcasts and resource transfers at mourning ceremonies in Azerbaijan, we describe how people identify and ascribe their relationships to others by relying on available cultural conventions to mark economic transactions and other media as appropriate or inappropriate. By conceptualizing social capital in this way, we also obtain a process-tracing methodology useful for social researchers and for community activists to generate ideas on how to expand social capital in their own or others’ communities.

Whose Need Matters?: The Local Welfare State, Poverty, and Variation in US Counties’ Social Service Provisioning

Sociologists have long studied poverty across localities. Yet, little research focuses on local governments and the social services they directly provide to those in-need. Researchers concerned with the US welfare state note that localized administration of social programs creates geographic variability in provisioning and potential for status-based discrimination, such as racism, to influence policy. This paper addresses two questions: (1) To what extent does local need influence counties’ provision of social services? (2) Does the provision of social services vary according to which social group is most in-need? Conceptually, we break ground by placing spatial inequality research on local disparities into dialogue with sociology’s welfare state tradition. Using novel data for 1,600 county governments across the nation, we find that local need as measured by the poverty rate is related to greater social service provisioning, suggesting governments’ responsiveness. However, provisioning is unequal when the level of need is disaggregated among social groups, race/ethnicity, and gender. Higher poverty among whites is associated with greater provisioning of social services. This study showcases possible means by which unequal patterns of social welfare support emerge and reveals the potential role of local governments in perpetuating inequalities by privileging some groups’ need more than others.

A Pathway to Racial Equity: Student Debt Cancellation Policy Designs

Student debt in the United States has had a disproportionate negative impact on black and Latinx borrowers. We argue that analyses of plans proposing student debt cancellation should therefore foreground their potential impact on racial equity. To do so, we use data from the 2019 Survey of Consumer Finances and model the impact of debt cancellation on four key policy outcomes (reach, impact on the most vulnerable borrowers, borrower wealth gains, and impact on racial wealth gaps). We examine universal policy designs as well as designs that incorporate an income eligibility threshold as a means of targeting benefits toward less affluent borrowers. We find that cancellation amounts ranging from $50,000 to $75,000 yield the most desirable outcomes, especially when paired with a relatively low household income eligibility cutoff at between $100,000 and $150,000. Such policies would cancel roughly half of all outstanding student debt without substantially expanding the racial wealth gap, while still reaching a large majority of borrowers and leading to substantial wealth gains, especially for black households.

“Will America Work? Racial and Economic Equity in a Post-COVID World”

Due to a variety of structural, political, and economic changes, the US is currently in the midst of record levels of economic inequality. At the same time, the country is rapidly becoming more racially diverse (and dealing with the backlash of these demographic changes). In this article, I use Kalleberg’s (2003) framework of “good jobs” and “bad jobs” in conjunction with several sociological theories of race and racism to assess the implications of these changes. I suggest that the United States is at an inflection point that will either result in a shift toward policies that produce more racial and economic parity, or a commitment to forces that will further entrench these inequalities.

Capitalism and Sustainability: An Exploratory Content Analysis of Frameworks in Environmental Political Economy

A critical divide within environmental sociology concerns the relationship between capitalism and the environment. Risk society and ecological modernization scholars advance a concept of reflexive political economy, arguing that capitalism will transition from a dirty, industrial stage to a green, eco-friendly stage. In contrast, critical political economy scholars suggest that the core imperatives of capitalist accumulation are fundamentally unsustainable. We conduct a content analysis of 136 journal articles to assess how these frameworks have been implemented in empirical studies. Our analysis provides important commentary about the mechanisms, agents, magnitude, scale, temporality, and outcomes these frameworks analyze and employ, and the development of a hybrid perspective that borrows from both these perspectives. In addition, we reflect on how and why reflexive political economy has not answered key challenges leveled in the early 21st century, mainly the disconnect between greening values and the ongoing coupling of economic growth and environmental destruction. We also reflect on the significance of critical political economy, as the only framework we study that provides analysis of the roots of ecological crisis. Finally, we comment on the emergent hybrid perspective as a framework that attempts to reconcile new socioecological configurations in an era of increasing environmental instability.

White Americans’ Opposition to Affirmative Action, Revisited: New Racism, Principled Objections, or Both?

In this short article, we provide an update and extension of Thomas C. Wilson’s study, “Whites’ Opposition to Affirmative Action: Rejection of Group-based Preferences as well as Rejection of Blacks.” Wilson drew on data from the 1996 General Social Survey (GSS) to revisit a long-standing debate in the racial attitudes literature concerning whether anti-black prejudice (e.g., “new racism”) or ostensibly race-neutral opposition to group-based policies generally (i.e., “principled objections”) is the primary determinant of whites’ opposition to affirmative action in the form of “preferential hiring and promotion for blacks.” We analyze data from the 2000–2018 GSS to replicate and extend key aspects of Wilson’s work. As in the prior study, we find mixed support for the new racism and principled objections perspectives, providing an important update on white Americans’ beliefs about affirmative action for the twenty-first century.