1106199

research-article2022
STXXXX10.1177/07352751221106199Sociological TheoryHoang

Coser Lecture

Sociological Theory

Theorizing from the Margins:

2022, Vol. 40(3) 203­–223
© American Sociological Association 2022
DOI: 10.1177/07352751221106199
https://doi.org/10.1177/07352751221106199

A Tribute to Lewis and Rose st.sagepub.com

Laub Coser

Kimberly Kay Hoang1

Abstract
This article is an adaptation of the sixteenth Lewis A. Coser lecture, given virtually in
2021 for the American Sociological Association Meetings. In this article, I pay tribute to
Lewis and Rose Laub Coser by engaging with their past work, which inspired a theoretical
provocation about what it means to theorize from the margins. I specifically address the
questions of who gets to be a theorist and what kinds of theoretical work get marginalized.
I outline the process of epistemic oppression involved in trying to publish marginal ideas in
mainstream journals. I argue that the relationship between mainstream sociology and what
I refer to as “marginal” requires a relational perspective that (1) situates both marginalized
scholars and their scholarship in the broader discipline of sociology and (2) examines the
epistemic oppression of their theories regardless of their sometimes-powerful institutional
positioning in highly ranked departments or as leaders within various professional
associations.

Keywords
social theory, marginal sociology, qualitative sociology, epistemic oppression, race/class/
gender, sociology of knowledge

Epistemic oppression remains powerful, regardless of how we are positioned within

sociology or how people treat us because it silences us and possibilities for Black
feminist thought.
—Patricia Hill Collins (2022)

In 2017–2018, I presided over the Southern Sociological Society and the American
Sociological Association and, in 2018, became the James B. Duke Distinguished
Professor of Sociology at Duke. Some believe this is clear and convincing evidence of

1
University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA

Corresponding Author:
Kimberly Kay Hoang, Department of Sociology, University of Chicago, 1126 E. 59th St., Chicago, IL 60607, USA.
Email: kayhoang@uchicago.edu
204 Sociological Theory 40(3)

my “success” and standing in the business. To them I repeat Flavor Flav’s refrain in a
song: “Don’t believe the hype.” Race matters even when one is seemingly successful.

—Eduardo Bonilla-Silva (2022)

Who gets to be a theorist? What kinds of theoretical work get marginalized? And how does
epistemic oppression of marginal theories play out through the peer-review process in main-
stream sociology journals?
Beginning in 2006, the Theory Section of the American Sociological Association recog-
nized a midcareer sociologist “whose work holds great promise for setting the agenda in the
field of sociology.”1 As part of this award, the winner is invited to deliver the Lewis A. Coser
Lecture, participate in a salon the following year, and publish a peer-reviewed essay in
Sociological Theory. Many of my predecessors took this occasion to set a new theoretical
agenda, with broad questions like how do we know what we know and how do we classify
the knowledge and concepts in sociological research (Abend 2019; Fourcade 2016). Others
asked how we theorize with different epistemological orientations through case selection
(Krause 2021). Two scholars and awardees of color, both men, focused on racial theory
(Bonilla-Silva 2012) and the historical epistemic exclusion of race and empire in the socio-
logical canon (Go 2020).2
In this article, I offer a provocation about what it means to theorize from the margins. In
doing so, I pay tribute to Lewis A. Coser and Rose Laub Coser, both prominent sociologists
whose marginality early in their careers gave them a unique lens to develop critical theoreti-
cal insights about conflict, power, authority, and institutions. Inspired by Cosers, Bonilla-
Silva, and Go, I focus on three distinct yet often overlapping epistemic relations of
marginalization. First, I highlight the exclusion, oppression, and repression of theoretical
contributions by women and those advancing feminist theories—especially feminist schol-
ars of color—in mainstream sociology journals. Second, I call attention to the marginaliza-
tion of qualitative research in relation to quantitative research, with the misguided belief that
quantitative research is objective, value-neutral, and closer to a science, whereas qualitative
research (especially that which falls in the realm of scholar activism) lacks in theoretical and
empirical rigor. And finally, I focus on the marginalization of theories developed at the
periphery through non-Western-centered global contemporary sociology, especially empiri-
cal case studies that move beyond the First World versus Third World or Global North versus
Global South to center theory building that highlights comparative cases outside the Western
hemisphere.
As sociologists, we have been taught what it means to develop a research project that is
not only informed by—but will ideally advance—existing theories, both in a general sense
and in ways that speak directly to the growing subfields in our discipline. Sociology depart-
ments recruit new potential PhD students during visit week, often with narratives about what
it means to have a “Berkeley,” “Chicago,” or “XXX” PhD. These authenticity arguments
have a lot to do with the theoretical and empirical training students can expect to receive.
And during the first two years of a PhD program, most students are required to take a
Sociological Theory course to expose them to the broad general theories valued not only in
the discipline but also in the department where they will eventually obtain their PhDs. Most
syllabi include detailed units on the classical and canonical works of Marx, Weber, Durkheim,
Goffman, Foucault, Bourdieu, and, in exceptional cases, one week on Fanon, W.E.B. Du
Bois, and/or feminist theories. This standard course structuring evinces a broader orientation
in sociology: an understanding that the center of the field includes these canonical works and
works by Du Bois, Fanon, or Collins are on the margins.
Hoang 205

Theorizing from the margins requires a reflection on what I mean by “center or main-
stream” and “margin” in the discipline of sociology and as part of the intellectual work
involved with broader theory building. Sociologists theorize in several competing ways (see
e.g., Abend 2019). As I see it, positivist mainstream sociological theory involves research in
Western settings with causal propositions between variables or attempts to identify law-like
regularities through a set of variables (see Abend 2019:Theories 1–3). Marginal theories, in
contrast, involve critical race and feminist theories that harness empirical evidence to inter-
pret social reality (see Abend 2019:Theory 5) with multiple truths (Emerson, Fretz, and
Shaw 1995). Subjective social science views knowledge as situated and contextual and does
not aspire toward universal truths.
To specify, Howard Winant (2007) and Aldon Morris (2015) divide the field between
mainstream and insurgent or critical sociology. I build on this work in two ways: first, by
conceptualizing theories developed at the center and the margins as inherently relational and
asymmetrical and second, by arguing that the center and the margin are not fixed categories
but are situated relationally based on the positioning of the scholar vis-à-vis other sociolo-
gists in their respective departments and the broader discipline and the positioning of their
scholarship (i.e., the engagement or reach of their theoretical frameworks) across subfields.
At the same time, the Cosers teach us that the people who develop theories at the margins of
the field may, over time, come to occupy influential positions in the establishment and them-
selves become new gatekeepers, thereby creating space for new forms of marginality to
emerge. Yet when we suspend the relationship between the scholar and their scholarship, we
can see how—as Collins and Bonilla-Silva articulate in the opening quotes of this article—it
is possible to hold powerful positions in prestigious sociology departments or the broader
profession while your very theoretical insights are still marginal in the wider discipline. Put
another way, it is possible to be well known or influential while one’s theories are not
respected as “theoretical.”
Finally, rather than focus on all the places where our discipline suffers as a result of epis-
temic repression and all the scholars denied (Morris 2015) throughout history (Go 2016), I
draw inspiration from Michael Rodríguez-Muñiz’s (2016) concept of bridgework—a prac-
tice of reaching across subfields to illustrate how we as sociologists might find ways to
engage with theories developed at the margins of sociology. A powerful example, as I high-
light, comes from Sanyu Mojola (2014), whose research involves high-level theorizing that
bridges ethnography with demography and population change, gender, migration, and global
sociology. Mojola’s work is theoretical but is not recognized (or cited) for her theoretical
contributions. By highlighting contemporary works like Mojola’s, I invite our discipline to
imagine how our knowledge structures might fundamentally shift if those highly regarded
award-winning works were cited more for their theoretical advances than as an empirical
case of X, Y, or Z.

