Recent analyses of responses to coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) have posited that men’s dismissive attitudes toward the risks of the virus reflect their attempts to conform to masculine norms that valorize bravery and strength. In this article, the authors develop an alternative account of the gender differences in attitudes toward COVID-19. Drawing on three waves of in-depth interviews with college students and members of their households ( n = 45) over a period of 16 weeks (for a total of 120 interviews), the authors find that men and women in comparable circumstances perceive similar risks of COVID-19, but they diverge in their attitudes toward, and responses to, these risks. Connecting scholarship on gender and care work with research on risk, the authors argue that gender differences in attitudes toward risk are influenced by the unique and strenuous care work responsibilities generated by the COVID-19 pandemic, which are borne primarily by women—and from which men are exempt.

The “Black Lives Matter” movement, centered on fighting racial injustice and inequality (particularly in the criminal justice system), has garnered a great deal of media attention in recent years. Given the relatively recent emergence of the movement, there exists very little scholarly research on media portrayals of the movement. In this article, I report findings from a qualitative examination of major newspaper portrayals of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement between April and August 2016, before the particularly divisive 2016 presidential election. Inductive textual analyses of 131 newspaper articles indicate that, although the movement’s goals were represented positively and from the perspective of members of the movement, the newspapers politicized and sensationalized the movement, and they focused far more on supposed negative consequences of the movement. I discuss these findings by drawing on the “protest paradigm” and the “public nuisance paradigm” in media coverage of social protest movements, arguing that the latter is particularly useful for interpreting portrayals of Black Lives Matter in the prevailing US political climate.

No abstract

Penological literature has focused extensively, and often exclusively, on the “hypermasculine” nature of men’s prisons. A separate and relatively recent body of sociological research has explored “hybrid masculinities,” whereby (usually privileged) men selectively enact traits conventionally associated with subordinate masculinities and even femininities. In this article, I draw on 24 in-depth interviews with incarcerated men to argue that these men construct hybrid masculinities in response to their feelings of insecurity and to resist the hypermasculine prison environment. In so doing, I link theoretical literature on hybrid masculinities with penological research to explore how a particularly marginalized group of men construct hybrid masculinities to cope with and challenge hegemonic masculinity in prison.

Penological research has extensively documented how incarcerated men’s identities are shaped by the prison setting, highlighting how these men cope with and adapt to the ‘pains of imprisonment’ through careful emotion management. Significantly less research has focused explicitly on the role of emotion in incarcerated men’s constructions of their selves. In this article, I draw on 24 in-depth interviews with incarcerated men to reveal how the prison setting generates negative emotions (such as sadness, shame, humiliation, and anger) that in turn perpetuate the isolation that these men face. Emotions thus constitute an overlooked source of these men’s social marginalization. Additionally, I draw on theoretical literature derived from symbolic interactionism (and identity theory in particular) to explore how participants cope with, and make efforts to overcome, their negative emotions by engaging in active emotion and identity work centred on constructing morality narratives of pride, self-worth, and superiority.

No abstract

Despite a growing body of scholarship on wrongful convictions, research on the prison and pre-prison experiences of wrongfully-convicted men (including the racialized nature of these experiences) continues to be limited. In this article, I draw on in-depth interviews with 15 exonerated men in the United States to frame wrongful conviction as an experience of racialized cumulative disadvantage, defined as the accrual and perpetuation of socioeconomic, psychological, and emotional harms that disproportionately impact Black and Hispanic wrongfully-convicted men over the life course. Through this analysis, I reveal the intersecting and accumulating inequalities that are (re)produced by the processes that generate wrongful convictions and by the experience of wrongful imprisonment. In addition to underscoring the need for critical evaluation of the role of state actors responsible for wrongful convictions, these findings speak to the importance of restorative justice programs to support Black and Hispanic exonerees’ recovery following wrongful imprisonment.

No abstract