Yuchen Yang is a PhD Candidate in sociology at the University of Chicago. For the 2023–24 academic year, he is a dissertation fellow at the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality and an Associate Editor of the American Journal of Sociology. His research and teaching interests broadly include gender and (a)sexuality, family and childhood, culture and semiotics, social category and language use, as well as social theory and qualitative methodology.
His current research brings together theoretical insights from feminist sociology, linguistic anthropology, ethnomethodology, and critical childhood studies to examine how seemingly “natural” and “individual” attributes like gender and life stage emerge or dissipate through consumptive, discursive, and semiotic practices in childrearing and interview conversations.
In the past, he has also studied cosplay participants’ collective embodiment of gender, asexual people’s experiences of high school sex talk, and Gramsci’s influence on Connell’s theorization of hegemonic masculinity. His work has been published in Sociological Theory, Sexualities, and The Journal of Chinese Sociology, and received awards from the American Sociological Association’s Section on Sex & Gender, Section on Theory, Section on Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis, Section on Body and Embodiment, and from the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction.
You may contact him via email at yucheny@uchicago.edu.
Yuchen Yang 