A Tribute to Lewis A. Coser

Lewis A. Coser was one of the founding members of “conflict sociology” (Coser 1964). This
paradigm-shifting framework forged a new direction in the study of group formation through
dissociations rather than associations. It is conflict, Coser argued, not just cooperation, that
serves an important social function for establishing and maintaining group identities.
As I read his work, I was inspired most by the publications that contextualized and
explained the processes underlying his theorizations. Aside from Timmermans and Tavory
(2022), few scholars take the time to dissect the back-end process for how we arrive at our
theories. I would argue that the process of arriving at one’s theories is just as important of a
206 Sociological Theory 40(3)

story as the theoretical contribution itself. Coser’s marginality within the broader establish-
ment of sociology was where he arguably produced his most paradigm-shifting and impor-
tant intellectual contributions.
Coser was a refugee and an immigrant who fled Nazi Germany. He completed his dis-
sertation at the mature age of 41. Before entering a doctoral program in sociology at Columbia
University, he had performed numerous odd jobs to make ends meet. Coming to the disci-
pline with a different background and worldview, he described himself as “something of an
outsider professionally to later participating in the inside life of sociology” (Coser 1993:1).
Coser (1998b:xii, cited in Fleck 2013) wrote,

[W]hat appears to be one major guiding thread, and largely in my work as well, is the
fact that in a variety of ways, under many different circumstances, I have been a
“stranger within the gate.” That is, while never having been fully part of a specific
community or group, I have yet belonged to a number of them.

Coser was what Collins (1999) theorizes as the “outsider-within.”

In addition, Coser was a political leftist who penned essays and reviews for The New
Republic, The Nation, Politics, and Commentary. To my surprise, however, he was not a
scholar-activist and certainly did not see himself as engaged in an insurgent or critical kind
of sociology. For instance, he did not advocate merging sociology with his political engage-
ments. He believed we all had multiple selves and that sociology as a discipline should only
get one part of ourselves:

I am indeed committed to the calling of sociology, but I have never felt that the
discipline claimed more of me than a segmental participation. Science is not one of
those institutions which claim the total man. I can be a devoted sociologist and no less
devoted husband, father, democrat, sociologist, gardener, or what not. I can play an
active part in the political affairs of the nation, I can be an impassioned social critic, an
advocate for this or that conformist or nonconformist position, without necessarily
implicating my role as a sociologist. (Coser 1988a:283, cited in Fleck 2013:965)

The quote reflects a long-standing tendency in the broader academy to create a hard line in
the production of knowledge between the politically motivated “activist” and the objective
“social scientist.” For Coser, the activist or insurgent critical theorist is impassioned and
swayed by the social problems of their time. The intellectual, in contrast, is an objective
outside researcher motivated by data and evidence over politics (Coser 1965). However, as
I unpack in this article, this binary is incredibly blurry in practice: Research is inherently
embedded in the political agendas of its time.
To Coser’s credit, he was equally critical of ivory tower social scientists claiming to be
objective researchers while working in a shadowy role in policy implementation. For exam-
ple, in the preface to his book Men of Ideas, Coser (1965:xi, xii) provides an impassioned
critique of the role of intellectuals in the Vietnam War:

The Vietnam War created a new sense of solidarity among intellectuals or men of ideas
in opposition against a government engaged in a cynical and manipulative effort to
hide the true facts from the American People.

But of equal importance is the response of those intellectuals who lent their skills to
the men in power in order to attempt to provide legitimation for the war. Intellectuals
Hoang 207

hoping to manipulate men of power, end up by being manipulated in their own turn,
depends, at least in part on one’s own political views and values. Future sociologists
should analyze the subtle and not so subtle ways in which some independent and
autonomous men of ideas were transformed in recent years into pliable instruments of
men of power.

This critique of philosophy is powerful because it implicitly questions the role social scien-
tists play in legitimizing institutions of power. As Stiglitz (2001:ix) articulates it, “Some are
easy to dispense with: ideology and special interests masquerading as economic science.”
Today, one might ask what the difference is between the public intellectual and the scholar-
activist (Hoang 2017). The false binary Coser endorsed between the objective researcher and
public intellectual versus the scholar-activist presents at least three major problems for
advancing new theories in sociology. First, it inhibits our ability to examine how scholarship
has been manipulated for political purposes. Second, it assumes activist research is some-
how atheoretical or less empirically rigorous. Third, as Mary Romero (2019:3) notes, “the
empiricist tradition of ‘objectivity,’ in which sociologists are detached from their research,
has isolated and marginalized sociologists from communities that have long been the sub-
jects (I mean objects) of research.” This critique reframes the question, in line with many
marginal scholars, to suggest there is no objective scholarship. Scholarship is always politi-
cal, either explicitly or implicitly, in the service of social change or policing the knowledge
boundaries of the mainstream.
Focusing not just on the theory but also on the scholar, Coser himself provides an excel-
lent example of how scholars may become powerfully positioned as gatekeepers in the dis-
cipline despite developing their most innovative frameworks from the margins. As Coser
wrote, he started at the margins of the discipline before becoming part of the establishment,
eventually serving as the 66th President of the American Sociological Association. Similarly,
one might argue that Bonilla-Silva, Go, and Mojola have become part of the establishment
based on their now powerful institutional positionings. However, as Bonilla-Silva and
Collins suggest, for scholars of color, it is possible to occupy multiple relational position-
ings. Nevertheless, Coser’s articulation of his move to the center created different forms of
theoretical marginality in relation to his positioning. Coser mentored and worked to create
space for marginal students, but he did not engage with or teach innovative theories pro-
duced by theorists of color.
For instance, Coser was a mentor of Aldon Morris in the mid- to late 1970s at the State
University of New York-Stony Brook. In his book The Scholar Denied, Morris (2015:xv)
recounts, “on the walls of Coser’s office were arrayed pictures of Marx, Weber, Durkheim,
and Mannheim that seemed to beckon the uninitiated to the paths of sociological wisdom.”
During one meeting with Coser, Morris asked why Coser did not have a picture of Du Bois
on the wall alongside the theorists he revered. Coser responded, “Masters of sociological
thought are those rare scholars who build theoretical systems, and Du Bois did not build
such a system. . . . Du Bois was not a master of sociological thought” (Morris 2015:xv).
As Morris (2015) generously explains, the problem was not that white scholars purposely
ignored Du Bois but rather, his marginalization as a theorist by the white founders of sociol-
ogy made them ignorant of Du Bois’s work. This kind of epistemic oppression of Du Bois
does not just happen to scholars of the past. Sociologists reproduce these problems today
when it comes to theoretically cutting-edge work produced by scholars of color in our disci-
pline. Several race scholars have written a great deal about the marginalization of not only
early theorists but also contemporary theorists who produce theories of race relations (Hall
2017; Itzigsohn and Brown 2020).
208 Sociological Theory 40(3)

Like many mainstream sociologists, Coser believed there is an objective social science
while engaging in the implicit oppression of theories advanced by marginal scholars like Du
Bois. Whereas he and many others in the social sciences assume science is a neutral space,
outside of politics, where one can have a political self and a scientific self, I would argue this
is a false dichotomy. The profession itself is inherently political by virtue of the oppression
of certain kinds of knowledge structures over others. Moreover, race is not the only marginal
subfield in the discipline. In this article, I highlight the epistemic oppression of theories
produced by women, especially women of color, feminist theorists, qualitative sociologists,
and scholars outside the Western hemisphere.

Who Gets to Be a Theorist?

Similarly, notably absent from many Sociological Theory syllabi today are the works of
feminist theorists looking at the intersecting (Glenn 1985) relationships between gender and
social, cultural, economic, and political processes (Chafetz 1997). Feminist standpoint the-
ory is one such marginal advance, which emerged as a critique of mainstream sociology and
the masculinist, objectivist, positivist social science (Chafetz 1997). Pioneered by Dorothy
Smith (1987, 1990) and Patricia Hill Collins (1989, 2000), feminist standpoint makes three
key theoretical contributions: (1) Knowledge is socially situated, (2) people who belong to
marginal groups are socially situated in a way that gives them a different lens through which
to see and identify social problems to build new theories, and (3) as such, we must include
research that begins with those whose lives are part of that marginalized group.
The marginalization of women and feminist theorists included one of Lewis A. Coser’s
closest intellectual partners, his wife, Rose Laub Coser, an eminent sociologist who was a
passionate feminist and a strong defender of affirmative action and social justice. Like many
women of her time, she not only helped elevate her husband’s work while staying incredibly
productive, but her theoretical contributions as they relate to gender were marginal in the
broader discipline.
Lewis acknowledged Rose’s intellectual contributions to many of his ideas in multiple
places. For example, in a 1993 Annual Review piece titled “A Sociologist’s Atypical Life,”
he wrote:

Let me anticipate here and say that she has been my partner now for over 50 years. She
has had so intimate a part of my intellectual and emotional life that I find it almost
impossible to sort out ideas of hers that later cropped up as mine. (P. 4)

After reading acknowledgments like this in Lewis A. Coser’s multiple works, I wanted to
learn more about Rose Laub Coser to examine her career trajectory. The absence of any
photo of her online was shocking to me.

Including Rose Laub Coser

Rose started a PhD program in sociology at Columbia University before Lewis Coser did in
1945. In fact, she introduced her husband to Robert Merton and inspired him to pursue a
PhD in sociology also at Columbia. Nonetheless, she completed her degree three years after
he did in 1957. And like many women of her generation, she had a far more challenging
career path when compared to her husband’s. She started as an instructor before becoming
an assistant professor at Wellesley College from 1951 to 1959, where she was denied tenure.
After eight years at Wellesley, she moved to the department of psychiatry at Harvard Medical
Hoang 209

Photo note: This photo was kindly shared with me by Andrew Perrin, the Cosers’ grandson, a sociologist at Johns
Hopkins University. This photo aptly conveys the essence of how Lewis wrote about Rose and acknowledges her
contributions to many of his theoretical ideas.

Source: Photo courtesy of Andrew Perrin, the Cosers’ grandson.

School, where she worked as a research associate, before taking a position as an associate
professor at Northeastern University. It would be nearly 10 years before this dual-career
couple would become professors together at SUNY-Stony Brook, where they remained until
retirement. During Rose Coser’s time, women were not getting PhDs in large numbers or
offered tenure-track positions, and they were usually the primary caregiver for their
210 Sociological Theory 40(3)

children. This was part of the politics of the profession, which not only hinders women’s
ability to advance knowledge but also represses the theoretical contributions of women like
Rose Coser even when they produce important work against all odds.
Despite the lack of early institutional support, Rose was a theorist whose work made
significant contributions within and across various subfields. She pushed to deconstruct
functional theory, role theory, and modernism. She was also a prominent medical sociologist
and a sociologist of family and gender. She was a critical feminist who recognized the mar-
ginality of gender scholars of her time, both in her writing and in her professional work as a
founding member of Sociologists for Women in Society.
Her theoretical contributions span multiple subfields. In an article published in the
American Sociological Review, she questioned the relationship between “observability and
authority”—who observes whom, when, where, and how, she argues, makes it possible for
status-occupants to present themselves in different forms (Coser 1961). Among the impor-
tant structural elements comprising a bureaucracy, insulation from and access to observabil-
ity are as important as the distribution and delimitation of authority. Here she argues that the
determination of who can hide from whom may be as essential to the workings of a social
system as the determination of who has power over whom (Coser 1961).
As her career evolved, she engaged with the works of Goffman, Gluckman, and Merton to
theorize role distance—through detachment and conformity—ambivalence, and status sys-
tems (Coser 1966). She applied “role theory” to women in the family and workplace. She
brought a rich experience of theory building and empirical research to comparative studies of
women’s power and powerlessness in elite careers and showed how “access to power remains
a rather thin one” (Coser 1966). One of my favorite pieces of hers was published in Social
Problems. It was a classic paper creatively titled “Stay Home Little Sheba: On Placement,
Displacement, and Social Change,” where she looks at how spatial movement through the
busing of school children and child care centers are two mechanisms that can disrupt the
insulation of social classes (Coser 1975). Both Rose and Lewis Coser describe the family as
a “greedy institution” and highlight how family life conflicts with other institutions. It is the
family as an institution, she argues, that has restricted women’s participation in public life,
and the lack of public policies providing institutionalized child care reinforces social and
political subordination (Coser 1974; see also De Campo 2013). These articles are a just a few
among many that illustrate not only how well published Rose Laub Coser was but also the
depths and layers to how she theorized “role theory” across a variety of institutions.
As I reflect on the influence that Rose Laub Coser had on Lewis Coser’s ideas, as well as
her efforts to theorize in ways that bridge different subfields in sociology, I can’t help but ask
why this award is not named the Lewis and Rose Coser Award.3 Why do men tend to get
recognition and respect as theorists while the women who theorized alongside them and
propped up their careers are labeled as empiricists, not theorists? As many of my fellow
sociologists of gender can attest—there are several women like Rose Laub Coser in our
profession to whom we should pay tribute for their contributions to the advancement of the
theories in our discipline. The section should consider renaming this award the Lewis and
Rose Laub Coser Award for theoretical agenda setting.
In her essay “On Nepotism and Marginality,” Rose Laub Coser (1971:259) describes the
subtle discrimination against women across professions: “If she is a ‘lawyer’ she must be a
family lawyer, a physician a pediatrician, a sociologist ‘social worker’ and [women] are not
as readily addressed by their doctoral titles as men.” I would add, “if she is a sociologist, she
must be an empiricist and not a theorist.” A look at the 2020 American Sociological
Association section membership reveals that only 34 percent of the members of the
Sociological Theory section identify as female, and less than 2 percent identify as gender
Hoang 211

nonconforming. This number is startling, given that women outnumber men as members of
the ASA. Between 2006 and 2020, only four women have been awarded a Coser Prize for
Theoretical Agenda Setting. I am the only woman of color to receive this award and the only
scholar who engages with gender and feminist theories. All four women awardees’ theoreti-
cal contributions are in the subfields of economic sociology, political sociology, and political
economy—subfields dominated by men. This is troubling given that the subfield of Sex &
Gender is the largest section within the American Sociological Association. Bias and dis-
crimination indeed have a part to play in this disparity, but I would argue that even more
profound is the question of what gets counted as a theoretical contribution.
Given the gendered transformation within our broader discipline and the growing promi-
nence of the Sex & Gender section, not much has changed since the 1950s when Rose Laub
Coser was paving the way for women who would come after her. The discipline fails to
recognize the innovative theoretical contributions of sociologists like Rose Laub Coser and
continues to oppress theories developed by women, especially feminist theories. To change
this, we must pause to reflect on why or how this is still happening today.

How Women and Feminist Theories Get Marginalized

Although sociology as a discipline has made some inroads in recognizing the theoretical
contributions of women like Rose Laub Coser, we still have a long way to go. I highlight
four different exclusions: theories developed by women, especially women of color; femi-
nist theories; theory building derived from qualitative research methods; and theories
developed through studies where North America and Western Europe are not a central or
relational focus. These four can be thought of separately, but as I will highlight, they often
intersect with one another at the margins.
To be clear, I am not the first person to raise these questions. In fact, in the late 1980s to
early 2000s, several sociologists looked at the question of gender and racial biases in publish-
ing (Grant and Ward 1991; Grant, Ward, and Rong 1987) as well as the effects of publishing
qualitative versus quantitative work on scholarly reputations (Clemens et al. 1995; Cole 1987).
Interestingly, they found important links between gender and qualitative methods. Qualitative
approaches such as participant observations, interviews, and ethnography have long been asso-
ciated with feminist theory building through emotion and self-reflection (Cook and Fonow
1985). That is, important dimensions of women’s lives are best understood through qualitative
methods. In contrast, so-called objective mobility measures associated with men’s statuses
using quantitative methods have been prioritized since the mid-1980s. Feminist theorists have
made calls for recentering knowledge and theory building about women’s experiences rather
than extrapolating and universalizing from theories derived from the study of men (Collins
1989; Harding 2004; Hartsock 1983; Stacey and Thorne 1985).
The association between gender and methods is complicated because qualitative and
quantitative methods hold unequal prestige in sociology, the social sciences, and science.
Grant and colleagues (1987) systematically examined the associations between methods and
topic. They found feminist theory and scholarship are most often associated with qualitative
methods, but there was an increase in the study of women’s work using quantitative methods
in the top sociology journals.4 One interpretation they gave for this outcome was that because
research about gender was a “relatively new and perhaps not fully legitimated topic of
inquiry,” quantitative work “might have been more palatable to editors and reviewers of
mainstream journals” (Grant et al. 1987:861). These findings might help explain why the
winners of the Lewis A. Coser Award for theoretical agenda setting tend to make theoretical
contributions in masculinized subfields, such as economic sociology, political sociology, or
212 Sociological Theory 40(3)

political economy, rather than in marginal ones where scholars are advancing critical race
and gender theories.
In the early 2000s, “sociologists became increasingly concerned about whether some
types of sociological research had been marginalized within the discipline (Cappell and
Guterbock 1992; Halliday and Janowitz 1992) and whether this marginalization dispropor-
tionately extends to particular authors (for example, women and people of color)” (Karides
et al. 2001:111). Karides and colleagues (2001) compared the American Journal of Sociology
(AJS), American Sociological Review (ASR), and Social Problems (SP)—three journals that
are assumed to publish the “best” work in the discipline—between 1995 and 1997 to look at
whether the top-tier journals fairly represented the subfields within sociology as well as
women and men authors. At the time, AJS and ASR represented mainstream journals, whereas
SP was marginalized as the journal that “lost its commitment to science in the pursuit of
social justice” (Karides et al. 2001:111). They found underrepresentation of women as first
authors and an overrepresentation of men authors (Karides et al. 2001). The subfields Sex &
Gender and Racial and Ethnic Minorities were appropriately represented in ASR and SP, but
they made the case that further research is needed to unpack the substance of the articles
published in those subfields.
The data produced nearly 20 years ago made me wonder where we are today as a disci-
pline. With the help of three research assistants at the University of Chicago, we analyzed
AJS and ASR between 2017 and 2021 to look specifically at the representation of women
versus men as first authors, qualitative versus quantitative methods, articles on the topic of
gender that applied feminist theories, and a breakdown of the region of study for each article.
I chose AJS and ASR because these two journals reflect the mainstream within the discipline
and are supposed to showcase the most theoretically ambitious and empirically rigorous
work across all subfields. As a woman of color, I am cognizant that race and gender intersect
here in ways that would reveal even starker numbers for the representation of work by
women of color engaged in feminist theorizing with goals of subjectivity. However, the data
I was working with did not enable me to dig deeper to examine these intersections. We did
not look at the race/ethnicity of authors because to do that most accurately would require us
to survey 354 authors, which we did not have the time or resources to do. We were able to
look at gender by looking up the public profiles of all authors to see how they self-identify
on their professional websites (see Table 1).5
The data show the mainstream journals seem to be closing the gender gaps among authors,
with 60 percent of the papers published by men, 39 percent by women authors, and 1 percent
by nonbinary authors. In addition, 29 percent of papers were on gender. However, only 14
percent of the articles on gender (or 4 percent of the total number of articles) engaged with
feminist theory. These data seem to affirm the hypothesis by earlier scholars that only “certain
types” of papers on the topic of gender make it into mainstream outlets, namely, those that
engage with broader subfields beyond feminist theories. It may be the case that feminist theory
gets relegated to the top subfield journals of our discipline, like Gender & Society. However, if
so, we must ask what counts as “general sociology” for the top journals of our discipline.
The qualitative and quantitative divide was vast. We found that less than 24 percent of all
papers used qualitative methods involving interview or ethnographic data. Only 2 percent of
papers used solely ethnographic data, 13 percent relied exclusively on interview data, and 9
percent used a combination of ethnographic and interview data. These numbers pale com-
pared to papers using quantitative methods, which make up over 63 percent of all papers.
The overwhelming dominance of quantitative methods, especially in relation to ethnogra-
phy, inevitably leads to a problem where qualitative papers must force themselves into the
logic of quantitative methods, which value causality and generalizability, to make it into
mainstream outlets.
Hoang 213

Table 1. Percentage of Papers by Author Gender, Substantive Topic, Research Methodology, and
Geographic Location, American Journal of Sociology and American Sociological Review, 2017 to 2022.

Category Percentage
Author gender
Male 60%
Female 39%
 Nonbinary 1%
Substantive topic
Gender 29%
Gender, using feminist theory 4%
Research methodology
Quantitative 63%
Historical comparative 13%
Interview 13%
Interview and ethnography 9%
Ethnography 2%
Geographic region of study
US and Canada 66%
Europe 14%
Asia, Middle East, and North Africa 8%
Latin America 2%
Sub-Saharan Africa 2%

Together, these data highlight the marginalization of qualitative work and feminist theo-
ries and a broader epistemological and theoretical problem—the demand within top general
journals for ethnographers to mimic the epistemological logics of quantitative research.
The goal for ethnography then becomes one of establishing “causal claims” identifying
“mechanisms” and, in the process, loses an entire strain within qualitative methods that
aims for thick description, storytelling, and a processually informed theoretical framework.
What I mean here is not simply a stereotypical privileging of qualitative methods that aim
for general theorizing over an extreme of qualitative methods with the aim of thick descrip-
tion (or a rich story without the theory). But instead, a move where graduate students must
confront competing demands within the discipline when they ask “qualitative how ques-
tions” and are told by their advisors to address these questions with “quantitative why log-
ics.” This is a fundamental mismatch in epistemologies. It is also worth mentioning that
such qualitative methodologies that privilege how questions are much more likely to permit
theory-building approaches in their analysis (see e.g., Small 2009).
Tavory and Timmermans (2014) offer a way for us to reconcile the different theoretical
goals between quantitative and qualitative work through what they call “abductive analysis.”
They provide a new approach to generating theory from qualitative observations, different
from induction and deduction. It considers the surprising encounters and anomalous obser-
vations that do not fit existing theories. In my read, Tavory and Timmermans offer a way of
legitimizing the reality of the qualitative research process for quantitative-oriented minds.
This is a significant advance and one that will surely help improve intellectual exchanges
between qualitative and quantitative scholarship within the broader discipline. However, as
I see it, abductive methods should be just one of many possible approaches scholars can
work with in deciding which method is most appropriate for the different kinds of empirical
projects they are pursuing. If we were to equally engage a diverse set of qualitative
214 Sociological Theory 40(3)

approaches, such as abduction, grounded theory, extended case methods, and so on, we must
avoid forcing all these projects to conform to logics of objectivity. To get there, we must
move away from an overvaluation of “objectivity” in relation to “subjectivity” as an impor-
tant basis for theorizing. In doing so, we move toward a collective discourse on these
approaches of the “theory/method package and the ways that theory shapes what ethnogra-
phers study and how they conduct research” (Graizbord, Rodríguez-Muñiz, and Baiocchi
2017:326).
In addition to feminist theory and qualitative work, research using the case of a country
outside North America or Western Europe is still very marginal in our broader discipline. For
instance, the data highlight the continued dominance of North America and Western Europe
as regions of substantive research. A small but growing trend in papers published on Asia
(East Asia, Southeast Asia, South Asia, and Central Asia), the Middle East, and North Africa
make up 8 percent of all articles. Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa each account for
only 2 percent of all articles. The lack of research in the top journals using case studies out-
side the United States highlights the continued provincialism of American sociology.
Nearly all papers published in U.S. journals on topics and research sites outside of North
America and Western Europe must go through the painstaking effort to “justify” their case
by explaining why we should care about X country or place instead of what this is a case of
(e.g., race-making or gendered labor markets). This is a practice learned in graduate school,
where those of us carrying out global projects were instructed to “situate our cases” to justify
the “why” to studying China (Lei 2017), Vietnam (Hoang 2015), the Philippines (Garrido
2019; Parreñas 2001; Reyes 2019), Brazil and Colombia (Paschel 2016), and so on. Studies
carried out in U.S. cities like Chicago (Sampson 2012) or Los Angeles (Bruch and Mare
2006) are allowed to generalize in ways that studies of Beijing, Ho Chi Minh City, Manila
Bogotá, or Rio de Janeiro are not. Chicago was at the epicenter for urban ethnography;
Beijing, Ho Chi Minh City, Manila, and others were at the margins of the discipline.
Researchers operating within global frameworks, including some of the most innovative
contributions by postcolonial thinkers like Frantz Fanon ([1963] 2021) and Homi Bhabha
(1994), continue to engage in a practice that orients back to the core, North America, and
Western Europe, or the “Global North,” thereby missing important opportunities to theorize
in innovative ways from the margin. For one, assumptions about the dominance of the Global
North or core make it incredibly challenging for our discipline to see that the world order is
shifting. For example, between 2010 and 2014, I spent nearly four years trying to advance a
new paradigm, “Asian Ascendency and Western Decline,” through an ethnography of the
global sex industry in Vietnam (Hoang 2014, 2015). Today, few would dispute the rapid rise
of Asian economies and the declining significance of the West. Yet still, we do not have theo-
ries to explain a new global order beyond paradigms of Global North/South, First/Third
World, and Empire/Colony. Race and gender scholars point to this work as speaking from
the margin within, but this leads us to miss critical political changes and social movements
because the center is Anglo and masculine.
Finally, a look at mainstream journals, namely, AJS and ASR, is just one benchmark for
trying to assess inequality across fields, and the appropriateness of this benchmark is certainly
up for debate. I am not necessarily advocating for this benchmark, but by presenting these
data and making these claims, I hope to advance the conversation over what constitutes epis-
temological equity within the general journals of our discipline. Regardless of the metric one
might use to measure marginalization, the data show we use the wrong metrics to evaluate
work produced at the margins. As Ruha Benjamin (2019:45) articulates, critical race and
gender studies should not be “defined by just what we study but also how we analyze, ques-
tioning our assumptions about what is deemed high theory versus pop culture, academic
Hoang 215

versus activist, evidence versus anecdote.” Attention to what gets excluded also means we
must pay attention to what Ann Orloff refers to as the “repression” of theories advanced by
marginal sociologists; this includes a lack of engagement or citations (Adams, Brueckner, and
Naslund 2019).6 Women of color scholars have been calling out with #CiteBlackWomen, an
insurgent feminist initiative. But I would further argue that while it is essential to cite and
honor black women’s significant theoretical and scholarly contributions by including them on
theory syllabi, it is equally important for journals to publish more of this work and for sociol-
ogy departments to have more epistemological diversity within their faculty ranks.

Peer Review as a Potential Source of Epistemic Oppression

Inspired by the way Bonilla-Silva (2012) draws on a personal anecdote as a catalyst for a
bigger question for his 2008 Coser Lecture, I provide a personal account of trying to publish
a paper in a top sociology journal and what got lost in the peer-review process. By giving a
peek behind the curtain of the publishing process, I reveal a firsthand experience that
involved the repression of a senior woman theorist during the peer-review process and the
struggle for qualitative scholars to get published in mainstream outlets dominated by quan-
titative epistemologies.
I published a paper titled “Risky Investments: How Local and Foreign Investors Finesse
Corruption-Rife Emerging Markets” (Hoang 2018) in the American Sociological Review. As
is the case with nearly every peer-reviewed piece, the theoretical framing of this paper was
completely transformed as a result of the peer-review and editorial process. At the heart of
the paper was a study of different investors in Vietnam’s real estate market and the kinds of
social relationships necessary to close business deals. The first version of the article I sub-
mitted for peer review engaged with social network theory and made links to Viviana
Zelizer’s (2005, 2007, 2011, 2012) theory of relational work in economic transactions.
To me, the theoretical advance was an engagement with Zelizer’s concept of relational
work, which examines how people manage social ties in economic transactions. Whereas
Zelizer theorizes how intimacy and economic transactions are intertwined, the theoretical
advancements and applications of her ideas have primarily been carried out by feminist
scholars looking at the comingling of intimacy and money in feminized occupations such as
sex work or care work (Boris and Parreñas 2010). Virtually no scholar has used this frame-
work to theorize masculinized occupations like high finance. I wanted to bring her ideas
outside of the private sphere (i.e., household or paid sex and care work) and into the public
sphere to look at relational work in market transactions of global finance.7
In the first set of reviews, the reviewers and editors argued that “relational work is not
really a theory or a theoretical framework with propositions and predictions. Rather it is a
general perspective or orienting strategy . . . [that] does not constitute a significant advance.”
The reviewers/editors here had a particular conception of theory in mind that lacks what
Abend (2019) refers to as theoretical pluralism, not only with respect to content but also in
the kinds of work deemed theoretical and therefore publishable in the general journals. The
reviewers provided some suggestions on how I might reframe the theoretical contribution,
advising me to move away from relational work and toward a framework of obfuscation
advanced by Gabriel Rossman (2014) and Dan Lainer-Vos (2013). Moreover, they told me,
“You have to show that the typology captures something of causal and not just ‘taxonomic’
significance.” I read this as implying that “theory” can only, and must be, causal, that theory
was associated with men and not women, even if the men built their theories from women’s
scholarly advancements.
216 Sociological Theory 40(3)

I had not engaged with Rossman’s or Lainer-Vos’s work before this set of reviews. It was
clear from both the reviewer and editorial comments that this was a necessary move for me
to get a qualitative paper published in a top sociology journal. In hindsight, I find it incred-
ibly ironic that both Rossman and Lainer-Vos developed their theories of obfuscation through
an engagement of Zelizer’s relational work. Another possible explanation is that Zelizer’s
work is taken seriously if men like Rossman and Lainer-Vos engage it. Still, as a woman
with the topic I study, perhaps I was pushed to engage the men’s work to justify the impor-
tance or significance of the research to the broader discipline. The important lesson here is
that Rossman and Lainer-Vos make Zelizer’s theory more appealing to quantitative scholars,
so they count as “theory” while her work does not.
To be clear, I am proud of the final product, appreciate the careful reviews, and am grate-
ful to the editors for shepherding the paper through the journal. I also benefited greatly from
a concerted effort ASR made in 2015 to better showcase ethnographic and qualitative arti-
cles.8 Still, lingering in the back of my mind was this uncomfortable feeling that I had par-
ticipated in the subtle “repression” of women theorists like Zelizer in exchange for two male
and causally oriented theorists, Rossman and Lainer-Vos. It was unclear to me what made
the “obfuscation framework” better or more appropriate, aside from the fact that it followed
a model of abductive theorizing, which was legible to quantitatively minded scholars.
There are many intersecting layers and possible explanations for this outcome. One
explanation provided by Professor Nina Bandelj in her response to my 2021 ASA Coser
Lecture is that maybe in this case, it was not the repression of a female theorist but rather, “it
is partly because the theory that works for ‘soft’ economic processes (intimacy, sex econ-
omy, etc.) is gendered as feminine, and there is resistance for it to be seen as pertaining to
‘hard’ ‘real’ economic transactions in foreign investment.”9
As noted by Reviewer 2 for this Sociological Theory article, a second possible explana-
tion for this outcome is that I have more agency than I exercised as an author. As R2 notes,

[N]othing prevents the author from standing her ground . . . so why cave in? . . . The idea
that, somehow, the author felt coerced into a twisted bargain as an aspiring young
scholar eager to publish in American Sociological Review is not whol[ly] convincing,
especially since the episode is now being repurposed to air her frustration and even
disavow some of her own writing.

Here are a few different reactions. First, given that only 2 percent of all papers were solely
ethnographic and 4 percent used feminist theory, this evidence suggests most authors who
“stood their ground” ultimately never got their papers published in AJS or ASR. Either these
papers are getting rejected en masse or authors are self-selecting out of submitting to these
journals because of a long-standing history of rejections. Ultimately, I “caved in” because
I did not think it was possible to publish a qualitative paper in a top sociology journal with-
out adhering to quantitative logic for setting up the theoretical framework. The data I pre-
sented here substantiate this claim. This vignette is an example of how an ethnographic
paper using feminist approaches might have a very slim chance of getting published in
mainstream journals without capitulating to some of these unspoken rules. To further inter-
rogate this question, we must have access to data that look at the probability of ethno-
graphic papers making it through the review process for publication in mainstream journals.
Nonetheless, the kinds of papers mainstream journals publish adhere to particular ideas
around what counts as theory.
The point here is that regardless of how we define theory, I had multiple reviewers say
Zelizer’s concept of relational work is not theory and then was told to replace her work with
Hoang 217

that of two men who cite her theory to develop theirs. Two men were allowed to cite and use
Zelizer, but perhaps this was not possible for me, as Bandelj states, because of how my
research is viewed in terms of “soft” economic processes. These kinds of processes are ones
that we, as a discipline, have not taken the time to systematically unpack to better understand
the epistemic repression of theories generated by women; this might have the consequence
of making sociology as a discipline reductive and provincial if there is only room for theory
that is masculine and causal.

Bridgework
The answer to what kinds of theoretical work get marginalized is even more troubling for
female theorists of color. As Adia Harvey Wingfield (2019) writes,

[S]ociology . . . has yet to produce [a] systematic study of black women like Ida B.
Wells-Barnett, Zora Neale Hurston, and Anna Julia Cooper [who] like Du Bois
developed sociological analyses that emphasized intersections of race, gender, and
class. . . . These black women were early originators of sociological arguments and
knowledge. Yet systemic racism and patriarchal norms limited the extent to which
their analysis was widely disseminated.

For example, Anna Julia Cooper’s writings in 1892 provided the earliest articulation of
standpoint theory and theories of intersectionality. Cooper highlighted how racism and sex-
ism experienced by black women gave them a unique epistemological standpoint to observe
interlocking systems of oppression in society (Gines 2015).
This is true not just of the past but also of the present. Among female scholars of color
within sociology, the informal saying is that “you have to kick twice as high just to tie.” The
bias inherent in the peer-review process often leads to far more critical reviews, not just for
articles but also for books and in the informal conversations that happen behind closed doors
about the theoretical rigor of a job candidate’s research. Female scholars of color, when they
are cited, are most often cited as examples of empirical case studies on various topics rather
than for their critical theoretical advances.
To get published, feminist theorists of color have long engaged in a practice of bridge-
work, which Rodríguez-Muñiz (2016) describes as the intellectual bridges scholars build to
connect critical sociologies. Bridgework involves creative work to bridge divides between
various subfields in the broader discipline and bring them into productive conversations.
The effort to bridge marginal sociology with mainstream sociology is most often carried out
by scholars of color working at the margins of the discipline. To be clear, contemporary
sociology offers several examples of this work, carried out by people like Raka Ray (1999;
Ray and Qayum 2009), Rhacel Parreñas (2001, 2011, 2021), Mignon Moore (2012), Celeste
Watkins-Hayes (2019), and Karida Brown (2018), to name a select few among many. Here,
I will go deep into the bridgework in one of my favorite contemporary books to highlight the
extra work scholars of color doing research on gender in non-U.S. contexts must carry out to
make their work speak to our broader discipline.
Sanyu Mojola’s (2014) book Love, Money, and HIV: Becoming a Modern African Woman
in the Age of AIDS is an incredible piece of scholarship that bridges the sociology of gender
(including feminist theories), global sociology, demography, and education.
The book adopts a mixed-methods approach that bridges ethnographic fieldwork and
interview data with more than 200 participants with survey data from the Kenyan
Demographic and Health Survey. Taking a life-course approach, Mojola examines the
218 Sociological Theory 40(3)

youth-gender disparity of HIV rates that place adolescent women at greater risk than men.
But she does not stop there; while it is common for demographers aiming for large-scale
populations to carry out their research without learning the language or embedding them-
selves in the local context, Mojola bridges the goals of objectivity with demography with a
sensitivity toward the values of subjectivity with her use of ethnographic fieldwork and
interview research. This methodological approach allows her to theoretically interrogate
both why and how young African women have a desire to consume despite widespread
knowledge about HIV/AIDS. Grounded theory shaped her back-and-forth between survey
and fieldwork data, which enabled her to uncover several startling paradoxes: why women
living in the wealthiest households in Africa have the highest rates of HIV, why those who
are least educated have the lowest rates of HIV, and why women who work have higher rates
of HIV than those who do not work. Notably, the ethnography leads to important ways of
conceptualizing how love, money, and young women’s transformations into “consuming
women” explain their disproportionate rates of HIV.
Theoretically, this book provides a processual and relational account highlighting how
young women’s desires for money, gifts, modernity, and consumption are inextricably linked
with their intimate relationships with the riskiest male partners. Mojola (2014:8) theorizes
how “consuming young women” have been “cultivated and produced across three con-
texts—communities, schools, and gendered labor markets” in their transition to adulthood.
This work builds on Zelizer’s theory of relational work to illustrate how “the entanglement
of love and money and the production of consuming women” is at the heart of women’s
greatest risk for HIV/AIDs (Mojola 2014:49). This gendered process of consumption and
the gendered economies where young women’s needs and access to money force them to
turn to men for help ultimately produces gendered life and death outcomes. In addition,
Mojola bridges a networks approach with theories on migration to highlight the socio-struc-
tural processes that engender different risks and life expectancy outcomes. Her ethnographic
insights put a face to the numbers, thereby humanizing the lives of real people at the heart of
her research and the devastating consequences young women confront in the transition to
early adulthood, dying early in their marriages and often leaving behind young children.
What I find most powerful about Mojola’s theoretical approach is how she bridges differ-
ent understandings and conceptions of theory. In addition, we could imagine applying her
conceptual framework to other cases in multiple ways. For example, by looking at how
consuming women are cultivated and produced, we could consider why some powerfully
positioned women might engage in risky behaviors. Here I am thinking of how this might
apply to women in business who can only see pathways for advancement through their inti-
mate relations with more powerfully positioned men who hold the keys to any advancement
opportunities. Exporting Mojola’s concept of consuming women to other contexts may
reveal a new set of relations and structural constraints that drive women to knowingly engage
in risky behaviors where they must deal with incessant harassment or capitulate to (un)desir-
able sexual relations as a strategy for advancement.
By taking on the burden of engaging demographers and qualitative scholars, Mojola’s
exemplary work provides one of the most innovative examples of how to theorize by engag-
ing in a practice of bridgework across disparate subfields. Mojola raises the bar for socio-
logical theorizing while shifting paradigms on the processes that shape different life
outcomes for men and women in sub-Saharan Africa.

Conclusion
To conclude, I would like to make the case that the burden of doing bridgework should apply
to all researchers in our broader discipline and not just to scholars working on the margins
Hoang 219

trying to make their way into mainstream journals. Sociology as a wider discipline holds so
much potential and promise when scholars working in one subfield find inspiration in the
theoretical advances made in other subfields. And while this sounds great in theory, the cur-
rent state of our field, in practice, is one where mainstream subfields only become main-
stream by avoiding bridgework. By ignoring the theoretical contributions made by scholars
at the margins—who are trying to make sense of a world that is messy, nuanced, and does
not always fit neatly into a regression model—we will miss out on meaningful opportunities
to advance new forms of knowledge.
As our discipline grows, some are concerned about nuance traps that create silos across
subfields. However, one consequence of a greater push for “generalizability” is that it allows
scholars working in subfields well represented by mainstream journals to publish papers
without being asked by reviewers to read, engage, or cite important work carried out in mar-
ginalized subfields or by marginalized scholars. In this vein, referring to AJS and ASR as
generalist journals is a bit of a misnomer because what is understood as “general” is, in fact,
so restricted that important boundary-pushing work at the margins does not have a home in
these general journals. We have this vision that is supposed to be expansive, yet a certain
myopia comes from the presumption of general or mainstream sociology.
But what if we engaged in a practice of epistemic humility that instead centers theories
at the margins (Reyes 2022)? As scholars in a field with limitless opportunities to grow,
we should all aspire to a practice of bridgework that advances theoretical pluralism. The
current lack of engagement, particularly by positivist scholars who engage only with work
built around causal inference, means they cannot adequately evaluate qualitative work on
its own terms, thereby foreclosing the possibility for theoretical innovations at the mar-
gins. Our pedagogical practices and peer-review efforts should demand that all scholars,
not just scholars working at the margins of the discipline, engage in a practice of bridge-
work that makes their work speak to the “broader discipline.” Without bridgework, sociol-
ogy will promote academic mediocrity that is often incomprehensible and useless to
nonacademics while hiding behind the guise of “high-level theory.” As both Lewis A. and
Rose Laub Coser teach us, sometimes the view from the margins can be the one that leads
to the most paradigm-shifting work. So rather than oppress it, maybe we should celebrate
and make room for it.

Acknowledgments
I thank the reviewers of Sociological Theory for their comments and suggestions. I also thank Nina Bandelj,
Hana Brown, Karida Brown, Henry Cotton, Julian Go, Jennifer Jones, Reyna Hernandez, Michael
Rodríguez-Muñiz, Saher Selod, and Viviana Zelizer for their comments, feedback, and reactions.

ORCID iD
Kimberly Kay Hoang https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6977-490X

Notes
1. See: http://www.asatheory.org/coser-award.html.
2. Eduardo Bonilla-Silva was a Lewis A. Coser Awardee in 2007. However, his paper was published in
the journal Ethnic and Racial Studies, likely because this was before the public lectures were published
as peer-reviewed papers in Sociological Theory. I asked Bonilla-Silva for a copy of his 2008 address,
and this is the published paper he sent to me.
3. I should note that I wrote and delivered this lecture before I had the chance to engage with Andrew
Perrin, the Cosers’ grandson; I learned of him on the heels of recording this lecture. In an email exchange
after he watched the lecture, he kindly wrote to clarify and provide an answer to this question. It turns
220 Sociological Theory 40(3)

out that Rose died well before Lewis. When she died, the family set up the Rose Laub Coser disserta-
tion award at the Eastern Sociological Society, of which Rose was once the president. When Lewis
died, Andrew Perrin went to the Theory Section of the ASA because Lewis had been president of the
ASA. This was a part of the history I did not know as I engaged their works as an outsider. I thank
Andrew for his engagement and clarification here.
4. The journals they looked at included American Journal of Sociology, American Sociological Review,
Journal of Health and Social Behavior, Pacific Sociological Review, Social Forces, Social Problems,
Social Psychology Quarterly, Sociological Quarterly, Sociology of Education, and Work and
Occupations.
5. I thank Jasmin Becerra, Henry Cotton, and a UChicago sociology PhD student who preferred not to
be named for their work compiling and analyzing the data from American Journal of Sociology and
American Sociological Review between 2017 and 2021. The data collected here was compiled by the
research assistants. ASR does not collect data on author backgrounds. AJS did not reply to my request
for data. The assistants coded authors’ gender by looking up their professional websites to see how
each author referred to themselves as “she/her/he/him/they/them.” We do not have any data on race,
which is why we do not analyze race here as it intersects with the other categories.
6. There is no citation for Ann Orloff’s comments on repression because this comes from a comment she
gave in response to a talk by Julian Go on Race, Empire, and Epistemic Exclusion.
7. Although these ideas got edited out for my paper in the American Sociological Review, I managed to
find a way to publish them, albeit in a top sociology of gender journal (see Hoang 2020).
8. See, for example, “Suggested ASR Reviewer Guidelines for Ethnographic and Qualitative Papers”
(https://journals.sagepub.com/pb-assets/cmscontent/ASR/review_guidelines_ethnography.pdf).
9. Bandelj (2019), Zelizer’s former student, published an article in The American Sociologist titled
“Academic Familism, Spillover Prestige and Gender Segregation in Sociology Subfields: The
Trajectory of Economic Sociology” and writes about the ways sociology as a discipline has privileged
quantitative male-led network analyses over other approaches in economic sociology and how this
stalls gender integration within sociological subfields.

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Author Biography
Kimberly Kay Hoang is an associate professor of sociology and the Director of the Global Studies
Program at the University of Chicago. She is the author of two books, Spiderweb Capitalism: How Global
Elites Exploit Frontier Markets (Princeton University Press 2022) and Dealing in Desire: Asian
Ascendancy, Western Decline and the Hidden Currencies of Global Sex Work (University of California
Press 2015). Her current and past research makes contributions to the sociology of gender, global sociology,
economic sociology, and qualitative/ethnographic research methods.